Conan the Adaptable
Author: Robert E. Howard, Gerald W. Page, Richard L. Tierney, David A. English; J.R. Karlsson
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00

Foreword

J.R. Karlsson

I would like to sincerely apologise to all the Howard purists that this collection is most certainly going to offend with its blasphemous rendition of Howard's works.

To see the unaltered versions of these tales or review the extent of my alterations, I urge you to search for the Del Rey and Bison Books collections.

In 1955, after the urging of Oscar J. Friend, one Lyon Sprague de Camp took it upon himself to re-write four original Robert E. Howard tales.

The reasons for his doing so are considered largely monetary, after previously editing and rewriting typescripts of most of the previous Conan tales in existence for publication with Gnome Press.

Whether this was the sole concern of de Camp is questionable, as the man himself was frustrated by the lack of Conan stories and their potential had Howard not killed himself.

Upon doing a bit of research, I discovered the original versions of these tales were from other adventurers such as Kirby O'Donnell, Diego de Guzman, Ivan Sablianka and El Borak himself, Francis X. Gordon. All of them easily converted into Conan of Cimmeria.

This got me wondering, were there any other tales with these heroes?

It turns out that both O'Donnell and Gordon had a string of high-quality adventures that de Camp had either chosen not to or never got around to converting.

There are two schools of thought regarding Howard's other tales. The first of these states that a great number of them featured protagonists that were barbaric strong men pitted against the odds, quite often securing the woman at the end. The second maintains that each of Howard's main characters were distinct and three-dimensional.

Based on the edits, L. Sprague de Camp clearly considered Howard's protagonists to be largely similar. The Howard purists insist that this belief is false to the extreme. They loathe de Camp with a passion that they cannot help but express regularly.

I am of the belief that there is a middle ground, a third camp of sorts. A more sensible camp at that.

The Pictish king Bran Mak Morn is not Conan of Cimmeria, nor is Solomon Kane or King Kull. These are different characters altogether, with different attitudes and beliefs. You could feasibly re-write their tales into Conan yarns, but you'd have to do a lot of editing in order to make it so.

Steve Costigan is another great example of a character that differs wildly from Conan, a lumbering bull-headed brute that got into comical trouble boxing on a ship. Not Conan.

This stands as proof enough to most that Howard could write different characters.

Except that Howard himself re-wrote Kull's final story into Conan. He re-wrote and adapted constantly, shifting characters and names and worlds and events. Swords of the Red Brotherhood and Gods of the North being perfect examples of tales that were once Conan stories being rewritten into something else entirely.

There are a number of tales which clearly aren't Conan in disguise. Dark Agnes (the inspiration for Red Sonja), Pike Bearfield, the aforementioned Steve Costigan and a number of others would translate poorly into the Hyborian era.

Then you get stories like The Dark Man. Where the protagonist is called Conan and swears by Crom.

Or Hawks of Outremer, starring Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, the Crusader knight who is identical in appearance and mannerisms to Conan.

Or Tigers of the Sea, where our hero teams up with a viking called Wulfhere (a name reused in Conan lore several times) and who is also called Cormac.

Cimmeria was based on the ancestral lands of where Erin now is. Both Cormacs are the same height and weight as Conan, with dark square-cut manes and smouldering blue eyes. You're not fooling anyone by thinking they are anything but Conan transplanted into another point in history.

The idea of a connection between Howard's characters is not only explored, but written in the form of the James Allison tales, where a Texan (like Howard) recalls past lives of ancient heroes. Ancient Hyborian-era heroes nonetheless that have more than a touch of Conan about them.

Roy Thomas of Marvel Comics was one of many to hold this belief, and with the permission of Glenn Lord he took some of Howard's better tales and converted them into Conan stories.

These as well as de Camp's edits of Conan's adventures falls into a middle ground of pastiche, between the outright new works (such as the Tor paperbacks) and the original works of Howard. They use the written word of Robert E. Howard and re-purpose it slightly through renaming, and are more faithful to the tone of Conan than some of the latter works.

The one thing that stood out in Thomas's adaptions was that he chose tales that didn't need much adapting in order to become Conan. It was only later on in his career with Marvel that he began to run out of stories to convert and started resorting to some of Howard's lesser-fitting tales (such as the horror stories of The Haunter of the Ring and The Shadow of the Beast).

So you have a bunch of Howard stories that feature protagonists that have either been converted into the Conan timeline or feature a character that was converted.

That's where my editing comes in.

After gathering up as many of these tales as possible, I assembled every story that Thomas had taken inspiration from, and every near-complete story I could find that also featured the same character. I then went about converting them into Conan tales.

Black Turlogh, El Borak, Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, Kirby O'Donnell, Cormac Mac Art and Black Vulmea (who himself was Conan rewritten by Howard) all translated easily into Hyborian-era yarns.

Roy's works are included when possible, including fragments such as Two against Turan and The Slave-Princess, neither of which I could find a satisfactory conclusion to without great personal expense or extensive re-writing that wasn't true to the spirit of this collection.

In addition to this, a selection of edited James Allison and John Garfield reincarnation tales have also been included, with their perspectives changed from first to third person and the Allison/Garfield sections removed.

Elsewhere, I tried to keep meddling to a minimum. Guns were altered into bows, gods were retitled, races were renamed, places were altered. Occasionally people were renamed, often by Roy Thomas rather than me.

There are going to be mistakes in this collection, as it was all done manually by one person and spans near four-hundred thousand words. Try not to wince too much if you spot a gun here or an incorrect expletive there.

I have not altered the stories beyond that. There is no added supernatural element as Mr. Thomas was prone to doing (thus these tales will differ from the Marvel Comics slightly), there are no swathes of text written by me and inserted jarringly into Howard's work like de Camp. I have attempted to keep as much of the original story and action as true to Howard as it can be.

This is not a complete revision of all tales that are suitable for conversion or all tales that were converted into Conan yarns. There are a number of historical works that could be altered into Conan tales but I have chosen not to, they can be found in any good Howard collection and I urge you to hunt them down. Other works such as the spicy stories Guns of Khartum, The Dragon of Kao Tsu and Murderer's Grog were impossible to find and convert.

The Voice of El-Lil was told in both narrative and first person perspective, and thus would have made a poor conversion. I have decided not to include it. Black Canaan is also absent due to the amount of editing it would take to remove all the racial undertones of the text.

The only story not written by Howard in this collection is Tower of Blood, a forgotten David A. English 'Cromek' short that was edited by chance into a Conan tale by Roy for Marvel Comics. He found it while reading the Howard tale Mistress of Death, and liked it so much that he made it part of the Marvel canon.

The two barbarian series by Gardner F. Fox and Norvell W. Page that were also adapted by Roy into Conan stories have not been added to this collection as they are feature-length novels and work against the premise of this primarily Howard-based short story collection.

The premise that these stories work under is simple: what if Howard had lived beyond thirty and decided to go back and re-write some of his old tales into Conan?

We can only guess, but something like this may have been the result.

Old Garrad's Heart

(Originally Old Garrad's Heart)

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

Conan of Cimmeria, still but a youth, watched as when his grandfather hobbled out and sank down on his favorite chair with the cushioned seat, and began to stuff tobacco in his old corncob-pipe.

"I thought you'd be going to the dance," he said.

"I'm waiting for Brax," Conan answered. "I'm going over to old man Garrad's with him."

His grandfather sucked at his pipe awhile before he spoke again.

"Old Garrad pretty bad off?"

"Brax says he hasn't a chance."

"Who's takin' care of him?"

"Joran, against Garrad's wishes. But somebody had to stay with him."

His grandfather sucked his pipe noisily, and watched the heat lightning playing away off up in the hills; then he said: "You think old Garrad's the biggest liar in these mountains, don't you?"

"He tells some pretty tall tales," the youth admitted. "Some of the things he claimed he took part in, must have happened before he was born."

"I came from the northern mountains fifty summers ago," his grandfather said abruptly. "I saw these lands grow up from nothing. There wasn't anything but snow when I came. But old Garrad was here, living in the same place he lives now, only then it was in better condition. He don't look a day older now than he did the first time I saw him."

"You never mentioned that before," Conan said in some surprise.

"I knew you'd put it down to an old man's maunderings," he answered. "Old Garrad was the first Cimmerian to settle in this country. He built his place a good fifty miles west of the frontier. Crom knows how he did it, for these hills swarmed with Picts then.

"I remember the first time I ever saw him. Even then everybody called him 'old Garrad.'

"I remember him telling me the same tales he's told you—only I believe him, and you don't."

"What he speaks of was so long ago—" Conan protested.

"The last full-scale Pictish raid through this country was thirty summers past," said his grandfather, engrossed in his own reminiscences. "I was in on that fight, and so was old Garrad. I saw him kill the chieftan at seven hundred paces with his bow.

"But before that I was with him in a fight up near the head of frozen water. A band of Picts came down, looting and burning, rode through the hills and started back up, and a scout of them were hot on their heels. they ran on to them just at sundown. they killed seven of them, and the rest skinned out through the woods on foot. But three of our boys were killed, and Garrad got a thrust in the breast with a spear.

"It was an awful wound. He lay like a dead man, and it seemed sure nobody could live after a wound like that. But an old Pict came out of the brush, and when they aimed our weapons at him, he made the peace sign and spoke to them. I don't know why the boys didn't shoot him in his tracks, because our blood was heated with the fighting and killing, but something about him made them hold our fire. He said he wasn't an enemy, but was an old friend of Garrad's, and wanted to help him. He asked them to carry Garrad into a clump of the woods, and leave him alone, and to this day I don't know why they did, but they did. It was an awful time—the wounded moaning and calling for water, the staring corpses strewn about the camp, night coming on, and no way of knowing that the Picts wouldn't return when dark fell.

"they made camp right there, because the horses were exhausted, and they watched all night, but the Picts didn't come back. I don't know what went on out in the woods where Garrad's body lay, because I never saw that strange Pict again; but during the night I kept hearing a weird moaning that wasn't made by the dyin' men, and an owl hooted from midnight till dawn.

"And at sunrise Garrad came walking out of the woods, pale and haggard, but alive, and already the wound in his breast had closed and begun to heal. And since then he's never mentioned that wound, nor that fight, nor the strange Pict who came and went so mysteriously. And he hasn't aged a bit; he looks now just like he did then—a man of about fifty winters."

In the silence that followed, the galloping hooves of a horse cut through the dusk.

"That's Brax," Conan said. "When I come back I'll tell you how Garrad is."

Brax was prompt with his predictions as they galloped across the three miles of snow covered hills that lay between his home and the Garrad farm.

"I'll be surprised to find him alive," he said, "smashed up like he is. A man his age ought to have more sense than to try to break a young horse."

"He doesn't look so old," Conan remarked.

"I'll be fifty, this next birthday," answered Brax. "I've known him all his life, and he must have been at least fifty the first time I ever saw him. His looks are deceiving."

Old Garrad's dwelling-place was reminiscent of the past. The mossy sides of the low squat house had never known much repair.

Old Garrad lay on his rude bed, tended crudely but efficiently by the man Brax had hired over the old man's protests. As Conan looked at him, Conan was impressed anew by his evident vitality. His frame was stooped but unwithered, his limbs rounded out with springy muscles. In his corded neck and in his face, drawn though it was with suffering, was apparent an innate virility. His eyes, though partly glazed with pain, burned with the same unquenchable element.

"He's been raving," said Joran stolidly.

"First Cimmerian this far south," muttered old Garrad, becoming intelligible. "Hills nobody ever set foot in before. Getting too old. Have to settle down. Can't move on like I used to. Settle down here. Good country before it filled up with the rest of them."

Brax shook his head. "He's all smashed up inside. He won't live till daylight."

Garrad unexpectedly lifted his head and looked at them with clear eyes.

"Wrong," he wheezed, his breath whistling with pain. "I'll live. What's broken bones and twisted guts? Nothing! It's the heart that counts. As long as the heart keeps pumping, a man can't die. My heart's sound. Listen to it! Feel of it!"

He groped painfully for Brax's wrist, dragged his hand to his bosom and held it there, staring up into the shaman's face with avid intensity.

"Regular dynamo, ain't it?" he gasped. "Stronger than a wild bull!"

Brax beckoned me. "Lay your hand here," he said, placing his hand on the old man's bare breast. "He does have a remarkable heart beat."

Conan noted, in the dim light of the hut, a great livid scar in the gaunt arching breast—such a scar as might be made by a flint-headed spear. Conan laid his hand directly on this scar, and an exclamation escaped his lips.

Under his hand old Garrad's heart pulsed, but its throb was like no other heart beat Conan have ever observed. Its power was astounding; his ribs vibrated to its steady throb. It felt more like a vibration than the action of a human organ. Conan could feel its amazing vitality radiating from his breast, stealing up into his hand and up his arm, until his own heart seemed to speed up in response.

"I can't die," old Garrad gasped. "Not so long as this heart's in my breast. Only an arrow through the brain can kill me. And even then I wouldn't be rightly dead, as long as this heart beats in my breast. Yet it isn't rightly mine, either. It belongs to Ghost Man, the Pict chief. It was the heart of a god the Picts worshipped before our people drove them out of their native hills.

"I knew Ghost Man down south, in the old wandering days. I saved his life from raiders once. He tied the string of a ghost between him and me—the string no man but me and him can see or feel. He came when he knew I needed him, in that fight up on the frozen headwaters, when I got this scar.

"I was dead as a man can be. My heart was sliced in two, like the heart of a butchered beef steer.

"All night Ghost Man did magic, calling his ghost back from spirit-land. I remember that flight, a little. It was dark, and gray-like, and I drifted through gray mists and heard the dead wailing past me in the mist. But Ghost Man brought me back.

"He took out what was left of my mortal heart, and put the heart of the god in my bosom. But it's his, and when I'm through with it, he'll come for it. It's kept me alive and strong for the lifetime of a man. Age can't touch me. What do I care if these fools around here call me an old liar? What I know, I know. But hark!"

His fingers became claws, clamping fiercely on Brax's wrist. His old eyes, old yet strangely young, burned fierce as those of an eagle under his bushy brows.

"If by some mischance I should die, now or later, promise me this! Cut into his bosom and take out the heart Ghost Man lent me so long ago! It's his. And as long as it beats in my body, my spirit will be tied to that body, though his head be crushed like an egg underfoot! A living thing in a rotting body! Promise!"

"All right, Conan promise," replied Brax, to humor him, and old Garrad sank back with a whistling sigh of relief.

He did not die that night, nor the next, nor the next. Conan well remembered the next day, because it was that day that he had the fight with Kirhak.

People will take a good deal from a bully, rather than to spill blood. Because nobody had gone to the trouble of killing him, Kirhak thought the whole mountainside was afraid of him.

He had bought a steer from his father, and when his father went to collect for it, Kirhak told him that he had paid the money to him—which was a lie. Conan went looking for Kirhak, and came upon him, boasting of his toughness, and telling the crowd that he was going to beat Conan up and make him say that he had paid him the money, and that Conan had stuck it into his own pocket. When Conan heard him say that, he saw red, and ran in on him with a knife, and cut him across the face, and in the neck, side, breast and belly, and the only thing that saved his life was the fact that the crowd pulled him off.

There was a preliminary hearing from the elders, and Conan was due to be punished. Kirhak was as tough-fibered as a Cimmerian boy ought to be, and he recovered, swearing vengeance, for he was vain of his looks, though Crom knew why, and Conan had permanently impaired them.

And while Kirhak was recovering, old man Garrad recovered too, to the amazement of everybody, especially Brax.

Conan well remembered the night Brax took him again out to old Garrad's farm.

As they drove along the winding old road in Doc's car, Conan asked: "Why are you insistent that I go with you this particular night? Is he dying?"

"No," he said. "You couldn't kill old Garrad with a maul. He's completely recovered from injuries that ought to have killed an ox. To tell the truth, Kirhak is swearing he'll kill you on sight."

"By Crom!" Conan exclaimed angrily. "Now everybody will think I left because Conan was afraid of him. Turn around and take me back, damn it!"

"Be reasonable," he said. "Everybody knows you're not afraid of Kirhak. Nobody's afraid of him now. His bluff's broken, and that's why he's so wild against you. But you can't afford to have any more trouble with him now, and the punishment of the elders is only a short time off."

Conan laughed and said: "Well, if he's looking for me hard enough, he can find me as easily at old Garrad's as in town, because Corlan heard you say where they were going. And he's hated me since last winter. He'll tell Kirhak where I went."

"I never thought of that," said Brax, worried.

"Forget it," Conan advised. "Kirhak hasn't got guts enough to do anything but blow."

But Conan was mistaken. Puncture a bully's vanity and you touch his one vital spot.

Old Garrad had not gone to bed when they got there. He was sitting in the room opening on to his sagging porch, the room which was at once living-room and bedroom, smoking his old cob pipe and trying to read a newspaper by the light of his coal-oil lamp. All the windows and doors were wide open for the coolness, and the insects which swarmed in and fluttered around the lamp didn't seem to bother him.

They sat down and discussed the weather—which isn't so inane as one might suppose, in a country where men's livelihood depends on sun and rain, and is at the mercy of wind and snow. The talk drifted into other kindred channels, and after some time, Brax bluntly spoke of something that hung in his mind.

“Garrad," he said, "that night I thought you were dying, you babbled a lot of stuff about your heart, and an Pict who lent you his. How much of that was delirium?"

"None," said Garrad, pulling at his pipe. "It was truth. Ghost Man, the Pict priest of the Gods of Night, replaced his dead, torn heart with one from something he worshipped. Conan ain't sure himself just what that something is—something from away back and a long way off, he said. But being a god, it can do without its heart for awhile. But when Conan die—if Conan ever get his head smashed so his consciousness is destroyed—the heart must be given back to Ghost Man."

"You mean you were in earnest about cutting out your heart?" demanded Brax.

"It has to be," answered old Garrad. "A living thing in a dead thing is opposed to neither. That's what Ghost Man said."

"Who the devil was Ghost Man?"

"I told you. A witch-shaman of the Picts, who dwelt in this country before the Cimmerians came down from the mountains and drove them across the border. I was a friend to them. I reckon Ghost Man is the only one left alive."

"Alive? Now?"

"I don't," confessed old Garrad. "I don't know whether he's alive or dead. I dunno whether he was alive when he came to me after the fight, or even if he was alive when I knew him in the southern country. Alive as they understand life, I mean."

"What nonsense is this?" demanded Brax uneasily, and Conan felt a slight stirring in his hair. Outside was stillness, and the stars, and the black shadows of the woods. The torch cast old Garrad's shadow grotesquely on the wall, so that it did not at all resemble that of a human, and his words were strange as words heard in a nightmare.

"I knew you wouldn't understand," said old Garrad. "I don't understand myself, and I haven't got the words to explain those things I feel and know without understanding. Ghost Man was different—that's all I can say—alive or dead, I don't know, but he was. What's more, he is."

"Is it you or me that's crazy?" asked Brax.

"Well," said old Garrad, "I'll tell you this much—Ghost Man knew of Acheron."

"Crazy as a loon!" murmured Brax. Then he lifted his head. "What's that?"

"Horse coming to a canter nearby," Conan said. "Sounds like it stopped."

Conan stepped to the door, like a fool, and stood etched in the light behind him. He got a glimpse of a shadowy bulk he knew to be a man on a horse; then Brax yelled: "Look out!" and threw himself against him, knocking them both sprawling. At the same instant Conan heard the twang of a bow, and old Garrad grunted and fell heavily.

"Kirhak!" screamed Brax. "He's killed him!"

Conan scrambled up, hearing the clatter of retreating hoofs, snatched old Garrad's axe from the wall, rushed recklessly out into the open and threw it at the fleeing shape, dim in the starlight. The toss was too light to kill at that range, but the blade stung the horse and maddened him. It swerved, crashed headlong through the trees and a limb knocked his rider out of the saddle. He never moved after he hit the ground. Conan ran out there and looked down at him. It was Kirhak, right enough, and his neck was broken like a rotten branch.

Conan let him lie, and ran back to the house. Brax had stretched old Garrad out on a bench he'd dragged in from the porch, and man's face was whiter than he'd ever seen it. Old Garrad was a ghastly sight; it had been a good shot, and at that range the arrowhead had literally torn off the top of his head. His features were masked with blood and brains. He had been directly behind Conan, and he had stopped the arrow meant for him.

Brax was trembling, though he was anything but a stranger to such sights.

"Would you pronounce him dead?" he asked.

"That's for you to say." Conan answered. "But even a fool could tell that he's dead.”

"He is dead," said Brax in a strained unnatural voice. "Rigor mortis is already setting in. But feel his heart!"

Conan did, and cried out. The flesh was already cold; but beneath it that his heart still hammered steadily away. No blood coursed through those veins; yet the heart pounded, pounded, pounded, like the pulse of Eternity.

"A living thing in a dead thing," whispered Brax, cold sweat on his face. "This is opposed to nature. I am going to keep the promise I made him. I'll assume full responsibility. This is too monstrous to ignore."

Their implements were a butcher-knife and a crude axe. Outside only the still stars looked down on the black shadows and the dead man that lay in the snow. Inside, the torch flickered, making strange shadows move and shiver and cringe in the corners, and glistened on the blood on the floor, and the red-dabbled figure on the bench. The only sound inside was the crunch of the axe in bone; outside an owl began to hoot weirdly.

Brax thrust a red-stained hand into the aperture he had made, and drew out a red, pulsing object that caught the lamplight. With a choked cry he recoiled, and the thing slipped from his fingers and fell on the table. And Conan too cried out involuntarily. For it did not fall with a soft meaty thud, as a piece of flesh should fall. It thumped hard on the table.

Impelled by an irresistible urge, Conan bent and gingerly picked up old Garrad's heart. The feel of it was brittle, unyielding, like steel or stone, but smoother than either. In size and shape it was the duplicate of a human heart, but it was slick and smooth, and its crimson surface reflected the lamplight like a jewel more lambent than any ruby; and in his hand it still throbbed mightily, sending vibratory radiations of energy up his arm until his own heart seemed swelling and bursting in response. It was cosmic power, beyond his comprehension, concentrated into the likeness of a human heart.

The thought came to him that here was an aspect of life, the nearest approach to immortality that is possible for the destructible human body, the materialization of a cosmic secret more wonderful than any other. His soul was drawn into that gleam, and Conan suddenly wished passionately that it hammered and thundered in his own bosom in place of his paltry heart of tissue and muscle.

Brax ejaculated incoherently. Conan wheeled.

The noise of his coming had been no greater than the whispering of a night wind through the corn. There in the doorway he stood, tall, dark, inscrutable—a Pict warrior, in the paint, war bonnet, breech-clout and moccasins of an elder age. His dark eyes burned like fires gleaming deep under fathomless black lakes. Silently he extended his hand, and Conan dropped Garrad's heart into it. Then without a word he turned and stalked into the night. But when Brax and Conan rushed out into the yard an instant later, there was no sign of any human being. He had vanished like a phantom of the night, and only something that looked like an owl was flying, dwindling from sight, into the rising moon.

The People of the Dark

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

He came to Dagon's Cave to kill Gaeric. He went down the dusky avenues made by the towering trees, and his mood well-matched the primitive grimness of the scene. The approach to Dagon's Cave was always dark, for the mighty branches and thick leaves shut out the sun, and now the somberness of his own soul made the shadows seem more ominous and gloomy than was natural.

Not far away he heard the slow wash of the waves against the tall cliffs, but the sea itself was out of sight, masked by the dense oak forest. The darkness and the stark gloom of his surroundings gripped his shadowed soul as he passed beneath the ancient branches--as he came out into a narrow glade and saw the mouth of the ancient cavern before him. He paused, scanning the cavern's exterior and the dim reaches of the silent oaks.

The man he hated had not come before him! He was in time to carry out his grim intent. For a moment his resolution faltered, then like a wave there surged over him the fragrance of Tamera, a vision of wavy golden hair and deep gray eyes, changing and mystic as the sea. He clenched his hands until the knuckles showed white, and instinctively touched the wicked snub-nosed revolver whose weight sagged his coat pocket.

But for Gaeric, he felt certain he had already won this woman, desire for whom made his waking hours a torment and his sleep a torture. Whom did she love? She would not say; he did not believe she knew. Let one of us go away, he thought, and she would turn to the other. And he was going to simplify matters for her--and for himself. By chance he had overheard his blond rival remark that he intended coming to lonely Dagon's Cave on an idle exploring outing--alone.

He was not by nature criminal. He was born and raised in a hard country, and had lived most of his life on the raw edges of the world, where a man took what he wanted, if he could, and mercy was a virtue little known. But it was a torment that racked him day and night that sent him out to take the life of Gaeric. He had lived hard, and violently, perhaps. When love overtook him, it also was fierce and violent.

Perhaps he was not wholly sane, what with his love for Tamera and his hatred for Gaeric.

Under any other circumstances, he would had been glad to call him friend--a fine, rangy, upstanding young fellow, clear-eyed and strong. But he stood in the way of his desire and he must die.

He stepped into the dimness of the cavern and halted. He had never before visited Dagon's Cave, yet a vague sense of misplaced familiarity troubled him as he gazed on the high arching roof, the even stone walls and the dusty floor. He shrugged his shoulders, unable to place the elusive feeling; doubtless it was evoked by a similarity to caverns in the mountain country of the American Southwest where he was born and spent his childhood.

And yet he knew that he had never seen a cave like this one, whose regular aspect gave rise to myths that it was not a natural cavern, but had been hewn from the solid rock ages ago by the tiny hands of the mysterious Little People, the prehistoric beings of legend. The whole countryside thereabouts was a haunt for ancient folk lore.

The country folk were predominantly Cimmerian; here the Nordheim invaders had never prevailed, and the legends reached back, in that long settled land, further than anywhere else in the north - back beyond the coming of the Saxons, aye, and incredibly beyond that distant age, beyond the coming of the Aquilonians, to those unbelievably ancient days when the native Cimmerian ancestors warred with the devilish Picts.

The Little People, of course, had their part in the lore. Legend said that this cavern was one of their last strongholds against the conquering Cimmerians, and hinted at lost tunnels, long fallen in or blocked up, connecting the cave with a network of subterranean corridors which honeycombed the hills. With these chance meditations vying idly in his mind with grimmer speculations, he passed through the outer chamber of the cavern and entered a narrow tunnel, which he knew by former descriptions, connected with a larger room.

It was dark in the tunnel, but not too dark for him to make out the vague, half-defaced outlines of mysterious etchings on the stone walls. He ventured to switch on his electric torch and examine them more closely. Even in their dimness he was repelled by their abnormal and revolting character. Surely no men cast in human mold as they know it, scratched those grotesque obscenities.

He snapped off the torch and passed through the tunnel, to come out into a sort of doorway which seemed entirely too symmetrical to had been the work of nature. He was looking into a vast dim cavern, at a somewhat lower level than the outer chamber, and again he shuddered with a strange alien sense of familiarity. A short flight of steps led down from the tunnel to the floor of the cavern--tiny steps, too small for normal human feet, carved into the solid stone. Their edges were greatly worn away, as if by ages of use. He started the descent--his foot slipped suddenly. He instinctively knew what was coming--it was all in part with that strange feeling of familiarity--but he could not catch himself. He fell headlong down the steps and struck the stone floor with a crash that blotted out his senses....

Slowly consciousness returned to him, with a throbbing of his head and a sensation of bewilderment. He lifted a hand to his head and found it caked with blood. He had received a blow, or had taken a fall, but so completely had his wits been knocked out of him that his mind was an absolute blank. Where he was, who he was, he did not know. He looked about, blinking in the dim light, and saw that he was in a wide, dusty cavern. He stood at the foot of a short flight of steps which led upward into some kind of tunnel. He ran his hand dazedly through his square-cut black mane, and his eyes wandered over his massive naked limbs and powerful torso. He was clad, he noticed absently, in a sort of loincloth, from the girdle of which swung an empty scabbard, and leathern sandals were on his feet.

Then he saw an object lying at his feet, and stooped and took it up. It was a heavy iron sword, whose broad blade was darkly stained. his fingers fitted instinctively about its hilt with the familiarity of long usage. Then suddenly he remembered and laughed to think that a fall on his head should render him, Conan of Cimmeria, so completely daft. Aye, it all came back to him now. It had been a raid on the Aquilonians, on whose forts they continually swooped with torch and sword, Venarium had at last fallen to their might. That day they had swept suddenly down and in the hurricane of battle which followed, the Aquilonians had at last given up the stubborn conquest of his home and retreated, warriors, women and bairns, into the deep shadows of the forests to the south.

And now he followed a girl there, whom he desired with a burning passion, a lithe, slim young creature with wavy golden hair and deep gray eyes, changing and mystic as the sea. Her name was Tamera and she put up a fair chase.

He saw her white half-clad body flickering among the trees as she ran with the swiftness of a doe, and he followed, panting with fierce eagerness. Under the dark shadows of the gnarled oaks she fled, with him in close pursuit, while far away behind died out the final shouts of slaughter and the clashing of swords. Then they ran in silence, save for her quick labored panting, and he was so close behind her as they emerged into a narrow glade before a somber-mouthed cavern, that he caught her flying golden tresses with one mighty hand. She sank down with a despairing wail, and even so, a shout echoed her cry and he wheeled quickly to face a rangy young Cimmerian who sprang from among the trees, the light of desperation in his eyes.

"Gaeric!" the girl wailed, her voice breaking in a sob, and fiercer rage welled up in him, for he knew the lad was her lover.

"Run for the forest, Tamera!" he shouted, and leaped at him as a panther leaps, his bronze ax whirling like a flashing wheel about his head. And then sounded the clangor of strife and the hard-drawn panting of combat.

The boy was as tall as he, but he was lithe where he was massive. The advantage of sheer muscular power was his, and soon he was on the defensive, striving desperately to parry his heavy strokes with his ax. Hammering on his guard like a smith on an anvil, he pressed him relentlessly, driving him irresistibly before him. His chest heaved, his breath came in labored gasps, his blood dripped from scalp, chest and thigh where his whistling blade had cut the skin, and all but gone home. As he redoubled his strokes and he bent and swayed beneath them like a sapling in a storm, he heard the girl cry: "Gaeric! Gaeric! The cave! Into the cave!"

He saw the boy's face pale with a fear greater than that induced by his hacking sword.

"Not there!" he gasped. "Better a clean death! In Crom's name, girl, run into the forest and save yourself!"

"I will not leave you!" she cried. "The cave! It was our one chance!"

His foe saw her flash past them like a flying wisp of white and vanish in the cavern, and with a despairing cry, the youth launched a wild desperate stroke that nigh cleft his skull. As he staggered beneath the blow he had barely parried, Gaeric sprang away, leaping into the cavern after the girl and vanished in the gloom.

With a maddened yell that invoked all his grim gods, he sprang recklessly after them, not reckoning if the man lurked beside the entrance to brain him as he rushed in. But a quick glance showed the chamber empty and a wisp of white disappearing through a dark doorway in the back wall.

He raced across the cavern and came to a sudden halt as an ax licked out of the gloom of the entrance and whistled perilously close to his black-maned head. He gave back suddenly. Now the advantage was with Gaeric, who stood in the narrow mouth of the corridor where he could hardly come at him without exposing himself to the devastating stroke of his ax.

He was near frothing with fury and the sight of a slim white form among the deep shadows behind the warrior drove him into a frenzy. He attacked savagely but warily, thrusting venomously at his foe, and drawing back from his strokes. He wished to draw him out into a wide lunge, avoid it and run him through before he could recover his balance. In the open he could had beat him down by sheer power and heavy blows, but here he could only use the point and that at a disadvantage; he always preferred the edge. But he was stubborn; if he could not come at him with a finishing stroke, neither could he or the girl escape him while he kept him hemmed in the tunnel.

It must had been the realization of this fact that prompted the girl's action, for she said something to Gaeric about looking for a way leading out, and though he cried out fiercely forbidding her to venture away into the darkness, she turned and ran swiftly down the tunnel to vanish in the dimness. his wrath rose appallingly and he nearly got his head split in his eagerness to bring down his foe before she found a means for their escape.

Then the cavern echoed with a terrible scream and Gaeric cried out like a man death-stricken, his face ashy in the gloom. He whirled, as if he had forgotten him and his sword, and raced down the tunnel like a madman, shrieking Tamera's name. From far away, as if from the bowels of the earth, he seemed to hear her answering cry, mingled with a strange sibilant clamor that electrified him with nameless but instinctive horror. Then silence fell, broken only by Gaeric's frenzied cries, receding farther and farther into the earth.

Recovering himself he sprang into the tunnel and raced after the Cimmerian as recklessly as he had run after the girl. And to give him his due, red-handed reaver though he was, cutting down his rival from behind was less in his mind than discovering what dread thing had Tamera in its clutches.

As he ran along he noted absently that the sides of the tunnel were scrawled with monstrous pictures, and realized suddenly and creepily that this must be the dread Cavern of the Children of the Night, tales of which had crossed the narrow sea to resound horrifically in the ears of the Cimmerians. Terror of him must had ridden Tamera hard to had driven her into the cavern shunned by her people, where, it was said, lurked the survivals of that grisly race which inhabited the land before the coming of Cimmeria, and which had fled before them into the unknown caverns of the hills.

Ahead of him the tunnel opened into a wide chamber, and he saw the white form of Gaeric glimmer momentarily in the semidarkness and vanish in what appeared to be the entrance of a corridor opposite the mouth of the tunnel he had just traversed. Instantly there sounded a short, fierce shout and the crash of a hard-driven blow, mixed with the hysterical screams of a girl and a medley of serpent-like hissing that made his hair bristle. And at that instant he shot out of the tunnel, running at full speed, and realized too late the floor of the cavern lay several feet below the level of the tunnel. his flying feet missed the tiny steps and he crashed terrifically on the solid stone floor.

Now as he stood in the semi-darkness, rubbing his aching head, all this came back to him, and he stared fearsomely across the vast chamber at that black cryptic corridor into which Tamera and her lover had disappeared, and over which silence lay like a pall. Gripping his sword, he warily crossed the great still cavern and peered into the corridor. Only a denser darkness met his eyes. He entered, striving to pierce the gloom, and as his foot slipped on a wide wet smear on the stone floor, the raw acrid scent of fresh-spilled blood met his nostrils. Someone or something had died there, either the young man or his unknown attacker.

He stood there uncertainly, all the supernatural fears that are the heritage of the Gael rising in his primitive soul. He could turn and stride out of these accursed mazes, into the clear sunlight and down to the clean blue sea where his comrades, no doubt, impatiently awaited him after the routing of the Aquilonians. Why should he risk his life among these grisly rat dens? he was eaten with curiosity to know what manner of beings haunted the cavern, and who were called the Children of the Night by his people, but it was his love for the yellow-haired girl which drove him down that dark tunnel – and love her he did, in his way, and would had been kind to her, had he carried her away to his haunt.

He walked softly along the corridor, blade ready. What sort of creatures the Children of the Night were, he had no idea, but the tales he had heard had lent them a distinctly inhuman nature.

The darkness closed around him as he advanced, until he was moving in utter blackness. his groping left hand encountered a strangely carven doorway, and at that instant something hissed like a viper beside him and slashed fiercely at his thigh. He struck back savagely and felt his blind stroke crunch home, and something fell at his feet and died. What thing he had slain in the dark he could not know, but it must had been at least partly human because the shallow gash in his thigh had been made with a blade of some sort, and not by fangs or talons. And he sweated with horror, for the gods know, the hissing voice of the Thing had resembled no human tongue he had ever heard.

And now in the darkness ahead of him he heard the sound repeated, mingled with horrible slitherings, as if numbers of reptilian creatures were approaching. He stepped quickly into the entrance his groping hand had discovered and came near repeating his headlong fall, for instead of letting into another level corridor, the entrance gave onto a flight of dwarfish steps on which he floundered wildly.

Recovering his balance he went on cautiously, groping along the sides of the shaft for support. He seemed to be descending into the very bowels of the earth, but he dared not turn back. Suddenly, far below him, he glimpsed a faint eery light. He went on, perforce, and came to a spot where the shaft opened into another great vaulted chamber; and he shrank back, aghast.

In the center of the chamber stood a grim, black altar; it had been rubbed all over with a sort of phosphorous, so that it glowed dully, lending a semi-illumination to the shadowy cavern. Towering behind it on a pedestal of human skulls, lay a cryptic black object, carven with mysterious hieroglyphics. The Black Stone! The ancient, ancient Stone before which was said, the Children of the Night bowed in gruesome worship, and whose origin was lost in the black mists of a hideously distant past. Once, legend said, it had stood in that grim circle of monoliths, before its votaries had been driven like chaff before the bows of the Picts.

But he gave it but a passing, shuddering glance. Two figures lay, bound with rawhide thongs, on the glowing black altar. One was Tamera; the other was Gaeric, bloodstained and disheveled. His bronze ax, crusted with clotted blood, lay near the altar. And before the glowing stone squatted Horror.

Though he had never seen one of those ghoulish aborigines, he knew this thing for what it was, and shuddered. It was a man of a sort, but so low in the stage of life that its distorted humanness was more horrible than its bestiality.

Erect, it could not had been five feet in height. Its body was scrawny and deformed, its head disproportionately large. Lank snaky hair fell over a square inhuman face with flabby writhing lips that bared yellow fangs, flat spreading nostrils and great yellow slant eyes. He knew the creature must be able to see in the dark as well as a cat. Centuries of skulking in dim caverns had lent the race terrible and inhuman attributes. But the most repellent feature was its skin: scaly, yellow and mottled, like the hide of a serpent. A loin-clout made of a real snake's skin girt its lean loins, and its taloned hands gripped a short stone-tipped spear and a sinister-looking mallet of polished flint.

So intently was it gloating over its captives, it evidently had not heard his stealthy descent. As he hesitated in the shadows of the shaft, far above him he heard a soft sinister rustling that chilled the blood in his veins.

The Children were creeping down the shaft behind him, and he was trapped. He saw other entrances opening on the chamber, and he acted, realizing that an alliance with Gaeric was our only hope. Enemies though they were, they were men, cast in the same mold, trapped in the lair of these indescribable monstrosities.

As he stepped from the shaft, the horror beside the altar jerked up his head and glared full at him. And as he sprang up, he leaped and he crumpled, blood spurting, as his heavy sword split his reptilian heart. But even as he died, he gave tongue in an abhorrent shriek which was echoed far up the shaft. In desperate haste he cut Gaeric's bonds and dragged him to his feet. And he turned to Tamera, who in that dire extremity did not shrink from him, but looked up at him with pleading, terror-dilated eyes. Gaeric wasted no time in words, realizing chance had made allies of us. He snatched up his ax as he freed the girl.

"We can't go up the shaft," he explained swiftly; "they'll had the whole pack upon us quickly. They caught Tamera as she sought for an exit, and overpowered him by sheer numbers when he followed. They dragged us hither and all but that carrion scattered – bearing word of the sacrifice through all their burrows, he doubt not. Crom alone knows how many of his people, stolen in the night, had died on that altar. We must take our chance in one of these tunnels – all lead to hell! Follow him!"

Seizing Tamera's hand he ran fleetly into the nearest tunnel and he followed. A glance back into the chamber before a turn in the corridor blotted it from view showed a revolting horde streaming out of the shaft. The tunnel slanted steeply upward, and suddenly ahead of us they saw a bar of gray light. But the next instant our cries of hope changed to curses of bitter disappointment. There was daylight, aye, drifting in through a cleft in the vaulted roof, but far, far above our reach. Behind us the pack gave tongue exultingly. And he halted.

"Save yourselves if you can," he growled. "Here he make his stand. They can see in the dark and he cannot. Here at least he can see them. Go!"

But Gaeric halted also. "Little use to be hunted like rats to our doom. There was no escape. Let us meet our fate like men."

Tamera cried out, wringing her hands, but she clung to her lover.

"Stand behind me with the girl," he grunted. "When I fall, dash out her brains with your ax lest they take her alive again. Then sell your own life as high as you may, for there was none to avenge us."

His keen eyes met Conan's squarely.

"We see the world in different ways," he said, "but Crom loves brave men. Mayhap they shall meet again, beyond the Dark."

"Hail and farewell!" they growled, and our right hands gripped like steel.

And he wheeled as a hideous horde swept up the tunnel and burst into the dim light, a flying nightmare of streaming snaky hair, foam-flecked lips and glaring eyes. Thundering his war-cry he sprang to meet them and his heavy sword sang and a head spun grinning from its shoulder on an arching fountain of blood.

They came upon him like a wave and the fighting madness of his race was upon him. He fought as a maddened beast fights and at every stroke he clove through flesh and bone, and blood spattered in a crimson rain.

Then as they surged in and he went down beneath the sheer weight of their numbers, a fierce yell cut the din and Gaeric's ax sang above him, splattering blood and brains like water. The press slackened and he staggered up, trampling the writhing bodies beneath his feet.

"A stair behind us!" the Cimmerian was screaming. "Half hidden in an angle of the wall! It must lead to daylight! Up it, in the name of Crom!"

So they fell back, fighting our way inch by inch. The vermin fought like blood-hungry devils, clambering over the bodies of the slain to screech and hack. Both of us were streaming blood at every step when they reached the mouth of the shaft, into which Tamera had preceded them.

Screaming like very fiends the Children surged in to drag us down. The shaft was not as light as had been the corridor, and it grew darker as they climbed, but our foes could only come at us from in front. By the gods, they slaughtered them till the stair was littered with mangled corpses and the Children frothed like mad wolves! Then suddenly they abandoned the fray and raced back down the steps.

"What portends this?" gasped Gaeric, shaking the bloody sweat from his eyes.

"Up the shaft, quick!" he panted. "They mean to mount some other stair and come at us from above!"

So they raced up those accursed steps, slipping and stumbling, and as they fled past a black tunnel that opened into the shaft, far down it they heard a frightful howling. An instant later they emerged from the shaft into a winding corridor, dimly illumined by a vague gray light filtering in from above, and somewhere in the bowels of the earth he seemed to hear the thunder of rushing water. We started down the corridor and as they did so, a heavy weight smashed on his shoulders, knocking him headlong, and a mallet crashed again and again on his head, sending dull red flashes of agony across his brain. With a volcanic wrench he dragged his attacker off and under him, and tore out his throat with his naked fingers. And his fangs met in his arm in his death-bite.

Reeling up, he saw that Tamera and Gaeric had passed out of sight. He had been somewhat behind them, and they had run on, knowing nothing of the fiend which had leaped on his shoulders. Doubtless they thought he was still close on their heels. A dozen steps he took, then halted. The corridor branched and he knew not which way his companions had taken. At blind venture he turned into the left-hand branch, and staggered on in the semi darkness. He was weak from fatigue and loss of blood, dizzy and sick from the blows he had received. Only the thought of Tamera kept him doggedly on his feet. Now distinctly he heard the sound of an unseen torrent.

That he was not far underground was evident by the dim light which filtered in from somewhere above, and he momentarily expected to come upon another stair. But when he did, he halted in black despair; instead of up, it led down. Somewhere far behind him he heard faintly the howls of the pack, and he went down, plunging into utter darkness. At last he struck a level and went along blindly. He had given up all hope of escape, and only hoped to find Tamera--if she and her lover had not found a way of escape – and die with her. The thunder of rushing water was above his head now, and the tunnel was slimy and dank. Drops of moisture fell on his head and he knew he was passing under the river.

Then he blundered again upon steps cut in the stone, and these led upward. He scrambled up as fast as his stiffening wounds would allow – and he had taken punishment enough to had killed an ordinary man. Up he went and up, and suddenly daylight burst on him through a cleft in the solid rock. He stepped into the blaze of the sun. He was standing on a ledge high above the rushing waters of a river which raced at awesome speed between towering cliffs. The ledge on which he stood was close to the top of the cliff; safety was within arm's length. But he hesitated and such was his love for the golden-haired girl that he was ready to retrace his steps through those black tunnels on the mad hope of finding her. Then he started.

Across the river he saw another cleft in the cliff-wall which fronted him, with a ledge similar to that on which he stood, but longer. In olden times, he doubt not, some sort of primitive bridge connected the two ledges – possibly before the tunnel was dug beneath the river-bed. Now as he watched, two figures emerged upon that other ledge – one gashed, dust-stained, limping, gripping a bloodstained ax; the other slim, white and girlish.

Gaeric and Tamera! They had taken the other branch of the corridor at the fork and had evidently followed the windows of the tunnel to emerge as he had done, except that he had taken the left turn and passed clear under the river. And now he saw that they were in a trap. On that side the cliffs rose half a hundred feet higher than on his side of the river, and so sheer a spider could scarce had scaled them.

There were only two ways of escape from the ledge: back through the fiend-haunted tunnels, or straight down to the river which raved far beneath.

He saw Gaeric look up the sheer cliffs and then down, and shake his head in despair. Tamera put her arms about his neck, and though he could not hear their voices for the rush of the river, he saw them smile, and then they went together to the edge of the ledge. And out of the cleft swarmed a loathsome mob, as foul reptiles writhe up out of the darkness, and they stood blinking in the sunlight like the night-things they were. He gripped his sword-hilt in the agony of his helplessness until the blood trickled from under his fingernails. Why had not the pack followed him instead of his companions?

The Children hesitated an instant as the two Cimmerians faced them, then with a laugh Gaeric hurled his ax far out into the rushing river, and turning, caught Tamera in a last embrace. Together they sprang far out, and still locked in each other's arms, hurtled downward, struck the madly foaming water that seemed to leap up to meet them, and vanished. And the wild river swept on like a blind, insensate monster, thundering along the echoing cliffs.

A moment he stood frozen, then like a man in a dream he turned, caught the edge of the cliff above him and wearily drew himself up and over, and stood on his feet above the cliffs, hearing like a dim dream the roar of the river far beneath.

Out of the Deep

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

Fallon sailed at dawn and Marga, the girl who was to marry him, stood on the wharfs in the cold vagueness to wave a good-bye. At dusk Marga knelt, stony eyed, above the still white form that the crawling tide had left crumpled on the beach.

The people of the town gathered about, whispering:

"The fog hung heavy; mayhap she went ashore on Ghost Reef. Strange that his corpse alone should drift back to the harbor – and so swiftly."

And an undertone:

"Alive or dead, he would come to her!"

The body lay above the tide mark, as if flung by a vagrant wave; slim, but strong and virile in life, now darkly handsome even in death. The eyes were closed, strange to say, so it appeared that he but slept.

The seaman's clothes he wore dripped salt water and fragments of sea-weed clung to them.

"Strange," muttered old Harpur, owner of the Sea-lion Inn and the oldest ex-seaman of the town. "He sank deep, for these weeds grow only at the bottom of the ocean, aye, in the cold green caves of the sea."

Marga spoke no word, she but knelt, her hands pressed to her cheeks, eyes wide and staring.

"Take him in your arms, lass, and kiss him," gently urged the people of that had gathered, "for 'tis what he would have wished, alive."

The girl obeyed mechanically, shuddering at the coldness of his body. Then as her lips touched his, she screamed and recoiled.

"This is not Fallon!" she shrieked, staring wildly about her.

The people nodded sadly to each other.

"Her brain is turned," they whispered, and then they lifted the corpse and bore it to the house wherein Fallon had lived – where he had hoped to bring his bride when he returned from his voyage.

And the people brought Marga along with them, caressing her and soothing her with gentle words. But the girl walked like one in a trance, her eyes still staring in that strange manner.

They laid the body of Fallon on his bed with death candles at the head and feet, and the salt water from his garments trickled off the bed and splashed on the floor. For it is a superstition in Faring town as on many dim coasts, that monstrously bad luck will follow if a drowned man's clothes are removed.

And Marga sat there in the death room and spoke to none, staring fixedly at Fallon's dark calm face.

And as she sat, Gowar, a rejected suitor of hers, and a moody, dangerous man, came and looking over her shoulder, said:

"Sea death brings a curious change, if that is the Fallon I knew." Black looks were passed his way, whereat he seemed surprized, and men rose and quietly escorted him to the door.

"You hated Fallon, Gowar," said Lireigh. "And you hate Marga because the child preferred a better man than you. Now, by Ymir, you'll not be torturing the girl with your calloused talk. Get out and stay!"

Gowar scowled darkly at this, but Lireigh stood up boldly to him, and the men of the town backed him, so Gowar turned his back squarely upon them and strode away. Yet to Conan it had seemed that what he had said had not been meant as a taunt or an insult, but simply the result of a sudden, startling thought.

And as the man walked away the Cimmerian heard him mutter to himself:

" – Alike, and yet strangely unlike him – "

Night had fallen on the small Vanir town and the windows of the houses blinked through the darkness; through the windows of Fallon's house glimmered the death candles where Marga and others kept silent watch until dawn. And beyond the friendly warmth of the town's lights, the dusky green titan brooded along the strand, silent now as if in sleep, but ever ready to leap with hungry talons. Conan wandered down to the beach and, reclining on the white sand, gazed out over the slowly heaving expanse which coiled and billowed in drowsy undulations like a sleeping serpent.

The northern sea – the great, grey, cold-eyed woman of the ages. Her tides spoke to him as they had spoken to him since birth – in the swish of the flat waves along the sand, in the wail of the ocean-bird, in her throbbing silence. I am very old and very wise (brooded the sea), I have no part of man; I slay men and even their bodies I fling back upon the cowering land. There is life in my bosom but it is not human life (whispered the sea), my children hate the sons of men.

A shriek shattered the stillness and brought the young Cimmerian out of his thoughts and to his feet, gazing wildly about him. Above the stars gleamed coldly and their scintillant ghosts sparkled on the ocean's cold surface. The town lay dark and still, save for the death lights in Fallon's house – and the echoes still shuddered through the pulsating silence.

He was among the first to arrive at the door of the death room and there halted aghast with the rest.

Marga lay dead upon the floor, her slender form crushed like a slim ship among shoals, and crouching over her, cradling her in his arms, was Gowar, the gleam of insanity in his wide eyes. And the death candles still flickered and leaped, but no corpse lay on Fallon's bed.

"God's mercy!" gasped Lireigh. "Gowar, ye fiend from Hell, what devil's work is this?"

Gowar looked up.

"I told you," he shrieked. "She knew – and I knew – 'twas not Fallon, that cold monster flung up by the mocking waves! 'Tis some demon inhabiting his corpse! Hark – I sought my bed and tried to sleep, but each time there came the thought of this soft girl sitting beside that cold inhuman thing she thought her lover, and at last I rose and came to the window. Marga sat, drowsing, and the others, fools that they were, slept in other parts of the house. And as I watched – "

He shook as a wave of shuddering passed over him.

"As I watched, Fallon's eyes opened, and the corpse rose swift and stealthy from the bed where it lay. I stood without the window, frozen, helpless, and the ghastly thing stole upon the unknowing girl, with frightful eyes burning with Hellish light and snaky arms outstretched. Then, she woke and screamed and then – oh Mother of God! – the dead man lapped her in his terrible arms and she died without a sound."

Gowar's voice died out into incoherent gibberings and he rocked the dead girl gently to and fro like a mother with a child.

Lireigh shook him:

"Where is the corpse?"

"He fled into the night," said Gowar tonelessly.

Men looked at each other bewildered.

"He lies," muttered they, deep in their beards. "He has slain Marga himself and hidden the corpse somewhere to bear out his ghastly tale."

A sullen snarl shook the throng and as one man they turned and looked where, on Hangman's Hill overlooking the bay, Lie-lip Canool's bleached skeleton glimmered against the stars.

They took the dead girl from Gowar's arms, though he clung to her, and laid her gently on the bed between the candles meant for Fallon. Still she lay and white, and men and women whispered that she seemed more like one drowned than one crushed to death.

They bore Gowar through the village streets, he not resisting but seeming to walk in a daze, muttering to himself. But in the square, Lireigh halted.

"This is a strange tale Gowar told us," said he. "And doubtless a lie. Still, I am not a man to be hanging another without certainty. Therefore let us place him in the stocks for safe-keeping, while we search for Fallon's corpse. Time enough for hanging afterwards."

So this was done and as they turned away Conan looked back upon Gowar who sat, head bowed upon his breast, like a man who is weary unto death.

So under the dim wharfs and in the attics of houses and among stranded hulls the people searched for Fallon's corpse. Back up into the hills behind the town the hunt led them, where they broke up into groups and couples and scattered out over the barren downs.

Conan's companion was Hansun, and they had gotten so far apart that the darkness cloaked them from each other, when he gave a sudden shout. The Cimmerian started toward him and then the shout broke into a shriek and the shriek died off into grisly silence. Hansun lay dead on the earth and a dim form slunk away in the gloom as Conan stood above the corpse, his flesh crawling.

Lireigh and the rest came on the run and gathered about, swearing that Gowar had done this deed also.

"He has escaped, somehow, from the stocks," said they, and together they legged it for the village at top speed.

Aye, Gowar had escaped from the stocks and from his townsmen's hate and from all the sorrows of life. He sat as they had left him, head bowed upon his breast, but One had come to him in the darkness and, though all his bones were broken, he seemed like a drowned man.

Then stark horror fell like a thick fog on the town. They clustered about the stocks, struck silent, till shrieks from a house on the outskirts of the village told them that the horror had struck again and, rushing there, Conan found red destruction and death. And a maniac woman who whimpered before she died that Fallon's corpse had broken through the window, flaming-eyed and horrible, to rend and slay. A green slime fouled the room and fragments of sea-weed clung to the window sill.

Then fear, unreasoning and shameless, took possession of the men of the sleepy fishing town and they fled to their separate houses where they locked and bolted doors and windows and crouched behind them, weapons trembling in their hands and black terror in their souls. For what weapon can slay the dead?

And through that deathly night, horror stalked through Faring town, and hunted the sons of men. Men shuddered and dared not even look forth when the crash of a door or window told of the entrance of the fiend into some wretch's cottage, when shrieks and gibberings told of its grisly deeds therein.

Yet there was one man who did not shut himself behind doors to be there slaughtered like a sheep. Conan braved the ghastly night alone in his courage. His actions were bolstered by the driving power of a Thought, a Thought which had birth in his brain as he had looked on the dead face of Hansun. A vague and illusive thing it was, a hovering and an almost-being, but not quite. Somewhere at the back of his skull It lurked and he could not rest until he had proved or disproved that which he could not even formulate into a concrete theory.

So with his brain in strange and chaotic condition he stole through the shadows, warily. Mayhap the sea, strange and fickle even to her chosen, had whispered something to his inner mind, had betrayed her own.

He knew not.

But all through the dark hours he prowled along the beach and when, in the first grey light of the early dawn, a fiendish shape came striding down to the shore, he was waiting there.

To all seeming it was Fallon's corpse, animated by some horrid life, which confronted him there in the grey gloom. The eyes were open now and they glimmered with a cold light, like the reflections of some deep-sea Hell.

And he knew that it was not Fallon who faced him.

"Sea fiend," Conan said in an unsteady voice, "I know not how you came by Fallon's apparel. I know not whether his ship went upon the rocks, or whether he fell overboard, or whether you climbed up the strake and over the rail and dragged him from his own deck. Nor do I know by what foul ocean magic you twisted your devil's features into a likeness of his.

"But this I know: Fallon sleeps in peace beneath the blue tides. You are not he. That I suspected – now I know. This horror has come upon the land of yore – so long ago that all men have forgotten the tales – all except such as I, whom men name fool. I know, and knowing, I fear you not, and here I slay you, for though you are not human, you may be slain by a man who does not fear you – even though that man be only a youth and considered strange and foolish. You have left your demon's mark upon the land; God alone knows how many souls you have reft, how many brains you have shattered this night. The ancients said your kind could do harm only in the form of men, on land. Aye, you tricked the sons of men – were borne into their midst by kind and gentle hands – by men who knew not they carried a monster from the abysses.

"Now, you have worked your will, and the sun will soon rise. Before that time you must be far below the green waters, basking in the accursed caverns that human eye has never looked upon save in death.

There lies the sea and safety; I bar the way alone."

He came upon Conan like a towering wave and his arms were like green serpents about the young Cimmerian. He knew they were crushing him, yet I felt as if he were drowning instead, and even then understood the expression that had puzzled him on Hansun's face – that of a drowned man.

He was looking into the inhuman eyes of the monster and it was as if he gazed into untold depths of oceans – depths into which he should presently tumble and drown. And he felt scales –

Neck, arm and shoulder the creature gripped him, bending him back to break his spine, and Conan drove his knife into his body again – and again – and again. The thing roared once, the only sound he ever heard him make, and it was like the roar of the tides among the shoals. Like the pressure of a hundred fathoms of green water was the grasp upon the Cimmerian's body and limbs and then, as he thrust again, it gave way and crumpled to the beach.

It lay there writhing and then was still, and already it had begun to change. Mermen, the ancients named his kind, knowing they were endowed with strange attributes, one of which was the ability to take the full form of a man if lifted from the ocean by the hands of men. Conan bent and tore the human clothing from the thing. And the first gleams of the sun fell upon a slimy and moldering mass of sea-weed, from which stared two hideous dead eyes – a formless bulk that lay at the water's edge, where the first high wave would bear it back to that from which it came, the cold jade ocean deeps.

Marchers of Aesgaard

(Formerly titled Marchers of Valhalla)

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

They were five hundred men and their gaze was fixed on the black towers which reared against the blue of sea and sky. All day they had guided their mounts by them, since the first red glow of dawn had disclosed them to their wondering eyes. A man could see far across those level, grassy plains; at first sight they had thought that city near, but they had trudged all day, and still they were miles away.

Lurking in their minds had been the thought that it was a ghost city – one of the phantoms which had haunted them on their long march across the bitter dusty deserts to the west, where, in the burning skies they had seen mirrored, still lakes, bordered by palms, and winding rivers, and spacious cities, all which vanished as they approached. But this was no mirage, born of sun and dust and silence. Etched in the clear evening sky they saw plainly the giant details of massive turret and grim abutment; of serrated tower and titanic wall.

Men had grown old in these frozen plains. Conan of Cimmeria had come to manhood. When he had first set forth on the long trail, he had been a young boy; now he was a young man, a proven warrior, mighty limbed, with great broad shoulders, a corded throat, and an iron heart.

His company were all mighty men. Their mighty thews were tuned to a blinding speed that would make the motions of finely-trained athletes seem stodgy and clumsy and slow. Their might was more than physical; born of a wolfish race, the years of their wandering and fighting man and beast and the elements in all forms, had instilled in their souls the very spirit of the wild – the intangible power that quivers in the long howl of the grey wolf, that roars in the north wind, that sleeps in the mighty unrest of turbulent rivers, that sounds in the slashing of icy sleet, the beat of the eagle’s wings, and lurks in the brooding silence of the vast places.

It was a strange trek. They were all men, adventurers to whom even the ways of wandering, warlike folk were too tame. They had taken the watery trail, conquering, exploring and wandering, driven only by their desire for blunder and to see beyond the horizon.

Kelka, his blood-brother, was a Pict. He had joined them among the jungle-clad hills of a far land that marked the southernmost drift of his race, where the tom-toms of his people pulsed incessantly through the hot star-flecked night. He was short, thick-limbed, deadly as a jungle-cat, a savage. Behind him lay the abysmal chaos of the squalling black jungle. The pad of the tiger was in his stealthy tread, the grip of the gorilla in his black-nailed hands; the fire that burns in a leopard’s eyes burned in his.

Oh, they were a hard-bitten horde, and their tracks had been laid in blood and smouldering embers in many lands. Many slaughters, rapine and massacres lay behind them, enough to make a civilized man recoil in horror.

As they looked at the great city they were not awed. They had ravaged red-handed through cities in other lands down the black river. Many conflicts had taught them to avoid battle with superior forces when possible, but they had no fear. They were equally ready for war or the feast of friendship, as the people of the city might choose.

They had seen them. They were close enough to make out the lines of orchards, fields and vineyards outside the walls, and the figures of the workers scurrying to the city. They saw the glitter of spears on the battlements, and heard the quick throb of war-drums.

‘It will be war, brother,’ said Kelka gutturally, settling his buckler firmly on his left arm. They took up their girdles and gripped their weapons – not of copper and bronze as the people of these lands still worked in, but of keen steel, fashioned by a conquered, cunning people in the land of palm-trees and elephants, whose steel-armed warriors had not been able to withstand them.

They drew up on the plain a moderate distance from the great black walls, which seemed to be built of gigantic blocks of basaltic stone. From their lines Asgrimm strode, weaponless, with his hands lifted, open palm outward, as a sign of parley. But an arrow cut into the sod near him, arching from the turrets, and he fell back to their lines.

‘War, brother!’ hissed Kelka, red fires glimmering in his black eyes. And at that instant the mighty gates swung open, and out filed lines of warriors, their war-plumes nodding above them in a glitter of lifted spears. The westering sun striking fire from their burnished copper helmets.

They were tall and leanly built, dark of skin, though neither brown nor black, with straight hawk-like features. Their harness was of copper and leather, their bucklers covered with glossy shagreen. Their spears and slender swords and long daggers were of bronze. They advanced in perfect formation, fifteen hundred strong, a surging tide of nodding plumes and gleaming spears. The battlements behind them were lined with watchers.

There was no parley. As they came, Asgrimm gave tongue like a hunting wolf and they charged to meet the attack. They had no formation; they ran towards them like wolves, and they saw scorn on their hawk-features as they neared them. They had no bows, and not an arrow was winged from their racing lines, not a spear thrown. They wished only to come to hand-grips. When they were within javelin-cast they sent a shower of spears, most of which glanced from their shields and corselets, and then with a deep-throated roar, their charge crashed home.

Who said the ordered discipline of a degenerate civilization can match the sheer ferocity of barbarism? They strove to fight as a unit; the crew fought as individuals, rushing headlong against their spears, hacking like mad men. Their entire first rank went down beneath the whistling swords of the crew, and the ranks behind crushed back and wavered as the warriors felt the brute impact of their incredible strength. If they had held, they might have flanked them, hemmed them in with their superior numbers, and slaughtered them. But they could not stand. In a storm of hammering swords they ploughed through, breaking their lines, treading their dead underfoot as they surged irresistibly onward. Their battle formation melted; they strove against them, man to man, and the battle became a slaughter. For in personal strength and ferocity, they were no match for the men of Asgrimm.

They hewed them down like corn; they reaped them like ripe grain!

The defenders broke and fled, casting away their spears. The Æsir were hard at their heels, cutting them down as they ran, to the very gates through which the foremost streamed and which they slammed in their faces, and in the faces of the wretches who were last in the flight. Shut off from safety these clawed and yammered at the unyielding portals until they hewed them down. Then they, in turn, battered at the gates until a shower of stones and beams cast from above, brained three of their warriors, and they gave back to a safe distance. They heard the women howling in the streets, and the men lined the walls and shot arrows at them, with no great skill.

The bodies of the slain strewed the plain from the spot where the hosts clashed to the threshold of the gates, and where one pirate had died, half a dozen plumed warriors had fallen.

The sun had set. They pitched their rude camp before the gates, and all night they heard wailing and moaning within the walls, where the people howled for those whose still bodies they plundered and cast in a heap some distance away. At dawn they took the corpses of the thirty Æsir who had fallen in the fight, and leaving archers to watch the city, they bore them to the cliffs, which pitched sheer for fifteen hundred feet to the white sandy beach. They found sloping defiles which led down, and made their way to the water’s edge with their burdens.

There, from fishing boats drawn up on the sands, they fashioned a great raft, and heaped it high with driftwood. On the pile they laid the dead warriors, clad in their mail, with their weapons by their sides, and they cut the throats of the dozen captives they had taken, and stained the weapons and the raft-sides with their blood. Then they set the torch to the wood, and shoved the raft off. It floated far out on the mirrored surface of the blue water, until it was but a red glare, fading into the rising dawn.

Then they went back up the defiles, and ranged themselves before the city, chanting their war-songs. They unslung their bows, and man after man toppled from the turrets, pierced by their long shafts. From trees they found growing in the gardens outside the city, they built scaling ladders, and set them against the walls. They swarmed up them in the teeth of arrow and spear and falling beam. They poured molten lead down on them, and burnt their warriors like ants in a flame. Then once more they plied their shafts, until no plumed heads showed on the battlements.

Under cover of their archers, they again set up the ladders. As they tensed themselves for the upward rush that would carry them over the walls, on one of the towers that rose above the gates appeared a figure which halted them in their tracks.

It was a woman, such as they had not seen for long years – golden hair blowing free in the wind, milky white skin gleaming in the sunlight. She called to them in their own tongue, stumblingly, as if she had not used the language in many years.

‘Wait! Conan's masters have a word for you.’

‘Masters?’ Asgrimm spat the word. ‘Whom does a woman of these people call masters, except the men of her own clan?’

She did not seem to understand, but she answered, ‘This is the city of Khemu, and the masters of Khemu are lords of this land. They bid me say to you that they can not stand before you in battle, but they say you shall have small profit if you scale the walls, because they will cut down their women and children with their own hands, and set fire to the palaces, so you will take only a mass of crumbling stones. But if you will spare the city, they will send out to you presents of gold and jewels, rich wines and rare foods, and the fairest girls of the city.’

Asgrimm rubbed her chin in thought, loath to forego the sacking and the blood-letting of these swine; but the younger men roared: ‘Spare the city, Captain! Otherwise they will kill the women – and we have sailed many a moon where no women came.’

‘Young fools!’ snarled Asgrimm. ‘The kisses and love-cries of women fade and pall, but the sword sings a fresh song with each stroke. Is it the false lure of women, or the bright madness of slaughter?’

‘Women!’ roared the young warriors, clashing their swords.

‘Let them send out their girls, and we will spare their cursed city.’ Asgrimm turned with a sneer of bitter scorn, and called to the golden-haired girl on the tower.

'We would raze your walls and spires into dust, and drench the dust with the blood of your masters,’ he said, ‘but my young men are fools! Send us forth food and women – and send us the sons of the chiefs for hostages.’

‘It shall be done, my lord,’ replied the girl, and they cast down the scaling ladders and retired to their camp.

Soon then the gates swung open again, and out filed a profession of naked slaves, laden with golden vessels containing foods and wines such as they had not known existed. They were directed by a hawk-faced man in a mantle of bright-hued feathers, bearing an ivory wand in his hand, and wearing on his temples a circlet of copper like a coiling serpent, the head reared up in front. It was evident from his bearing that he was a priest, and he spoke the name, Shakkaru, indicating himself.

With him came half a dozen youths, clad in silken breeks, jewelled girdles and gay feathers, and trembling with fear. The yellow-haired girl stood on the tower and called to them that these were the sons of princes, and Asgrimm made them taste the wine and food before he ate or drank.

For Asgrimm the slaves brought amber jars filled with gold dust, a cloak of flaming crimson silk, a shagreen belt with a jewelled golden buckle, and a burnished copper head-dress adorned with great plumes.

He shook his head and muttered, ‘Gauds and bright trappings are dust of vanity and fade before the march of the years, but the edge of slaughter is not dulled, and the scent of fresh-spilled blood is good to my nostrils.’

But he donned the gleaming apparels, and then the girls came forth – slender young things, lithe and dark-eyed, scantily clad in shimmering silk – he chose the most beautiful, though morosely, as he might pluck a bitter fruit.

Many a moon had passed since they had seen women, save the swart, smoke-stained creatures of the blubber-eaters. The warriors seized the terrified girls in fierce hunger – but Conan's soul was dizzy with the sight of the golden-haired girl on the tower. In his mind there was room for no other thought.

Asgrimm set him to guard the hostages, and to cut them down without mercy if the wine or food proved poisoned, or any woman stabbed a warrior with a hidden dagger, or the men of the city made a sudden sally on them.

But men came forth only to collect the bodies of their dead, which they burned, with many weird rituals, on a lofty promontory overlooking the sea.

Then there came to them another procession, longer and more elaborate than the first. Chiefs of the fighting men walked along unarmed, their harness exchanged for silken tunics and cloaks. Before them came Shakkaru, his ivory wand uplifted, and between the lines young slave youths, clad only in short mantles of parrot feathers, bore a canopied Utter of polished mahogany, crusted with jewels.

Within sat a lean man with a curious crown on his high, narrow head. Beside the Utter walked the white-skinned girl who had spoken from the tower. They came before them, and the slaves knelt, still supporting the Utter, while the nobles gave back to each side, dropping to their knees. Only Shakkaru and the girl stood upright.

Old Asgrimm faced them, gaunt, fierce, wary, his deep-lined face shadowed by the black plumes which waved above it. And he thought how much more the natural king he looked, standing on his feet among his giant fighting men, sword in hand, than the man who lolled supinely in the slave-borne litter.

But his eyes were all for the girl, whom he saw for the first time face to face. She was clad only in a short, sleeveless and low-necked tunic of blue silk, which came to a hand’s breadth above her knees, and soft green leather sandals were on her feet. Her eyes were wide and clear, her skin whiter than the purest milk, and her hair caught the sun in a sheen of rippling gold. There was a softness about her slender form that he had never seen in any woman of the Æsir. There was a fierce beauty about their flaxen-haired women, but this girl was equally beautiful without that fierceness. She had not grown up in a naked land, as they had, where life was a merciless battle for existence, for man and for woman. But these thoughts he did not pursue to their last analysis; he merely stood, dazzled by the blond radiance of her, as she translated the words of the king, and the deep-growled replies of Asgrimm.

‘Conan's lord says to you, “Lo, I am Khemu, priest of Ishtar, king of Khemu. Let there be friendship between us. We have need of each other, for ye be men wandering blindly in a naked land, as my sorcery tells me, and the city of Khemu has need of keen swords and mighty arms, for a foe comes up against them out of the sea whom they can not withstand alone. Abide in this land, and lend your swords to us, and take our gifts for your pleasure and our girls for your wives. Our slaves shall toil for you, and each day you shall sit ye down at boards groaning with meats, fishes, grains, white breads, fruits and wines. Fine raiment shall you wear, and you shall dwell in marble palaces with silken couches and tinkling fountains.”’

Now Asgrimm understood this speech, for they had seen the cities of the palm-tree lands; but it was at the talk of foes and sword-heaving that his cold blue eyes gleamed.

‘We will bide,’ he answered, and they roared their assent. ‘We will bide and cut out the hearts of the foes who come against you. But we will camp outside the walls, and the hostages will abide with us, night and day.’

‘It is well,’ said Khemu, with a stately inclination of his narrow head, and the nobles of Khemu knelt before Asgrimm and would have kissed his high-strapped sandals. But he swore
at them and gave back in wrathful embarrassment, while his warriors roared with rough mirth. Then Khemu went back in his litter, bobbing on the shoulders of the slaves, and they settled themselves for a long rest from their wanderings. Conan's gaze hung on the golden-haired interpreter, until the gates of the city closed behind her.

So they dwelt outside the walls, and day by day the people brought them food and wine, and more girls were sent out to them. The workers came and toiled in the gardens, the fields and the vineyards without fear of them, and the fishing boats went out - narrow crafts with curving bows and striped silken sails. And they accepted the king’s invitation at last, and went in a compact body, the hostages in the centre with naked swords at their throats, through the iron-grilled gates and into the city.

By Ymir, Khemu was mightily built! Surely the present masters of the city sprang from the loins of gods, for who else could have reared up those black basaltic walls, eighty feet in height, and forty feet at the base? Or erected that great golden dome which rose five hundred feet above the marble-paved streets?

As they strode down the broad column-flanked street, and into the broad market place, their swords in their fists, doors and windows were crowded by eager faces, fascinated and frightened. The chatter of the market place died suddenly as they swung into it, and the people crowded back from the shops and stalls to give them room. They were wary as tigers, and the slightest mishap would have sufficed to make them explode in a frenzied burst of slaughter. But the people of Khemu were wise, and the provocation did not come.

The priests came and bowed before them and led them to the great palace of the king, a colossal pile of black stone and marble. Beside the palace was a broad, open court, paved with marble flags, and from this court marble steps, broad enough for ten men to mount abreast, led up to a dais, where the king stood on occasion to harangue the multitude. One wing of the palace extended behind this court, and against this wing the steps were built. This wing was of older construction than the rest of the palace, and was furnished with a curiously carven slanting roof of stone, steep and high, towering above all other spires in the city except the golden dome. The edge of this carven slope of masonry was but a few feet above the dais, and what was contained in that wing, none of the Æsir ever saw; folk said it was Khemu’s seraglio.

Beyond this open court were the mysterious column-fronted stone houses of the lesser priests, on both sides of a broad, marble-paved street, and beyond them again the lofty golden dome which crowned the great temple of Ishtar. On all sides rose sapphirean spires and gleaming towers, but the dome shone serenely above all, just as the bright glory of Ishtar, Shakkaru told them, shone above the heads of men. In the few days they had spent among the crew, the young princes had learned much of their rugged, simple language, and by their interpretation and by the medium of signs, the priests of Khemu talked with them.

They led them to the lofty portals of the temple, but looking through the lines of tall marble columns, into the mysterious dim gloom of the interior, they baulked, fearing a trap, and refused to go in. All the time Conan was looking eagerly for the golden-haired girl, but she was not in evidence. No longer needed as interpreter, the silence of the mysterious city had engulfed her.

After this first visit, they returned to their camp outside the walls, but they came again and again, at first in bands, and then, as their suspicions were lulled, in small groups or singly. However, they would not sleep within the city, though Khemu urged them to pitch their tents in the great market place, if they disliked the marble palaces he offered them. Few men among them had ever lived in a stone house, or within high walls. Conan's own race dwelt in tents of tanned hides, or huts of mud and wattle, and often as not slept like wolves on the naked earth. But day after day the Æsir wandered through the city, marvelling at the wonders of it, taking what they wished at the stalls, to the despair of the merchants, and entering palaces, warily, but at will, to be entertained by women who feared them, yet seemed to be fascinated by them. The people of Khemu were wondrous apt at learning; they soon spoke the common tongue as well as their guests, though the speech came hard to their barbaric tongues.

But all this came in time. The day after they first visited the city, a number of them went again, and Shakkaru guided them to the palace of the higher priests which adjoined the temple of Ishtar. As they entered Conan saw the golden-haired girl, shining a pudgy copper idol with a handful of silk. Asgrimm laid a heavy hand on the shoulder of one of the young princes.

‘Tell the priest that I would have that girl for my own,’ he growled, but before the priest could reply, red rage rose in the young Cimmerian's brain and he stepped toward Asgrimm as a tiger steps toward his rival.

‘If any man of them takes that woman it shall be me,’ he growled, and Asgrimm wheeled cat-like at the thick killer’s purr in his voice. They faced each other tensely, their hands on their hilts, and Kelka grinned wolfishly and began to edge toward Asgrimm’s back, stealthily drawing his long knife, when Khemu spoke through the hostage.

‘Nay, his lords, Aluna is not for either of you, or for any other man. She is handmaiden to the goddess Ishtar. Ask for any other woman in the city, and she shall be yours, even to the favourite of the king; but this woman is sacred to the goddess.’

Asgrimm grunted and did not press the matter. The incense-breathing mystery of the temple had impressed even his fierce soul, and though the Æsir had not overmuch regard for other people’s gods, they had no desire to take a girl who had been in such close communion with deity. But Conan's superstitions were less than his desire for the girl Aluna. He came again and again to the palace of the priests, and though the priests little liked his coming, they would not, or dared not, say nay; and with small beginnings, he did his wooing.

Another woman he might have dragged to his tent by her long hair, but even without the priestly ban, there was something in his regard for Aluna that tied his hands from violence. He wooed her in the way they of the Æsir wooed their fierce lithe beauties – with boastings of prowess, and tales of slaughter and rapine. And in truth, without exaggeration, his tales of battle and massacre might have drawn to him the most wayward of the fierce beauties of Nordheim. But Aluna was soft and mild, and had grown up in temple and palace, instead of wattle hut and ice field! Conan's ferocious boastings frightened her; she did not understand. And by the strange perversity of nature, it was this very lack of understanding which made her more enthralling to him. Even as the very savagery she feared in him made her look upon him with more interest than she looked on the soft-thewed men of Khemu.

But in his conversations with her, he learned of her coming to Khemu, and her saga was strange as that of Asgrimm and their band. Where she had dwelt in her childhood she could little say, having no geography, but it had been far away across the sea to the east. She remembered a bleak wave-lashed coast, and straggling huts of wattle and mud, and yellow-haired people like herself. So he believed she came of a branch of the Æsir which marked the westernmost drift of their race up to that time. She was perhaps nine or ten years old when she had been taken in a raid on the village by dark-skinned men in galleys – who they were she did not know.

They took her, and a storm drove them westward and southward for many days, until their galley crashed on the reefs of a strange island where alien, painted men swarmed onto the beach and slaughtered the survivors for their cooking pots. The yellow-haired child they spared, for some whim, and placing her in a great canoe with skulls grinning along the gunwales, they rowed until they sighted the spires of Khemu on the high cliffs.

There they sold her to the priests of Khemu, to be a handmaiden for the goddess Ishtar. Conan had supposed her position to be holy and revered, but he found that it was otherwise. The worm of suspicion stirred in his soul against the Khemuri, as he realized, in her words, the cruel and bitter contempt in which they held folk of other, younger races.

Her position in the temple was neither honourable nor dignified, and though the servant of the goddess, she was without honour herself, save that no man except the priests was allowed to touch her. She was, in fact, no more than a menial, subject to the cold cruelty of the hawk-like priests. She was not beautiful to them; to them her fair skin and shimmering golden hair were but the marks of an inferior race. And even to young Conan, who was not prone to tax his brain, came the vague thought that if a blond girl was so contemptible in their eyes, that treachery must lurk behind the honour they gave to men of the same race.

Of Khemu he learned a little from Aluna and more from the priests and the princes. As a people, they were very old. They claimed descent from the half-mythical Lemurians. Once their cities had girdled the gulf upon which Khemu overlooked. But some the sea had gulped down, some had fallen before the painted savages of the islands, and some had been destroyed by civil wars, so that now, for near a thousand years, Khemu had reigned alone in solitary majesty. Their only contact had been with the wayward, painted people of the islands, who, until a year or so before, had come regularly in their long, high-prowed canoes to trade.

The people of Khemu were a waning race. Although they still numbered thousands, many were slaves, descendants of a thousand generations of slaves. Their race was but a shadow of its former greatness. A few more centuries would have seen the last of them, but on the sea to the south, out of sight over the horizon, was brooding a menace that threatened to sweep them all out of existence at one stroke.

The painted people had ceased to come in peaceful trade. They had come in war-canoes, with a clashing of spears on hide-covered shields, and a barbaric chant of war. A king had risen among them who had united the warring tribes, and now launched them against Khemu - not their former masters, for the old empire of which Khemu had been a part had crumbled before the drift of these people into the isles from that far-away continent which was the cradle of their race. This king was unlike them; he was a white-skinned giant like themselves, with mad blue eyes and hair crimson as blood.

They had seen him, the people of Khemu. By night his war-canoes full of painted spearmen had stolen along the coast, and at sunrise the slayers had swept up the defiles of the cliff, slaying the fishermen who then slept in huts along the beach, cutting down the labourers just going to work in the fields, and storming at the gates. The great walls had held, however, and the attackers had despaired of the storming and drawn off. But the red-haired king had stood up before the gates, dangling the severed head of a woman by its long hair, and shouted his bloody vow to return with a fleet of war-canoes that should blacken the sea, and to raze the towers of Khemu to the red-stained dust. He and his slayers were the foes they had been hired to fight, and they awaited their coming with fierce impatience.

And while they waited they grew more and more used to the ways of civilization, insofar as barbarians can accustom themselves in such a short time. They still camped outside the walls, and kept their swords ready within, but it was more in instinctive caution than fear of treachery. Even Asgrimm seemed lulled to a sense of security, especially after Kelka, maddened by the wine they gave him, killed three Khemurians in the marketplace, and no blood-vengeance or man-bote for the deed.

They overcame their superstitions and allowed the priests to guide them into the breathless dim cavern of a building that was the temple of Ishtar. They went even into the inner shrine, where sacred fires burned dimly in the scented gloom. There a screaming slave girl was sacrificed on the great black, red-veined altar at the foot of the marble stairs which mounted upward in the darkness until they were lost to view. These stairs led to the abode of Ishtar, they were told, and up them the spirit of the sacrifice mounted to serve the goddess. Which he decided was true, for after the corpse on the altar lay still, and the chants of worship died to a blood-freezing whisper, he heard the sound of weeping far above them, and knew that the naked soul of the victim stood whimpering in terror before her goddess.

He asked Aluna later if she had ever seen the goddess, and she shook with fright, and said only the spirits of the dead looked on Ishtar. She, Aluna, had never set foot on the marble stair that led up to the abode of the goddess. She was called the handmaiden of Ishtar, but her duties were to do the biddings of the hawk-faced priests and the evil-eyed naked women who served them, and who glided like dusky shadows among the purple gloom amidst the columns.

But among the warriors grew discontent, and they wearied of ease and luxury, and even of the dark-skinned women. For in the strange soul of the Æsir, only the lust for red battle and far-wandering remains constant. Asgrimm daily conversed with Shakkaru and Khemu on ancient times; he was chained by the lure of Aluna; Kelka guzzled each day in the wine shops until he fell senseless in the streets. But the rest clamoured against the life they were leading and asked Khemu what of the foe they were to slay?

‘Be patient,’ said Khemu. ‘They will come, and their red-haired king with them.’

Dawn rose over the shimmering spires of Khemu. Warriors had begun to spend the nights as well as the days in the city. Conan had drunk with Kelka the night before and lain with him in the streets until the breeze of noon had blown the fumes of the wine from his brain. Seeking Aluna, he strode down the marble pave and entered the palace of Shakkaru, which adjoined the temple of Ishtar. He passed through the wide outer chambers, where priests and women still lolled in slumber, and heard on a sudden, beyond a closed door, the sound of sharp blows on soft naked flesh. Mingled with them was a piteous weeping and sobs for mercy in a voice he knew.

The door was bolted, and it was of silver-braced mahogany, but he burst it inward as if it had been match-wood. Aluna grovelled on the floor with her scanty tunic tucked up, before a hatchet-faced priest who with cold venom was scourging her with a cruel, small-thonged whip which left crimson weals on her bare flesh. He turned as he entered, and his face went ashy. Before the priest could move Conan clenched his fist and gave him a buffet that crushed his skull like an egg shell and broke his neck in the bargain.

The whole palace swam red to his maddened glare. Perhaps it was not so much the pain the priest had inflicted on Aluna – because pain was the most common thing in that fierce life – but the proprietorial way in which he inflicted it – the knowledge that the priests had possessed her – all of them, perhaps.

A man is no better and no worse than his feelings regarding the women of his blood, which is the true and only test of racial consciousness. A man will take to himself the stranger woman, and sit down at meat with the stranger man, and feel no twinges of race-consciousness. It is only when he sees the alien man in possession of, or intent upon, a woman of his blood, that he realizes the difference in race and strain. So he, who had held women of many races in his arms, who was blood-brother to a Pictish savage, was shaken by mad fury at the sight of an alien laying hands on a woman of the Æsir.

He believed it was the sight of her, a slave of an alien race, and the slow wrath it produced, which first stirred him towards her. For the roots of love are set in hate and fury. And her unfamiliar softness and gentleness crystallized the first vague sensation.

Now he stood scowling down at her as she whimpered at his feet. He did not lift her and wipe her tears as a civilized man would have done. Had such a thought occurred to young Conan, he would have rejected it disgustedly as unmanly.

As he stood so, he heard his name shouted suddenly, and Kelka raced into the chamber, yelling: ‘They come, brother, just as the old one said! The watchers on the cliffs have run to the city, with a tale of the sea black with war-boats!’

With a glance at Aluna, and a dumb incoherence struggling for expression, he turned to go with the Pict, but the girl staggered up and ran towards him, tears streaming down her cheeks, her arms outstretched pleadingly.

‘Conan!’ she wailed. ‘Do not leave me! I am afraid! I am afraid!’

‘I can not take you now,’ he growled. ‘War and slaughter are forward. But when I return I will take you, and not the priests of all the gods shall stay me!’

He took a quick step toward her, his hands yearning towards her – then smitten with the fear of bruising her tender flesh, his hands dropped empty to his side. An instant he stood, dumb, torn by fierce yearning, speech and action frozen by the strangeness of the emotion which tore his soul. Then tearing himself away, he followed the impatient Pict into the streets.

The sun was rising as they of the Æsir marched towards the crimson-etched cliffs, followed by the regiments of Khemu. They had thrown aside the gay garments and head-pieces they had worn in the city. The rising sun sparkled on their homed helmets, worn hauberks and naked swords. Forgotten the months of idleness and debauchery. Their souls were riot with the wild exultation of coming strife. They went to slaughter as to a feast, and as they strode they clashed sword and shield in crude thundering rhythm, and sang the slaying-song of Niord who ate the red smoking heart of Heimdul. The warriors of Khemu looked at them in amazement, and the people who lined the walls of the city shook their heads in bewilderment and whispered among themselves.

So they came to the cliffs, and saw, as Kelka had said, the sea black with war-canoes, high prowed, and adorned with grinning skulls. Scores of these boats were already pulled up on the beach, and others were sweeping in on the crests of the waves. Warriors were dancing and shouting on the sands, and their clamour came up to them. There were many of them – three thousand, at the very least – probably many more. The men of Khemu blenched, but old Asgrimm laughed as they had not heard him laugh in many a moon, and his age fell from him like a cast-off mantle.

There were half a dozen runways leading down through the cliffs to the beach, and up these the invaders must come, for the precipices on all other sides were unclimbable. They ranged themselves at the heads of these runways, and the men of Khemu were behind them. Little part they had in that battle, holding themselves in reserve for aid that they did not call for.

Up the passes swarmed the chanting, painted warriors, and at last they saw their king, towering above the huge figures. The morning sun caught his hair in a crimson blaze, and his laughter was like a gust of sea wind. Alone of that horde he wore mail and helmet, and in his hand his great sword shone like a sheen of silver. Aye, he was one of the wandering Vanir, their red-haired kin in Nordheim. Of his long trek, his wanderings, and his wild saga, he know not, but that saga must have been wilder and stranger than that of Aluna’s or of theirs. By what madness in his soul he came to be king of these fierce savages, he could not even offer a guess. But when he saw what manner of men confronted him, new fury entered his yells, and at his bellow the warriors rolled up the runways like steel-crested waves.

They bent their bows and their arrows whistled in clouds down the defiles. The front ranks melted away, the hordes reeled backward, then stiffened and came on once more. Charge after charge they broke, and charge after charge hurtled up the passes in blind ferocity. The attackers wore no armour, and their long shafts tore through hide-covered shields like they were cloth. They had no skill at archery. When they came near enough they threw their spears in whistling showers, and some of them died. But few of them came within spear-cast and less won through to the heads of the passes. He remembered one huge warrior who came crawling up out of the defile like a snake, a crimson froth drooling from his lips, and the feathered ends of arrows standing out from his belly, ribs, neck and limbs. He howled like a mad dog, and his death-bite tore the heel of Conan's sandal as he stamped the man's head into a red ruin.

Some few did break through the blinding hail and came to hand-grips, but there they fared little better. Man to man they of the Æsir were the stronger, and their armour turned their spears, While their swords and axes crashed through their wooden shields as though they were paper. Yet so many there were, but for their advantage in location, all the Æsir would have died there on the cliffs, and the setting sun would have lighted the smoking ruins of Khemu.

All through that long summer day they held the cliffs, until, when their quivers were empty and their bow-strings frayed through, and the defiles were choked with painted bodies, they threw aside their bows, and drawing their swords, went down into the defiles and met the invaders hand to hand and blade to blade. They had died like flies in the passes, yet there were many of them left, and the fire of their rage burned no less brightly because of the arrow-feathered corpses which lay beneath their feet.

They came on and up, roaring like a wave, stabbing with spear and lashing with war-club. They met them in a whirlwind of steel, cleaving skulls, smashing breasts, hewing limbs from their bodies and heads from their shoulders, till the defiles were shambles where men could scarcely keep their feet on the blood-washed, corpse-littered paths.

The westering sun cast long shadows across the cliff-shaded beaches when he came upon the king of the attackers. He was on a level expanse where the upward trending slope ran level for a short distance before it dipped up again at a steeper slant. Arrows had wounded him, and swords had gashed him, but the mad blaze in his eyes was undimmed, and his thundering voice still urged his gasping, weary, staggering warriors to the onset. Yet now, though the battle raged fiercely in the other defiles, he stood among a host of the dead, and only two huge warriors stood beside him, their spears clotted with blood and brains.

Kelka was at his heels as he rushed at the Vanir. The two painted warriors leaped to bar his path, but Kelka was upon them. From each side they leaped at him, their spears driving in with a hiss. Yet as a wolf avoids the stroke he writhed beyond the goring blades, and the three figures caromed together an instant; then one warrior fell away, disembowelled, and the other dropped across him, his head half severed from his body.

As he leaped toward the red-haired king, they struck simultaneously. Conan's sword tore the helmet from his head, and at his terrible stroke, his sword and his shield shattered together. Before he could strike again, the king dropped the broken hilt and grappled with Conan as a grizzly grapples. He let go his sword, useless at such close quarters, and close-locked, they reeled on the crest of the slope.

They were almost evenly matched in strength, but Conan's might was ebbing from him with the blood of a score of wounds. Straining and gasping with the effort, they swayed, hard-braced, and he felt his pulse pound in his temples, saw the great veins swell in his enemy's. Then suddenly he gave way, and they pitched headlong, to roll down the slanting defile. In that grim strife neither dared try to draw a dagger. But as they rolled and tore at each other, he felt the iron ebbing from his mighty limbs, and by a volcanic burst of effort, heaved on top, and sunk his fingers deep in his corded throat. Sweat and blood misted his vision, his breath came in whistling gasps, but he sank his fingers deeper and deeper. His tearing hands grew aimless and groping, until with a racking gasp of effort, he tore out his dagger and drove it home again and again, until the giant lay motionless beneath me.

Then as he reeled upright, half-blind and shaking from the desperate strife, Kelka would have hewed off the king’s head, but he prevented it.

A long wavering cry went up from the invaders and they flinched for the first time. Their king had been the fire which had held them like doom to their fate all day. Now they broke suddenly and fled down the defiles, and they cut them down as they ran. They followed them down onto the beach, still slaughtering them like cattle, and as they ran to their canoes and pushed off, they waded into the water until it flowed over their shoulders, glutting their mad fury. When the last survivors, rowing madly, had passed to safety, the beach was littered with still forms, and floating bodies sprawled to the wash of the surf.

Only painted bodies lay on the beach and in the shallow water, but in the defiles, where the fighting had been fiercest, seventy of the Æsir lay dead. Of the rest of them, few there were who bore not some mark or wound.

By Crom, what a slaying! The sun was dipping towards the horizon when they came back from the cliffs, weary, dusty and bloody, with little breath left for singing, but with their hearts glad because of the red deeds they had done. The people of Khemu did the singing for them. They swarmed out of the city in a vast shouting, cheering throng, and they laid carpets of silk, strewn with roses and gold dust, before their feet. They bore with them their wounded on litters. But first they took their dead to the beach, and broke up war-canoes to make a mighty raft, and lade it with the corpses and set it afire. And they took the red-haired king of the invaders, and laid him in his great war-canoe, with the corpses of his bravest chiefs about him to serve him in ghostland, and they gave to him the same honours they gave to their own men.

Conan looked eagerly for Aluna among the throng, but he did not see her. They had put up tents in the market place, and there they placed their wounded, and leeches of the Khemu came among them, and they dressed the wounds of the rest of them. Khemu had prepared a mighty victory feast for them in his great hall, and thither they went, dust-stained and blood-stained. Even old Asgrimm grinned like a hungry wolf as he wiped the clotted blood from his knotty hands and donned the garb they had given him.

Conan lingered for a space among the tents where lay those too desperately wounded to walk or even be carried to the feast, hoping that Aluna would come to him. But she did not come, and he went to the great hall of the king, without which the warriors of Khemu stood at attention – three hundred of them, the more to do honour to their allies, Khemu said.

That hall was three hundred feet in length, and half as many wide. It was floored with polished mahogany, half covered with thick rugs and leopard-skins. The walls were of carven stone, pierced by many arched, mahogany-panelled doors, and towering up to a lofty arching ceiling, and half covered with velvet tapestries. On a throne at the back of the hall, Khemu sat, looking down at the revelry from a raised dais, with files of plumed spearmen on either side. At the great board which ran the full length of the hall, the Æsir in their battered, stained, dusty garments and corselets, many with bloody bandages, drank and roared and gorged, served by bowing slaves, both men and women,

Chiefs and nobles and warriors of the city in their burnished harness sat among their allies, and for each Æsir it seemed to Conan there were at least three or four girls, laughing, jesting, submitting to their rude caresses. Their laughter rose shrill and strident above the clamour. There was an unreality about the scene – a strained levity, a forced gaiety. But he did not see Aluna, so he turned and, passing through one of the mahogany arched doors, crossed a silken-hung chamber, and entered another. It was dimly lighted, and he almost ran into old Shakkaru. The man recoiled, and seemed much put out at meeting Conan, for some reason or another. The barbarian noted that the man's hand clutched at his robe, which, Khemu had told them, all the priests wore that night in their honour.

A thought occurred to him and he voiced it.

‘I wish to speak with Aluna,’ he said. ‘Where is she?’

‘She is at present occupied with her duties and can not see you,’ he said. ‘Come to the temple tomorrow—’

He edged away from the young warrior, and in a vague pallor underlying his swarthy complextion, in a tremor behind his voice, Conan sensed that the man was in deadly fear of him and wished to be rid of him. The suspicions of the barbarian flashed up in him. In an instant he had him by the throat, wrenching from his hand the long, wicked blade he drew from beneath his robe.

‘Where is she, you jackal?’ Conan snarled. ‘Tell me—or—'

The man was dangling like a puppet in his grasp, his kicking heels clear of the floor, his head bent back almost to the snapping point. With the fear of death in his distended eyes, he jerked his head violently, and he eased his grasp a trifle.

‘In the shrine of Ishtar,’ he gasped. ‘They sacrifice her to the goddess – spare my life – I will tell you all – the whole secret and plot—’

But he had heard enough. Whirling him on high by girdle and knee, he dashed out his brains against a column, and leaping through an outer door, raced between rows of massive pillars, and gained the street.

A breathless silence reigned over all. No throngs were abroad that night, as one would have thought, celebrating the destruction of their enemies. The doors were shut, the windows shuttered. Hardly a light shone, and he did not even see a watchman. It was all strange and unreal; the silent, ghostly city, where the only sound was the strident, unnatural revelry rising from the great feast hall. Conan could see the glow of torches in the market place where their wounded lay. He had seen old Asgrimm sitting at the head of the board, with his hands stained with dried blood, and his hacked and dusty mail showing under the silken cloak he wore; his gaunt features shadowed by the great black plumes that waved above him. All up and down the board the girls were embracing and kissing the half-drunken Æsir, lifting off their heavy helmets and easing them of their mail as they grew hot with wine.

Near the foot of the board, Kelka was tearing at a great beef-bone like a famished wolf. Some laughing girls were teasing him, coaxing him to give them his sword, until suddenly, infuriated by their sport and importunities, he dealt his foremost tormentor such a blow with the bone he was gnawing that she fell, dead or senseless, to the floor. But the high pitched laughter and wild merriment did not slacken. Conan likened them suddenly to vampires and skeletons, laughing over a feast of dust and ashes.

He hurried down the silent street, crossing the court and passing the houses of the priests, which seemed deserted except for slaves. Rushing into the lofty-pillared portico of the temple, he ran through the deep-lying gloom, groping in the darkness – burst into the vaguely lighted inner shrine – and halted, frozen. Lesser priests and naked women stood about the altar in positions of adoration, chanting the sacrificial song, holding golden goblets to catch the blood that ebbed down the stained grooves in the stone. And on that altar, whimpering softly, as a dying doe might whimper, lay Aluna.

Shadowy was the cloud of incense smoke which gloomed the shrine; crimson as hell fire the cloud which veiled his sight. With one inhuman yell that rang hideously to the vaulted roof, he rushed, and skulls splintered beneath his madly lashing sword. Conan's memories of that slaughter are frenzied and chaotic. There were frenzied screams, the whir of steel and the chop and crunch of murderous blows, the snapping of bones, spattering of blood, and the gibbering flight of figures that tore their hair and screeched to their gods as they ran – and he among them, raging in silent deadliness, like a blood-mad wolf among sheep. Some few escaped.

Clear etched against a murky red background of madness, a lithe, naked woman stood close to the altar, frozen with horror. A goblet at her lips, her eyes flaring, he caught her up with his left hand and dashed her against the marble steps with a fury that must have splintered every bone in her body. There was a brief, mad whirling blast of ferocity that littered the shrine with mangled corpses. Then he stood alone among the dead, in a shrine that was a shambles, with streaks and dots and pools of blood and human fragments scattered hideously and obscenely about the dark, polished floor.

Conan's sword trailed in a suddenly nerveless hand as he approached the altar with dragging steps. Aluna’s eyelids fluttered open as he looked down at her, his hands hanging limply, his entire body sagging helplessly.

She murmured, ‘Conan!’ Then her eyelids sank down, the long lashes shadowing the youthful cheek, and with a little sigh, she moved her flaxen head and lay like a child just settling to sleep. All his agonized soul cried out within me, but his lips were mute with the inarticulateness of the barbarian. He sank down upon his knees beside the altar and, groping hesitantly about her slender form with his arms, he kissed her dying lips, clumsily, falteringly, as a callow stripling might have done. That one act – that one faltering kiss – was the one touch of tenderness in the whole, hard life of Conan's journey among the Æsir.

Slowly he rose, and stood above the dead girl, and slowly and mechanically he picked up his sword. At the familiar touch of the hilt, there surged through his brain again the red fury of his race.

With a terrible cry he sprang to the marble stairs. Ishtar! They had sent her spirit shuddering up to the goddess, and close on the heels of that spirit should come the avenger! No less than the bloody goddess herself should pay for Aluna. His was the simple cult of the barbarian, and his god was Crom. The priests had told him that Ishtar dwelt above and the steps led to her abode. Vaguely he supposed it mounted through misty realms of stars and shadows. But up he went, to a dizzy height, until below him the shrine was but a vague play of dim lights and shadows, and darkness was all around.

Then he came suddenly, not into a broad starry expanse of the deities, but to a grill of golden bars, and beyond them he heard a woman sobbing. But it was not Aluna’s naked soul which wailed before some divine throne, for dead or alive, he knew her cry.

In mad fury he gripped the bars and they bent and buckled in his hands. Like straws he tore them aside and leaped through, his killing yell trembling in his throat. In the dim light that came from a torch set high in a niche, he saw that he was in a circular, domed chamber, whose walls and ceiling seemed to be of gold. There were velvet couches there, and silken cushions, and among these lay a naked woman, weeping. He saw the weals of a whip on her white body, and he halted, bewildered. Where was the goddess, Ishtar?

He must have spoken aloud in his barbaric smattering of Khemuri, for she lifted her head and looked at him with luminous dark eyes, swimming with tears. There was a strange beauty about her, something alien and exotic beyond his reckoning.

‘I am Ishtar,’ she answered him, and her voice was soft as distant golden chimes, though broken now with sobbing.

‘You—’ he gasped, ‘you – Ishtar – the goddess of Khemu?’

‘Yes!’ she rose to her knees, wringing her white hands. ‘Oh, man, whoever you are – grant me one touch of mercy, if there be mercy left in the world at all! Cut my head from my body and end this long agony!’

But he drew back and lowered his sword.

‘I came to slay a bloody goddess,’ he growled. ‘Not to butcher a whimpering slave girl. If you be Ishtar—who—where—in Ymir’s name, what madness is this?’

‘Listen, and I will tell you!’ she cried, hitching towards Conan on her knees and catching at the skirt of his corselet. ‘Only listen, and then grant me the little thing I ask – the stroke of your sword!

‘I am Ishtar, a daughter of a king in dim Lemuria, which the sea drank so long ago. As a child he was wed to Poseidon, god of the sea, and in the awesome mysterious bridal night, when he lay floating and unharmed on the breast of the ocean, the god gave to me the gift of life everlasting, which has become as a curse in the long centuries of his captivity.

‘But I dwelt in purple Lemuria, young and beautiful, while my playmates grew old and grey about me. Then Poseidon wearied of Lemuria and of Atlantis. He rose and shook his foaming mane, and his white steeds raced over the walls and the spires and the crimson towers. But he lifted me gently on his bosom and bore me unharmed to a far land, where for many centuries he dwelt among a strange and kindly race.

‘Then in an evil day he went upon a galley from distant Khitai, and in a hurricane it sank off this accursed coast. But as before he was borne gently ashore on the waves of his master, Poseidon, and the priests found me upon the beach. The people of Khemu claim descent from Lemuria, but they were a subject race, speaking a mongrel tongue. When he spoke to them in pure Lemurian, they cried out to the people that Poseidon had sent them a goddess and the people fell down and worshipped me. But the priests were devils then as now, necromancers and devil-worshippers, owning no gods save the demons of the Outer Gulfs. They pent me in this golden dome, and by cruelty they wrung his secret from me.

‘For more than a thousand years I have been worshipped by the people, who were sometimes given faint glimpses of me, standing on the marble stair, half-hidden in the sacrificial smoke, or were allowed to hear his voice speaking in a strange tongue as oracle. But the priests – oh, gods of Mu, what I have suffered at their hands! Goddess to the people – slave to the priests!’

‘Why do you not destroy them with your sorcery?’ he demanded.

‘I am no sorceress,’ she answered, ‘though you might deem me such, were I to tell you what mysteries the ages have unfolded to me. Yet there is one sorcery I might invoke – one terrible, overwhelming doom – if I might escape from this prison – if I might stand up naked in the dawn and call upon Poseidon. In the still nights I hear him roaring beyond the cliffs, but he sleeps and heeds not my cries. Yet if I might stand up in his sight and call upon him, he might hear and heed. The priests are crafty – they have shut me from his sight and hearing – for more than a thousand years I have not looked on the great blue monster—’

Suddenly they both started. From the city far below them welled up a strange wild clamour.

‘Treachery!’ she cried. ‘They are murdering your people in the streets! You destroyed the enemies they feared – now they turn on you!’

With a curse he raced down the stairs, cast one anguished glance at the still white form on the altar, and ran out of the temple. Down the street, beyond the houses of the priests, rose the clanging of steel, howls of death, yells of fury, and the thunderous war-cries of the Æsir. They were not dying alone. The Khemuri’s cries of hate and triumph were mingled with screams of fear and pain. Ahead of me the streets seethed with battling humanity, no more silent and deserted. From the doors of shops, hovels and palaces alike swarmed screeching city folk, weapons in hand, to aid their soldiers who were locked in mad battle with the yellow-haired aliens. Flame from a score of fires lighted the frenzied scene like day.

As he neared the court adjoining the king’s palace, along streets through which men ran howling, an Æsir warrior staggered toward him, drift of the storm of battle which was raging further down. He was without armour, bent almost double, and though an arrow stood out from his ribs, it was his belly he was gripping with his empty hands.

‘The wine was poisoned,’ he groaned. ‘We are betrayed and doomed! We drank deep, and in our cups the women coaxed from us our swords and armour. Only Asgrimm and the Pict would not give them up. Then suddenly the women slipped away, that old vulture Khemu left the feast hall – then the pangs took hold on them! Ah, Ymir, it twists my vitals like a knotted rope! Then the doors swarmed suddenly with archers who drove their arrows upon us – the warriors of Khemu drew their swords and fell upon us—the priests who swarmed the
hall tore hidden blades from their robes. Hark to the yelling in the market place where they cut the throats of the wounded! Ymir, cold steel a man may laugh at, but this—this—ah, Ymir!’

He sank to the pave, bent like a drawn bow, froth drooling from his lips, his limbs jerking in horrible convulsions.

Conan raced into the court. On the further side, and in the street in front of the palace, was a mass of struggling figures.

Swarms of dark-skinned men in armour battled with half-naked yellow-haired giants, who smote and rent like wounded lions, though their only weapons were broken benches, arms snatched from dying foes, or their naked hands, and whose lips were flecked with the froth of the agony that knotted their entrails. He swore by Crom, they did not die alone; mangled corpses were trodden under their feet, and they were like wild beasts whose ferocity is not quenched save with the extinguishing of the last, least spark of life.

The great feast hall was burning. In its light he saw, standing on the dais high above the conflict, old Khemu, shaking and trembling with terror at his own treachery, with two stalwart guards on the steps below him. The fighting scattered out over the court, and he saw Kelka. He was drunk, but this did not alter his deadliness. He was the centre of a struggling clump of thrusting, hacking figures, and his long knife flashed in the firelight as it ripped through throats and bellies, spilling blood and entrails on the marble pave.

With a low, sullen roar he charged into the thick of them, and in an instant they stood alone in a ring of corpses.

He grinned wolfishly, his teeth champing spasmodically.

‘There was the devil in the wine, Conan! It claws at my guts like a wildcat – come, let us kill some more of them before we die. Look – the Old One makes his last stand!’

He glanced quickly where, directly in front of the blazing feast hall, Asgrimm’s gaunt frame loomed among the swarming pack. He saw the flash of his sword and the dropping of men about him. An instant his black plumes waved over the horde – then they vanished and over the place he had stood rolled the dark wave.

The next instant Conan was leaping toward the marble stairs, with Kelka close at his heels. They smote the line of warriors on the lower steps, and burst through. They surged in behind to pull them down, but Kelka wheeled and his long blade made deadly play among them. They swarmed in on him from all sides, and there he died as he had lived, slashing and slaying in silent frenzy, neither asking quarter nor giving it.

Conan leaped up on the steps, and old Khemu howled at his coming. Conan's broken sword he had left wedged in a guardsman’s breastbone. With his naked hands he charged the two guardsmen at the upper steps. They sprang to meet him, stabbing hard. He caught the driving spear of one and hurled him headlong down the stairs, to dash out his brains at the bottom. The spear of the other tore through his mail and blood gushed over the shaft. Before his foe could tear it free for a second thrust, Conan gripped his throat and tore it out with his fingers. Then wrenching forth the spear and casting it aside, he rushed at Khemu, who screamed and sprang up, grasping the scrolled edge of the sloping stone roof behind the dais. Mad terror lent the old one strength and courage. Up the steep slope he clambered like a monkey, catching at the carved decorations with fingers and toes, and howling all the time like a beaten dog.

And Conan followed him. His life was ebbing out of the wound beneath his mail. It was soaked with blood, but his wild beast vitality was as yet undiminished. Up and up the king climbed, shrieking, and higher and higher they rose above the city, until they swayed precariously on the level roof-ridge, five hundred feet above the howling streets. And then they were frozen, the hunted and the hunter.

A strange, haunting cry rang above the hellish tumult that raged below them, above Khemu’s frenzied howling. On the great golden dome, high above all other towers and spires, stood a naked figure, hair blown in the dawn wind, etched in the red dawn glow. It was Ishtar, waving her arms and screaming a frenzied invocation in a strange tongue. Faintly it came to them. She had escaped from the golden prison he had burst open. Now she stood on the dome, calling upon the god of her fathers, Poseidon!

But Conan had his own vengeance to consummate. He poised for the leap that would carry them both crashing five hundred feet to death – and under his feet the solid masonry rocked. A new frenzy rang in Khemu’s screams. With a thunderous crash the distant cliffs fell into the sea. There was a long, rumbling, cataclysmic crash, like the shattering of a world, and to his startled gaze the entire vast plain waved like a surf, gave way, and dipped southward.

Great chasms gaped in the tilting plain, and suddenly, with an indescribable rumble, a grinding thunder, and a crashing of falling walls and buckling towers, the entire city of Khemu was in motion! It was sliding in a vast, chaotic ruin down to the sea which rose, rearing, to meet it! In that sliding horror, tower crashed against tower, buckling and toppling, grinding screaming human insects to red dust, crushing them to bits with falling stones. Where he had looked out upon an ordered city, with walls and spires and roofs, all was a mad, buckled, crumpled, splintering chaos of thundering stone, where spires rocked crazily above the ruins, and came thundering down.

Still the dome rode the wrack, and the white figure upon it still screamed and gestured. Then with an awesome roar, the sea stirred and rose, and great tentacles of green foam curled mountain high and roared down over the sliding, rumbling ruins, mounting higher and higher until the entire southern side of the crushed city was hidden in swirling green waters.

For an instant the ancient roof-ridge on which they clung had risen above the ruin, holding its place. And in that instant he leaped and gripped old Khemu. His death-shriek yowled in Conan's ear as under his iron fingers he felt the flesh tear like rotten pulp, his thews rip from his bones, and the bones themselves splinter. The thunderings of the breaking world were in his ear, the swirling green waters at his feet, but, as the whole earth seemed to crumble and break, as the masonry dissolved beneath his feet, and the roaring green tides surged over him, drowning him in untold shimmering fathoms, his last thought was that Khemu had died by his hand, before a wave touched him.

He sprang up with a cry, hands out thrown as if to fend off the swirling waves. He reeled, dizzy with surprise. Khemu and the city had vanished. He shook on the oak-clad hill, and the sun hung a hand’s breadth above the snowy hills. A woman gestured before his eyes. Now she stood looking at him with an enigmatic smile that had less of mockery than pity.

‘What is this?’ he exclaimed, dazedly. ‘Was I dreaming? Why then are you here?’

Ishtar shook her head.

‘It came to pass, Conan of Cimmeria.’

‘Then what of Khemu?’ he exclaimed.

‘Its broken ruins sleep in the deep blue waters, as do the remnants of the men that you travelled with, whither they will wash in the long ages that pass after the breaking of this land, before the waters recede and we are left with long rolling steppes.’

‘But what of you woman, are you not Ishtar, their goddess?’

‘Was I not the bride of Poseidon, who heard my cry and destroyed the evil city? On his bosom he bore me unharmed. I am deathless and eternal. I wander through many lands, and dwell with many people, but I have learned my lesson, and I who have been a slave of priests, become their ruler. I who have been a goddess in cruel seeming, have become a goddess in my own right, by virtue of ancient wisdom.

‘The races call me by many names, and worship me in many ways, but I am one and the same, and the fires of my altars are not quenched.’

As she spoke she lifted her clear, dark luminous eyes to him; the last lurid sheen of the sunset caught the rippling glory of her hair, dusky as night, framing the strange beauty of her face, alien and exotic beyond his understanding. And a cry broke from his lips.

‘Then it is true! And you are deathless – you are the Eternal Woman – the root and the bud of Creation – the symbol of life everlasting!’

‘As truly as you shall know all again,’ she said softly, ‘when, in a little while, you shall pull off that vessel you name flesh and don new raiment, bright and gleaming in the halls of Crom!’

Then night dipped down, and whither she went he know not, but he sat alone on the thicket-clad hill, and the night wind murmured up cold hills, and whispered among the dreary branches above.

The Dark Man

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

“For this is the night of the drawing of swords,

And the painted tower of the heathen hordes

Leans to our hammers, fires and cords,

Leans a little and falls.”

—Chesterton

I

A biting wind drifted the snow as it fell. The surf snarled along the rugged shore and farther out the long leaden combers moaned ceaselessly. Through the gray dawn that was stealing over the coast a fisherman came trudging, a man rugged as the land that bore him. His feet were wrapped in rough cured leather; a single garment of deerskin scantily outlined his body. He wore no other clothing. As he strode stolidly along the shore, as heedless of the bitter cold as if he were the shaggy beast he appeared at first glance, he halted. Another man loomed up out of the veil of falling snow and drifting sea-mist. Conan stood before him.

This man was nearly a head taller than the stocky fisherman, and he had the bearing of a fighting man. No single glance would suffice, but any man or woman whose eyes fell on Conan would look long. Six feet and one inch he stood, and the first impression of slimness faded on closer inspection. He was big but trimly molded; a magnificent sweep of shoulder and depth of chest. Rangy he was, but compact, combining the strength of a bull with the lithe quickness of a panther. The slightest movement he made showed that steel-trap coordination that makes the super-fighter. Conan of Cimmeria, once of the north. And black he was as to hair, and dark of complexion. From under heavy black brows gleamed eyes of a hot volcanic blue. And in his clean-shaven face there was something of the somberness of dark mountains, of the ocean at midnight. Like the fisherman, he was a part of this fierce land.

On his head he wore a plain vizorless helmet without crest or symbol. From neck to mid-thigh he was protected by a close-fitting shirt of black chain mail. His legs were wrapped with hard leather that might turn a sword edge, and the shoes on his feet were worn with much traveling.

A broad belt encircled his lean waist, holding a long dirk in a leather sheath. On his left arm he carried a small round shield of hide-covered wood, hard as iron, braced and reinforced with steel, and having a short, heavy spike in the center. An ax hung from his right wrist, and it was to this feature that the fisherman’s eyes wandered. The weapon with its three-foot handle and graceful lines looked slim and light when the fisherman mentally compared it to the great axes carried by the Vanir. Yet scarcely three years had passed, as the fisherman knew, since such axes as these had shattered the northern hosts into red defeat and broken their power forever.

There was individuality about the ax as about its owner. It was not like any other the fisherman had ever seen. Single-edged it was, with a short three-edged spike on the back and another on the top of the head. Like the wielder, it was heavier than it looked. With its slightly curved shaft and the graceful artistry of the blade, it looked like the weapon of an expert—swift, lethal, deadly, cobra-like. The head was of finest Cimmerian workmanship, which meant, at that day, the finest in the world. The handle, cut from the head of a century-old oak, specially fire-hardened and braced with steel, was as unbreakable as an iron bar.

“Who are you?” asked the fisherman, with the bluntness of the west.

“Who are you to ask?” answered the other.

The fisherman’s eyes roved to the single ornament the warrior wore—a heavy golden armlet on his left arm.

“Clean-shaven and close-cropped in the Cimmerian fashion,” he muttered. “And dark—you’d be Conan the outlaw. You range far; I heard of you last in the hills preying off the good folk below.”

“A man must eat, outcast or not,” growled the Cimmerian.

The fisherman shrugged his shoulders. A masterless man—it was a hard road. In those days of clans, when a man’s own kin cast him out he became filled with a vengeance. All men’s hands were against him. The fisherman had heard of Conan—a strange, bitter man, a terrible warrior and a crafty strategist, but one whom sudden bursts of strange madness made a marked man even in that land and age of madmen.

“It’s a bitter day,” said the fisherman, apropos of nothing.

Conan stared somberly at his tangled beard and wild matted hair. “Have you a boat?”

The other nodded toward a small sheltered cove where lay snugly anchored a trim craft built with the skill of a hundred generations of men who had torn their livelihood from the stubborn sea.

“It scarce looks seaworthy,” said Conan.

“Seaworthy? You who were born and bred on the western coast should know better. I’ve sailed her alone to Drumcliff Bay and back, and all the devils in the wind ripping at her.”

“You can’t take fish in such a sea.”

“Do ye think it’s only you chiefs that take sport in risking your hides? By the saints, I’ve sailed to Ballinskellings in a storm—and back too—just for the fun of the thing.”

“Good enough,” said Conan. “I’ll take your boat.”

“Ye’ll take the devil! What kind of talk is this? If you want to leave this land, go to Vanaheim and take the ship with your Vanir friends.”

A black scowl made Conan’s face a mask of menace. “Men have died for less than that.”

“Did you not intrigue with the Vanir? And is that not why your clan drove you out to starve in the heather?”

“The jealousy of a cousin and the spite of a woman,” growled Conan. “Lies—all lies. But enough. Have you seen a long serpent beating up from the south in the last few days?”

“Aye—three days ago we sighted a dragon-beaked galley before the scud. But she didn’t put in—faith, the pirates get naught from the western fishers but hard blows.”

“That would be Thorfel the Fair,” muttered Conan, swaying his ax by its wrist-strap. “I knew it.”

“There has been a ship-harrying in the south?”

“A band of reavers fell by night on the castle on Kilbaha. There was a sword-quenching—and the pirates took Mara, daughter of Murtagh, a chief of the Brythunians.”

“I’ve heard of her,” muttered the fisherman. “There’ll be a wetting of swords in the south—a red sea-plowing, eh, my black jewel?”

“Her brother Dermod lies helpless from a sword-cut in the foot. The lands of her clan are harried by the Murroughs in the east and others from the north. Not many men can be spared from the defense of the tribe, even to seek for Mara—the clan is fighting for its life. All Brythunia is rocking under the Brythunian throne since great Brian fell. Even so, Cormac O’Brien has taken ship to hunt down her ravishers—but he follows the trail of a wild goose, for it is thought the riders were Vanir from Coningbeg. Well—we outcasts have ways of knowledge—it was Thorfel the Fair who holds the Isle of Slyne, that the Vanir call Helni, in the center of this lake. There he has taken her—there I follow him. Lend me your boat.”

“You are mad!” cried the fisherman sharply. “What are you saying. From here to the island in an open boat? In this weather? I say you are mad.”

“I will essay it,” answered Conan absently. “Will you lend me your boat?”

“No.”

“I might slay you and take it,” said Conan.

“You might,” returned the fisherman stolidly.

“You crawling swine,” snarled the outlaw in swift passion, “a princess of Brythunia languishes in the grip of a red-bearded reaver of the north and you haggle like a Zamoran.”

“Man, I must live!” cried the fisherman as passionately. “Take my boat and I shall starve! Where can I get another like it? It is the cream of its kind!”

Conan reached for the armlet on his left arm. “I will pay you. Here is a torc that King Brian put on my arm with his own hand before battle. Take it; it would buy a hundred boats. I have starved with it on my arm, but now the need is desperate.”

But the fisherman shook his head, the strange illogic burning in his eyes. “No! My hut is no place for a torc that King Brian’s hands have touched. Keep it—and take the boat, in the name of the saints, if it means that much to you.”

“You shall have it back when I return,” promised Conan, “and mayhap a golden chain that now decks the bull neck of some northern reaver.”

The day was sad and leaden. The wind moaned and the everlasting monotone of the sea was like the sorrow that is born in the heart of man. The fisherman stood on the rocks and watched the frail craft glide and twist serpent-like among the rocks until the blast of the open sea smote it and tossed it like a feather. The wind caught sail and the slim boat leaped and staggered, then righted herself and raced before the gale, dwindling until it was but a dancing speck in the eyes of the watcher. And then a flurry of snow hid it from his sight.

Conan realized something of the madness of his pilgrimage. But he was bred to hardships and peril. Cold and ice and driving sleet that would have frozen a weaker man, only spurred him to greater efforts. He was as hard and supple as a wolf. Among a race of men whose hardiness astounded even the toughest Vanir, Conan stood out alone. At birth he had been tossed into a snow-drift to test his right to survive. His childhood and boyhood had been spent on the mountains, coasts and moors of the west. Until manhood he had never worn woven cloth upon his body; a wolf-skin had formed the apparel of this son of a Cimmerian chief. Before his outlawry he could out-tire a horse, running all day long beside it. He had never wearied at swimming. Now, since the intrigues of jealous clansmen had driven him into the wastelands and the life of the wolf, his ruggedness was such as cannot be conceived by a civilized man.

The snow ceased, the weather cleared, the wind held. Conan necessarily hugged the coastline, avoiding the reefs against which it seemed again and again he would be dashed. With tiller, sail and oar he worked tirelessly. Not one man out of a thousand of seafarers could have accomplished it, but Conan did. He needed no sleep; as he steered he ate from the rude provisions the fisherman had provided him. By the time he sighted the isle the weather had calmed wonderfully. There were still heavy waters, but the gale had slackened to a sharp breeze that sent the little boat skipping along.

As he steered he thought of the fisherman’s last words: “Why should you risk your life for a clan that’s put a price on your head?”

Conan shrugged his shoulders. Blood was thicker than water. The mere fact that his people had booted him out to die like a hunted wolf on the moors did not alter the fact that they were his people. Little Mara, daughter of Murtagh na Kilbaha, had nothing to do with it. He remembered her well, he remembered the deep grayness of her eyes and the burnished sheen of her black hair, the fairness of her skin. Even as a child she had been remarkably beautiful—why, she was only a child now, for he, Conan, was young and he was many years her senior. Now she was speeding north to become the unwilling bride of a Norse reaver. Thorfel the Fair—the Handsome—Conan swore by gods that knew not the cross. A red mist waved across his eyes so that the rolling sea swam crimson all around him. An Brythunian girl a captive in a skalli of a Norse pirate—with a vicious wrench Conan turned his bows straight for the isle ahead. There was a tinge of madness in his eyes.

He sailed by instinct and through knowledge. He knew the waters as a man knows his house. He had sailed them as a raider and as an avenger, and once he had sailed them as a captive lashed to the deck of a Vanir dragon ship. And he followed a red trail. Smoke drifting from headlands, floating pieces of wreckage, charred timbers showed that Thorfel was ravaging as he went. Conan growled in savage satisfaction; he was close behind the Vanir, in spite of the long lead. For Thorfel was burning and pillaging the shores as he went, and Conan’s course was like an arrow’s.

He was still a long way from Helni when he sighted a small island slightly off his course. He knew it of old as one uninhabited, but there he could get fresh water. So he steered for it. The Isle of Swords it was called, no man knew why. And as he neared the beach he saw a sight which he rightly interpreted. Two boats were drawn up on the shelving shore. One was a crude affair, something like the one Conan had, but considerably larger. The other was a long, low craft—undeniably Vanir. Both were deserted. Conan listened for the clash of arms, the cry of battle, but silence reigned. Fishers, he thought, from the Scotch isles; they had been sighted by some band of rovers on ship or on some other island, and had been pursued in the long rowboat. But it had been a longer chase than they had anticipated, he was sure; else they would not have started out in an open boat. But inflamed with the murder lust, the reavers would have followed their prey across a hundred miles of rough water, in an open boat, if necessary.

Conan drew inshore, tossed over the stone that served for anchor and leaped upon the beach, ax ready. Then up the shore a short distance he saw a strange red huddle of forms. A few swift strides brought him face to face with mystery. Fifteen red-bearded Vanir lay in their own gore in a rough circle. Not one breathed. Within this circle, mingling with the bodies of their slayers, lay a mass of what at first looked like Picts and yet seemed to differ from them. Short of stature they were, and very dark; their staring dead eyes were the blackest Conan had ever seen. They were scantily armored, and their stiff hands still gripped broken swords and daggers. Here and there lay arrows that had shattered on the corselets of Vanir, and Conan observed with surprize that many of them were tipped with flint.

Another thought struck him. Why did not the Pict-like creatures scatter and flee, hide themselves in the woods? He believed he knew the answer. There, at the very center of the silent circle, lay a strange thing. A statue it was, of some dark substance and it was in the form of a man. Some five feet long—or high—it was, carved in a semblance of life that made Conan start. Half over it lay the corpse of an ancient man, hacked almost beyond human semblance. One lean arm was locked about the figure; the other was outstretched, the hand gripping a flint dagger which was sheathed to the hilt in the breast of a Vanir. Conan noted the fearful wounds that disfigured all the dark men. They had been hard to kill—they had fought until literally hacked to pieces, and dying, they had dealt death to their slayers. So much Conan’s eyes showed him. In the dead faces of the dark strangers was a terrible desperation. He noted how their dead hands were still locked in the beards of their foes. One lay beneath the body of a huge Vanir, and on this Vanir Conan could see no wound; until he looked closer and saw the dark man’s teeth were sunk, beast-like, into the bull throat of the other.

He bent and dragged the figure from among the bodies. The ancient’s arm was locked about it, and he was forced to tear it away with all his strength. It was as if, even in death, the old one clung to his treasure; for Conan felt that it was for this image that the small dark men had died. They might have scattered and eluded their foes, but that would have meant giving up their image. They chose to die beside it. Conan shook his head; his hatred of the Norse, a heritage of wrongs and outrages, was a burning, living thing, almost an obsession, that at times drove him to the point of insanity. There was, in his fierce heart, no room for mercy; the sight of these Vanir, lying dead at his feet, filled him with savage satisfaction. Yet he sensed here, in these silent dead men, a passion stronger than his. Here was some driving impulse deeper than his hate. Aye—and older. These little men seemed very ancient to him, not old as individuals are old, but old as a race is old. Even their corpses exuded an intangible aura of the primeval. And the image—

The Cimmerian bent and grasped it, to lift it. He expected to encounter great weight and was astonished. It was no heavier than if it had been made of light wood. He tapped it, and the sound was solid. At first he thought it was of iron; then he decided it was of stone, but such stone as he had never seen; and he felt that no such stone was to be found anywhere in the world that he knew. For like the little dead men, it looked old. It was smooth and free from corrosion, as if carved yesterday, but for all that, it was a symbol of antiquity, Conan knew. It was the figure of a man who much resembled the small dark men who lay about it. But it differed subtly. Conan felt somehow that this was the image of a man who had lived long ago, for surely the unknown sculptor had had a living model. And he had contrived to bring a touch of life into his work. There was the sweep of the shoulders, the depth of the chest, the powerfully molded arms; the strength of the features was evident. The firm jaw, the regular nose, the high forehead, all indicated a powerful intellect, a high courage, an inflexible will. Surely, thought Conan, this man was a king—or a god. Yet he wore no crown; his only garment was a sort of loincloth, wrought so cunningly that every wrinkle and fold was carved as in reality.

“This was their god,” mused Conan, looking about him. “They fled before the Vanir—but died for their god at last.”

He stood, leaning on his ax, and a strange tide rose in his soul. A sense of mighty abysses of time and space opened before him; of the strange, endless tides of mankind that drift forever; of the waves of humanity that wax and wane with the waxing and waning of the sea-tides. Life was a door opening upon two black, unknown worlds—and how many races of men with their hopes and fears, their loves and their hates, had passed through that door—on their pilgrimage from the dark to the dark? Conan sighed. Deep in his soul stirred the mystic sadness of the Cimmerian.

“You were a king once, Dark Man,” he said to the silent image. “Mayhap you were a god and reigned over all the world. Your people passed—as mine are passing. Surely you were a king of the Flint People, the race whom my ancestors destroyed. Well—we have had our day, and we, too, are passing. These Vanir who lie at your feet—they are the conquerors now. They must have their day—but they too will pass. But you shall go with me, Dark Man, king, god, or devil though you be. Aye, for it is in my mind that you will bring me luck, and luck is what I shall need when I sight Helni, Dark Man.”

Conan bound the image securely in the bows. Again he set out for his sea-plowing. Now the skies grew gray and the snow fell in driving lances that stung and cut. The waves were gray-grained with ice and the winds bellowed and beat on the open boat. But Conan feared not. And his boat rode as it had never ridden before. Through the roaring gale and the driving snow it sped, and to the mind of the Cimmerian it seemed that the Dark Man lent him aid. Surely he had been lost a hundred times without supernatural assistance. With all his skill at boat-handling he wrought, and it seemed to him that there was an unseen hand on the tiller, and at the oar; that more than human skill aided him when he trimmed his sail.

And when all the world was a driving white veil in which even the Cimmerian’s sense of direction was lost, it seemed to him that he was steering in compliance with a silent voice that spoke in the dim reaches of his consciousness. Nor was he surprized when, at last, when the snow had ceased and the clouds had rolled away beneath a cold silvery moon, he saw land loom up ahead and recognized it as the isle of Helni. More, he knew that just around a point of land was the bay where Thorfel’s dragon ship was moored when not ranging the seas, and a hundred yards back from the bay lay Thorfel’s skalli. He grinned fiercely. All the skill in the world could not have brought him to this exact spot—it was pure luck—no, it was more than luck. Here was the best possible place for him to make an approach—within half a mile of his foe’s hold, yet hidden from sight of any watchers by this jutting promontory. He glanced at the Dark Man in the bows—brooding, inscrutable as the sphinx. A strange feeling stole over the Cimmerian—that all this was his work; that he, Conan, was only a pawn in the game. What was this fetish? What grim secret did those carven eyes hold? Why did the dark little men fight so terribly for him?

Conan ran his boat inshore, into a small creek. A few yards up this he anchored and stepped out onshore. A last glance at the brooding Dark Man in the bows, and he turned and went hurriedly up the slope of the promontory, keeping to cover as much as possible. At the top of the slope he gazed down on the other side. Less than half a mile away Thorfel’s dragon ship lay at anchor. And there lay Thorfel’s skalli, also the long low building of rough-hewn log emitting the gleams that betokened the roaring fires within. Shouts of wassail came clearly to the listener through the sharp still air. He ground his teeth. Wassail! Aye, they were celebrating the ruin and destruction they had committed—the homes left in smoking embers—the slain men—the ravished girls. They were lords of the world, these Vanir—all the southland lay helpless beneath their swords. The southland folk lived only to furnish them sport—and slaves—Conan shuddered violently and shook as if in a chill. The blood-sickness was on him like a physical pain, but he fought back the mists of passion that clouded his brain. He was here, not to fight but to steal away the girl they had stolen.

He took careful note of the ground, like a general going over the plan of his campaign. He noted where the trees grew thick close behind the skalli; that the smaller houses, the storehouses and servants’ huts were between the main building and the bay. A huge fire was blazing down by the shore and a few carles were roaring and drinking about it, but the fierce cold had driven most of them into the drinking-hall of the main building.

Conan crept down the thickly wooded slope, entering the forest which swept about in a wide curve away from the shore. He kept to the fringe of its shadows, approaching the skalli in a rather indirect route, but afraid to strike out boldly in the open lest he be seen by the watchers that Thorfel surely had out. Gods, if he only had the warriors of Clare at his back as he had of old! Then there would be no skulking like a wolf among the trees! His hand locked like iron on his ax-shaft as he visualized the scene—the charge, the shouting, the blood-letting, the play of the Cimmerian axes—he sighed. He was a lone outcast; never again would he lead the swordsmen of his clan to battle.

He dropped suddenly in the snow behind a low shrub and lay still. Men were approaching from the same direction in which he had come—men who grumbled loudly and walked heavily. They came into sight—two of them, huge Norse warriors, their silver-scaled armor flashing in the moonlight. They were carrying something between them with difficulty and to Conan’s amazement he saw it was the Dark Man. His consternation at the realization that they had found his boat was gulfed in a greater astonishment. These men were giants; their arms bulged with iron muscles. Yet they were staggering under what seemed a stupendous weight. In their hands the Dark Man seemed to weigh hundreds of pounds; yet Conan had lifted it as lightly as a feather! He almost swore in his amazement. Surely these men were drunk. One of them spoke, and Conan’s short neck hairs bristled at the sound of the guttural accents, as a dog will bristle at the sight of a foe.

“Let it down; Thor’s death, the thing weighs a ton. Let’s rest.”

The other grunted a reply, and they began to ease the image to the earth. Then one of them lost his hold on it; his hand slipped and the Dark Man crashed heavily into the snow. The first speaker howled.

“You clumsy fool, you dropped it on my foot! Curse you, my ankle’s broken!”

“It twisted out of my hand!” cried the other. “The thing’s alive, I tell you!”

“Then I’ll slay it,” snarled the lame Vanir, and drawing his sword, he struck savagely at the prostrate figure. Fire flashed as the blade shivered into a hundred pieces, and the other man howled as a flying sliver of steel gashed his cheek.

“The devil’s in it!” shouted the other, throwing his hilt away. “I’ve not even scratched it! Here, take hold—let’s get it into the ale-hall and let Thorfel deal with it.”

“Let it lie,” growled the second man, wiping the blood from his face. “I’m bleeding like a butchered hog. Let’s go back and tell Thorfel that there’s no ship stealing on the island. That’s what he sent us to the point to see.”

“What of the boat where we found this?” snapped the other. “Some Scotch fisher driven out of his course by the storm and hiding like a rat in the woods now, I guess. Here, bear a hand; idol or devil, we’ll carry this to Thorfel.”

Grunting with the effort, they lifted the image once more and went on slowly, one groaning and cursing as he limped along, the other shaking his head from time to time as the blood got into his eyes.

Conan rose stealthily and watched them. A touch of chilliness traveled up and down his spine. Either of these men was as strong as he, yet it was taxing their powers to the utmost to carry what he had handled easily. He shook his head and took up his way again.

At last he reached a point in the woods nearest the skalli. Now was the crucial test. Somehow he must reach that building and hide himself, unperceived. Clouds were gathering. He waited until one obscured the moon and in the gloom that followed, ran swiftly and silently across the snow, crouching. A shadow out of the shadows he seemed. The shouts and songs from within the long building were deafening. Now he was close to its side, flattening himself against the rough-hewn logs. Vigilance was most certainly relaxed now—yet what foe should Thorfel expect, when he was friends with all northern reavers, and none else could be expected to fare forth on a night such as this had been?

A shadow among the shadows, Conan stole about the house. He noted a side door and slid cautiously to it. Then he drew back close against the wall. Someone within was fumbling at the latch. Then a door was flung open and a big warrior lurched out, slamming the door to behind him. Then he saw Conan. His bearded lips parted, but in that instant the Cimmerian’s hands shot to his throat and locked there like a wolf-trap. The threatened yell died in a gasp. One hand flew to Conan’s wrist, the other drew a dagger and stabbed upward. But already the man was senseless; the dagger rattled feebly against the outlaw’s corselet and dropped into the snow. The Norseman sagged in his slayer’s grasp, his throat literally crushed by that iron grip. Conan flung him contemptuously into the snow and spat on his dead face before he turned again to the door.

The latch had not fastened within. The door sagged a trifle. Conan peered in and saw an empty room, piled with ale barrels. He entered noiselessly, shutting the door but not latching it. He thought of hiding his victim’s body, but he did not know how he could do it. He must trust to luck that no one saw it in the deep snow where it lay. He crossed the room and found it led into another parallel with the outer wall. This was also a storeroom, and was empty. From this a doorway, without a door but furnished with a curtain of skins, let into the main hall, as Conan could tell from the sounds on the other side. He peered out cautiously.

He was looking into the drinking-hall—the great hall which served as a banquet, council, and living-hall of the master of the skalli. This hall, with its smoke-blackened rafters, great roaring fireplaces, and heavily laden boards, was a scene of terrific revelry tonight. Huge warriors with golden beards and savage eyes sat or lounged on the rude benches, strode about the hall or sprawled full length on the floor. They drank mightily from foaming horns and leathern jacks, and gorged themselves on great pieces of rye bread and huge chunks of meat they cut with their daggers from whole roasted joints. It was a scene of strange incongruity, for in contrast with these barbaric men and their rough songs and shouts, the walls were hung with rare spoils that betokened civilized workmanship. Fine tapestries that Brythunian women had worked; richly chased weapons that princes had wielded; armor and silken garments from the east—for the dragon ships ranged far. With these were placed the spoils of the hunt, to show the Vanir’s mastery of beasts as well as men.

The modern man can scarcely conceive of Conan's feeling toward these men. To him they were devils—ogres who dwelt in the north only to descend on the peaceful people of the south. All the world was their prey to pick and choose, to take and spare as it pleased their barbaric whims. His brain throbbed and burned as he gazed. As only a Cimmerian can hate, he hated them—their magnificent arrogance, their pride and their power, their contempt for all other races, their stern, forbidding eyes—above all else he hated the eyes that looked scorn and menace on the world. The Cimmerians were cruel but they had strange moments of sentiment and kindness. There was no sentiment in the Vanir make-up.

The sight of this revelry was like a slap in Conan’s face, and only one thing was needed to make his madness complete. This was furnished. At the head of the board sat Thorfel the Fair, young, handsome, arrogant, flushed with wine and pride. He was handsome, was young Thorfel. In build he much resembled Conan himself, except that he was larger in every way, but there the resemblance ceased. As Conan was exceptionally dark among a dark people, Thorfel was exceptionally blond among a people essentially fair. His hair and mustache were like fine-spun gold and his light gray eyes flashed scintillant lights. By his side—Conan’s nails bit into his palms, Mara seemed greatly out of place among these huge blond men and strapping yellow-haired women. She was small, almost frail, and her hair was black with glossy bronze tints. But her skin was fair as theirs, with a delicate rose tint their most beautiful women could not boast. Her full lips were white now with fear and she shrank from the clamor and uproar. Conan saw her tremble as Thorfel insolently put his arm about her. The hall waved redly before Conan’s eyes and he fought doggedly for control.

“Thorfel’s brother, Osric, to his right,” he muttered to himself; “on the other side Tostig, the Vanir, who can cleave an ox in half with that great sword of his—they say. And there is Halfgar, and Sweyn, and Oswick, and Athelstane—the one man of a pack of sea-wolves, the one he had met many times before. And name of the devil—what is this? A priest?”

A priest it was, sitting white and still in the rout, silently counting his beads, while his eyes wandered pitying toward the slender Brythunian girl at the head of the board. Then Conan saw something else. On a smaller table to one side, a table of mahogany whose rich scrollwork showed that it was loot from the southland, stood the Dark Man. The two crippled Vanir had brought it to the hall, after all. The sight of it brought a strange shock to Conan and cooled his seething brain. Only five feet tall? It seemed much larger now, somehow. It loomed above the revelry, as a god that broods on deep dark matters beyond the ken of the human insects who howl at his feet. As always when looking at the Dark Man, Conan felt as if a door had suddenly opened on outer space and the wind that blows among the stars. Waiting—waiting—for whom? Perhaps the carven eyes of the Dark Man looked through the skalli walls, across the snowy waste, and over the promontory. Perhaps those sightless eyes saw the five boats that even now slid silently with muffled oars, through the calm dark waters. But of this Conan knew nothing; nothing of the boats or their silent rowers; small, dark men with inscrutable eyes.

Thorfel’s voice cut through the din: “Ho, friends!” They fell silent and turned as the young sea-king rose to his feet. “Tonight,” he thundered, “I am taking a bride!”

A thunder of applause shook the noisy rafters. Conan cursed with sick fury.

Thorfel caught up the girl with rough gentleness and set her on the board.

“Is she not a fit bride for a Vanir?” he shouted. “True, she’s a bit shy, but that’s only natural.”

“All Brythunians are cowards!” shouted Oswick.

“As proved by the siege and the scar on your jaw!” rumbled Athelstane, which gentle thrust made Oswick wince and brought a roar of rough mirth from the throng.

“‘Ware her temper, Thorfel,” called a bold-eyed young Juno who sat with the warriors. “Brythunian girls have claws like cats.”

Thorfel laughed with the confidence of a man used to mastery. “I’ll teach her her lessons with a stout birch switch. But enough. It grows late. Priest, marry us.”

“Daughter,” said the priest unsteadily, rising, “these pagan men have brought me here by violence to perform Christian nuptials in an ungodly house. Do you marry this man willingly?”

“No! No! Oh God, No!” Mara screamed with a wild despair that brought the sweat to Conan’s forehead. “Oh most holy master, save me from this fate! They tore me from my home—struck down my brother that would have saved me! This man bore me off as if I were a chattel—a soulless beast!”

“Be silent!” thundered Thorfel, slapping her across the mouth, lightly but with enough force to bring a trickle of blood from her delicate lips. “By Thor, you grow independent. I am determined to have a wife, and all the squeals of a puling little wench will not stop me. Why, you graceless hussy, am I not wedding you in the Brythunian manner, simply because of your foolish superstitions? Take care that I do not dispense with the nuptials, and take you as slave, not wife!”

“Daughter,” quavered the priest of Mitra, afraid, not for himself, but for her, “bethink you! This man offers you more than many a man would offer. It is at least an honorable married state.”

“Aye,” rumbled Athelstane, “marry him like a good wench and make the best of it. There’s more than one foreign woman on the cross benches of the north.”

What can I do? The question tore through Conan’s brain. There was but one thing to do—wait—until the ceremony was over and Thorfel had retired with his bride. Then steal her away as best he could. After that—but he dared not look ahead. He had done and would do his best. What he did, he of necessity did alone; a masterless man had no friends, even among masterless men. There was no way to reach Mara to tell her of his presence. She must go through with the wedding without even the slim hope of deliverance that knowledge of his presence might have lent. Instinctively, his eyes flashed to the Dark Man standing somber and aloof from the rout. At his feet the old quarreled with the new—the pagan with the Mitran—and Conan even in that moment felt that the old and new were alike young to the Dark Man.

Did the carven ears of the Dark Man hear strange prows grating on the beach, the stroke of a stealthy knife in the night, the gurgle that marks the severed throat? Those in the skalli heard only their own noise and those who revelled by the fire outside sang on, unaware of the silent coils of death closing about them.

“Enough!” shouted Thorfel. “Count your beads and mutter your mummery, priest! Come here, wench, and marry!” He jerked the girl off the board and plumped her down on her feet before him. She tore loose from him with flaming eyes. All the hot Brythunian blood was roused in her.

“You yellow-haired swine!” she cried. “Do you think that a princess of Brythunia with King Brian’s blood in her veins, would sit at the cross bench of a barbarian and bear the tow-headed cubs of a northern thief? No—I’ll never marry you!

“Then I’ll take you as a slave!” he roared, snatching at her wrist.

“Nor that way either, swine!” she exclaimed, her fear forgotten in fierce triumph. With the speed of light she snatched a dagger from his girdle, and before he could seize her she drove the keen blade under her heart. The priest cried out as though he had received the wound, and springing forward, caught her in his arms as she fell.

“The curse of Almighty Mitra on you, Thorfel!” he cried, with a voice that rang like a clarion, as he bore her to a couch nearby.

Thorfel stood nonplussed. Silence reigned for an instant, and in that instant Conan went mad.

The war cry of Cimmeria ripped through the stillness like the scream of a wounded panther, and as men whirled toward the shriek, the frenzied barbarian came through the doorway like the blast of a wind from Hell. He was in the grip of the black fury beside which the berserk rage of the Vanir pales. Eyes glaring and a tinge of froth on his writhing lips, he crashed among the men who sprawled, off guard, in his path. Those terrible eyes were fixed on Thorfel at the other end of the hall, but as Conan rushed he smote to right and left. His charge was the rush of a whirlwind that left a litter of dead and dying men in his wake.

Benches crashed to the floor, men yelled, ale flooded from upset casks. Swift as was the Celt’s attack, two men blocked his way with drawn swords before he could reach Thorfel—Halfgar and Oswick. The scarred-faced Vanir went down with a cleft skull before he could lift his weapon, and Conan, catching Halfgar’s blade on his shield, struck again like lightning and the clean ax sheared through hauberk, ribs and spine.

The hall was in a terrific uproar. Men were seizing weapons and pressing forward from all sides, and in the midst the lone Cimmerian raged silently and terribly. Like a wounded tiger was Conan in his madness. His eerie movement was a blur of speed, an explosion of dynamic force. Scarce had Halfgar fallen when the Cimmerian leaped across his crumpling form at Thorfel, who had drawn his sword and stood as if bewildered. But a rush of carles swept between them. Swords rose and fell and the Cimmerian ax flashed among them like the play of summer lightning. On either hand and from before and behind a warrior drove at him. From one side Osric rushed, swinging a two-handed sword; from the other a house-carle drove in with a spear. Conan stooped beneath the swing of the sword and struck a double blow, forehand and back. Thorfel’s brother dropped, hewed through the knee, and the carle died on his feet as the back-lash return drove the ax’s back-spike through his skull. Conan straightened, dashing his shield into the face of the swordsman who rushed him from the front. The spike in the center of the shield made a ghastly ruin of his features; then even as the Cimmerian wheeled cat-like to guard his rear, he felt the shadow of Death loom over him. From the corner of his eye he saw the Vanir Tostig swinging his great two-handed sword, and jammed against the table, off balance, he knew that even his superhuman quickness could not save him. Then the whistling sword struck the Dark Man on the table and with a clash like thunder, shivered to a thousand blue sparks. Tostig staggered, dazedly, still holding the useless hilt, and Conan thrust as with a sword; the upper spike of his ax struck the Vanir over the eye and crashed through to the brain.

And even at that instant, the air was filled with a strange singing and men howled. A huge carle, ax still lifted, pitched forward clumsily against the Cimmerian, who split his skull before he saw that a flint-pointed arrow transfixed his throat. The hall seemed full of glancing beams of light that hummed like bees and carried quick death in their humming. Conan risked his life for a glance toward the great doorway at the other end of the hall. Through it was pouring a strange horde. Small, dark men they were, with beady black eyes and immobile faces. They were scantily armored, but they bore swords, spears, and bows. Now at close range they drove their long black arrows point-blank and the carles went down in windrows.

Now a red wave of combat swept the skalli hall, a storm of strife that shattered tables, smashed the benches, tore the hangings and trophies from the walls, and stained the floors with a red lake. There had been less of the black strangers than Vanir, but in the surprize of the attack, the first flight of arrows had evened the odds, and now at hand-grips the strange warriors showed themselves in no way inferior to their huge foes. Dazed with surprize and the ale they had drunk, with no time to arm themselves fully, the Vanir yet fought back with all the reckless ferocity of their race. But the primitive fury of the attackers matched their own valor, and at the head of the hall, where a white-faced priest shielded a dying girl, Conan tore and ripped with a frenzy that made valor and fury alike futile.

And over all towered the Dark Man. To Conan’s shifting glances, caught between the flash of sword and ax, it seemed that the image had grown—expanded—heightened; that it loomed giant-like over the battle; that its head rose into smoke-filled rafters of the great hall—that it brooded like a dark cloud of death over these insects who cut each other’s throats at its feet. Conan sensed in the lightning sword-play and the slaughter that this was the proper element for the Dark Man. Violence and fury were exuded by him. The raw scent of fresh-spilled blood was good to his nostrils and these yellow-haired corpses that rattled at his feet were as sacrifices to him.

The storm of battle rocked the mighty hall. The skalli became a shambles where men slipped in pools of blood, and slipping, died. Heads spun grinning from slumping shoulders. Barbed spears tore the heart, still beating, from the gory breast. Brains splashed and clotted the madly driving axes. Daggers lunged upward, ripping bellies and spilling entrails upon the floor. The clash and clangor of steel rose deafeningly. No quarter was asked or given. A wounded man had dragged down one of the dark men, and doggedly strangled him regardless of the dagger his victim plunged again and again into his body.

One of the dark men seized a child who ran howling from an inner room, and dashed its brains out against the wall. Another gripped a woman by her golden hair and hurling her to her knees, cut her throat, while she spat in his face. One listening for cries of fear or pleas of mercy would have heard none; men, women or children, they died slashing and clawing, their last gasp a sob of fury, or a snarl of quenchless hatred.

And about the table where stood the Dark Man, immovable as a mountain, washed the red waves of slaughter. Vanir and tribesmen died at his feet. How many red infernos of slaughter and madness have your strange carved eyes gazed upon, Dark Man?

Shoulder to shoulder Sweyn and Thorfel fought. The Saxon Athelstane, his golden beard a-bristle with the battle-joy, had placed his back against the wall and a man fell at each sweep of his two-handed ax. Now Conan came in like a wave, avoiding, with a lithe twist of his upper body, the first ponderous stroke. Now the superiority of the light Brythunian ax was proved, for before the Saxon could shift his heavy weapon, the Cimmerian ax lit out like a striking cobra and Athelstane reeled as the edge bit through the corselet into the ribs beneath. Another stroke and he crumpled, blood gushing from his temple.

Now none barred Conan’s way to Thorfel except Sweyn, and even as the Cimmerian leaped like a panther toward the slashing pair, one was ahead of him. The chief of the Dark Men glided like a shadow under the slash of Sweyn’s sword, and his own short blade thrust upward under the mail. Thorfel faced Conan alone. Thorfel was no coward; he even laughed with pure battle-joy as he thrust, but there was no mirth in Conan’s face, only a frantic rage that writhed his lips and made his eyes coals of blue fire.

In the first swirl of steel Thorfel’s sword broke. The young sea-king leaped like a tiger at his foe, thrusting with the shards of the blade. Conan laughed fiercely as the jagged remnant gashed his cheek, and at the same instant he cut Thorfel’s left foot from under him. The Vanir fell with a heavy crash, then struggled to his knees, clawing for his dagger. His eyes were clouded.

“Make an end, curse you!” he snarled.

Conan laughed. “Where is your power and your glory now?” he taunted. “You who would have for unwilling wife an Brythunian princess—you—”

Suddenly his hate strangled him, and with a howl like a maddened panther he swung his ax in a whistling arc that cleft the man from shoulder to breastbone. Another stroke severed the head, and with the grisly trophy in his hand he approached the couch where lay Mara. The priest of Mitra had lifted her head and held a goblet of wine to her pale lips. Her cloudy gray eyes rested with slight recognition of Conan—but it seemed at last she knew him and she tried to smile.

“Mara, blood of my heart,” said the outlaw heavily, “you die in a strange land. But the birds in the hills will weep for you, and the heather will sigh in vain for the tread of your little feet. But you shall not be forgotten; axes shall drip for you and for you shall galleys crash and walled cities go up in flames. And that your ghost go not unassuaged into the realms of beyond, behold this token of vengeance!”

And he held forth the dripping head of Thorfel.

“In God’s name, my son,” said the priest, his voice husky with horror, “have done—have done. Will you do your ghastly deeds in the very presence of—see, she is dead. May Mitra in His infinite justice have mercy on her soul, for though she took her own life, yet she died as she lived, in innocence and purity.”

Conan dropped his ax-head to the floor and his head was bowed. All the fire of his madness had left him and there remained only a dark sadness, a deep sense of futility and weariness. Over all the hall there was no sound. No groans of the wounded were raised, for the knives of the little dark men had been at work, and save their own, there were no wounded. Conan sensed that the survivors had gathered about the statue on the table and now stood looking at him with inscrutable eyes. The priest mumbled over the body of the girl, telling his beads. Flames ate at the farther wall of the building, but none heeded it. Then from among the dead on the floor a huge form heaved up unsteadily. Athelstane, overlooked by the killers, leaned against the wall and stared about dazedly. Blood flowed from a wound in his ribs and another in his scalp where Conan’s ax had struck glancingly.

The Cimmerian walked over to him. “I have lost all my hatred for you,” said he, heavily, “but blood calls for blood and you must die.”

Athelstane looked at him without an answer. His large gray eyes were serious, but without fear. He too was a barbarian; he too realized the rights of the blood-feud. But as Conan raised his ax, the priest sprang between, his thin hands outstretched, his eyes haggard.

“Have done! In God’s name I command you! Almighty Powers, has not enough blood been shed this fearful night? In the name of the Most High, I claim this man.”

Conan dropped his ax. “He is yours; not for your oath or your curse, not for your creed but for that you too are a man and did your best for Mara.”

A touch on his arm made Conan turn. The chief of the strangers stood regarding him with inscrutable eyes.

“Who are you?” asked the Cimmerian idly. He did not care; he felt only weariness.

“I am Brogar, chief of the Picts, Friend of the Dark Man.”

“Why do you call me that?” asked Conan.

“He rode in the bows of your boat and guided you to Helni through wind and snow. He saved your life when he broke the great sword of the Vanir.”

Conan glanced at the brooding Dark One. It seemed there must be human or superhuman intelligence behind those strange stone eyes. Was it chance alone that caused Tostig’s sword to strike the image as he swung it in a death blow?

“What is this thing?” asked the Cimmerian

“It is the only God we have left,” answered the other somberly. “It is the image of our greatest king, he who gathered the broken lines of the Pictish tribes into a single mighty nation, he who drove forth the Vanir and Brythunian and shattered the legions of Acheron, centuries ago. A wizard made this statue while the great one yet lived and reigned, and when he died in the last great battle, his spirit entered into it. It is our god.

“Ages ago we ruled. Before the Vanir, before the Cimmerian, before the Brythunian, before the Acheronian, we reigned in the west. Our stone circles rose to the sun. We worked in flint and hides and were happy. Then came the men of the north and drove us into the wilderness. They held the southland. But we throve in the north and were strong. Acheron broke the Britons and came against us. But there rose among us our king, of the same blood as Brule the Spear-slayer, the friend of King Kull of Valusia who reigned thousands of years ago before Atlantis sank. He became king of all Hyboria. He broke the iron ranks of Acheron and sent the legions cowering south behind their Wall.

“He fell in battle; the nation fell apart. Civil wars rocked it. The Cimmerians came and reared the kingdom of Hyboria above the ruins of what was once ours. The last remnant of the Pictish empire faded like snow on the mountains. Like wolves we live now among the scattered islands and the deep jungles, among the crags of the highlands and the dim hills. We are a fading people. We pass. But the Dark Man remains—the Dark One, the great king, whose ghost dwells forever in the stone likeness of his living self.”

As in a dream Conan saw an ancient Pict who looked much like the one in whose dead arms he had found the Dark Man, lift the image from the table. The old man’s arms were thin as withered branches and his skin clung to his skull like a mummy’s, but he handled with ease the image that two strong Vanir had had trouble in carrying.

As if reading his thoughts, Brogar spoke softly: “Only a friend may with safety touch the Dark One. We knew you to be a friend, for he rode in your boat and did you no harm.”

“How know you this?”

“The Old One,” pointing to the white-bearded ancient, “Gonar, high priest of the Dark One—the ghost comes to him in dreams. It was Grok, the lesser priest and his people who stole the image and took to sea in a long boat. In dreams Gonar followed; aye, as he slept he sent his spirit with the ghost of the Morni, and he saw the pursuit by the Vanir, the battle and slaughter on the Isle of Swords. He saw you come and find the Dark One, and he saw that the ghost of the great king was pleased with you. Woe to the foes of Mak Morn! But good luck shall fare the friends of him.”

Conan came to himself as from a trance. The heat of the burning hall was in his face and the flickering flames lit and shadowed the carven face of the Dark Man as his worshippers bore him from the building, lending it a strange life. Was it, in truth, that the spirit of a long-dead king lived in that cold stone? Bran Mak Morn loved his people with a savage love; he hated their foes with a terrible hate. Was it possible to breathe into inanimate blind stone a pulsating love and hate that should outlast the centuries?

Conan lifted the still, slight form of the dead girl and bore her out of the flaming hall. Five long open boats lay at anchor, and scattered about the embers of the fires the carles had lit, lay the reddened corpses of the revelers who had died silently.

“How stole ye upon these undiscovered?” asked Conan. “And whence came you in those open boats?”

“The stealth of the panther is theirs who live by stealth,” answered the Pict. “And these were drunken. We followed the path of the Dark One and we came hither from the Isle of Altar, near the Scottish mainland, from whence Grok stole the Dark Man.”

Conan knew no island of that name but he did realize the courage of these men in daring the seas in boats such as these. He thought of his own boat and requested Brogar to send some of his men for it. The Pict did so. While he waited for them to bring it around the point, he watched the priest bandaging the wounds of the survivors. Silent, immobile, they spoke no word either of complaint or thanks.

The fisherman’s boat came scudding around the point just as the first hint of sunrise reddened the waters. The Picts were getting into their boats, lifting in the dead and wounded. Conan stepped into his boat and gently eased his pitiful burden down.

“She shall sleep in her own land,” he said somberly. “She shall not lie in this cold foreign isle. Brogar, whither go you?”

“We take the Dark One back to his isle and his altar,” said the Pict. “Through the mouth of his people he thanks you. The tie of blood is between us, Cimmerian, and mayhap we shall come to you again in your need, as the great king of Pictdom shall come again to his people some day in the days to come.”

“And you, good priest? You will come with me?”

The priest shook his head and pointed to Athelstane. The wounded former foe reposed on a rude couch made of skins piled on the snow.

“I stay here to attend this man. He is sorely wounded.”

Conan looked about. The walls of the skalli had crashed into a mass of glowing embers. Brogar’s men had set fire to the storehouses and the long galley, and the smoke and flame vied luridly with the growing morning light.

“You will freeze or starve. Come with me.”

“I will find sustenance for us both. Persuade me not, my son.”

“He is a pagan and a reaver.”

“No matter. He is a human—a living creature. I will not leave him to die.”

“So be it.”

Conan prepared to cast off. The boats of the Picts were already rounding the point. The rhythmic clacks of their oar-locks came clearly to him. They looked not back, bending stolidly to their work.

He glanced at the stiff corpses about the beach, at the charred embers of the skalli and the glowing timbers of the galley. In the glare the priest seemed unearthly in his thinness and whiteness, like a saint from some old illuminated manuscript. In his worn pallid face was a more than human sadness, a greater than human weariness.

“Look!” he cried suddenly, pointing seaward. “The ocean is of blood! See how it swims red in the rising sun! Oh my people, my people, the blood you have spilt in anger turns the very seas to scarlet! How can you win through?”

“I came in the snow and sleet,” said Conan, not understanding at first. “I go as I came.”

The priest shook his head. “It is more than a mortal sea. Your hands are red with blood and you follow a red sea-path, yet the fault is not wholly with you. Almighty Mitra, when will the reign of blood cease?”

Conan shook his head. “Not so long as the race lasts.”

The morning wind caught and filled his sail. Into the west he raced like a shadow fleeing the dawn. And so passed Conan from the sight of the priest, who stood watching, shading his weary brow with his thin hand, until the boat was a tiny speck far out on the tossing wastes of the blue ocean.

The Twilight of the Grim Grey God

(Originally The Gray God Passes)

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

A voice echoed among the bleak reaches of the mountains that reared up gauntly on either hand. At the mouth of the defile that opened on a colossal crag, Conan wheeled, snarling like a wolf at bay. He was tall and massively built, the fierceness of the wild dominant in his broad, sloping shoulders, his huge chest and long, heavily muscled arms. His features were in keeping with his bodily aspect–a strong, stubborn jaw, low slanting forehead topped by a square-cut mane of dishevelled dark hair which added to the wildness of his appearance no more than did his cold blue eyes. His only garment was a scanty loin-cloth. His own wolfish ruggedness was protection enough against the elements–for he was a slave in an age when even the masters lived lives as hard as the iron environments which bred them.

Now Conan half crouched, sword ready, a bestial snarl of menace humming in his bull-throat, and from the defile there came a tall man, wrapped in a cloak beneath which the thrall glimpsed a sheen of mail. The stranger wore a slouch hat pulled so low that from his shadowed features only one eye gleamed, cold and grim as the grey sea.

“Well, Conan of Cimmeria,” said the stranger in a deep, powerful voice, “whither do you flee, with your master’s blood on your hands?”

“I know you not,” growled Conan, “nor how you know me. If you would take me, whistle up your dogs and make an end. Some of them will taste steel ere I die.”

“Fool!” There was deep scorn in the reverberant tone. “I am no hunter of runaway serfs. There are wilder matters abroad. What do you smell in the wind?”

Conan turned toward the sea, lapping greyly at the cliffs far below. He expanded his mighty chest, his nostrils flaring as he breathed deeply.

“I smell naught but the mountain air,” he answered.

The stranger’s voice was like the rasp of swords. “The scent of blood is on the wind–the musk of slaughter and the shouts of the slaying.”

Conan shook his head, bewildered. “It is only the wind among the crags.”

“There is war in Brythunia,” said the stranger sombrely. “The spears of the North have risen against the swords of the South and the death-fires are lighting the land like the mid-day sun.”

“What is this to me?” asked the Cimmerian uneasily. “Who are you? Whence come you? How know you these things?”

“Can you not hear the skirl of the pipes, the clashing of the axes?” replied the tall stranger. “Can you not smell the war-reek the wind brings?”

“Not I,” answered Conan. “It is many a long league from whence I came to Brythunia, and I hear only the wind among the crags and the birds screeching over the mountaintops. Yet if there is war, there may be coin for one such as I.”

The stranger gave no heed, standing like a statue as he gazed far out across the reaches of hazy barren mountains and misty waves.

“It is the death-grip,” he said, like one who speaks to himself. “Now comes the reaping of kings, the garnering of chiefs like a harvest. Gigantic shadows stalk red-handed across the world, and night is falling on the northern realms. I hear the cries of long-dead heroes whistling in the void, and the shouts of forgotten gods. To each being there is an appointed time, and even the gods must die…”

He stiffened suddenly with a great shout, flinging his arms northward. Tall, rolling clouds, sailing gigantically before the gale, veiled the sea. Out of the mist came a great wind and out of the wind a whirling mass of clouds. And Conan cried out. From out the flying clouds, shadowy and horrific, swept twelve shapes. He saw, as in a nightmare, the twelve winged horses and their riders, women in flaming silver mail and winged helmets, whose golden hair floated out on the wind behind them, and whose cold eyes were fixed on some awesome goal beyond his ken.

“The Choosers of the Slain!” thundered the stranger, flinging his arms wide in a terrible gesture. “They ride in the twilight of the North! The winged hooves spurn the rolling clouds, the web of Fate is spun, the Loom and Spindle broken! Doom roars upon the gods and night falls on Hyperborea! Night and the trumpets of Ragnarok!”

The cloak was blown wide in the wind, revealing the mighty, mail-clad figure; the slouch hat fell aside; the wild elf-locks blew free. And Conan shrank before the blaze of the stranger’s eye. And he saw that where the other eye should have been, was but an empty socket. Thereat panic seized him, so that he turned and ran down the defile as a man flees demons. And a fearsome backward glance showed him the stranger etched against the cloud-torn sky, cloak blowing in the wind, arms flung high, and it seemed to the barbarian that the man had grown monstrously in stature, that he loomed colossal among the clouds, dwarfing the mountains and the sea, and that he was suddenly grey, as with vast age.

II

Oh Masters of the North, we come with tally of remembered dead,

Of broken hearth and blazing home, and rafters crashing overhead.

A single cast of dice we throw to balance, by the leaden sea,

A hundred years of wrong and woe with one red hour of butchery.

The spring gale had blown itself out. The sky smiled blue overhead and the sea lay placid as a pool, with only a few scattered bits of driftwood along the beaches to give mute evidence of her treachery. Along the strand rode a lone horseman, his saffron cloak whipping out behind him, his yellow hair blowing about his face in the breeze.

Suddenly he reined up so short that his spirited steed reared and snorted. From among the sand dunes had risen a man, tall and powerful, of wild, shock-headed aspect, and naked but for a loin-cloth.

“Who are you,” demanded the horseman, “who bear the sword of a chief, yet have the appearance of a masterless man, and wear the collar of a serf withal?”

“I am Conan, young master,” answered the wanderer, “once an outlaw, once a thrall, a man of King Brian’s, whether he will have me or no. And I know you.

“I am Dunlang, friend of Murrogh, son of Brian, prince of Brythunia.

“Tell me, is there war in the land?”

“Sooth to say,” answered the young chief, “even now King Brian and Chief Malachi lie encamped. I have but ridden from them this morning. From all the lands of the Hyperboreans King Sitric of Dublin has summoned the slayers, and Brythunians and Hyperboreans are ready to join battle–and such a battle as Brythunia has never seen before.”

Conan’s eyes clouded. “By Crom!” he muttered, half to himself, “it is even as the Grey Man said–yet how could he have known? Surely it was all a dream.”

“How come you here? Your chains suggest the Hyperborean slave pens, am I correct?” asked Dunlang.

“Aye, the dogs enslaved me for a time, but no man can keep a Cimmerian captive for long. I have many Hyperboreans to slay.” The barbarian touched the heavy copper ring encircling his bull-neck. “I was sold to a man known as Wolfgar Snorri’s son. He was a hard master. I did the work of three men, and stood at his back and mowed down carles like wheat when he brawled with his neighbors. In return he gave me crusts from his board, a bare earth floor to sleep on, and deep scars on my back. Finally I could bear it no more, and I leaped upon him in his own skalli and crushed his skull with a log of firewood. Then I took his sword and fled to the mountains, preferring to freeze or starve there rather than die under the lash.

“There in the mountains,”–again Conan’s eyes clouded with doubt–” I think I dreamed,” he said, “I saw a tall grey man who spoke of war in Brythunia, and in my dream I saw Valkyries riding southward on the clouds…

“Better to die in the mountains on a good venture than to starve at the hands of the Hyperboreans,” he continued with more assurance, his feet on firm ground. “By chance I found a small hut, with a store of food and water, and I set out south from there. By Crom! I wonder to find myself still alive! The gale took me in her fangs last night, and I know only that I fought the mountain until the snow sank under my feet, and then fought her in her drifts until my senses went from me. None could have been more surprised than I when I came to myself this dawn lying like a piece of detritus at its base. I have lain in the sun since, trying to warm the cold of the peaks out of my bones.”

“By the saints, Conan,” said Dunlang, “I like your spirit.”

“I hope King Brian likes it as well,” grunted the Cimmerian.

“Attach yourself to my train,” answered Dunlang. “I’ll speak for you. King Brian has weightier matters on his mind than a single warrior. This very day the opposing hosts lie drawn up for the death-grip.”

“Will the spear-shattering fall on the morrow?” asked Conan.

“Not by King Brian’s will,” answered Dunlang. “He is loath to shed blood this day. But who knows when the heathen will come down upon us?”

Conan laid a hand on Dunlang’s stirrup-leather and strode beside him as the steed moved leisurely along.
“There is a notable gathering of weapon-men?”

“More than twenty thousand warriors on each side; the soldiers flood our borders from all around. From all lands the hosts have gathered–our spies say Sigurd and Brodir have a thousand men armed in steel mail from crown to heel, who fight in a solid wedge. They may be hard put to break that iron wall. Yet, God willing, we shall prevail. Then among the other chiefs and warriors there are Anrad the berserk, Hrafn the Red, Thorstein and his comrade-in-arms Asmund, Thorleif Hordi, the Strong, Athelstane, and Jarl Thorwald Raven.”

At that name Conan grinned savagely and fingered his copper collar. “It is a great gathering if both Sigurd and Brodir come.”

“That was the doing of Gormlaith,” responded Dunlang.

“Word had come to the north that Brian had divorced Kormlada,” said Conan.

“Aye–and her heart is black with hate against him. Strange it is that a woman so fair of form and countenance should have the soul of a demon.”

“You speak truth. And what of her brother, Prince Mailmora?”

“Who but he is the instigator of the whole war?” cried Dunlang angrily. “The hate between him and Murrogh, so long smoldering, has at last burst into flame, firing both kingdoms. Both were in the wrong–Murrogh perhaps more than Mailmora. Gormlaith goaded her brother on. I did not believe King Brian acted wisely when he gave honors to those against whom he had warred. It was not well he married Gormlaith and gave his daughter to Gormlaith’s son, Sitric. With Gormlaith he took the seeds of strife and hatred into his palace. She is a wanton; once she was the wife of Amlaff Cauran, the Hyperborean; then she was wife to Chief Malachi, and he put her aside because of her wickedness.”

“What of Melaghlin?” asked Conan.

“He seems to have forgotten the struggle in which Brian wrested Brythunia's crown from him. Together the two kings move against the Hyperboreans.”

As they conversed, they passed along the bare path until they came into a rough broken clearing of trees and boulders; and there they halted suddenly. On a boulder sat a girl, clad in a shimmering green garment whose pattern was so much like scales that for a bewildered instant Conan thought himself gazing on a mermaid come out of the deeps.

“Eevin!” Dunlang swung down from his horse, tossing the reins to Conan, and advanced to take her slender hands in his. “You sent for me and I have come–you’ve been weeping!”

Conan, holding the steed, felt an impulse to retire, prompted by superstitious qualms. Eevin, with her slender form, her wealth of shimmering golden hair, and her deep mysterious eyes, was not like any other girl he had ever seen. Her entire aspect was different from the women of the north and of the Brythunians alike, and Conan knew her to be a member of that fading mystic race which had occupied the land before the coming of his ancestors, some of whom still dwelt in caverns along the sea and deep in unfrequented forests–sorcerers, it was said, and kin to the faeries.

“Dunlang!” The girl caught her lover in a convulsive embrace. “You must not go into battle–the weird of far-sight is on me, and I know if you go to the war, you will die! Come away with me–I’ll hide you–I’ll show you dim purple caverns like the castles of deep-sea kings, and shadowy forests where none save my people has set foot. Come with me and forget wars and hates and prides and ambitions, which are but shadows without reality or substance. Come and learn the dreamy splendors of far places, where fear and hate are naught, and the years seem as hours, drifting forever.”

“Eevin, my love!” cried Dunlang, troubled, “you ask that which is beyond my power. When my clan moves into battle, I must be at Murrogh’s side, though sure death be my portion. I love you beyond all life, but by the honor of my clan, this is an impossible thing.”

“I feared as much,” she answered, resigned. “You of the Tall Folk are but children–foolish, cruel, violent–slaying one another in childish quarrels. This is punishment visited on me who, alone of all my people, have loved a man of the Tall Folk. Your rough hands have bruised my soft flesh unwittingly, and your rough spirit as unwittingly bruises my heart.”

“I would not hurt you, Eevin,” began Dunlang, pained.

“I know,” she replied, “the hands of men are not made to handle the delicate body and heart of a woman of the Dark People. It is my fate. I love and I have lost. My sight is a far sight which sees through the veil and the mists of life, behind the past and beyond the future. You will go into battle and the harps will keen for you; and Eevin of Craglea will weep until she melts in tears and the salt tears mingle with the cold salt sea.”

Dunlang bowed his head, unspeaking, for her young voice vibrated with the ancient sorrow of womankind; and even the rough kern shuffled his feet uneasily.

“I have brought you a gift against the time of battle,” she went on, bending lithely to lift something which caught the sun’s sheen. “It may not save you, the ghosts in my soul whisper–but I hope without hope in my heart.”

Dunlang stared uncertainly at what she spread before him. Conan, edging closer and craning his neck, saw a hauberk of strange workmanship and a helmet such as he had never seen before,–a heavy affair made to slip over the entire head and rest on the neckpieces of the hauberk. There was no movable vizor, merely a slit cut in the front through which to see, and the workmanship was of an earlier, more civilized age, which no man living could duplicate.

Dunlang looked at it askance, with the characteristic Brythunian antipathy toward armor. The Brythunians who had faced Aquilonian legionaries fought naked, judging a man cowardly who cased himself in metal, and in later ages the clans entertained the same conviction regarding mail-clad knights.

“Eevin,” said Dunlang, “my brothers will laugh at me if I enclose myself in iron, like an Aquilonian. How can a man have full freedom of limb, weighted by such a garment? Of all the Brythunians, only Turlogh Dubh wears full mail.”

“And is any man of the Brythunian less brave than he?” she cried passionately. “Oh, you of the Tall People are foolish! For ages the iron-clad Hyperboreans have trampled you, when you might have swept them out of the land long ago, but for your foolish pride.”

“Not altogether pride, Eevin,” argued Dunlang. “Of what avail is mail or plated armor against the Dalcassian ax which cuts through iron like cloth?”

“Mail would turn the swords of the Hyperboreans,” she answered, “and not even an ax of the Vanir would rend this armor. Long it has lain in the deep caverns of my people, carefully protected from rust. He who wore it was a warrior of Atlantis in the long ago, before the legions were withdrawn from this plane. In an ancient war on the border it fell into the hands of my people, and because its wearer was a great prince, my people treasured it. Now I beg you to wear it, if you love me.”

Dunlang took it hesitantly, nor could he know that it was the armor worn by a gladiator in the days of the later Aquilonian empire, nor wonder by what chance it had been worn by an officer in the Atlantean legion. Little of that knew Dunlang who, like most of his brother chiefs, could neither read nor write; knowledge and education were for monks and priests; a fighting man was kept too busy to cultivate the arts and sciences. He took the armor, and because he loved the strange girl, agreed to wear it–“If it will fit me.”

“It will fit,” she answered. “But I will see you no more alive.”

She held out her white arms and he gathered her hungrily to him, while Conan looked away. Then Dunlang gently unlocked her clinging arms from about his neck, kissed her, and tore himself free.

Without a backward glance he mounted his steed and rode away, with Conan trotting easily alongside. Looking back in the gathering dusk, the Cimmerian saw Eevin standing there still, a poignant picture of despair.

III

The campfires sent up showers of sparks and illumined the land like day. In the distance loomed the grim walls of the Brythunian encampment, dark and ominously silent; before the walls flickered other fires where the warriors of King Mailmora whetted their axes for the coming battle. Out in the pass, the starlight glinted on myriad mountaintops, peaks and arching valleys. Between the city and the fires of the Brythunian host stretched the plains of battle, bordered by Tomar’s Wood, dark and rustling in the night, and a mountain river's star-flecked waters.

Before his tent, the firelight playing on his white beard and glinting from his undimmed eagle eyes, sat the great King Brian among his chiefs. The king was old–seventy-three winters had passed over his lion-like head–long years crammed with fierce wars and bloody intrigues. Yet his back was straight, his arm unwithered, his voice deep and resonant. His chiefs stood about him, tall warriors with war-hardened hands and eyes whetted by the sun and the winds and the high places; tigerish princes in their rich tunics, green girdles, leathern sandals and saffron mantles caught with great golden brooches.

They were an array of war-eagles–Murrogh, Brian’s eldest son, the pride of all Brythunia, tall and mighty, with wide blue eyes that were never placid, but danced with mirth, dulled with sadness, or blazed with fury; Murrogh’s young son, Turlogh, a supple lad of fifteen with golden locks and an eager face–tense with anticipation of trying his hand for the first time in the great game of war. And there was that other Turlogh, his cousin–Turlogh Dubh, who was only a few years older but who already had his full stature and was famed throughout all Brythunia for his berserk rages and the cunning of his deadly ax-play. And there were Prince Meathla and his kin–Lennox and Donarr of Mar–tall men, sombre and gaunt and silent. And there were Dunlang and Hyne, chief of Conanacht. But Kelai, brother chief of the Hyne, and prince of Hy Many, was in the tent of his uncle, Chief Malachi, which was pitched in the camp of the Brythunian, apart from the others, and King Brian was brooding on the matter. For since the setting of the sun, Kelai had been closeted with the King, and no man knew what passed between them.

Nor was Donagh, son of Brian, among the chiefs before the royal pavilion, for he was afield with a band ravaging the holdings of Mailmora.

Now Dunlang approached the king, leading with him Conan of Cimmeria.

“My Lord,” quoth Dunlang, “here is a barbarian from the north, who has spent vile durance among the Hyperboreans, and who risked his life by storm and snow to turn and fight under your banner. From the north he came, naked and alone, and the mountain cast him all but lifeless to its base.”

Brian stiffened; even in small things his memory was sharp as a whetted stone. “Thou!” he cried. “Aye, I know of you Cimmerian. Well, Conan, you have come to Brythunia–and with your red hands!”

“Aye, King Brian,” answered Conan stolidly, “my hands are red with Brythunian blood, it is true, and so I look to washing off the stain in Hyperborean blood.”

“You dare stand before me, to whom your life is forfeit!”

“This alone I know, King Brian,” said Conan boldly, “My people have fought the Hyperboreans since the days beyond memory. You need men who can strike strong blows, and it is my right to die in battle against my ancient enemies, rather than shamefully at the end of a rope.”

King Brian nodded. “Well spoken. Take your life. Your days of outlawry are at an end. Malachi would perhaps think otherwise, since it was a man of his you slew, but–” He paused; an old doubt ate at his soul at the thought of the King. “Let it be,” he went on, “let it rest until after the battle–mayhap that will be world’s end for us all.”

Dunlang stepped toward Conan and laid hand on the copper collar. “Let us cut this away; you are a free man now.”

But Conan shook his head. “Not until I have slain Thorwald Raven, the man who put it there. I’ll wear it into battle as a sign of no quarter.”

“That is a noble sword you wear, Cimmerian,” said Murrogh suddenly.

“Aye, my Lord. Murkertagh of the Leather Cloaks wielded this blade until Blacair the Hyperborean slew him, and it remained in their possession until I took it from the body of Wolfgar Snorri’s son.”

“It is not fitting that a barbarian dog should wear the sword of a king,” said Murrogh brusquely. “Let one of the chiefs take it and give him an ax instead.”

Conan’s fingers locked about the hilt. “He would take the sword from me had best give me the ax first,” he said grimly, “and that suddenly.”

Murrogh’s hot temper blazed. With an oath, he strode toward Conan, who met him eye to eye and gave back not a step.

“Be at ease, my son,” ordered King Brian. “Let the barbarian keep the blade.”

Murrogh shrugged. His mood changed. “Aye, keep it and follow me into battle. We shall see if a king’s sword in a barbarian’s hands can hew as wide a path as a prince’s blade.”

“My lords,” said Conan, “it may be Crom’s will that I fall in the first onset–but the scars of slavery burn deep in my back this night, and I will not be backward when the spears are splintering.”

IV

Therefore your doom is on you,

Is on you and your kings….

—Chesterton

While King Brian communed with his chiefs on the plains, a grisly ritual was being enacted within the gloomy castle that was at once the fortress and palace of Dublin’s king. With good reason did Christians fear and hate those grim walls; Dublin was a pagan city, ruled by savage heathen kings, and dark were the deeds committed therein.

In an inner chamber in the castle stood the Hyperborean Brodir, sombrely watching a ghastly sacrifice on a grim black altar. On that monstrous stone writhed a naked, frothing thing that had been a comely youth; brutally bound and gagged, he could only twist convulsively beneath the dripping, inexorable dagger in the hands of the white-bearded wild-eyed priest of Borri.

The blade hacked through flesh and thew and bone; blood gushed, to be caught in a broad, copper bowl, which the priest, with his red-dappled beard, held high, invoking Borri in a frenzied chant. His thin, bony fingers tore the yet pulsing heart from the butchered breast, and his wild half-mad eyes scanned it with avid intensity.

“What of your divinations?” demanded Brodir impatiently.

Shadows flickered in the priest’s cold eyes, and his flesh crawled with a mysterious horror. “Fifty years I have served Borri,” he said–“Fifty years divined by the bleeding heart, but never such portents as these. Hark, Brodir!–If ye fight not on this day, your host will be utterly routed and all your chiefs slain; if ye fight on this day, King Brian will die–but he will win the day.”

Brodir cursed with cold venom.

The priest shook his ancient head. “I cannot fathom the portent–and I am the last of the priests of the Flaming Circle, who learned mysteries at the feet of Thorgils. I see battle and slaughter–and yet more–shapes gigantic and terrible that stalk monstrously through the mists…”

“Enough of such mummery,” snarled Brodir. “If I fall I would take Brian with me. We go against the Brythunians on the morrow, fall fair, fall foul!” He turned and strode from the room.

Brodir traversed a winding corridor and entered another, more spacious chamber, adorned, like all the king’s palace, with the loot of all the world–gold-chased weapons, rare tapestries, rich rugs, divans from Byzantium and the East–plunder taken from all peoples by the roving Hyperboreans; for this was the center of their wide-flung world, the headquarters whence they fared forth to loot the kings of the earth.

A queenly form rose to greet him. Kormlada, whom the Brythunians called Gormlaith, was indeed fair, but there was cruelty in her face and in her hard, scintillant eyes. She was of mixed Brythunian and Hyperborean blood, and looked the part of a barbaric queen, with her pendant ear-rings, her golden armlets and anklets, and her silver breastplates set with jewels. But for these breastplates, her only garments were a short silken skirt which came half way to her knees and was held in place by a wide girdle about her lithe waist, and sandals of soft red leather. Her hair was red-gold, her eyes light grey and glittering. Queen she had been, and queen she was still, for she held her son Sitric and her brother Mailmora in the palm of her slim white hand. Carried off in a raid in her childhood, she had early discovered her power over men. As the child-wife of the rough Hyperborean, she had swayed his kingdom at will, and her ambitions increased with her power.

Now she faced Brodir with her alluring, mysterious smile, but secret uneasiness ate at her. In all the world there was but one woman she feared, and but one man. And the man was Brodir. With him she was never entirely certain of her course; she duped him as she duped all men, but it was with many misgivings, for she sensed in him an elemental savagery which, once loosed, she might not be able to control.

“What of the priest’s words, Brodir?” she asked.

“If we avoid battle on the morrow we lose,” the Hyperborean answered moodily. “If we fight, Brian wins, but falls. We fight–the more because my spies tell me Donagh is away from camp with a strong band, ravaging Mailmora’s lands. We have sent spies to Malachi, who has an old grudge against Brian, urging him to desert the king–or at least to stand aside and aid neither of us. We have offered him rich rewards and Brian’s lands to rule. Ha! Let him step into our trap! Not gold, but a bloody sword we will give him. With Brian crushed we will turn on Malachi and tread him into the dust! But first–Brian.”

She clenched her white hands in savage exultation. “Bring me his head! I’ll hang it above our bridal bed.”

“I have heard strange tales,” said Brodir soberly. “Sigurd has boasted in his cups.”

Kormlada started and scanned the inscrutable countenance. Again she felt a quiver of fear as she gazed at the sombre Hyperborean with his tall, strong stature, his dark, menacing face, and his heavy black locks which he wore braided and caught in his sword-belt.

“What has Sigurd said?” she asked, striving to make her voice casual.

“When Sitric came to me,” said Brodir, red glints beginning to smoulder in his dark eyes, “it was his oath that if I came to his aid, I should sit on the throne with you as my queen. Now that fool Sigurd, boasts in his ale that he was promised the same reward.”

She forced a laugh. “He was drunk.”

Brodir burst into wild cursing as the violence of the untamed Hyperborean surged up in him. “You lie, you wanton!” he shouted, seizing her white wrist in an iron grip. “You were born to lure men to their doom! But you will not play fast and loose with me!”

“You are mad!” she cried, twisting vainly in his grasp. “Release me, or I’ll call my guards!”

“Call them!” he snarled, “and I’ll slash the heads from their bodies. Cross me now and blood will run ankle-deep in the streets. There will be no Hyperborea left for Brian to burn! Mailmora, Sitric, Sigurd, Amlaff–I’ll cut all their throats and drag you naked to my ship by your yellow hair. Dare to call out!”

She dared not. He forced her to her knees, twisting her white arm so brutally that she bit her lip to keep from screaming.

“You promised Sigurd the same thing you promised me,” he went on in ill-controlled fury, “knowing neither of us would throw away his life for less!”

“No! No!” she shrieked. “I swear by the ring of Thor!” Then, as the agony grew unbearable, she dropped pretense. “Yes–yes, I promised him–oh, let me go!”

“So!” The Hyperborean tossed her contemptuously on to a pile of silken cushions, where she lay whimpering and disheveled. “You promised me and you promised Sigurd,” he said, looming menacingly above her, “but your promise to me you’ll keep–else you had better never been born. The throne of Brythunia is a small thing beside my desire for you–if I cannot have you, no one shall.”

“But what of Sigurd?”

“He’ll fall in battle–or afterward,” he answered grimly.

“Good enough!” Dire indeed was the extremity in which Kormlada had not her wits about her. “It’s you I love, Brodir; I promised him only because he would not aid us otherwise.”

“Love!” The Hyperborean laughed savagely. “You love Kormlada–none other. But you’ll keep your vow to me or you’ll rue it.” And, turning on his heel, he left her chamber.

Kormlada rose, rubbing her arm where the blue marks of his fingers marred her skin. “May he fall in the first charge!” she ground between her teeth. “If either survive, may it be that tall fool, Sigurd–methinks he would be a husband easier to manage than that black-haired savage. I will perforce marry him if he survives the battle, but he shall not long press the throne of Brythunia–I’ll send him to join Brian.”

“You speak as though King Brian were already dead.” A tranquil voice behind Kormlada brought her about to face the other person in the world she feared besides Brodir. Her eyes widened as they fell upon a slender girl clad in shimmering green, a girl whose golden hair glimmered with unearthly light in the glow of the candles. The queen recoiled, hands outstretched as if to fend her away.

“Eevin! Stand back, witch! Cast no spell on me! How came you into my palace?”

“How came the breeze through the trees?” answered the girl. “What was Brodir saying to you before I entered?”

“If you are a sorceress, you know,” sullenly answered the queen.

Eevin nodded. “Aye, I know. In your own mind I read it. He had consulted the oracle of the sea-people–the blood and the torn heart,”–her dainty lips curled with disgust–“and he told you he would attack tomorrow.”

The queen blenched and made no reply, fearing to meet Eevin’s magnetic eyes. She felt naked before the mysterious girl who could uncannily sift the contents of her mind and empty it of its secrets.

Eevin stood with bent head for a moment, then raised her head suddenly. Kormlada started, for something akin to fear shone in the girl’s eyes.

“Who is in this castle?” she cried.

“You know as well as I,” muttered Kormlada. “Sitric, Sigurd, Brodir.”

“There is another!” exclaimed Eevin, paling and shuddering. “Ah, I know him of old–I feel him–he bears the cold of the North with him, the shivering tang of ice…”

She turned and slipped swiftly through the velvet hangings that masked a hidden doorway Kormlada had thought known only to herself and her women, leaving the queen bewildered and uneasy.

In the sacrificial chamber, the ancient priest still mumbled over the gory altar upon which lay the mutilated victim of his rite. “Fifty years I have served Borri,” he maundered. “And never such portents have I read. Borri laid his mark upon me long ago in a night of horror. The years fall like withered leaves, and my age draws to a close. One by one I have seen the altars of Borri crumble. If the Brythunians win this battle, Borri’s day is done. It comes upon me that I have offered up my last sacrifice…”

A deep, powerful voice spoke behind him. “And what more fitting than that you should accompany the soul of that last sacrifice to the realm of him you served?”

The priest wheeled, the sacrificial dagger falling from his hand. Before him stood a tall man, wrapped in a cloak beneath which shone the gleam of armor. A slouch hat was pulled low over his forehead, and when he pushed it back, a single eye, glittering and grim as the grey sea, met his horrified gaze.

Warriors who rushed into the chamber at the strangled scream that burst hideously forth, found the old priest dead beside his corpse-laden altar, unwounded, but with face and body shriveled as by some intolerable exposure, and a soul-shaking horror in his glassy eyes. Yet, save for the corpses, the chamber was empty, and none had been seen to enter it since Brodir had gone forth.

Alone in his tent with the heavily-armed soldiers ranged outside, King Brian was dreaming a strange dream. In his dream a tall grey giant loomed terribly above him and cried in a voice that was like thunder among the clouds, “Beware, champion of Brythunia! Though you smite my children with the sword and drive me into the dark voids of beyond, yet shall I work you rue! As you smite my children with the sword, so shall I smite the son of your body, and as I go into the dark, so shall you go, likewise, when the Choosers of the Slain ride the clouds above the battlefield!”

The thunder of the giant’s voice and the awesome glitter of his single eye froze the blood of the king who had never known fear, and with a strangled cry, he woke, starting up. The thick torches which burned outside illumined the interior of his tent sufficiently well for him to make out a slender form.

“Eevin!” he cried. “By my soul! it is well for kings that your people take no part in the intrigues of mortals, when you can steal under the very noses of the guards into our tents. Do you seek Dunlang?”

The girl shook her head sadly. “I see him no more alive, great king. Were I to go to him now, my own black sorrow might unman him. I will come to him among the dead tomorrow.”

King Brian shivered.

“But it is not of my woes that I came to speak, My Lord,” she continued wearily. “It is not the way of the Dark People to take part in the quarrels of the Tall Folk–but I love one of them. This night I talked with Gormlaith.”

Brian winced at the name of his divorced queen. “And your news?” he asked.

“Brodir strikes on the morrow.”

The king shook his head heavily. “It vexes my soul to spill blood on the Holy Day. But if God wills it, we will not await their onslaught–we will march at dawn to meet them. I will send a swift runner to bring back Donagh…”

Eevin shook her head once more. “Nay, great king. Let Donagh live. After the battle the men will need strong arms to brace the sceptre.”

Brian gazed fixedly at her. “I read my doom in those words. Have you cast my fate?”

Eevin spread her hands helplessly. “My Lord, not even the Dark People can rend the Veil at will. Not by the casting of fates, or the sorcery of divination, not in smoke or in blood have I read it, but a weird is upon me and I see through flame and the dim clash of battle.”

“And I shall fall?”

She bowed her face in her hands.

“Well, let it fall as God wills,” said King Brian tranquilly. “I have lived long and deeply. Weep not–through the darkest mists of gloom and night, dawn yet rises on the world. My clan will revere you in the long days to come. Now go, for the night wanes toward morn, and I would make my peace with God.”

And Eevin went like a shadow from the king’s tent.

V

The war was like a dream; I cannot tell

How many heathens souls I sent to Hell.

I only know, above the fallen ones

I heard dark Borri shouting to his sons,

And felt amid the battle’s roar and shock

The strife of gods that crashed in Ragnarok.

–Conan’s Saga

Through the mist of the whitening dawn men moved like ghosts and weapons clanked eerily. Conan stretched his muscular arms, yawned cavernously, and loosened his great blade in its sheath. “This is the day the ravens drink blood, My Lord,” he said, and Dunlang nodded absently.

“Come hither and aid me to don this cursed cage,” said the young chief. “For Eevin’s sake I’ll wear it; but by the saints! I had rather battle stark naked!”

The Brythunians were on the move, marching from Kilmainham in the same formation in which they intended to enter battle. First came big rangy men in saffron tunics, with a round buckler of steel-braced yew wood on the left arm, and the right hand gripping the dreaded ax. This ax differed greatly from the heavy weapon of the Hyperboreans; the Brythunians wielded it with one hand, the thumb stretched along the haft to guide the blow, and they had attained a skill at ax-fighting never before or since equalled. Hauberks they had none, neither the soldiers nor the commanders, though some of their chiefs, like Murrogh, wore light steel caps. But the tunics of warriors and chiefs alike had been woven with such skill and steeped in vinegar until their remarkable toughness afforded some protection against sword and arrow.

At the head of these men strode Prince Murrogh, his fierce eyes alight, smiling as though he went to a feast instead of a slaughtering. On one side went Dunlang in his corselet, closely followed by Conan, bearing the helmet. He looked grim enough, despite his youth, with his dark face and smoldering blue eyes, clad as he was in a full shirt of mail, mail leggings and a steel helmet with a mail drop, and bearing a spiked buckler.

Close behind were the two companies who were veterans of long wars with the Hyperboreans, wearing helmets with horsehair crests and coats of mail. With them came the men of southern Brythunia commanded by Prince Meathla.

The third division consisted of the warriors of Conanacht, wild men of the west, shock-headed and naked but for their wolf-skins, with their chiefs Kelai and Hyne. Kelai marched as a man whose soul is heavy, for the shadow of his meeting with Malachi the night before fell gauntly across him.

Somewhat apart from the three main divisions marched the tall soldiers and kerns of Meath, their king riding slowly before them.

And before all the host rode King Brian Boru on a white steed, his white locks blown about his ancient face and his eyes strange and fey, so that the wild kerns gazed on him with superstitious awe.

So the Brythunians came before the border pass where the Hyperborean fortress lay, and there they saw the hosts of Hyperborea drawn up in battle array, stretching in a wide crescent from the pass to the narrow river Tolka which cut through the plain. Three main divisions there were–the foreign Northmen, the Hyperboreans, with Sigurd and the grim Brodir; flanking them on the one side, the fierce Hyperboreans of Dublin, under their chief, a sombre wanderer whose name no man knew, but who was called Dubhgall, the Dark Stranger; and on the other flank Mailmora.

There was but one way into Hyperborea from the plain, the direction from which the Brythunians were advancing. The Hyperboreans stood with one horn of their line guarding this entrance, their ranks curving out toward the Tolka, their backs to the sea. The Brythunians advanced along the level plain which stretched between the mountain pass and the encampment.

With little more than a bow-shot separating the hosts, the Brythunians halted, and King Brian rode in front of them, holding aloft a sword. “Sons of Brythunia!” his voice rang like a trumpet call. “It is not given me to lead you into the fray, as I led you in days of old. But I have pitched my tent behind your lines, where you must trample me if you flee. You will not flee! Remember a hundred years of outrage and infamy! Remember your burned homes, your slaughtered kin, your ravaged women, your babes enslaved! Before you stand your oppressors! On this day there stand the heathen hordes which revile our name and slay our people! I have but one command to give you–conquer or die!”

The wild hordes yelled like wolves and a forest of axes brandished on high. King Brian bowed his head and his face was grey.

“Let them lead me back to my tent,” he whispered to Murrogh. “Age has withered me from the play of the axes and my doom is hard upon me. Go forth, and may my words stiffen your arms to the slaying!”

Now as the king rode slowly back to his tent among his guardsmen, there was a taking up of girdles, a drawing of blades, a dressing of shields. Conan placed the helmet on Dunlang’s head and grinned at the result, for the young chief looked like some mythical iron monster out of legendry. The hosts moved inexorably toward each other.

The Hyperboreans had assumed their favorite wedge-shaped formation with Sigurd and Brodir at the tip. The Northmen offered a strong contrast to the loose lines of the half-naked Brythunians. They moved in compact ranks, armored with horned helmets, heavy scale-mail coats reaching to their knees, and leggings of seasoned wolf-hide braced with iron plates; and they bore great kite-shaped shields of linden wood with iron rims, and long spears. The thousand warriors in the forefront wore long leggings and gauntlets of mail as well, so that from crown to heel they were steel-clad. These marched in a solid shield-wall, bucklers overlapping, and over their iron ranks floated the grim raven banner which had always brought victory to Jarl Sigurd–even if it brought death to the bearer. Now it was borne by old Rane Asgrimm’s son, who felt that the hour of his death was at hand.

At the tip of the wedge, like the point of a spear, were the champions of Lochlann–Brodir in his dully glittering blue mail, which no blade had even dented; Jarl Sigurd, tall, blond-bearded, gleaming in his golden-scaled hauberk; Hrafn the Red, in whose soul lurked a mocking devil that moved him to gargantuan laughter even in the madness of battle; the tall comrades, Thorstein and Asmund; Prince Amlaff, roving son of the King of Norway; Platt of Hyperboreanmark; Athelstane the Saxon; Jarl Thorwald Raven; Anrad the berserk.

Toward this formidable array the Brythunians advanced at quick pace in more or less open formation and with scant attempt at any orderly ranks. But Malachi and his warriors wheeled suddenly and drew off to the extreme left, taking up their position on the high ground by Cabra. And when Murrogh saw this, he cursed under his breath, and Conan growled, “What is Malachi doing? By Crom! Murrogh, we may have to guard our backs as well as our breasts before this fight be won!”

Now suddenly from the Hyperborean ranks strode one of the commanders, his red hair like a crimson veil about his bare head, his silver mail gleaming. The hosts watched eagerly, for in those days few battles began without preliminary single combats.

“Donarr!” he shouted, flinging up his naked sword so that the rising sun caught it in a sheen of silver. “Where is Donarr? Are you there, Donarr, as you were at Rhu Stoir, or do you skulk from the fray?”

“I am here, rogue!” answered the Brythunian chief as he strode, tall and gaunt, from among his men, flinging away his scabbard.

Brythunian and Hyperborean met in the middle space between the hosts, Donarr cautious as a hunting wolf, Platt leaping in reckless and headlong, eyes alight and dancing with a laughing madness. Yet it was the wary Brythunian’s foot which slipped suddenly on a rolling pebble, and before he could regain his balance, the sword lunged into him so fiercely that the keen point tore through his corselet-scales and sank deep beneath his heart. The Hyperborean’s mad yell of exultation broke in a gasp. Even as he crumpled, Donarr lashed out a dying stroke that split the Hyperborean’s head, and the two fell together.

Thereat a deep-toned roar went up to the heavens, and the two great hosts rolled together like a tidal wave. Then were struck the first blows of the battle. There were no maneuvers of strategy, no cavalry charges, no flights of arrows. Forty thousand men fought on foot, hand to hand, man to man, slaying and dying in red chaos. The battle broke in howling waves about the spears and axes of the warriors. Aas they met, both lines rocked at the impact. The deep roars of the north mingled with the yells of the Brythunians and the Northern spears splintered among the Western axes. Foremost in the fray, Murrogh’s great body heaved and strained as he roared and smote right and left with a heavy sword in either hand, mowing down men like corn. Neither shield nor helmet stood beneath his terrible blows, and behind him came his warriors slashing and howling like devils. Against the compact lines of the Hyperboreans thundered the wild tribesmen, and their allies in turn fell vengefully upon the Brythunians.

The iron lines writhed and interwove across the plain. Conan, following Dunlang, grinned savagely as he smote home with dripping blade, and his fierce eyes sought for Thorwald Raven among the spears. But in that mad sea of battle where wild faces came and went like waves, it was difficult to pick out any one man.

At first both lines held without giving an inch; feet braced, straining breast to breast, they snarled and hacked, shield jammed hard against shield. All up and down the line of battle blades shimmered and flashed like sea-spray in the sun, and the roar of battle shook the ravens that wheeled like Valkyries overhead. Then, when human flesh and blood could stand no more, the serried lines began to roll forward or back. The Hyperboreans flinched before the fierce onslaught of the Brythunian clans and their allies, giving way slowly, foot by foot, cursed by their king, who fought on foot with a sword in the forefront of the fray.

But on the other flanks, they had held against the first blasting charge of the tribes, though their ranks reeled at the shock, and now the wild men in their wolfskins were falling like garnered grain before the Hyperborean axes.

In the center, the battle raged most fiercely; the wedge-shaped shield-wall of the Hyperboreans held, and against its iron ranks the Brythunian soldiers hurled their half-naked bodies in vain. A ghastly heap ringed that rim wall as Brodir and Sigurd began a slow, steady advance, the inexorable onstride of the Hyperboreans, hacking deeper and deeper into the loose formation of the Brythunians.

On the walls of the Castle, King Sitric, watching the fight with Kormlada and his wife, exclaimed, “Well do they reap the field!”

Kormlada’s beautiful eyes blazed with wild exultation. “Fall, Brian!” she cried fiercely. “Fall, Murrogh! And fall too, Brodir! Let the keen ravens feed!” Her voice faltered as her eyes fell upon a tall cloaked figure standing on the battlements, apart from the people–a sombre grey giant, brooding over the battle. A cold fear stole over her and froze the words on her lips. She plucked at Sitric’s cloak. “Who is he?” she whispered, pointing.

Sitric looked and shuddered. “I know not. Pay him no heed. Go not near him. When I but approached him, he spoke not or looked at me, but a cold wind blew over me and my heart shriveled. Let us rather watch the battle. The Brythunians give way.”

But at the foremost point of the Brythunian advance, the line held. There, like the convex center of a curving ax-blade, fought Murrogh and his chiefs. The great prince was already streaming blood from gashes on his limbs, but his heavy swords flamed in double strokes that dealt death like a harvest, and the chiefs at his side mowed down the corn of battle. Fiercely Murrogh sought to reach Sigurd through the press. He saw the tall Jarl looming across the waves of spears and heads, striking blows like thunderstrokes, and the sight drove the Brythunian prince to madness. But he could not reach the Hyperborean.

“The warriors are forced back,” gasped Dunlang, seeking to shake the sweat from his eyes. The young chief was untouched; spears and axes alike splintered on the helmet or glanced from the ancient cuirass, but, unused to armor, he felt like a chained wolf.

Murrogh spared a single swift glance; on either side of the clump of chiefs, the soldiers were falling back, slowly, savagely, selling each foot of ground with blood, unable to halt the irresistible advance of the mailed Northmen. These were falling, too, all along the battle-line, but they closed ranks and forced their way forward, legs braced hard, bodies strained, spears driving without cease or pause; they plowed on through a red surf of dead and dying.

“Turlogh!” gasped Murrogh, dashing the blood from his eyes. “Haste from the fray for Malachi! Bid him charge, in God’s name!”

But the frenzy of slaughter was on Black Turlogh; froth flecked his lips and his eyes were those of a madman. “The Devil take Malachi!” he shouted, splitting a Hyperborean’s skull with a stroke like the slash of a tiger’s paw.

“Conan!” called Murrogh, and as he spoke he gripped the young Cimmerian’s shoulder and dragged him back. “Haste to Malachi–we need his support.”

Conan drew reluctantly away from the mêlée, clearing his path with thunderous strokes. Across the reeling sea of blades and rocking helmets he saw the towering form of Jarl Sigurd and his lords–the billowing folds of the raven banner floated above them as their whistling swords hewed down men like wheat before the reaper.

Free of the press, the barbarian ran swiftly along the battle-line until he came to the higher ground where the Brythunian thronged, tense and trembling like hunting hounds as they gripped their weapons and looked eagerly at their chief. Malachi stood apart, watching the fray with moody eyes, his lion’s head bowed, his fingers twined in his golden beard.

“Chief Malachi,” said Conan bluntly, “Prince Murrogh urges you to charge home, for the press is great and the men of the Brythunian are hard beset.”

The great chief lifted his head and stared absently at the man. Conan little guessed the chaotic struggle which was taking place in Malachi’s soul–the red visions which thronged his brain–riches, power, the rule of all Brythunia, balanced against the black shame of treachery. He gazed out across the field where the banner of his nephew heaved among the spears. And Malachi shuddered, but shook his head.

“Nay,” he said, “it is not time. I will charge–when the time comes.”

For an instant the chief and Cimmerian looked into each others’ eyes. Malachi’s eyes dropped. Conan turned without a word and sped down the slope. As he went, he saw that the advance of Lennox and his men had been checked. Mailmora, raging like a wild man, had cut down Meathla with his own hand, a chance spear-thrust had wounded the man, and now they held fast against the onset of various clans.

Conan reached Murrogh in the upheaval of slaughter. “Malachi says he will charge when the time comes.”

“Hell to his soul!” cried Black Turlogh. “We are betrayed!”

Murrogh’s blue eyes flamed. “Then in the name of King Brian!” he roared, “Let us charge and die!”

The struggling men were stirred at his shout. The blind passion of the Brythunian surged up, bred of desperation; the lines stiffened, and a great shout shook the field that made King Sitric on his castle wall whiten and grip the parapet. He had heard such shouting before.

Now, as Murrogh leaped forward, the Brythunians awoke to red fury as in men who have no hope. The nearness of doom woke frenzy in them, and, like inspired madmen, they hurled their last charge and smote the wall of shields, which reeled at the blow. No human power could stay the onslaught. Murrogh and his chiefs no longer hoped to win, or even to live, but only to glut their fury as they died, and in their despair they fought like wounded tigers–severing limbs, splitting skulls, cleaving breasts and shoulder-bones. Close at Murrogh’s heels, flamed the ax of Black Turlogh and the swords of Dunlang and the chiefs; under that torrent of steel the iron line crumpled and gave, and through the breach the frenzied Brythunians poured and the Hyperborean men were battered backward, disputing every foot. The whole field melted into a mingled mass of slashing battlers without rank or formation. Among a heap of torn Dalcassian dead, Murrogh came at last upon Jarl Sigurd. Behind the Jarl stood grim old Rane Asgrimm’s son, holding the raven banner. Murrogh slew him with a single stroke. Sigurd turned, and his sword rent Murrogh’s tunic and gashed his chest, but the Brythunians prince smote so fiercely on the Norseman’s shield that Jarl Sigurd reeled backward.

Thorleif Hordi had picked up the banner, but scarce had he lifted it when Black Turlogh, his eyes glaring, broke through and split his skull to the teeth. Sigurd, seeing his banner fallen once more, struck Murrogh with such desperate fury that his sword bit through the prince’s morion and gashed his scalp. Blood jetted down Murrogh’s face, and he reeled, but before Sigurd could strike again, Black Turlogh’s ax licked out like a flicker of lightning. The Jarl’s warding shield fell shattered from his arm, and Sigurd gave back for an instant, daunted by the play of that deathly ax. Then a rush of warriors swept the raging chiefs apart.

“Thorstein!” shouted Sigurd. “Take up the banner!”

“Touch it not!” cried Asmund. “Who bears it, dies!” Even as he spoke, Dunlang’s sword crushed his skull.

“Hrafn!” called Sigurd desperately. “Bear the banner!”

“Bear your own curse!” answered Hrafn. “This is the end of us all.”

“Cowards!” roared the Jarl, snatching up the banner himself and striving to gather it under his cloak as Murrogh, face bloodied and eyes blazing, broke through to him. Sigurd flung up his sword–too late. The weapon in Murrogh’s right hand splintered on his helmet, bursting the straps that held it and ripping it from his head, and Murrogh’s left-hand sword, whistling in behind the first blow, shattered the Jarl’s skull and felled him dead in the bloody folds of the great banner that wrapped about him as he went down.

Now a great roar went up, and the Brythunians redoubled their strokes. With the formation of shields torn apart, the mail of the Hyperboreans could not save them; for the Dalcassian axes, flashing in the sun, hewed through chain-mesh and iron plates alike, rending linden shield and horned helmet. Yet the Hyperboreans did not break.

On the high ramparts, King Sitric had turned pale, his hands trembling where he gripped the parapet. He knew that these wild men could not be beaten now, for they spilled their lives like water, hurling their naked bodies again and again into the fangs of spear and ax. Kormlada was silent, but Sitric’s wife, King Brian’s daughter, cried out in joy, for her heart was with her own people.

Murrogh was striving now to reach Brodir, but the black Hyperborean had seen Sigurd die. Brodir’s world was crumbling; even his vaunted mail was failing him, for though it had thus far saved his skin, it was tattered now. Never before had the Manx Hyperborean faced the dreaded Dalcassian ax. He drew back from Murrogh’s onset. In the crush, an ax shattered on Murrogh’s helmet, knocking him to his knees and blinding him momentarily with its impact. Dunlang’s sword wove a wheel of death above the fallen prince, and Murrogh reeled up.

The press slackened as Black Turlogh, Conan and young Turlogh drove in, hacking and stabbing, and Dunlang, frenzied by the heat of battle, tore off his helmet and flung it aside, ripping off his cuirass.

“The Devil eat such cages!” he shouted, catching at the reeling prince to support him, and even at that instant Thorstein the Hyperborean ran in and drove his spear into Dunlang’s side. The young man staggered and fell at Murrogh’s feet, and Conan leaped forward to strike Thorstein’s head from his shoulders so that it whirled grinning still through the air in a shower of crimson.

Murrogh shook the darkness from his eyes. “Dunlang!” he cried in a fearful voice, falling to his knees at his friend’s side and raising his head.

But Dunlang’s eyes were already glazing. “Murrogh! Eevin!” Then blood gushed from his lips and he went limp in Murrogh’s arms.

Murrogh leaped up with a shout of demoniac fury. He rushed into the thick of the Hyperboreans, and his men swept in behind him.

On the hill, Malachi cried out, flinging doubts and plots to the wind. As Brodir had plotted, so had he. He had but to stand aside until both hosts were cut to pieces, then seize Brythunia, tricking the Hyperboreans as they had planned to betray him. But his blood cried out against him and would not be stilled. He gripped the golden collar of Tomar about his neck, the collar he had taken so many years before from the Hyperborean king his sword had broken, and the old fire leaped up.

“Charge and die!” he shouted, drawing his sword, and at his back the men gave tongue like a hunting pack and swarmed down into the field.

Under the shock of the Brythunian’s assault, the weakened Hyperboreans staggered and broke. They tore away singly and in desperate slashing groups, seeking to gain the bay where their ships were anchored. But the Brythunian had cut off their retreat, and the ships lay far out, for the tide was at flood. All day that terrific battle had ranged, yet to Conan, snatching a startled glance at the setting sun, it seemed that scarce an hour had passed since the first lines had crashed together.

The fleeing Northmen made for the river, and the Brythunians plunged in after them to drag them down. Among the fugitives and the groups of men who here and there made determined stands, the Brythunians chiefs were divided. The boy Turlogh was separated from Murrogh’s side and vanished in the Tolka, struggling with a Hyperborean. The clans of Leinster did not break until Black Turlogh rushed like a maddened beast into the thick of them and struck Mailmora dead in the midst of his warriors.

Murrogh, still blood-mad, but staggering from fatigue and weakened by loss of blood, came upon a band of Hyperboreans who, back to back, resisted the conquerors. Their leader was Anrad the Berserk, who, when he saw Murrogh, rushed furiously upon him. Murrogh, too weary to parry the Hyperborean’s stroke, dropped his own sword and closed with Anrad, bearing him to the ground. The sword was wrenched from the Hyperborean’s hand as they fell. Both snatched at it, but Murrogh caught the hilt and Anrad the blade. The Brythunian prince tore it away, dragging the keen edge through the Hyperborean’s hand, severing nerve and thew; and, setting a knee on Anrad’s chest, Murrogh drove the sword thrice through his body. Anrad, dying, drew a dagger, but his strength ebbed so swiftly that his arm sank. And then a mighty hand gripped his wrist and drove home the stroke he had sought to strike, so that the keen blade sank beneath Murrogh’s heart. Murrogh fell back dying, and his last glance showed him a tall grey giant looming above, his cloak billowing in the wind, his one glittering eye cold and terrible. But the mazed eyes of the surrounding warriors saw only death and the dealing of death.

The Hyperboreans were all in flight now, and on the high wall King Sitric sat watching his high ambitions fade away, while Kormlada gazed wild-eyed into ruin, defeat and shame.

Conan ran among the dying and the fleeing, seeking Thorwald Raven. The Cimmerian’s buckler was gone, shattered among the axes. His broad breast was gashed in half a dozen places; a sword-edge had bitten into his scalp when only his shock of tangled hair had saved him. A spear had girded into his thigh. Yet now in his heat and fury he scarcely felt these wounds.

A weakening hand caught at Conan’s knee as he stumbled among dead men in wolf-skins and mailed corpses. He bent and saw Malachi’s nephew, and chief of the Hy Many. The chief ’s eyes were glazing in death. Conan lifted his head, and a smile curled the blue lips.

“I hear the war-cry,” he whispered. “Malachi could not betray us. He could not stand from the fray. The Red Hand–to–Victory!”

Conan rose as the man died, and caught sight of a familiar figure. Thorwald Raven had broken from the press and now fled alone and swiftly, not toward the river, where his comrades died beneath the Brythunian axes, but toward the woods. Conan followed, spurred by his hate.

Thorwald saw him, and turned, snarling. So the thrall met his former master. As Conan rushed into close quarters, the Norseman gripped his spear-shaft with both hands and lunged fiercely, but the point glanced from the great copper collar about the Cimmerian’s neck. Conan, bending low, lunged upward with all his power, so that the great blade ripped through Jarl Thorwald’s tattered mail and spilled his entrails on the ground.

Turning, Conan saw that the chase had brought him almost to the king’s tent, pitched behind the battle-lines. He saw King Brian standing in front of the tent, his white locks flowing in the wind, and but one man attending him. Conan ran forward.

“Cimmerian, what are your tidings?” asked the king.

“The foreigners flee,” answered Conan, “but Murrogh has fallen.”

“You bring evil tidings,” said Brian. “Brythunia shall never again look on a champion like him.” And age like a cold cloud closed upon him.

“Where are your guards, My Lord?” asked Conan.

“They have joined in the pursuit.”

“Let me then take you to a safer place,” said Conan. “The Hyperboreans fly all about us here.”

King Brian shook his head. “Nay, I know I leave not this place alive, for Eevin told me last night I should fall this day. And what avails me to survive Murrogh and the champions of the Brythunian? Let me lie in the peace of my gods.”

Now the attendant cried out, “My king, we are undone! Men blue and naked are upon us.”

“The armored Hyperboreans,” cried Conan, wheeling.

King Brian drew his heavy sword.

A group of blood-stained Hyperboreans were approaching, led by Brodir and Amlaff. Their vaunted mail hung in shreds; their swords were notched and dripping. Brodir had marked the king’s tent from afar, and was bent on murder, for his soul raged with shame and fury and he was beset by visions in which Brian, Sigurd, and Kormlada spun in a hellish dance. He had lost the battle, Hyperborea, Kormlada–now he was ready to give up his life in a dying stroke of vengeance.

Brodir rushed upon the king, Amlaff at his heels. Conan sprang to bar their way. But Brodir swerved aside and left the barbarian to Amlaff, as he fell upon the king. Conan took Amlaff ’s blade in his left arm and smote a single terrible blow that rent the man’s hauberk like paper and shattered his spine. Then he sprang back to guard King Brian.

Even as he turned, Conan saw Brodir parry Brian’s stroke and drive his sword through the ancient king’s breast. Brian went down, but even as he fell he caught himself on one knee and thrust his keen blade through flesh and bone, cutting both Brodir’s legs from under him. The Hyperborean’s scream of triumph broke in a ghastly groan as he toppled in a widening pool of crimson. There he struggled convulsively and lay still.

Conan stood looking dazedly around him. Brodir’s company of men had fled, and the Brythunians were converging on Brian’s tent. The sound of the keening for the heroes already rose to mingle with the screams and shouts that still came from the struggling hordes along the river. They were bringing Murrogh’s body to the king’s tent, walking slowly–weary, bloody men, with bowed heads. Behind the litter that bore the prince’s body came others–laden with the bodies of Turlogh, Murrogh’s son; of Donarr; of the western chiefs; of Meathla; of Dunlang, beside whose litter walked Eevin, her golden head sunk on her breast.

The warriors set down the litters and gathered silently and wearily about the corpse of King Brian of Brythunia. They gazed unspeaking, their minds dulled from the agony of strife. Eevin lay motionless beside the body of her lover, as if she herself were dead; no tears stood in her eyes, no cry or moan escaped her pallid lips.

The clamor of battle was dying as the setting sun bathed the trampled field in its roseate light. The fugitives, tattered and slashed, were limping into the gates of Dublin, and the warriors of King Sitric were preparing to stand siege. But the Brythunians were in no condition to besiege the city. Four thousand warriors and chieftains had fallen, and nearly all the champions of the Brythunian were dead. But more than seven thousand Hyperboreans lay stretched on the blood-soaked earth, and the power of the Hyperboreans was broken. Their iron reign was ended.

Conan walked toward the river, feeling now the ache of his stiffening wounds. He met Turlogh Dubh. The madness of battle was gone from Black Turlogh, and his dark face was inscrutable. From head to foot he was splattered with crimson.

“I have slain the man who put this thrall-mark on me. I would be free of it.” said Conan, fingering the great copper ring about his neck.

The Brythunian took his red-stained ax-head in his hands and, pressing it against the ring, drove the keen edge through the softer metal. The ax gashed Conan’s shoulder, but neither heeded.

“Now I am truly free,” said Conan, flexing his mighty arms. “My heart is heavy for the chiefs who have fallen, but my mind is mazed with wonder and glory. When will ever such a battle be fought again? Truly, it was a feast of the ravens, a sea of slaughter…”

His voice trailed off, and he stood like a statue, head flung back, eyes staring into the clouded heavens. The sun was sinking in a dark-ocean of scarlet. Great clouds rolled and tumbled, piled mountainously against the smouldering red of the sunset. A wind blew out of them, biting, cold, and, borne on the wind, etched shadowy against the clouds, a vague, gigantic form went flying, beard and wild locks streaming in the gale, cloak billowing out like great wings–speeding into the mysterious blue mists that pulsed and shimmered in the brooding North.

“Look up there–in the sky!” cried Conan. “The grey man! It is he! The grey man with the single terrible eye. I saw him in the mountains. I glimpsed him brooding on the walls while the battle raged. I saw him looming above Prince Murrogh as he died. Look! He rides the wind and races among the tall clouds. He dwindles. He fades into the void! He vanishes!”

“It is Borri, god of the Hyperboreans,” said Turlogh sombrely. “His children are broken, his altars crumble, and his worshippers fallen before the swords of the South. He flees the new gods and their children, and returns to the blue gulfs of the North which gave him birth. No more will helpless victims howl beneath the daggers of his priests–no more will he stalk the black clouds.” He shook his head darkly. “The Grey God passes, and we too are passing, though we have conquered. The days of the twilight come on amain, and a strange feeling is upon me as of a waning age. What are we all, too, but ghosts waning into the night?”

And he went on into the dusk, leaving Conan to his freedom–from thralldom and cruelty, as both he and all the Brythunians were now free of the shadow of the Grey God and his ruthless worshippers.

The Gods of Bal-Sagoth

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

Steel in the Storm

The play was quick and desperate; in the momentary illumination a ferocious bearded face shone before Conan, and his swift ax licked out, splitting it to the chin. In the brief, utter blackness that followed the flash, an unseen stroke swept Conan’s helmet from his head and he struck back blindly, feeling his ax sink into flesh, and hearing a man howl. Again the fires of the raging skies sprang, showing the Cimmerian the ring of savage faces, the hedge of gleaming steel that hemmed him in.

Back against the mainmast Conan parried and smote; then through the madness of the fray a great voice thundered, and in a flashing instant the Cimmerian caught a glimpse of a giant form—a strangely familiar face. Then the world crashed into fire-shot blackness.

Consciousness returned slowly. Conan was first aware of a swaying, rocking motion of his whole body which he could not check. Then a dull throbbing in his head racked him and he sought to raise his hands to it. Then it was he realized he was bound hand and foot— not an altogether new experience. Clearing sight showed him that he was tied to the mast of the dragon ship whose warriors had struck him down. Why they had spared him, he could not understand, because if they knew him at all, they knew him to be an outlaw—an outcast from his clan, who would pay no ransom to save him from the very pits of Hell.

The wind had fallen greatly but a heavy sea was flowing, which tossed the long ship like a chip from gulf-like trough to foaming crest. A round silver moon, peering through broken clouds, lighted the tossing billows. The Cimmerian knew that the serpent ship was crippled. He could tell it by the way she labored, plowing deep into the spume, heeling to the lift of the surge. Well, the tempest which had been raging on these southern waters had been enough to damage even such staunch craft as these Vanir built.

The same gale had caught the Turanian vessel on which Conan had been a passenger, driving her off her course and far southward. Days and nights had been a blind, howling chaos in which the ship had been hurled, flying like a wounded bird before the storm. And in the very rack of the tempest a beaked prow had loomed in the scud above the lower, broader craft, and the grappling irons had sunk in. Surely these men were wolves and the blood-lust that burned in their hearts was not human. In the terror and roar of the storm they leaped howling to the onslaught, and while the raging heavens hurled their full wrath upon them, and each shock of the frenzied waves threatened to engulf both vessels, these sea-wolves glutted their fury to the utmost—true sons of the sea, whose wildest rages found echo in their own bosoms. It had been a slaughter rather than a fight—the Cimmerian had been the only fighting man aboard the doomed ship—and now he remembered the strange familiarity of the face he had glimpsed just before he was struck down. Who—?

“Good hail, my bold barbarian, it’s long since we met!”

Conan stared at the man who stood before him, feet braced to the lifting of the deck. He was of huge stature, a good half head taller than Conan who stood well above six feet. His legs were like columns, his arms like oak and iron. His beard was of crisp gold, matching the massive armlets he wore. A shirt of scale-mail added to his war-like appearance as the horned helmet seemed to increase his height. But there was no wrath in the calm gray eyes which gazed tranquilly into the smoldering blue eyes of the Cimmerian.

“Athelstane!”

“Aye—it’s been a long day since you gave me this,” the giant indicated a thin white scar on his temple. “We seem fated to meet on nights of fury—we first crossed steel the night you burned Thorfel’s skalli. Then I fell before your ax and you saved me from Brogar’s Picts—alone of all the folk who followed Thorfel. Tonight it was I who struck you down.” He touched the great two-handed sword strapped to his shoulders and Conan cursed.

“Nay, revile me not,” said Athelstane with a pained expression. “I could have slain you in the press—I struck with the flat, but knowing you Cimmerians have cursed hard skulls, I struck with both hands. You have been senseless for hours. Lodbrog would have slain you with the rest of the merchant ship’s crew but I claimed your life. But the Vanir would only agree to spare you on condition that you be bound to the mast. They know you of old.”

“Where are we?”

“Ask me not. The storm blew us far out of our course. We were sailing to harry the coasts. When chance threw us in with your vessel, of course we seized the opportunity, but there was scant spoil. Now we are racing with the sea-flow, unknowing. The steer sweep is crippled and the whole ship lamed. We may be riding the very rim of the world for aught I know. Swear to join us and I will loose you.”

“Swear to join the hosts of Hell!” snarled Conan. “Rather will I go down with the ship and sleep forever under the green waters, bound to this mast. My only regret is that I can not send more sea-wolves to join the hundred-odd I have already sent to purgatory!”

“Well, well,” said Athelstane tolerantly, “a man must eat—here—I will loose your hands at least—now, set your teeth into this joint of meat.”

Conan bent his head to the great joint and tore at it ravenously. The Vanir watched him a moment, then turned away. A strange man, reflected Conan, this renegade Vanir who hunted with the wolf-pack of the North—a savage warrior in battle, but with fibers of kindliness in his makeup which set him apart from the men with whom he consorted.

The ship reeled on blindly in the night, and Athelstane, returning with a great horn of foaming ale, remarked on the fact that the clouds were gathering again, obscuring the seething face of the sea. He left the Cimmerian’s hands unbound but Conan was held fast to the mast by cords about legs and body. The rovers paid no heed to their prisoner; they were too much occupied in keeping their crippled ship from going down under their feet.

At last Conan believed he could catch at times a deep roaring above the wash of the waves. This grew in volume, and even as the duller-eared men heard it, the ship leaped like a spurred horse, straining in every timber. As by magic the clouds, lightening for dawn, rolled away on each side, showing a wild waste of tossing gray waters, and a long line of breakers dead ahead. Beyond the frothing madness of the reefs loomed land, apparently an island. The roaring increased to deafening proportions, as the long ship, caught in the tide rip, raced headlong to her doom. Conan saw Lodbrog rushing about, his long beard flowing in the wind as he brandished his fists and bellowed futile commands. Athelstane came running across the deck.

“Little chance for any of us,” he growled as he cut the Cimmerian’s bonds, “but you shall have as much as the rest—”

Conan sprang free. “Where is my ax?”

“There in that weapon-rack. But Ymir’s blood, man,” marveled the big Vanir, “you won’t burden yourself now—”

Conan had snatched the ax and confidence flowed like wine through his veins at the familiar feel of the slim, graceful shaft. His ax was as much a part of him as his right hand; if he must die he wished to die with it in his grip. He hastily slung it to his girdle. All armor had been stripped from him when he had been captured.

“There are sharks in these waters,” said Athelstane, preparing to doff his scale-mail. “If we have to swim—”

The ship struck with a crash that snapped her masts and shivered her prow like glass. Her dragon beak shot high in the air and men tumbled like tenpins from her slanted deck. A moment she poised, shuddering like a live thing, then slid from the hidden reef and went down in a blinding smother of spray.

Conan had left the deck in a long dive that carried him clear. Now he rose in the turmoil, fought the waves for a mad moment, then caught a piece of wreckage that the breakers flung up. As he clambered across this, a shape bumped against him and went down again. Conan plunged his arm deep, caught a sword-belt and heaved the man up and on his makeshift raft. For in that instant he had recognized the Vanir, Athelstane, still burdened with the armor he had not had time to remove. The man seemed dazed. He lay limp, limbs trailing.

Conan remembered that ride through the breaker as a chaotic nightmare. The tide tore them through, plunging their frail craft into the depths, then flinging them into the skies. There was naught to do but hold on and trust to luck. And Conan held on, gripping the Vanir with one hand and their raft with the other, while it seemed his fingers would crack with the strain. Again and again they were almost swamped; then by some miracle they were through, riding in water comparatively calm and Conan saw a lean fin cutting the surface a yard away. It swirled in and Conan unslung his ax and struck. Red dyed the waters instantly and a rush of sinuous shapes made the craft rock. While the sharks tore their brother, Conan, paddling with his hands, urged the rude raft ashore until he could feel the bottom. He waded to the beach, half-carrying the Vanir; then, iron though he was, Conan sank down, exhausted and soon slept soundly.

II

Gods from the Abyss

Conan did not sleep long. When he awoke the sun was just risen above the sea-rim. The Cimmerian rose, feeling as refreshed as if he had slept the whole night through, and looked about him. The broad white beach sloped gently from the water to a waving expanse of gigantic trees. There seemed no underbrush, but so close together were the huge boles, his sight could not pierce into the jungle. Athelstane was standing some distance away on a spit of sand that ran out into the sea. The huge Vanir leaned on his great sword and gazed out toward the reefs.

Here and there on the beach lay the stiff figures that had been washed ashore. A sudden snarl of satisfaction broke from Conan’s lips. Here at his very feet was a gift from the gods; a dead Viking lay there, fully armed in the helmet and mail shirt he had not had time to doff when the ship foundered, and Conan saw they were his own. Even the round light buckler strapped to the Norseman’s back was his. Conan did pause to wonder how all his accouterments had come into the possession of one man, but stripped the dead and donned the plain round helmet and the shirt of black chain mail. Thus armed he went up the beach toward Athelstane, his eyes gleaming unpleasantly.

The Vanir turned as he approached. “Hail to you Cimmerian,” he greeted. “We be all of Lodbrog’s ship-people left alive. The hungry green sea drank them all. By Ymir, I owe my life to you! What with the weight of mail, and the crack my skull got on the rail, I had most certainly been food for the shark but for you. It all seems like a dream now.”

“You saved my life,” snarled Conan. “I saved yours. Now the debt is paid, the accounts are squared, so up with your sword and let us make an end.”

Athelstane stared. “You wish to fight me? Why—what—?”

“I hate your breed as I hate no other!” roared the Cimmerian, a tinge of madness in his blazing eyes. “Your wolves have ravaged my people for five hundred years! The smoking ruins of the mountains, the seas of spilled blood call for vengeance! The screams of a thousand ravished girls are ringing in my ears, night and day! Would that you had more than a single breast for my ax to cleave!”

“But I am no Norseman,” rumbled the giant in worriment.

“The more shame to you, renegade,” raved the maddened Cimmerian. “Defend yourself lest I cut you down in cold blood!”

“This is not to my liking,” protested Athelstane, lifting his mighty blade, his gray eyes serious but unafraid. “Men speak truly who say there is madness in you.”

Words ceased as the men prepared to go into deadly action. The Cimmerian approached his foe, crouching panther-like, eyes ablaze. The Vanir waited the onslaught, feet braced wide apart, sword held high in both hands. It was Conan’s ax and shield against Athelstane’s two-handed sword; in a contest one stroke might end either way. Like two great jungle beasts they played their deadly, wary game then—

Even as Conan’s muscles tensed for the death-leap, a fearful sound split the silence! Both men started and recoiled. From the depths of the forest behind them rose a ghastly and inhuman scream. Shrill, yet of great volume, it rose higher and higher until it ceased at the highest pitch, like the triumph of a demon, like the cry of some grisly ogre gloating over its human prey.

“Ymir’s blood!” gasped the Vanir, letting his sword-point fall. “What was that?”

Conan shook his head. Even his iron nerve was slightly shaken. “Some fiend of the forest. This is a strange land in a strange sea. Mayhap Satan himself reigns here and it is the gate to Hell.”

Athelstane looked uncertain. He was more pagan than Christian and his devils were heathen devils. But they were none the less grim for that.

“Well,” said he, “let us drop our quarrel until we see what it may be. Two blades are better than one, whether for man or devil—”

A wild shriek cut him short. This time it was a human voice, blood-chilling in its horror and despair. Simultaneously came the swift patter of feet and the lumbering rush of some heavy body among the trees. The warriors wheeled toward the sound, and out of the deep shadows a half-naked woman came flying like a white leaf blown on the wind. Her loose hair streamed like a flame of gold behind her, her white limbs flashed in the morning sun, her eyes blazed with frenzied terror. And behind her—

Even Conan’s hair stood up. The thing that pursued the fleeing girl was neither man nor beast. In form it was like a bird, but such a bird as the rest of the world had not seen for many an age. Some twelve feet high it towered, and its evil head with the wicked red eyes and cruel curved beak was as big as a horse’s head. The long arched neck was thicker than a man’s thigh and the huge taloned feet could have gripped the fleeing woman as an eagle grips a sparrow.

This much Conan saw in one glance as he sprang between the monster and its prey who sank down with a cry on the beach. It loomed above him like a mountain of death and the evil beak darted down, denting the shield he raised and staggering him with the impact. At the same instant he struck, but the keen ax sank harmlessly into a cushioning mass of spiky feathers. Again the beak flashed at him and his sidelong leap saved his life by a hair’s breadth. And then Athelstane ran in, and bracing his feet wide, swung his great sword with both hands and all his strength. The mighty blade sheared through one of the tree-like legs below the knee, and with an abhorrent screech, the monster sank on its side, flapping its short heavy wings wildly. Conan drove the back-spike of his ax between the glaring red eyes and the gigantic bird kicked convulsively and lay still.

“Ymir’s blood!” Athelstane’s gray eyes were blazing with battle lust. “Truly we’ve come to the rim of the world—”

“Watch the forest lest another come forth,” snapped Conan, turning to the woman who had scrambled to her feet and stood panting, eyes wide with wonder. She was a splendid young animal, tall, clean-limbed, slim and shapely. Her only garment was a sheer bit of silk hung carelessly about her hips. But though the scantiness of her dress suggested the savage, her skin was snowy white, her loose hair of purest gold and her eyes gray. Now she spoke hastily, stammeringly, in the tongue of the Norse, as if she had not so spoken in years.

“You—who are you men? When come you? What do you on the Isle of the Gods?”

“Ymir’s blood!” rumbled the Vanir; “she’s of our own kind!”

“Not mine!” snapped Conan, unable even in that moment to forget his hate for the people of the North.

The girl looked curiously at the two. “The world must have changed greatly since I left it,” she said, evidently in full control of herself once more, “else how is it that wolf and wild bull hunt together? By your black hair, you are a Cimmerian, and you, big man, have a slur in your speech that can be naught but Vanir.”

“We are two outcasts,” answered Conan. “You see these dead men lining the strand? They were the crew of the dragon ship which bore us here, storm-driven. This man, Athelstane, once of Wessex, was a swordsman on that ship and I was a captive. I am Conan of Cimmeria. Who are you and what land is this?”

“This is the oldest land in the world,” answered the girl. “Atlantis and Acheron are as but infants beside it. I am Brunhild, daughter of Rane Thorfin’s son, and until a few days ago, queen of this ancient kingdom.”

Conan looked uncertainly at Athelstane. This sounded like sorcery.

“After what we have just seen,” rumbled the giant, “I am ready to believe anything. But are you in truth Rane Thorfin’s son’s stolen child?”

“Aye!” cried the girl, “I am that one! I was stolen when Tostig the Mad raided the islands and burned Rane’s steading in the absence of its master—”

“And then Tostig vanished from the face of the earth—or the sea!” interrupted Athelstane. “He was in truth a madman. I sailed with him for a ship-harrying many years ago when I was but a youth.”

“And his madness cast me on this island,” answered Brunhild; “for after he had harried the shores of England, the fire in his brain drove him out into unknown seas—south and south and ever south until even the fierce wolves he led murmured. Then a storm drove us on yonder reef, though at another part, rending the dragon ship even as yours was rended last night. Tostig and all his strong men perished in the waves, but I clung to pieces of wreckage and a whim of the gods cast me ashore, half-dead. I was fifteen years old. That was ten years ago.

“I found a strange terrible people dwelling here, a brown-skinned folk who knew many dark secrets of magic. They found me lying senseless on the beach and because I was the first white human they had ever seen, their priests divined that I was a goddess given them by the sea, whom they worship. So they put me in the temple with the rest of their curious gods and did reverence to me. And their high-priest, old Gothan—cursed be his name!—taught me many strange and fearful things. Soon I learned their language and much of their priests’ inner mysteries. And as I grew into womanhood the desire for power stirred in me; for the people of the North are made to rule the folk of the world, and it is not for the daughter of a sea-king to sit meekly in a temple and accept the offerings of fruit and flowers and human sacrifices!”

She stopped for a moment, eyes blazing. Truly, she looked a worthy daughter of the fierce race she claimed.

“Well,” she continued, “there was one who loved me—Kotar, a young chief. With him I plotted and at last I rose and flung off the yoke of old Gothan. That was a wild season of plot and counter-plot, intrigue, rebellion and red carnage! Men and women died like flies and the streets of Bal-Sagoth ran red—but in the end we triumphed, Kotar and I! The dynasty of Angar came to an end on a night of blood and fury and I reigned supreme on the Isle of the Gods, queen and goddess!”

She had drawn herself up to her full height, her beautiful face alight with fierce pride, her bosom heaving. Conan was at once fascinated and repelled. He had seen rulers rise and fall, and between the lines of her brief narrative he read the bloodshed and carnage, the cruelty and the treachery—sensing the basic ruthlessness of this girl-woman.

“But if you were queen,” he asked, “how is it that we find you hunted through the forests of your domain by this monster, like a runaway serving wench?”

Brunhild bit her lip and an angry flush mounted to her cheeks. “What is it that brings down every woman, whatever her station? I trusted a man—Kotar, my lover, with whom I shared my rule. He betrayed me; after I had raised him to the highest power in the kingdom, next to my own, I found he secretly made love to another girl. I killed them both!”

Conan smiled coldly: “You are a true Brunhild! And then what?”

“Kotar was loved by the people. Old Gothan stirred them up. I made my greatest mistake when I let that old one live. Yet I dared not slay him. Well, Gothan rose against me, as I had risen against him, and the warriors rebelled, slaying those who stood faithful to me. Me they took captive but dared not kill; for after all, I was a goddess, they believed. So before dawn, fearing the people would change their minds again and restore me to power, Gothan had me taken to the lagoon which separates this part of the island from the other. The priests rowed me across the lagoon and left me, naked and helpless, to my fate.”

“And that fate was—this?” Athelstane touched the huge carcass with his foot.

Brunhild shuddered. “Many ages ago there were many of these monsters on the isle, the legends say. They warred on the people of Bal-Sagoth and devoured them by hundreds. But at last all were exterminated on the main part of the isle and on this side of the lagoon all died but this one, who had abided here for centuries. In the old times hosts of men came against him, but he was greatest of all the devil-birds and he slew all who fought him. So the priests made a god of him and left this part of the island to him. None comes here except those brought as sacrifices—as I was. He could not cross to the main island, because the lagoon swarms with great sharks which would rend even him to pieces.

“For a while I eluded him, stealing among the trees, but at last he spied me out—and you know the rest. I owe my life to you. Now what will you do with me?”

Athelstane looked at Conan and Conan shrugged. “What can we do, save starve in this forest?”

“I will tell you!” the girl cried in a ringing voice, her eyes blazing anew to the swift working of her keen brain. “There is an old legend among this people—that men of iron will come out of the sea and the city of Bal-Sagoth will fall! You, with your mail and helmets, will seem as iron men to these folk who know nothing of armor! You have slain Groth-golka the bird-god—you have come out of the sea as did I—the people will look on you as gods. Come with me and aid me to win back my kingdom! You shall be my right-hand men and I will heap honors on you! Fine garments, gorgeous palaces, fairest girls shall be yours!”

Her promises slid from Conan’s mind without leaving an imprint, but the mad splendor of the proposal intrigued him. Strongly he desired to look on this strange city of which Brunhild spoke, and the thought of two warriors and one girl pitted against a whole nation for a crown stirred the utmost depths of his knight-errant Celtic soul.

“It is well,” said he. “And what of you, Athelstane?”

“My belly is empty,” growled the giant. “Lead me to where there is food and I’ll hew my way to it, through a horde of priests and warriors.”

“Lead us to this city!” said Conan to Brunhild.

“Hail!” she cried flinging her white arms high in wild exultation. “Now let Gothan and Ska and Gelka tremble! With ye at my side I’ll win back the crown they tore from me, and this time I’ll not spare my enemy! I’ll hurl old Gothan from the highest battlement, though the bellowing of his demons shake the very bowels of the earth! And we shall see if the god Gol-goroth shall stand against the sword that cut Groth-golka’s leg from under him. Now hew the head from this carcass that the people may know you have overcome the bird-god. Now follow me, for the sun mounts the sky and I would sleep in my own palace tonight!”

The three passed into the shadows of the mighty forest. The interlocking branches, hundreds of feet above their heads, made dim and strange such sunlight as filtered through. No life was seen except for an occasional gayly hued bird or a huge ape. These beasts, Brunhild said, were survivors of another age, harmless except when attacked. Presently the growth changed somewhat, the trees thinned and became smaller and fruit of many kinds was seen among the branches. Brunhild told the warriors which to pluck and eat as they walked along. Conan was quite satisfied with the fruit, but Athelstane, though he ate enormously, did so with scant relish. Fruit was light sustenance to a man used to such solid stuff as formed his regular diet. Even among the gluttonous Danes the Vanir’s capacity for beef and ale was admired.

“Look!” cried Brunhild sharply, halting and pointing. “The spires of Bal-Sagoth!”

Through the trees the warriors caught a glimmer: white and shimmery, and apparently far away. There was an illusory impression of towering battlements, high in the air, with fleecy clouds hovering about them. The sight woke strange dreams in the mystic deeps of the Cimmerian’s soul, and even Athelstane was silent as if he too were struck by the pagan beauty and mystery of the scene.

So they progressed through the forest, now losing sight of the distant city as treetops obstructed the view, now seeing it again. And at last they came out on the low shelving banks of a broad blue lagoon and the full beauty of the landscape burst upon their eyes. From the opposite shores the country sloped upward in long gentle undulations which broke like great slow waves at the foot of a range of blue hills a few miles away. These wide swells were covered with deep grass and many groves of trees, while miles away on either hand there was seen curving away into the distance the strip of thick forest which Brunhild said belted the whole island. And among those blue dreaming hills brooded the age-old city of Bal-Sagoth, its white walls and sapphire towers clean-cut against the morning sky. The suggestion of great distance had been an illusion.

“Is that not a kingdom worth fighting for?” cried Brunhild, her voice vibrant. “Swift now—let us bind this dry wood together for a raft. We could not live an instant swimming in that shark-haunted water.”

At that instant a figure leaped up from the tall grass on the other shore—a naked, brown-skinned man who stared for a moment, agape. Then as Athelstane shouted and held up the grim head of Groth-golka, the fellow gave a startled cry and raced away like an antelope.

“A slave Gothan left to see if I tried to swim the lagoon,” said Brunhild with angry satisfaction. “Let him run to the city and tell them—but let us make haste and cross the lagoon before Gothan can arrive and dispute our passage.”

Conan and Athelstane were already busy. A number of dead trees lay about and these they stripped of their branches and bound together with long vines. In a short time they had built a raft, crude and clumsy, but capable of bearing them across the lagoon. Brunhild gave a frank sigh of relief when they stepped on the other shore.

“Let us go straight to the city,” said she. “The slave has reached it ere now and they will be watching us from the walls. A bold course is our only one. Ymir’s hammer, but I’d like to see Gothan’s face when the slave tells him Brunhild is returning with two strange warriors and the head of him to whom she was given as sacrifice!”

“Why did you not kill Gothan when you had the power?” asked Athelstane.

She shook her head, her eyes clouding with something akin to fear: “Easier said than done. Half the people hate Gothan, half love him, and all fear him. The most ancient men of the city say that he was old when they were babes. The people believe him to be more god than priest, and I myself have seen him do terrible and mysterious things, beyond the power of a common man.

“Nay, when I was but a puppet in his hands, I came only to the outer fringe of his mysteries, yet I have looked on sights that froze my blood. I have seen strange shadows flit along the midnight walls, and groping along black subterranean corridors in the dead of night I have heard unhallowed sounds and have felt the presence of hideous beings. And once I heard the grisly slavering bellowings of the nameless Thing Gothan has chained deep in the bowels of the hills on which rests the city of Bal-Sagoth.”

Brunhild shuddered.

“There are many gods in Bal-Sagoth, but the greatest of all is Gol-goroth, the god of darkness who sits forever in the Temple of Shadows. When I overthrew the power of Gothan, I forbade men to worship Gol-goroth, and made the priest hail, as the one true deity, A-ala, the daughter of the sea—myself. I had strong men take heavy hammers and smite the image of Gol-goroth, but their blows only shattered the hammers and gave strange hurts to the men who wielded them. Gol-goroth was indestructible and showed no mar. So I desisted and shut the door of the Temple of Shadows which were opened only when I was overthrown and Gothan, who had been skulking in the secret places of the city, came again into his own. Then Gol-goroth reigned again in his full terror and the idols of A-ala were overthrown in the Temple of the Sea, and the priests of A-ala died howling on the red-stained altar before the black god. But now we shall see!”

“Surely you are a very Valkyrie,” muttered Athelstane. “But three against a nation is great odds—especially such a people as this, who must assuredly be all witches and sorcerers.”

“Bah!” cried Brunhild contemptuously. “There are many sorcerers, it is true, but though the people are strange to us, they are mere fools in their own way, as are all nations. When Gothan led me captive down the streets they spat on me. Now watch them turn on Ska, the new king Gothan has given them, when it seems my star rises again! But now we approach the city gates—be bold but wary!”

They had ascended the long swelling slopes and were not far from the walls which rose immensely upward. Surely, thought Conan, heathen gods built this city. The walls seemed of marble and with their fretted battlements and slim watch-towers, dwarfed the memory of such cities as Rome, Damascus, and Byzantium. A broad white winding road led up from the lower levels to the plateau before the gates and as they came up this road, the three adventurers felt hundreds of hidden eyes fixed on them with fierce intensity. The walls seemed deserted; it might have been a dead city. But the impact of those staring eyes was felt.

Now they stood before the massive gates, which to the amazed eyes of the warriors seemed to be of chased silver.

“Here is an emperor’s ransom!” muttered Athelstane, eyes ablaze. “Ymir’s blood, if we had but a stout band of reavers and a ship to carry away the plunder!”

“Smite on the gate and then step back, lest something fall upon you,” said Brunhild, and the thunder of Conan’s ax on the portals woke the echoes in the sleeping hills.

The three then fell back a few paces and suddenly the mighty gates swung inward and a strange concourse of people stood revealed. The two white warriors looked on a pageant of barbaric grandeur. A throng of tall, slim, brown-skinned men stood in the gates. Their only garments were loincloths of silk, the fine work of which contrasted strangely with the near-nudity of the wearers. Tall waving plumes of many colors decked their heads, and armlets and leglets of gold and silver, crusted with gleaming gems, completed their ornamentation. Armor they wore none, but each carried a light shield on his left arm, made of hard wood, highly polished, and braced with silver. Their weapons were slim-bladed spears, light hatchets and slender daggers, all bladed with fine steel. Evidently these warriors depended more on speed and skill than on brute force.

At the front of this band stood three men who instantly commanded attention. One was a lean hawk-faced warrior, almost as tall as Athelstane, who wore about his neck a great golden chain from which was suspended a curious symbol in jade. One of the other men was young, evil-eyed; an impressive riot of colors in the mantle of parrot-feathers which swung from his shoulders. The third man had nothing to set him apart from the rest save his own strange personality. He wore no mantle, bore no weapons. His only garment was a plain loincloth. He was very old; he alone of all the throng was bearded, and his beard was as white as the long hair which fell about his shoulders. He was very tall and very lean, and his great dark eyes blazed as from a hidden fire. Conan knew without being told that this man was Gothan, priest of the Black God. The ancient exuded a very aura of age and mystery. His great eyes were like windows of some forgotten temple, behind which passed like ghosts his dark and terrible thoughts. Conan sensed that Gothan had delved too deep in forbidden secrets to remain altogether human. He had passed through doors that had cut him off from the dreams, desires and emotions of ordinary mortals. Looking into those unwinking orbs Conan felt his skin crawl, as if he had looked into the eyes of a great serpent.

Now a glance upward showed that the walls were thronged with silent dark-eyed folk. The stage was set; all was in readiness for the swift, red drama. Conan felt his pulse quicken with fierce exhilaration and Athelstane’s eyes began to glow with ferocious light.

Brunhild stepped forward boldly, head high, her splendid figure vibrant. The white warriors naturally could not understand what passed between her and the others, except as they read from gestures and expressions, but later Brunhild narrated the conversation almost word for word.

“Well, people of Bal-Sagoth,” said she, spacing her words slowly, “what words have you for your goddess whom you mocked and reviled?”

“What will you have, false one?” exclaimed the tall man, Ska, the king set up by Gothan. “You who mocked at the customs of our ancestors, defied the laws of Bal-Sagoth, which are older than the world, murdered your lover and defiled the shrine of Gol-goroth? You were doomed by law, king and god and placed in the grim forest beyond the lagoon—”

“And I, who am likewise a goddess and greater than any god,” answered Brunhild mockingly, “am returned from the realm of horror with the head of Groth-golka!”

At a word from her, Athelstane held up the great beaked head, and a low whispering ran about the battlements, tense with fear and bewilderment.

“Who are these men?” Ska bent a worried frown on the two warriors.

“They are iron men who have come out of the sea!” answered Brunhild in a clear voice that carried far; “the beings who have come in response to the old prophesy, to overthrow the city of Bal-Sagoth, whose people are traitors and whose priests are false!”

At these words the fearful murmur broke out afresh all up and down the line of the walls, till Gothan lifted his vulture-head and the people fell silent and shrank before the icy stare of his terrible eyes.

Ska glared bewilderedly, his ambition struggling with his superstitious fears.

Conan, looking closely at Gothan, believed that he read beneath the inscrutable mask of the old priest’s face. For all his inhuman wisdom, Gothan had his limitations. This sudden return of one he thought well disposed of, and the appearance of the white-skinned giants accompanying her, had caught Gothan off his guard, Conan believed, rightly. There had been no time to properly prepare for their reception. The people had already begun to murmur in the streets against the severity of Ska’s brief rule. They had always believed in Brunhild’s divinity; now that she returned with two tall men of her own hue, bearing the grim trophy that marked the conquest of another of their gods, the people were wavering. Any small thing might turn the tide either way.

“People of Bal-Sagoth!” shouted Brunhild suddenly, springing back and flinging her arms high, gazing full into the faces that looked down at her. “I bid you avert your doom before it is too late! You cast me out and spat on me; you turned to darker gods than I! Yet all this will I forgive if you return and do obeisance to me! Once you reviled me—you called me bloody and cruel! True, I was a hard mistress—but has Ska been an easy master? You said I lashed the people with whips of rawhide—has Ska stroked you with parrot feathers?

“A virgin died on my altar at the full tide of each moon—but youths and maidens die at the waxing and the waning, the rising and the setting of each moon, before Gol-goroth, on whose altar a fresh human heart forever throbs! Ska is but a shadow! Your real lord is Gothan, who sits above the city like a vulture! Once you were a mighty people; your galleys filled the seas. Now you are a remnant and that is dwindling fast! Fools! You will all die on the altar of Gol-goroth ere Gothan is done and he will stalk alone among the silent ruins of Bal-Sagoth!

“Look at him!” her voice rose to a scream as she lashed herself to an inspired frenzy, and even Conan, to whom the words were meaningless, shivered. “Look at him where he stands there like an evil spirit out of the past! He is not even human! I tell you, he is a foul ghost, whose beard is dabbled with the blood of a million butcheries— an incarnate fiend out of the mist of the ages come to destroy the people of Bal-Sagoth!

“Choose now! Rise up against the ancient devil and his blasphemous gods, receive your rightful queen and deity again and you shall regain some of your former greatness. Refuse, and the ancient prophesy shall be fulfilled and the sun will set on the silent and crumbled ruins of Bal-Sagoth!”

Fired by her dynamic words, a young warrior with the insignia of a chief sprang to the parapet and shouted: “Hail to A-ala! Down with the bloody gods!”

Among the multitude many took up the shout and steel clashed as a score of fights started. The crowd on the battlements and in the streets surged and eddied, while Ska glared, bewildered. Brunhild, forcing back her companions who quivered with eagerness for action of some kind, shouted: “Hold! Let no man strike a blow yet! People of Bal-Sagoth, it has been a tradition since the beginning of time that a king must fight for his crown! Let Ska cross steel with one of these warriors! If Ska wins, I will kneel before him and let him strike off my head! If Ska loses, then you shall accept me as your rightful queen and goddess!”

A great roar of approval went up from the walls as the people ceased their brawls, glad enough to shift the responsibility to their rulers.

“Will you fight, Ska?” asked Brunhild, turning to the king mockingly. “Or will you give me your head without further argument?”

“Slut!” howled Ska, driven to madness. “I will take the skulls of these fools for drinking cups, and then I will rend you between two bent trees!”

Gothan laid a hand on his arm and whispered in his ear, but Ska had reached the point where he was deaf to all but his fury. His achieved ambition, he had found, had faded to the mere part of a puppet dancing on Gothan’s string; now even the hollow bauble of his kingship was slipping from him and this wench mocked him to his face before his people. Ska went, to all practical effects, stark mad.

Brunhild turned to her two allies. “One of you must fight Ska.”

“Let me be the one!” urged Conan, eyes dancing with eager battle-lust. “He has the look of a man quick as a wildcat, and Athelstane, while a very bull for strength, is a thought slow for such work—”

“Slow!” broke in Athelstane reproachfully. “Why, Conan, for a man my weight—”

“Enough,” Brunhild interrupted. “He must choose for himself.”

She spoke to Ska, who glared red-eyed for an instant, then indicated Athelstane, who grinned joyfully, cast aside the bird’s head and unslung his sword. Conan swore and stepped back. The king had decided that he would have a better chance against this huge buffalo of a man who looked slow, than against the black-haired tigerish warrior, whose cat-like quickness was evident.

“This Ska is without armor,” rumbled the Vanir. “Let me likewise doff my mail and helmet so that we fight on equal terms—”

“No!” cried Brunhild. “Your armor is your only chance! I tell you, this false king fights like the play of summer lightning! You will be hard put to hold your own as it is. Keep on your armor, I say!”

“Well, well,” grumbled Athelstane, “I will—I will. Though I say it is scarcely fair. But let him come on and make an end of it.”

The huge Vanir strode ponderously toward his foe, who warily crouched and circled away. Athelstane held his great sword in both hands before him, pointed upward, the hilt somewhat below the level of his chin, in position to strike a blow to right or left, or to parry a sudden attack.

Ska had flung away his light shield, his fighting-sense telling him that it would be useless before the stroke of that heavy blade. In his right hand he held his slim spear as a man holds a throwing-dart, in his left a light, keen-edged hatchet. He meant to make a fast, shifty fight of it, and his tactics were good. But Ska, having never encountered armor before, made his fatal mistake in supposing it to be apparel or ornament through which his weapons would pierce.

Now he sprang in, thrusting at Athelstane’s face with his spear. The Vanir parried with ease and instantly cut tremendously at Ska’s legs. The king bounded high, clearing the whistling blade, and in midair he hacked down at Athelstane’s bent head. The light hatchet shivered to bits on the Viking’s helmet and Ska sprang back out of reach with a blood-lusting howl.

And now it was Athelstane who rushed with unexpected quickness, like a charging bull, and before that terrible onslaught Ska, bewildered by the breaking of his hatchet, was caught off his guard— flat-footed. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the giant looming over him like an overwhelming wave and he sprang in, instead of out, stabbing ferociously. That mistake was his last. The thrusting spear glanced harmlessly from the Vanir’s mail, and in that instant the great sword sang down in a stroke the king could not evade. The force of that stroke tossed him as a man is tossed by a plunging bull. A dozen feet away fell Ska, king of Bal-Sagoth, to lie shattered and dead in a ghastly welter of blood and entrails. The throng gaped, struck silent by the prowess of that deed.

“Hew off his head!” cried Brunhild, her eyes flaming as she clenched her hands so that the nails bit into her palms. “Impale that carrion’s head on your sword-point so that we may carry it through the city gates with us as token of victory!”

But Athelstane shook his head, cleansing his blade: “Nay, he was a brave man and I will not mutilate his corpse. It is no great feat I have done, for he was naked and I full-armed. Else it is in my mind, the brawl had gone differently.”

Conan glanced at the people on the walls. They had recovered from their astonishment and now a vast roar went up: “A-ala! Hail to the true goddess!” And the warriors in the gateway dropped to their knees and bowed their foreheads in the dust before Brunhild, who stood proudly erect, bosom heaving with fierce triumph. Truly, thought Conan, she is more than a queen—she is a shield woman, a Valkyrie, as Athelstane said.

Now she stepped aside and tearing the golden chain with its jade symbol from the dead neck of Ska, held it on high and shouted: “People of Bal-Sagoth, you have seen how your false king died before this golden-bearded giant, who being of iron, shows no single cut! Choose now—do you receive me of your own free will?”

“Aye, we do!” the multitude answered in a great shout. “Return to your people, oh mighty and all-powerful queen!”

Brunhild smiled sardonically. “Come,” said she to the warriors; “they are lashing themselves into a very frenzy of love and loyalty, having already forgotten their treachery. The memory of the mob is short!”

Aye, thought Conan, as at Brunhild’s side he and the Vanir passed through the mighty gates between files of prostrate chieftains; aye, the memory of the mob is very short. But a few days have passed since they were yelling as wildly for Ska the liberator—scant hours had passed since Ska sat enthroned, master of life and death, and the people bowed before his feet. Now—Conan glanced at the mangled corpse which lay deserted and forgotten before the silver gates. The shadow of a circling vulture fell across it. The clamor of the multitude filled Conan’s ears and he smiled a bitter smile.

The great gates closed behind the three adventurers and Conan saw a broad white street stretching away in front of him. Other lesser streets radiated from this one. The two warriors caught a jumbled and chaotic impression of great white stone buildings shouldering each other; of sky-lifting towers and broad stair-fronted palaces. Conan knew there must be an ordered system by which the city was laid out, but to him all seemed a waste of stone and metal and polished wood, without rhyme or reason. His baffled eyes sought the street again.

Far up the street extended a mass of humanity, from which rose a rhythmic thunder of sound. Thousands of naked, gayly plumed men and women knelt there, bending forward to touch the marble flags with their foreheads, then swaying back with an upward flinging of their arms, all moving in perfect unison like the bending and rising of tall grass before the wind. And in time to their bowing they lifted a monotoned chant that sank and swelled in a frenzy of ecstasy. So her wayward people welcomed back the goddess A-ala.

Just within the gates Brunhild stopped and there came to her the young chief who had first raised the shout of revolt upon the walls. He knelt and kissed her bare feet, saying: “Oh great queen and goddess, thou knowest Zomar was ever faithful to thee! Thou knowest how I fought for thee and barely escaped the altar of Gol-goroth for thy sake!”

“Thou hast indeed been faithful, Zomar,” answered Brunhild in the stilted language required for such occasions. “Nor shall thy fidelity go unrewarded. Henceforth thou art commander of my own bodyguard.” Then in a lower voice she added: “Gather a band from your own retainers and from those who have espoused my cause all along, and bring them to the palace. I do not trust the people any more than I have to!”

Suddenly Athelstane, not understanding the conversation, broke in: “Where is the old one with the beard?”

Conan started and glanced around. He had almost forgotten the wizard. He had not seen him go—yet he was gone! Brunhild laughed ruefully.

“He’s stolen away to breed more trouble in the shadows. He and Gelka vanished when Ska fell. He has secret ways of coming and going and none may stay him. Forget him for the time being; heed ye well—we shall have plenty of him anon!”

Now the chiefs brought a finely carved and highly ornamented palanquin carried by two strong slaves and Brunhild stepped into this, saying to her companions: “They are fearful of touching you, but ask if you would be carried. I think it better that you walk, one on each side of me.”

“Ymir’s blood!” rumbled Athelstane, shouldering the huge sword he had never sheathed. “I’m no infant! I’ll split the skull of the man who seeks to carry me!”

And so up the long white street went Brunhild, daughter of Rane Thorfin’s son in the Orkneys, goddess of the sea, queen of age-old Bal-Sagoth. Borne by two great slaves she went, with a white giant striding on each side with bared steel, and a concourse of chiefs following, while the multitude gave way to right and left, leaving a wide lane down which she passed. Golden trumpets sounded a fanfare of triumph, drums thundered, chants of worship echoed to the ringing skies. Surely in this riot of glory, this barbaric pageant of splendor, the proud soul of the North-born girl drank deep and grew drunken with imperial pride.

Athelstane’s eyes glowed with simple delight at this flame of pagan magnificence, but to the black haired fighting-man of the West, it seemed that even in the loudest clamor of triumph, the trumpet, the drum and shouting faded away into the forgotten dust and silence of eternity. Kingdoms and empires pass away like mist from the sea, thought Conan; the people shout and triumph and even in the revelry of Belshazzar’s feast, the Medes break the gates of Babylon. Even now the shadow of doom is over this city and the slow tides of oblivion lap the feet of this unheeding race. So in a strange mood Conan strode beside the palanquin, and it seemed to him that he and Athelstane walked in a dead city, through throngs of dim ghosts, cheering a ghost queen.

III

The Fall of the Gods

Night had fallen on the ancient city of Bal-Sagoth. Conan, Athelstane and Brunhild sat alone in a room of the inner palace. The queen half-reclined on a silken couch, while the men sat on mahogany chairs, engaged in the viands that slave-girls had served on golden dishes. The walls of this room, as of all the palace, were of marble, with golden scrollwork. The ceiling was of lapis-lazuli and the floor of silver-inlaid marble tiles. Heavy velvet hangings decorated the walls and silken cushions; richly-made divans and mahogany chairs and tables littered the room in careless profusion.

“I would give much for a horn of ale, but this wine is not sour to the palate,” said Athelstane, emptying a golden flagon with relish. “Brunhild, you have deceived us. You let us understand it would take hard fighting to win back your crown—yet I have struck but one blow and my sword is thirsty as Conan’s ax which has not drunk at all. We hammered on the gates and the people fell down and worshipped with no more ado. And until a while ago, we but stood by your throne in the great palace room, while you spoke to the throngs that came and knocked their heads on the floor before you—by Ymir, never have I heard such clattering and jabbering! My ears ring till now—what were they saying? And where is that old conjurer Gothan?”

“Your steel will drink deep yet, Vanir,” answered the girl grimly, resting her chin on her hands and eyeing the warriors with deep moody eyes. “Had you gambled with cities and crowns as I have done, you would know that seizing a throne may be easier than keeping it. Our sudden appearance with the bird-god’s head, your killing of Ska, swept the people off their feet. As for the rest—I held audience in the palace as you saw, even if you did not understand and the people who came in bowing droves were assuring me of their unswerving loyalty— ha! I graciously pardoned them all, but I am no fool. When they have time to think, they will begin to grumble again. Gothan is lurking in the shadows somewhere, plotting evil to us all, you may be sure. This city is honeycombed with secret corridors and subterranean passages of which only the priests know. Even I, who have traversed some of them when I was Gothan’s puppet, know not where to look for the secret doors, since Gothan always led me through them blindfolded.

“Just now, I think I hold the upper hand. The people look on you with more awe than they regard me. They think your armor and helmets are part of your bodies and that you are invulnerable. Did you not note them timidly touching your mail as we passed through the crowd, and the amazement on their faces as they felt the iron of it?”

“For a people so wise in some ways they are very foolish in others,” said Conan. “Who are they and whence came they?”

“They are so old,” answered Brunhild, “that their most ancient legends give no hint of their origin. Ages ago they were a part of a great empire which spread out over the many isles of this sea. But some of the islands sank and vanished with their cities and people. Then the red-skinned savages assailed them and isle after isle fell before them. At last only this island was left unconquered, and the people have become weaker and forgotten many ancient arts. For lack of ports to sail to, the galleys rotted by the wharves which themselves crumbled into decay. Not in the memory of man has any son of Bal-Sagoth sailed the seas. At irregular intervals the red people descend upon the Isle of the Gods, traversing the seas in their long war-canoes which bear grinning skulls on the prows. Not far away as a Viking would reckon a sea-voyage, but out of sight over the sea rim lie the islands inhabited by those red men who centuries ago slaughtered the folk who dwelt there. We have always beaten them off; they can not scale the walls, but still they come and the fear of their raid is always hovering over the isle.

“But it is not them I fear; it is Gothan, who is at this moment either slipping like a loathly serpent through his black tunnels or else brewing abominations in one of his hidden chambers. In the caves deep in the hills to which his tunnels lead, he works fearful and unholy magic. His subjects are beasts—serpents, spiders, and great apes; and men—red captives and wretches of his own race. Deep in his grisly caverns he makes beasts of men and half-men of beasts, mingling bestial with human in ghastly creation. No man dares guess at the horrors that have spawned in the darkness, or what shapes of terror and blasphemy have come into being during the ages Gothan has wrought his abominations; for he is not as other men, and has discovered the secret of life everlasting. He has at least brought into foul life one creature that even he fears, the gibbering, mowing, nameless Thing he keeps chained in the farthest cavern that no human foot save his has trod. He would loose it against me if he dared….

“But it grows late and I would sleep. I will sleep in the room next to this, which has no other opening than this door. Not even a slave-girl will I keep with me, for I trust none of these people fully. You shall keep this room, and though the outer door is bolted, one had better watch while the other sleeps. Zomar and his guardsmen patrol the corridors outside, but I shall feel safer with two men of my own blood between me and the rest of the city.”

She rose, and with a strangely lingering glance at Conan, entered her chamber and closed the door behind her.

Athelstane stretched and yawned. “Well, Conan,” said he lazily, “men’s fortunes are unstable as the sea. Last night I was the picked swordsman of a band of reavers and you a captive. This dawn we were lost outcasts springing at each other’s throats. Now we are sword brothers and right-hand men to a queen. And you, I think, are destined to become a king.”

“How so?”

“Why, have you not noticed the girl’s eyes on you? Faith there’s more than friendship in her glances that rest on those black locks and that brown face of yours. I tell you—”

“Enough,” Conan’s voice was harsh as an old wound stung him. “Women in power are white-fanged wolves. It was the spite of a woman that—” He stopped.

“Well, well,” returned Athelstane tolerantly, “there are more good women than bad ones. I know—it was the intrigues of a woman that made you an outcast. Well, we should be good comrades. I am an outlaw, too. If I should show my face in Wessex I would soon be looking down on the countryside from a stout oak limb.”

“What drove you out on the path of plunder? So far have the Vanir forgotten the ocean-ways that your King was obliged to hire rovers to build and man his fleet when he fought the Hyperboreans.”

Athelstane shrugged his mighty shoulders and began whetting his dirk.

“So living—was—again—barred—to—me. I—took—the—plunder— path—again—”

Athelstane’s words trailed off. His hands slid limply from his lap and the whetstone and dirk dropped to the floor. His head fell forward on his broad chest and his eyes closed.

“Too much wine,” muttered Conan. “But let him slumber; I’ll keep watch.”

Yet even as he spoke, the Cimmerian was aware of a strange lassitude stealing over him. He lay back in the broad chair. His eyes felt heavy and sleep veiled his brain despite himself. And as he lay there, a strange nightmare vision came to him. One of the heavy hangings on the wall opposite the door swayed violently and from behind it slunk a fearful shape that crept slavering across the room. Conan watched it apathetically, aware that he was dreaming and at the same time wondering at the strangeness of the dream. The thing was grotesquely like a crooked gnarled man in shape, but its face was bestial. It bared yellow fangs as it lurched silently toward him, and from under penthouse brows small reddened eyes gleamed demoniacally. Yet there was something of the human in its countenance; it was neither ape nor man, but an unnatural creature horribly compounded of both.

Now the foul apparition halted before him, and as the gnarled fingers clutched his throat, Conan was suddenly and fearfully aware that this was no dream but a fiendish reality. With a burst of desperate effort he broke the unseen chains that held him and hurled himself from the chair. The grasping fingers missed his throat, but quick as he was, he could not elude the swift lunge of those hairy arms, and the next moment he was tumbling about the floor in a death grip with the monster, whose sinews felt like pliant steel.

That fearful battle was fought in silence save for the hissing of hard-drawn breath. Conan’s left forearm was thrust under the apish chin, holding back the grisly fangs from his throat, about which the monster’s fingers had locked. Athelstane still slept in his chair, head fallen forward. Conan tried to call to him, but those throttling hands had shut off his voice—were fast choking out his life. The room swam in a red haze before his distended eyes. His right hand, clenched into an iron mallet, battered desperately at the fearful face bent toward his; the beast-like teeth shattered under his blows and blood splattered, but still the red eyes gloated and the taloned fingers sank deeper and deeper until a ringing in Conan’s ears knelled his soul’s departure.

Even as he sank into semi-unconsciousness, his falling hand struck something his numbed fighting-brain recognized as the dirk Athelstane had dropped on the floor. Blindly, with a dying gesture, Conan struck and felt the fingers loosen suddenly. Feeling the return of life and power, he heaved up and over, with his assailant beneath him. Through red mists that slowly lightened, Conan Dubh saw the ape-man, now encrimsoned, writhing beneath him, and he drove the dirk home until the dumb horror lay still with wide staring eyes.

The Cimmerian staggered to his feet, dizzy and panting, trembling in every limb. He drew in great gulps of air and his giddiness slowly cleared. Blood trickled plentifully from the wounds in his throat. He noted with amazement that the Vanir still slumbered. And suddenly he began to feel again the tides of unnatural weariness and lassitude that had rendered him helpless before. Picking up his ax, he shook off the feeling with difficulty and stepped toward the curtain from behind which the ape-man had come. Like an invisible wave a subtle power emanating from those hangings struck him, and with weighted limbs he forced his way across the room. Now he stood before the curtain and felt the power of a terrific evil will beating upon his own, menacing his very soul, threatening to enslave him, brain and body. Twice he raised his hand and twice it dropped limply to his side. Now for the third time he made a mighty effort and tore the hangings bodily from the wall. For a flashing instant he caught a glimpse of a bizarre, half-naked figure in a mantle of parrot-feathers and a head-gear of waving plumes. Then as he felt the full hypnotic blast of those blazing eyes, he closed his own eyes and struck blind. He felt his ax sink deep; then he opened his eyes and gazed at the silent figure which lay at his feet, cleft head in a widening crimson pool.

And now Athelstane suddenly heaved erect, eyes flaring bewilderedly, sword out. “What—?” he stammered, glaring wildly. “Conan, what in Ymir’s name’s happened? Ymir’s blood! That is a priest there, but what is this dead thing?”

“One of the devils of this foul city,” answered Conan, wrenching his ax free. “I think Gothan has failed again. This one stood behind the hangings and bewitched us unawares. He put the spell of sleep on us—”

“Aye, I slept,” the Vanir nodded dazedly. “But how came they here—”

“There must be a secret door behind those hangings, though I can not find it—”

“Hark!” From the room where the queen slept there came a vague scuffling sound, that in its very faintness seemed fraught with grisly potentialities.

“Brunhild!” Conan shouted. A strange gurgle answered him. He thrust against the door. It was locked. As he heaved up his ax to hew it open, Athelstane brushed him aside and hurled his full weight against it. The panels crashed and through their ruins Athelstane plunged into the room. A roar burst from his lips. Over the Vanir’s shoulder Conan saw a vision of delirium. Brunhild, queen of Bal-Sagoth, writhed helpless in midair, gripped by the black shadow of a nightmare. Then as the great black shape turned cold flaming eyes on them Conan saw it was a living creature. It stood, man-like, upon two tree-like legs, but its outline and face were not of a man, beast or devil. This, Conan felt, was the horror that even Gothan had hesitated to loose upon his foes; the arch-fiend that the demoniac priest had brought into life in his hidden caves of horror. What ghastly knowledge had been necessary, what hideous blending of human and bestial things with nameless shapes from outer voids of darkness?

Held like a babe in arms Brunhild writhed, eyes flaring with horror, and as the Thing took a misshapen hand from her white throat to defend itself, a scream of heart-shaking fright burst from her pale lips. Athelstane, first in the room, was ahead of the Cimmerian. The black shape loomed over the giant Vanir, dwarfing and overshadowing him, but Athelstane, gripping the hilt with both hands, lunged upward. The great sword sank over half its length into the black body and came out crimson as the monster reeled back. A hellish pandemonium of sound burst forth, and the echoes of that hideous yell thundered through the palace and deafened the hearers. Conan was springing in, ax high, when the fiend dropped the girl and fled reeling across the room, vanishing in a dark opening that now gaped in the wall. Athelstane, clean berserk, plunged after it.

Conan made to follow, but Brunhild, reeling up, threw her white arms around him in a grip even he could hardly break. “No!” she screamed, eyes ablaze with terror. “Do not follow them into that fearful corridor! It must lead to Hell itself! The Vanir will never return! Let you not share his fate!”

“Loose me, woman!” roared Conan in a frenzy, striving to disengage himself without hurting her. “My comrade may be fighting for his life!”

“Wait till I summon the guard!” she cried, but Conan flung her from him, and as he sprang through the secret doorway, Brunhild smote on the jade gong until the palace re-echoed. A loud pounding began in the corridor and Zomar’s voice shouted: “Oh, queen, are you in peril? Shall we burst the door?”

“Hasten!” she screamed, as she rushed to the outer door and flung it open.

Conan, leaping recklessly into the corridor, raced along in darkness for a few moments, hearing ahead of him the agonized bellowing of the wounded monster and the deep fierce shouts of the Viking. Then these noises faded away in the distance as he came into the narrow passageway faintly lighted with torches stuck into niches. Face down on the floor lay a brown man, clad in gray feathers, his skull crushed like an eggshell.

How long Conan followed the dizzy windings of the shadowy corridor he never knew. Other smaller passages led off to each side but he kept to the main corridor. At last he passed under an arched doorway and came out into a strange vasty room.

Somber massive columns upheld a shadowy ceiling so high it seemed like a brooding cloud arched against a midnight sky. Conan saw that he was in a temple. Behind a black red-stained stone altar loomed a mighty form, sinister and abhorrent. The god Gol-goroth! Surely it must be he. But Conan spared only a single glance for the colossal figure that brooded there in the shadows. Before him was a strange tableau. Athelstane leaned on his great sword and gazed at the two shapes which sprawled in a red welter at his feet. Whatever foul magic had brought the Black Thing into life, it had taken but a thrust of English steel to hurl it back into a limbo from whence it came. The monster lay half-across its last victim—a gaunt white-bearded man whose eyes were starkly evil, even in death.

“Gothan!” ejaculated the startled Cimmerian.

“Aye, the priest—I was close behind this troll or whatever it is, all the way along the corridor, but for all its size it fled like a deer. Once one in a feather mantle tried to halt it, and it smashed his skull and paused not an instant. At last we burst into this temple, I closed upon the monster’s heels with my sword raised for the death-cut. But Ymir’s blood! When it saw the old one standing by that altar, it gave one fearful howl and tore him to pieces and died itself, all in an instant, before I could reach it and strike.”

Conan gazed at the huge formless thing. Looking directly at it, he could form no estimate of its nature. He got only a chaotic impression of great size and inhuman evil. Now it lay like a vast shadow blotched out on the marble floor. Surely black wings beating from moonless gulfs had hovered over its birth, and the grisly souls of nameless demons had gone into its being.

And now Brunhild rushed from the dark corridor with Zomar and the guardsmen. And from outer doors and secret nooks came others silently—warriors, and priests in feathered mantles, until a great throng stood in the Temple of Darkness.

A fierce cry broke from the queen as she saw what had happened. Her eyes blazed terribly and she was gripped by a strange madness.

“At last!” she screamed, spurning the corpse of her arch-foe with her heel. “At last I am true mistress of Bal-Sagoth! The secrets of the hidden ways are mine now, and old Gothan’s beard is dabbled in his own blood!”

She flung her arms high in fearful triumph, and ran toward the grim idol, screaming exultant insults like a mad-woman. And at that instant the temple rocked! The colossal image swayed outward, and then pitched suddenly forward as a tall tower falls. Conan shouted and leaped forward, but even as he did, with a thunder like the bursting of a world, the god Gol-goroth crashed down upon the doomed woman, who stood frozen. The mighty image splintered into a thousand great fragments, blotting from the sight of men forever Brunhild, daughter of Rane Thorfin’s son, queen of Bal-Sagoth. From under the ruins there oozed a wide crimson stream.

Warriors and priests stood frozen, deafened by the crash of that fall, stunned by the weird catastrophe. An icy hand touched Conan’s spine. Had that vast bulk been thrust over by the hand of a dead man? As it had rushed downward it had seemed to the Cimmerian that the inhuman features had for an instant taken on the likeness of the dead Gothan!

Now as all stood speechless, the acolyte Gelka saw and seized his opportunity.

“Gol-goroth has spoken!” he screamed. “He has crushed the false goddess! She was but a wicked mortal! And these strangers, too, are mortal! See—he bleeds!”

The priest’s finger stabbed at the dried blood on Conan’s throat and a wild roar went up from the throng. Dazed and bewildered by the swiftness and magnitude of the late events, they were like crazed wolves, ready to wipe out doubts and fear in a burst of bloodshed. Gelka bounded at Conan, hatchet flashing, and a knife in the hand of a satellite licked into Zomar’s back. Conan had not understood the shout, but he realized the air was tense with danger for Athelstane and himself. He met the leaping Gelka with a stroke that sheared through the waving plumes and the skull beneath, then half a dozen lances broke on his buckler and a rush of bodies swept him back against a great pillar. Then Athelstane, slow of thought, who had stood gaping for the flashing second it had taken this to transpire, awoke in a blast of awesome fury. With a deafening roar he swung his heavy sword in a mighty arc. The whistling blade whipped off a head, sheared through a torso and sank deep into a spinal column. The three corpses fell across each other and even in the madness of the strife, men cried out at the marvel of that single stroke.

But like a brown, blind tide of fury the maddened people of Bal-Sagoth rolled on their foes. The guardsmen of the dead queen, trapped in the press, died to a man without a chance to strike a blow. But the overthrow of the two white warriors was no such easy task. Back to back they smashed and smote; Athelstane’s sword was a thunderbolt of death; Conan’s ax was lightning. Hedged close by a sea of snarling brown faces and flashing steel they hacked their way slowly toward a doorway. The very mass of the attackers hindered the warriors of Bal-Sagoth, for they had no space to guide their strokes, while the weapons of the seafarers kept a bloody ring clear in front of them.

Heaping a ghastly row of corpses as they went, the comrades slowly cut their way through the snarling press. The Temple of Shadows, witness of many a bloody deed, was flooded with gore spilled like a red sacrifice to her broken gods. The heavy weapons of the white fighters wrought fearful havoc among their naked, lighter-limbed foes, while their armor guarded their own lives. But their arms, legs and faces were cut and gashed by the frantically flying steel and it seemed the sheer number of their foes would overwhelm them ere they could reach the door.

Then they had reached it, and made desperate play until the brown warriors, no longer able to come upon them from all sides, drew back for a breathing-space, leaving a torn red heap before the threshold. And in that instant the two sprang back into the corridor and seizing the great brazen door, slammed it in the very faces of the warriors who leaped howling to prevent it. Athelstane, bracing his mighty legs, held it against their combined efforts until Conan had time to find and slip the bolt.

“Ymir!” gasped the Vanir, shaking the blood in a red shower from his face. “This is close play! What now, Conan?”

“Down the corridor, quick!” snapped the Cimmerian, “before they come on us from this way and trap us like rats against this door. By Satan, the whole city must be roused! Hark to that roaring!”

In truth, as they raced down the shadowed corridor, it seemed to them that all Bal-Sagoth had burst into rebellion and civil war. From all sides came the clashing of steel, the shouts of men, and the screams of women, overshadowed by a hideous howling. A lurid glow became apparent down the corridor and then even as Conan, in the lead, rounded a corner and came out into an open courtyard, a vague figure leaped at him and a heavy weapon fell with unexpected force on his shield, almost felling him. But even as he staggered he struck back and the upper-spike on his ax sank under the heart of his attacker, who fell at his feet. In the glare that illumined all, Conan saw his victim differed from the brown warriors he had been fighting. This man was naked, powerfully muscled and of a copperish red rather than brown. The heavy animal-like jaw, the slanting low forehead showed none of the intelligence and refinement of the brown people, but only a brute ferocity. A heavy war-club, rudely carved, lay beside him.

“By Ymir!” exclaimed Athelstane. “The city burns!”

Conan looked up. They were standing on a sort of raised courtyard from which broad steps led down into the streets and from this vantage point they had a plain view of the terrific end of Bal-Sagoth. Flames leaped madly higher and higher, paling the moon, and in the red glare pigmy figures ran to and fro, falling and dying like puppets dancing to the tune of the Black Gods. Through the roar of the flames and the crashing of falling walls cut screams of death and shrieks of ghastly triumph. The city was swarming with naked, copper-skinned devils who burned and ravished and butchered in one red carnival of madness.

The red men of the isles! By the thousands they had descended on the Isle of the Gods in the night, and whether stealth or treachery let them through the walls, the comrades never knew, but now they ravened through the corpse-strewn streets, glutting their blood-lust in holocaust and massacre wholesale. Not all the gashed forms that lay in the crimson-running streets were brown; the people of the doomed city fought with desperate courage, but outnumbered and caught off guard, their courage was futile. The red men were like blood-hungry tigers.

“What ho, Conan!” shouted Athelstane, beard a-bristle, eyes ablaze as the madness of the scene fired a like passion in his own fierce soul. “The world ends! Let us into the thick of it and glut our steel before we die! Who shall we strike for—the red or the brown?”

“Steady!” snapped the Cimmerian. “Either people would cut our throats. We must hack our way through to the gates, and the Devil take them all. We have no friends here. This way—down these stairs. Across the roofs in yonder direction I see the arch of a gate.”

The comrades sprang down the stairs, gained the narrow street below and ran swiftly in the way Conan indicated. About them washed a red inundation of slaughter. A thick smoke veiled all now, and in the murk chaotic groups merged, writhed and scattered, littering the shattered flags with gory shapes. It was like a nightmare in which demoniac figures leaped and capered, looming suddenly in the fire-shot mist, vanishing as suddenly. The flames from each side of the streets shouldered each other, singeing the hair of the warriors as they ran. Roofs fell in with an awesome thunder and walls crashing into ruin filled the air with flying death. Men struck blindly from the smoke and the seafarers cut them down and never knew whether their skins were brown or red.

Now a new note rose in the cataclysmic horror. Blinded by the smoke, confused by the winding streets, the red men were trapped in the snare of their own making. Fire is impartial; it can burn the lighter as well as the intended victim; and a falling wall is blind. The red men abandoned their prey and ran howling to and fro like beasts, seeking escape; many, finding this futile, turned back in a last unreasoning storm of madness as a blinded tiger turns, and made their last moments of life a crimson burst of slaughter.

Conan, with the unerring sense of direction that comes to men who live the life of the wolf, ran toward the point where he knew an outer gate to be; yet in the windings of the streets and the screen of smoke, doubt assailed him. From the flame-shot murk in front of him a fearful scream rang out. A naked girl reeled blindly into view and fell at Conan’s feet, blood gushing from her mutilated breast. A howling, red-stained devil, close on her heels, jerked back her head and cut her throat, a fraction of a second before Conan’s ax ripped the head from its shoulders and spun it grinning into the street. And at that second a sudden wind shifted the writhing smoke and the comrades saw the open gateway ahead of them, a-swarm with red warriors. A fierce shout, a blasting rush, a mad instant of volcanic ferocity that littered the gateway with corpses, and they were through and racing down the slopes toward the distant forest and the beach beyond. Before them the sky was reddening for dawn; behind them rose the soul-shaking tumult of the doomed city.

Like hunted things they fled, seeking brief shelter among the many groves from time to time, to avoid groups of savages who ran toward the city. The whole island seemed to be swarming with them; the chiefs must have drawn on all the isles within hundreds of miles for a raid of such magnitude. And at last the comrades reached the strip of forest, and breathed deeply as they came to the beach and found it abandoned save for a number of long skull-decorated war canoes.

Athelstane sat down and gasped for breath. “Ymir’s blood! What now? What may we do but hide in these woods until those red devils hunt us out?”

“Help me launch this boat,” snapped Conan. We’ll take our chance on the open main—”

“Ho!” Athelstane leaped erect, pointing. “Ymir’s blood, a ship!”

The sun was just up, gleaming like a great golden coin on the sea-rim. And limned in the sun swam a tall, high-pooped craft. The comrades leaped into the nearest canoe, shoved off and rowed like mad, shouting and waving their oars to attract the attention of the crew. Powerful muscles drove the long slim craft along at an incredible clip, and it was not long before the ship stood about and allowed them to come alongside. Dark-faced men, clad in mail, looked over the rail.

“Spaniards,” muttered Athelstane. “If they recognize me, I had better stayed on the island!”

But he clambered up the chain without hesitation, and the two wanderers fronted the lean somber-faced man whose armor was that of a knight of Asturias. He spoke to them in Spanish and Conan answered him, for the Cimmerian, like many of his race, was a natural linguist and had wandered far and spoken many tongues. In a few words the Dalcassian told their story and explained the great pillar of smoke which now rolled upward in the morning air from the isle.

“Tell him there is a king’s ransom for the taking,” put in Athelstane. “Tell of the silver gates, Conan.”

But when the Cimmerian spoke of the vast loot in the doomed city, the commander shook his head.

“Good sir, we have not time to secure it, nor men to waste in the taking. Those red fiends you describe would hardly give up anything— though useless to them—without a fierce battle and neither my time nor my force is mine. I am Don Roderigo del Cortez and this ship, the Gray Friar, is one of a fleet that sailed to harry Corsairs. Some days agone we were separated from the rest of the fleet in a sea skirmish and the tempest blew us far off our course. We are even now beating back to rejoin the fleet if we can find it; if not, to harry the infidel as well as we may. We serve God and the king and we can not halt for mere dross as you suggest. But you are welcome aboard this ship and we have need of such fighting men as you appear to be. You will not regret it, should you wish to join us and strike a blow for freedom.”

In the narrow-bridged nose and deep dark eyes, in the lean ascetic face, Conan read the fanatic, the stainless cavalier, the knight errant. He spoke to Athelstane: “This man is mad, but there are good blows to be struck and strange lands to see; anyway, we have no other choice.”

“One place is as good as another to masterless men and wanderers,” quoth the huge Vanir. “Tell him we will follow him to Hell and singe the tail of the Devil if there be any chance of loot.”

IV

Conan and Athelstane leaned on the rail, gazing back at the swiftly receding Island of the Gods, from which rose a pillar of smoke, laden with the ghosts of a thousand centuries and the shadows and mysteries of forgotten empire, and Athelstane cursed as only a Vanir can.

“A king’s ransom—and after all that blood-letting—no loot!”

Conan shook his head. “We have seen an ancient kingdom fall—we have seen the last remnant of the world’s oldest empire sink into flames and the abyss of oblivion, and barbarism rear its brute head above the ruins. So pass the glory and the splendor and the imperial purple—in red flames and yellow smoke.”

“But not one bit of plunder—” persisted the Viking.

Again Conan shook his head. “I brought away with me the rarest gem upon the island—something for which men and women have died and the gutters run with blood.”

He drew from his girdle a small object—a curiously carved symbol of jade.

“The emblem of kingship!” exclaimed Athelstane.

“Aye—as Brunhild struggled with me to keep me from following you into the corridor, this thing caught in my mail and was torn from the golden chain that held it.”

“He who bears it is king of Bal-Sagoth,” ruminated the mighty Vanir. “As I predicted, Conan, you are a king!”

Conan laughed with bitter mirth and pointed to the great billowing column of smoke which floated in the sky away on the sea-rim.

“Aye—a kingdom of the dead—an empire of ghosts and smoke. I am Ard-Righ of a phantom city—I am King Conan of Bal-Sagoth and my kingdom is fading in the morning sky. And therein it is like all other empires in the world—dreams and ghosts and smoke.”

The Garden of Fear

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

He carried Jenna from the tribe, and the killers were hot on his trail. For a night and a day they pressed them hard, until they swam a rising river, a roaring, foaming torrent that even the men of the Æsir dared not attempt. But in the madness of lust and recklessness they buffeted their way across, beaten and torn by the frenzy of the flood, and reached the farther bank alive.

Then for many days they traversed upland forests haunted by tigers and leopards, until they came to a great barrier of mountains, blue ramparts climbing awesomely to the sky. Slope piled upon slope.

In those mountains they were assailed by freezing winds and hunger, and by giant condors which swept down upon them with a thunder of gigantic wings. In grim battles in the passes he shot away all his arrows and splintered his flintheaded spear, but at last they crossed the bleak backbone of the range and descending the southern slopes, came upon a village of mud huts among the cliffs inhabited by a peaceful, brown-skinned people who spoke a strange tongue and had strange customs. But they greeted them with the sign of peace, and brought them into their village, where they set meat and barley-bread and fermented milk before them, and squatted in a ring about them while they ate, and a woman slapped softly on a bowl-shaped tom-tom to do them honor.

They had reached their village at dusk, and night fell while they feasted. On all sides rose the cliffs and peaks shouldering massively against the stars. The little cluster of mud huts and the tiny fires were drowned and lost in the immensity of the night. Jenna felt the loneliness, the crowding desolation of that darkness, and she pressed close to him, her shoulder against his breast. But his axe was close at his hand, and he had never known the sensation of fear.

The little brown people squatted before them, men and women, and tried to talk to them with motions of their slender hands. Dwelling always in one place, in comparative security, they lacked both the strength and the uncompromising ferocity of the nomadic Æsir. Their hands fluttered with friendly gestures in the firelight.

Conan made them understand that they had come from the north, had crossed the backbone of the great mountain range, and that on the morrow it was their intention to descend into the green tablelands which they had glimpsed southward of the peaks. When they understood his meaning they set up a great cry shaking their heads violently, and beating madly on the drum. They were all so eager to impart something to him, and all waving their hands at once, that they bewildered rather than enlightened him. Eventually they did make him understand that they did not wish him to descend the mountains. Some menace lay to the south of the village, but whether of man or beast, he could not learn.

It was while they were all gesticulating and his whole attention was centred on their gestures, that the blow fell. The first intimation was a sudden thunder of wings in his ears; a dark shape rushed out of the night, and a great pinion dealt him a buffet over the head as he turned. He was knocked sprawling, and in that instant he heard Jenna scream as she was torn from his side. Bounding up, quivering with a furious eagerness to rend and slay, he saw the dark shape vanish again into the darkness, a white, screaming, writhing figure trailing from its talons.

Roaring his grief and fury he caught up his axe and charged into the dark, then halted short, wild, desperate, knowing not which way to turn.

The little brown people had scattered, screaming, knocking sparks from their fires as they rushed over them in their haste to gain their huts, but now they crept out fearfully, whimpering like wounded dogs. They gathered around him and plucked at him with timid hands and chattered in their tongue while he cursed in sick impotency, knowing they wished to tell him something which he could not understand.

At last he suffered them to lead him back to the fire, and there the oldest man of the tribe brought forth a strip of cured hide, a clay pot of pigments, and a stick. On the hide he painted a crude picture of a winged thing carrying a white woman—, oh, it was very crude, but he made out his meaning. Then all pointed southward and cried out loudly in their own tongue; and he knew that the menace they had warned him against was the thing that had carried off Jenna. Until then he supposed that it had been one of the great mountain condors which had carried her away, but the picture the old man drew, in black paint, resembled a winging man more than anything else.

Then, slowly and laboriously, he began to trace something he finally recognized as a map.

It took a long time; it was midnight before the old man had finished and Conan understood his tracings. But at last the matter was made clear. If he followed the course traced on the map, down the long narrow valley where stood the village, across a plateau, down a series of rugged slopes and along another valley, he would come to the place where lurked the being which had stolen his woman. At that spot the old man drew what looked like a miss-shapen hut, with many strange markings all about it in red pigments. Pointing to these, and again to him, he shook his head, with those loud cries that seemed to indicate peril among these people.

Then they tried to persuade him not to go, but afire with eagerness he took the piece of hide and pouch of food they thrust into his hands, they were indeed a strange people, grasped his axe and set off in the moonless darkness. But his eyes were keener than a modern mind can comprehend, and his sense of direction was as a wolfs. Once the map was fixed in his mind, he could have thrown it away and come unerring to the place he sought but he folded it and thrust it into his girdle.

He travelled at his best speed through the starlight, taking no heed of any beasts that might be seeking their prey—, cave bear or saber-toothed tiger. At times he heard gravel slide under stealthy padded paws; he glimpsed fierce yellow eyes burning in the darkness, and caught sight of shadowy, skulking forms. But he plunged on recklessly, in too desperate a mood to give the path to any beast however fearsome.

The young Cimmerian traversed the valley, climbed a ridge and came out on a broad plateau, gashed with ravines and strewn with boulders. he crossed this and in the darkness before dawn commenced his climb down the treacherous slopes. They seemed endless, falling away in a long steep incline until their feet were lost in darkness. But he went down recklessly, not pausing to unsling the rawhide rope he carried about his shoulders, trusting to his luck and skill to bring him down without a broken neck.

And just as dawn was touching the peaks with a white glow, he dropped into a broad valley, walled by stupendous cliffs. At that point it was wide from east to west, but the cliffs converged toward the lower end, giving the valley the appearance of a great fan, narrowing swiftly toward the south.

The floor was level, traversed by a winding stream. Trees grew thinly; there was no underbrush, but a carpet of tall grass, which at that time of year were somewhat dry. Along the stream where the green lush grew, wandered mammoths, hairy mountains of flesh and muscle.

He gave them a wide berth, giants too mighty for him to cope with, confident in their power, and afraid of only one thing on earth. They bent forward their great ears and lifted their trunks menacingly when he approached too near, but they did not attack him. he ran swiftly among the trees, and the sun was not yet above the eastern ramparts which its rising edged with golden flame, when he came to the point where the cliffs converged. His night-long climb had not affected his iron muscles. he felt no weariness; his fury burned unabated. What lay beyond the cliffs he could not know; he ventured no conjecture. he had room in his brain only for red wrath and killing-lust.

The cliffs did not form a solid wall. That is, the extremities of the converging palisades did not meet, leaving a notch or gap a few hundred feet wide, and emerged into a second valley, or rather into a continuance of the same valley which broadened out again beyond the pass.

The cliffs slanted away swiftly to east and west, to form a giant rampart that marched clear around the valley in the shape of a vast oval. It formed a blue rim all around the valley without a break except for a glimpse of the clear sky that seemed to mark another notch at the southern end. The inner valley was shaped much like a great bottle, with two necks.

The neck by which he entered was crowded with trees, which grew densely for several hundred yards, when they gave way abruptly to a field of crimson flowers. And a few hundred yards beyond the edges of the trees, he saw a strange structure.

He looked upon a great hut the construction of which was beyond his comprehension. It was a tower, some seventy feet in height, of a curious green stone, highly polished, and of a substance that created the illusion of semi-translucency. It was cylindrical, and, as near as he could see, without doors or windows. The main body of the building was perhaps sixty feet in height, and from its center rose a smaller tower that completed its full stature. This tower, being much inferior in girth to the main body of the structure, and thus surrounded by a sort of gallery, with a crenellated parapet, and was furnished with both doors, curiously arched, and windows, thickly barred as he could see, even from where he stood.

That was all. No evidence of human occupancy. No sign of life in all the valley. But it was evident that this castle was what the old man of the mountain village had been trying to draw, and he was certain that in it he would find Jenna—, if she still lived.

Beyond the tower he saw the glimmer of a blue lake into which the stream, following the curve of the western wall, eventually flowed. Lurking amid the trees he glared at the tower and at the flowers surrounding it on all sides, growing thick along the walls and extending for hundreds of yards in all directions. There were trees at the other end of the valley, near the lake; but no trees grew among the flowers.

They were not like any plants he had ever seen. They grew close together, almost touching each other. They were some four feet in height, with only one blossom on each stalk, a blossom larger than a man’s head, with broad, fleshy petals drawn close together. These petals were a livid crimson, the hue of an open wound. The stalks were thick as a man’s wrist, colorless, almost transparent. The poisonously green leaves were shaped like spearheads, drooping on long snaky stems. Their whole aspect was repellent, and he wondered what their denseness concealed.

For all his wild-born instincts were roused in him. he felt lurking peril, just as he had often sensed the ambushed lion before his external senses recognized him. he scanned the dense blossoms closely, wondering if some great serpent lay coiled among them. His nostrils expanded as he quested for a scent, but the wind was blowing away from him. But there was something decidedly unnatural about that vast garden. Though the north wind swept over it, not a blossom stirred, not a leaf rustled; they hung motionless, sullen, like birds of prey with drooping heads, and he had a strange feeling that they were watching him like living things.

It was like a landscape in a dream: on either hand the blue cliffs lifting against the cloud-fleeced sky; in the distance the dreaming lake; and that fantastic green tower rising in the midst of that livid crimson field.

And there was something else: in spite of the wind that was blowing away from him, he caught a scent, a charnel-house reek of death and decay and corruption that rose from the blossoms.

Then suddenly he crouched closer in his covert. There was life and movement on the castle. A figure emerged from the tower, and coming to the parapet, leaned upon it and looked out across the valley. It was a man, but such a man as he had never dreamed of, even in nightmares.

He was tall, powerful, black with the hue of polished ebony; but the feature which made a human nightmare of him was the batlike wings which folded on his shoulders. he knew they were wings: the fact was obvious and indisputable.

Was that winged man merely a freak, an isolated example of distorted nature, dwelling in solitude and immemorial desolation? Or was he a survival of a forgotten race, which had risen, reigned and vanished before the coming of man as they know him? The little brown people of the hills might have told him, but they had no speech in common.

Modern skepticism was not a part of his nature, nor did he seek to rationalize what seemed not to coincide with a natural universe. He acknowledged that the gods existed, and did not doubt the existence of demons of other deities, worshipped by other races. Supernatural beings of all sorts fitted into his conception of life and the universe. He no more doubted the existence of dragons, ghosts, fiends and devils than he doubted the existence of lions and buffaloes and elephants. He accepted this freak of nature as a supernatural demon and did not worry about its origin or source. Nor was he thrown into a panic from his own superstitious fear. He was a son of the north, who panicked over neither man nor devil, and he had more faith in the crushing power of his flint axe than in the spells of priests or the incantations of sorcerers.

But he did not immediately rush into the open and charge the tower. The wariness of the wild was his, and he saw no way to climb the castle. The winged man needed no doors on the side, because he evidently entered at the top, and the slick surface of the walls seemed to defy the most skilful climber. Presently a way of getting upon the tower occurred to him, but he hesitated, waiting to see if any other winged people appeared, though he had an unexplainable feeling that he was the only one of his kind in the valley, possibly in the world. While he crouched among the trees and watched, he saw him lift his elbows from the parapet and stretch lithely, like a great cat. Then he strode across the circular gallery and entered the tower. A muffled cry rang out on the air which caused him to stiffen, though even so he realized that it was not the cry of a woman. Presently the black master of the castle emerged, dragging a smaller figure with him, a figure which writhed and struggled and cried out piteously. he saw that it was a small brown man, much like those of the mountain village. Captured, he did not doubt, as Jenna had been captured.

He was like a child in the hands of his huge foe. The black man spread broad wings and rose over the parapet, carrying his captive as a condor might carry a sparrow. He soared out over the field of blossoms, while he crouched in his leafy retreat, glaring in amazement.

The winged man, hovering in mid-air, voiced a strange weird cry; and it was answered in horrible fashion. A shudder of awful life passed over the crimson field beneath him. The great red blossoms trembled, opened, spreading their fleshy petals like the mouths of serpents. Their stalks seemed to elongate, stretching upward eagerly. Their broad leaves lifted and vibrated with a curious lethal whirring, like the singing of a rattlesnake. A faint but flesh-crawling hissing sounded over all the valley. The blossoms gasped, straining upward. And with a fiendish laugh, the winged man dropped his writhing captive.

With a scream of a lost soul the brown man hurtled downward, crashing among the flowers. And with a rustling hiss, they were on him. Their thick flexible stalks arched like the necks of serpents, their petals closed on his flesh. A hundred blossoms clung to him like the tentacles of an octopus, smothering and crushing him down. His shrieks of agony came muffled; he was completely hidden by the hissing, threshing flowers. Those beyond reach swayed and writhed furiously as if seeking to tear up their roots in their eagerness to join their brothers. All over the field the great red blossoms leaned and strained toward the spot where the grisly battle went on. The shrieks sank lower and lower and lower, and ceased. A dread silence reigned over the valley. The black man flapped his way leisurely back to the tower, and vanished within it.

Then presently the blossoms detached themselves one by one from their victim who lay very white and still. Aye, his whiteness was more than that of death; he was like a wax image, a staring effigy from which every drop of blood had been sucked. And a startling transmutation was evident in the flowers directly about him. Their stalks no longer colorless; they were swollen and dark red, like transparent bamboos filled to the bursting with fresh blood.

Drawn by an insatiable curiosity, he stole from the trees and glided to the very edge of the red field. The blossoms hissed and bent toward him, spreading their petals like the hood of a roused cobra. Selecting one farthest from its brothers, he severed the stalk with a stroke of his axe, and the thing tumbled to the ground, writhing like a beheaded serpent.

When its struggles ceased he bent over it in wonder. The stalk was not hollow as he had supposed—, that is, hollow like a dry bamboo. It was traversed by a network of thread-like veins, some empty and some exuding a colorless sap. The stems which held the leaves to the stalk were remarkably tenacious and pliant, and the leaves themselves were edged with curved spines, like sharp hooks.

Once those spines were sunk in the flesh, the victim would be forced to tear up the whole plant by the roots if he escaped.

The petals were each as broad as his hand, and as thick as a prickly pear, and on the inner side covered with innumerable tiny mouths, not larger than the head of a pin. In the center, where the pistil should be, there was a barbed spike, of a substance like thorn, and narrow channels between the four serrated edges.

From his investigations of this horrible travesty of vegetation, he looked up suddenly, just in time to see the winged man appear again on the parapet. He did not seem particularly surprised to see him. He shouted in his unknown tongue and made a mocking gesture, while he stood statue-like, gripping his axe. Presently he turned and entered the tower as he had done before; and as before, he emerged with a captive. His fury and hate were almost submerged by the flood of joy that Jenna was alive.

In spite of her supple strength, which was that of a she-panther, the black man handled Jenna as easily as he had handled the brown man. Lifting her struggling white body high above his head, he displayed her to him and yelled tauntingly. Her golden hair streamed over her white shoulders as she fought vainly, crying to him in the terrible extremity of her fright and horror. Not lightly was a woman of the Æsir reduced to cringing terror. he measured the depths of her captor’s diabolism by her frenzied cries.

But he stood motionless. If it would have saved her, he would have plunged into that crimson morass of hell, to be hooked and pierced and sucked white by those fiendish flowers. But that would help her none. His death would merely leave her without a defender. So he stood silent while she writhed and whimpered, and the black man’s laughter sent red waves of madness surging across his brain. Once he made as if to cast her down among the flowers, and his iron control almost snapped and sent him plunging into that red sea of hell. But it was only a gesture. Presently he dragged her back to the tower and tossed her inside. Then he turned back to the parapet, rested his elbows upon it, and fell to watching him. Apparently he was playing with them as a cat plays with a mouse before he destroys it.

But while he watched, he turned his back and strode into the forest. he, Conan, was not a thinker, as modern men understand the term. he lived in an age where emotions were translated by the smash of a flint axe rather than by emanations of the intellect. Yet he was not the senseless animal the black man evidently supposed him to be. he had a human brain, whetted by the eternal struggle for existence and supremacy.

Conan knew he could not cross that red strip that banded the castle, alive. Before he could take a half dozen steps a score of barbed spikes would be thrust into his flesh, their avid mouths sucking the flood from his veins to feed their demoniac lust. Even his tigerish strength would not avail to hew a path through them.

The winged man did not follow. Looking back, he saw him still lounging in the same position.

He passed through the straits of the valley and came into the vale beyond where the trees thinned and the mammoths lumbered along the stream. Beyond the herd he stopped and drawing a pair of flints into his pouch, stooped and struck a spark in the dry grass. Running swiftly from chosen place to place, he set a dozen fires, in a great semi-circle. The north wind caught them, whipped them into eager life, drove them before it. In a few moments a rampart of flame was sweeping down the valley.

The mammoths ceased their feeding, lifted their great ears and bellowed alarm. In all the world they feared only fire. They began to retreat southward, the cows herding the calves before them, bulls trumpeting with a blast. Roaring like a storm the fire rushed on, and the mammoths broke and stampeded, a crushing hurricane of flesh, a thundering earthquake of hurtling bone and muscle. Trees splintered and went down before them, the ground shook under their headlong tread. Behind them came the racing fire and on the heels of the fire came he, so closely that the smouldering earth burnt the moose-hide sandals off his feet.

Through the narrow neck they thundered, levelling the dense thickets like a giant scythe. Trees were torn up by the roots; it was as if a tornado had ripped through the pass.

With a deafening thunder of pounding feet and trumpeting, they stormed across the sea of red blossoms. Those devilish plants might have even pulled down and destroyed a single mammoth; but under the impact of the whole herd, they were no more than common flowers. The maddened titans crashed through and over them, battering them to shreds, hammering, stamping them into the earth which grew soggy with their juice.

He trembled for an instant, fearing the brutes would not turn aside for the castle, and dubious of even it being able to withstand that battering ram concussion. Evidently the winged man shared his fears, for he shot up from the tower and raced off through the sky toward the lake. But one of the bulls butted head-on into the wall, was shunted off the smooth curving surface, caromed into the one next to him, and the herd split and roared by the tower on either hand, so closely their hairy sides rasped against it. They thundered on through the red field toward the distant lake.

The fire, reaching the edge of the trees, was checked; the smashed sappy fragments of the red flowers would not burn. Trees, fallen or standing, smoked and burst into flame, and burning branches showered around him as he ran through the trees and out into the gigantic swath the charging herd had cut through the livid field.

As he ran he shouted to Jenna and she answered him. Her voice was muffled and accompanied by a hammering on something. The winged man had locked her in a tower.

As he came under the castle wall, treading on remnants of red petals and snaky stalks, he unwound his rawhide rope, swung it, and sent its loop shooting upward to catch on one of the merlons of the crenellated parapet. Then he went up it, hand over hand, gripping the rope between his toes, bruising his knuckles and elbows against the sheer wall as he swung about.

He was within five feet of the parapet when he was galvanized by the beat of wings about his head. The black man shot out of the air and landed on the gallery. he got a good look at him as he leaned over the parapet. His features were straight and regular; there was no suggestion of the negroid about him. His eyes were slanted slits, and his teeth gleamed in a savage grin of hate and triumph. Long, long he had ruled the valley of the red blossoms, levelling tribute of human lives from the miserable tribes of the hills, for writhing victims to feed the carnivorous half-bestial flowers which were his subjects and protectors. And now he was in his power, his fierceness, and craft gone for naught. A stroke of the crooked dagger in his hand and he would go hurtling to his death. Somewhere Jenna, seeing his peril, was screaming like a wild thing, and then a door crashed with a splintering of wood.

The black man, intent upon his gloating, laid the keen edge of his dagger on the rawhide strand—, then a strong white arm locked about his neck from behind, and he was jerked violently backward. Over his shoulder he saw the beautiful face of Jenna, her hair standing on end, her eyes dilated with terror and fury.

With a roar he turned in her grasp, tore loose her clinging arms and hurled her against the tower with such force that she lay half stunned. Then he turned again to him, but in that instant he had swarmed up and over the parapet, and leaped upon the gallery, unslinging his axe.

For an instant he hesitated, his wings half-lifted, his hand poising on his dagger, as if uncertain whether to fight or take to the air. He was a giant in stature, with muscles standing out in corded ridges all over him, but he hesitated, as uncertain as a man when confronted by a wild beast.

Conan did not hesitate. With a deep-throated roar he sprang, swinging his axe with all his giant strength. With a strangled cry he threw up his arms; but down between them the axe plunged and blasted his head to red ruin.

He wheeled toward Jenna; and struggling to her knees, she threw her white arms about him in a desperate clasp of love and terror, staring awedly to where lay the winged lord of the valley, the crimson pulp that had been his head drowned in a puddle of blood and brains.

To him the tower, the ebony furnished chamber and the rolls of parchment were meaningless, inexplicable emanations of sorcery, whose significance lay only in their diabolism.

The castle was but a monstrous trap, concerning which he had but one emotion, and that a desire to escape from it as quickly as possible.

With Jenna clinging to him he slid to the ground, then with a dextrous flip he freed his rope and wound it; and after that they went hand and hand along the path made by the mammoths, now vanishing in the distance, toward the blue lake at the southern end of the valley and the notch in the cliffs beyond it.

Two Against Turan

(Originally titled Two Against Tyre)

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

Through the flaming riot of colour which was the streets of Turan strode a figure alien and incongruous. There was no lack of foreigners in this, the world’s richest capital, where purple-sailed ships brought the wealth of many seas and many lands. Among the native merchants and traders, with their slaves and guards, walked dark-skinned Stygians, light-fingered thieves from Zamora, lean wild tribesmen from the south – Zuagirs from the great desert – glittering princes of Keshan, with their swaggering retinues.

But there was a certain kinship evident among all these various peoples, a likeness betokening the east in each. The stranger, toward whom all eyes turned as he stalked by, was just as obviously alien to the east.

“He is a Corinthian,” whispered a crimson-robed courtier to a companion whose garb, no less than his wide-legged rolled gait, spoke of the sea. The captain shook his head.

“He is like them, yet unlike; he is of some kindred, but wilder, race – a barbarian from the north.”

The man under discussion did resemble certain types still found among the Corinthians in that his shock of hair was dark, his eyes blue, and his skin white, contrasting to the dark complexions about him. But the hard, almost wolfish lines of his mighty frame were not Corinthian. Here was a man who was akin to the original tribes of man, but who was much nearer the pristine Nordheimer stem – a man whose life had been spent, not in marble cities or fertile agricultural valleys, but in savage conflict with nature in her wildest form. This fact showed in his strong moody face, in the hard economy of his form – his heavy arms, broad shoulders, and lean loins. He wore an unadorned helmet and a scale-mail corselet, and from a broad gold-buckled girdle hung a long sword and a dagger with a double-edged blade, fourteen inches in length, and broad as a man’s palm near the hilt – a terrible weapon, one edge slightly convex, the other correspondingly conclave.

If the stranger was the object of curiosity, he no less evinced a like emotion in his scrutiny of the city and its inhabitants – a curiosity and wonder so evident that it would have seemed childish except for a certain underlying aspect of potential menace. There was a dangerous individuality about the barbarian which would not be submerged by his wonder at the strange environs among which he found himself.

And strange they were to him, who had never seen such luxury and wealth so carelessly spread out before him. Paved streets were strange to him, and he stared amazed at the buildings of stone and cedar and marble, decorated with gold, silver, ivory and precious stones. He blinked his eyes at the glitter which attended the procession of a notable or visiting prince along the streets – the exalted one lolling on silken cushions in a gem-crusted, silken-canopied litter, borne by slaves clad in silken loin-cloths, and followed by other slaves waving fly-flaps of ostrich-feathers, having jewelled handles – accompanied by soldiers in gilded helmets and bronze hauberks – Khauranians, Turanians, Stygians, rich merchants from the isle of Kittim. He stared at their garments of the famous Turanian purple, the dye on which the empire of Yildiz had been founded, and by the pursuit of the elements of which civilization had spread around the world. By virtue of their apparel the throngs of nobles and merchants were transformed from prosaic tradesmen, bent on cheating their neighbours, to princes questing from far for the glory of the gods. Their cloaks swung and shimmered in the sun, red as wine, darkly purple as a Stygian night, crimson as the blood of a murdered king.

Through the shifting rainbow colours and the gay-hued maze wandered the yellow-haired barbarian, his cold eyes filled with wonder, apparently unaware of the curious glances that were directed at him, or the bold-eyed stares of dark tinted women – walking in their sandals along the street, or borne in their canopied litters.

Now down the street came a procession whose wails and howls cut through the din of barter and contention. Hundreds of women ran along, half-naked and with their black hair streaming wildly down their shoulders. As they ran they beat their naked breasts and tore their hair, screaming as with grief too great to be borne in silence. Behind them came men bearing a litter on which lay a still form, covered with flowers. All the merchants and the keepers of stalls turned to look and listen.

Now the curious barbarian understood the cry which the women screamed over and over. “Thammuz is dead!”

The dark-haired stranger turned to a loiterer who had ceased his contentions with a shopkeeper over the price of a garment, and said, in barbaric tongue: “Who is the great chief they are bearing to his long rest?”

The other looked up the street, and then, without replying, opened his mouth to the fullest capacity and bawled, “Thammuz is dead!”

All up and down the street men and women took up the cry, repeating it over and over, until a hysterical note was apparent, and the wailers began to sway their bodies and rend their garments.

Still puzzled, the tall stranger plucked at the loiterer’s sleeve, and repeated his question: “Who is this Thammuz, some great king of the East?”

Angered at the intrusion, the other turned and shouted wrathfully, “Thammuz is dead, fool, Thammuz is dead! Who are you to interrupt my devotions?”

“My name is Conan, and I am a Cimmerian,” answered the other, nettled. “As for your devotions, you are doing naught except stand there and bellow ‘Thammuz is dead’ like a branded bull!”

The man glared, and then began howling at the top of his voice, “He defames Thammuz! He defames the great god!”

The litter was passing along by the disputants now, and it halted as the bearers, yelling as loudly as they could, nevertheless were attracted by the antics of the worshipper and his words. The litter halted, and scores of dark eyes, not entirely sane, were turned toward the Cimmerian. A throng was gathering, as it always gathers in eastern cities; the shout was repeated in high-pitched screams, the wailers weaving and swaying, foam flying from their lips in slobbering ecstasy, as they lashed themselves into religious frenzy. The most level-headed and unemotional race in the world, in ordinary moments, the Turanians were not free from the frenzied outbursts of emotions common to all people in regard to their devotions of the gods.

Now hands settled on dagger hilts and eyes flamed murderously in the direction of the yellow-haired giant, against whom the emotion-drunk loiterer still hurled his accusation.

“He defames Thammuz!” howled the foaming devotee.

A rumbling growl rose from the crowd, and the litter tossed like a boat on a stormy sea. The Cimmerian laid his hand on his sword, and his blue eyes glinted icily.

“Go your way, people,” he growled. “I’ve said nothing against any god. Go in peace and be cursed to you.”

Half heard in the growing clamour, his faulty Turanian was misunderstood; the crowd only caught the oath. Instantly there rose a savage yell: “He curses Thammuz! Slay the violator!”

They were all around him, and they swarmed on him so quickly that for all his speed, he had not time to draw his sword. Maddened by their own religious frenzy, the crowd swept upon him, overthrowing him. As he went down he dealt a terrible buffet to his foremost attacker – the misguided loiterer – and the man’s neck broke like a twig. Frantic heels lashed at him, frenzied fingers clawed at him, daggers flashed wickedly. Their own numbers hampered them; blood spurted and howls different from the cries of madness rose, as the hacking blades found marks unintended. Borne down by the mass of their numbers, Conan tore out his great dagger, and a scream of agony knifed the din as it sank home. The press gave suddenly before the deadly play of the glittering blade, and Conan heaved up, throwing men aside like ten-pins right and left. The wave of battle had washed over the litter; it lay in the dust of the street, and Conan grunted in astonishment and disgust as he realized the nature of its burden.

But the maddened worshippers were surging back upon him, blades flashing like the spume of an on-rolling wave. The foremost slashed at him savagely, but Conan ducked and swayed, ripping as he rolled, so that the stroke was one with the motion of his body. The attacker shrieked and fell as if the legs of him had suddenly given way – almost cut in half.

Conan leaped back from the humming blades, and his great shoulders struck hard against a door, which gave inward, precipitating him backward. Such was the momentum of his leap that he fell sprawling on his back, within the door. So quickly did he rise from his inglorious fall that he seemed to rebound from the floor like a cat – then he stopped short and stood glaring, his dripping dagger gripped in his hand.

The door was shut, and a man was throwing the bolt in place. As the Cimmerian stared in surprise, this man turned with a laugh, and moved toward an opposite door, motioning him to follow. Conan complied, walking warily and suspicious as a wolf. Outside the mob raved, and the door groaned and buckled to their impact. Then the stranger led the way into a dark, narrow, winding alley, and up this they went, meeting no one, until the roar of the throng faded to a whisper behind them. Then the man turned aside into a doorway, and they emerged into an inn, where a few men sat cross-legged and argued in the everlasting contentions of the East.

“Well, my friend,” said the Cimmerian’s rescuer, “I think that we have thrown the hounds off the scent.”

Conan looked at him dubiously, and realized a certain kinship. The man was certainly no Turanian. His features were as straight as the Cimmerian’s own. He was tall and well-knit, not much inferior in stature to the giant Cimmerian. His hair was black, his eyes grey; he appeared to be of early middle-life, and though he wore Eastern apparel, and spoke Turanian with a Semitic accent, Conan knew that he had met a descendant of ancestors common to them both – the roving Aryans who peopled the world with light eyed, fair haired drifts.

“Who are you?” the Cimmerian asked bluntly.

“Men call me Ormraxes, the Mede,” answered the other. “Let us sit here and drink wine; fleeing is thirsty work!”

They sat them down at a rough-hewn table, and a servant brought wine. They drank in silence. Conan was brooding over the past events, and presently he said, “I need not thank you for barring that door and leading me to safety. By Crom, these folks are all mad. I did but ask what king they bore to his tomb, and they flew at me like wildcats. And there was no corpse in that litter after all – only a wooden image, decorated with gold and jewels, drenched in rancid oil, and decked with flowers. What -”

He started up, drawing his sword, as in a nearby street a clamour broke forth afresh.

“They have forgotten all about you,” laughed Ormraxes. “Be at ease.”

But Conan went to the door and cautiously looked out through a crack. Looking along a winding street, he had a glimpse of another, larger street; down this the procession was marching, but the nature was greatly changed; the flower-decked image was borne upright on the shoulders of the votaries, and men and women were dancing and singing, shouting with rapture, as extravagant in their joy as they had been in their grief.

Conan snorted in disgust.

“Now they howl ‘Adonis is living,’” said he. “A short space agone it was ‘Thammuz is dead,’ and they rent their garments and gashed themselves with daggers. By Crom, Ormraxes, I tell you they are mad!”

The Mede laughed and lifted his goblet.

“All these people go mad during their religious festivals. They are celebrating the resurrection of the god of life, Adonis-Thammuz, who is slain in midsummer by Baal-Moloch, the Sun. They carry the dead image of the god first, then revive him and hail him as you have seen. This is nothing – you should see the worshippers at the holy city of Adonis, there they cut themselves to pieces in their frenzy, and throw themselves down to be trampled to dust by the throngs.”

The Cimmerian digested this statement for a space, then shook his head in bewilderment and drank hugely. Presently a question occurred to him.

“Why did you risk your life to aid me?”

“I saw you fighting with the mob. There was no fairness in it – a thousand to one. Besides, there is kinship between us – distant, and dim, yet the blood tie is there.”

“I have heard of your people,” answered Conan. “They dwell far to the north, do they not?”

“Beyond the lands of Turan and the headwaters of the Vilayet,” answered Ormraxes. “Slowly they have drifted southward from the steppes; year by year they encroach on the valleys of the Hyrkanians. Others have drifted singly and in small bands down the Vilayet as mercenary soldiers. This drift has been going on for three or four generations.”

“Are you a native, then, of this country?” asked the Cimmerian.

“Not of Turan. I was born in the valleys of the north, and wandered south as a hunter and mercenary. I came upon a people distantly akin to my tribe on the borders, and abode there.”

Conan made no comment. He knew no more of these tribes than he did of Atlantis. But there was something in his mind, and he gave voice to his thought.

“Tell me – in your goings about, and your wanderings and your travels throughout the land, have you seen or heard of a man named Sumuabi?”

Ormraxes shook his head.

“It is a Shemite or Khauranian name. But I never saw a man given the bare name, unless modified, such as Ishmi-Sumuabi, or Sumuabi-Pileser. What manner of man is he?”

“Of good height – though not so tall as either of us – and strongly made. His eyes are dark, and his hair is blue-black; likewise his beard, which he curls. His bearing is bold and arrogant; he is like these Turanians, yet strangely unlike, for where they cringed and whined, he strode domineeringly; and where they avoid battle, he sought it. Nor were his features much like them, though his nose was hooked, and his countenance somewhat of the same cast.”

“Truly you have described a Khauranian,” said Ormraxes with a laugh. “To the south-east, beyond the rivers, there are thousands of men who would answer your description, nor need you go that far, it may be, for there is war in the wind and Taramis, queen of Khauran, comes up with her war-chariots to war against the princes – or so men whisper in the market-places.”

“Who is this Sumuabi?” asked the Cimmerian, making a jumble out of the Shemitic pronunciation.

“The self-proclaimed greatest king of all Hyboria, whose empire stretches from the southern valleys near Stygia to the Sea of the Rising Sun, and from the flaming mountains of the north to the tents of the Turanian tribes, he has built Eruk to be a royal city and gemmed it with palaces, like jewels set in the hilt of a sword.”

Conan looked dubiously at his companion; these lapses into sonorous language were Sjemitic rather than the common tongue, but Conan realized that the Mede must have spent most of his life among easterns.

“And the chiefs of Khauran,” quoth the Cimmerian, “are they whetting their axes and preparing for the onslaught against Taramis from Sumuabi?”

“So men say,” answered the Mede warily.

“I have no gold,” muttered the Cimmerian. “Which of these leaders will pay me the most for my sword?”

Ormraxes’ eyes glinted, as if it were a remark for which he had been waiting. He leaned forward, opened his lips to speak – a shout interrupted him. Like a steel spring released he shot to his feet and wheeled, sword flashing into his hand.

At the outer door stood a band of soldiers in gleaming armour; with them was a noble in a purple cloak, and a ragged rogue who had slipped out of the inn when the companions entered. This rascal pointed at the Mede and shouted, “It is he! It is Khumri!”

“Quick!” whispered the Mede. “Out the side-door!”

But even as he turned, and Conan sprang up to follow him, this door was dashed open and a squad of soldiers poured in. Snarling like a cat, Ormraxes sprang back, and at the order of the purple-clad noble, the soldiers rushed in. The Mede cleft the skull of the foremost, parried a spear and sprang toward the noble who retreated, howling for help. The soldiers ringed him, and one, running in, pinioned Ormraxes’ arms from behind. Conan’s sword decapitated the fellow, and back to back the comrades made their stand. But the inn was swarming with soldiers. There was a terrific clashing of steel, yells of wrath and shrieks of pain, then a blasting charge swept the companions apart by sheer force. Conan was hurled back against an up-ended table, with a half dozen swords hacking for his life. Dripping blood, he roared, and disembowelled a soldier with a ferocious rip of his sword – then an iron mace crashed thunderingly on his helmet. Reeling, blind, he strove to fight back, but blow after blow rained on his iron-clad head, beating him slowly, relentlessly to the floor, like the felling of a great tree. Then he knew no more.

II

Conan recovered consciousness slowly. His head ached and throbbed, and his limbs felt stiff. There was a light in his eyes, which he recognized as a candle. He was in a small stone-walled chamber – evidently a cell, he thought – on a couch, and a man was bending over him, dressing his wounds. They did not want him to die so easily, the Cimmerian thought; they revived him to torture him. So he gripped the man by the throat like a python striking, before the victim realized that he had recovered consciousness. Other men were in the room, but no blows rained on the Cimmerian, as he expected, only a hand fell on his shoulder, and a voice cried in Turanian: “Wait! Wait! Don’t slay him! He is a friend! You are among friends!”

The words carried conviction, and Conan released his captive, who owed his life only to the fact that the Cimmerian had not fully recovered his usual powers. The fellow fell to the floor, gasping and gagging, where other men seized him and beat him lustily on the back and poured wine down his throat, so that presently he sat up and regarded his strangler reproachfully. The first speaker tugged at his beard absently and regarded Conan meditatively. This man was of medium height, with characteristic Turanian features, and was clad in crimson robes that denoted either the nobleman or the wealthy merchant.

“Bring food and drink,” he ordered, and a slave brought meats and a great flagon of wine. Conan, realizing his hunger, gulped down a gigantic amount of the liquor, and seizing a huge joint in both hands, began to wolf down the meat, tearing large morsels off with his teeth which were as strong as those of a bear. He did not ask the why and wherefore of it all; lean years had taught the barbarian to take food as it came.

“You are a friend of Khumri?” asked the crimson-clad person.

“If you mean the Mede,” the Cimmerian answered between bites, “I never saw him until today, when he doubtless saved my life from a mob. What have you done with him?”

The other shook his head.

“It was not I who took him – I only wish it had been. It was the soldiers of the king of Turan who seized him. They bore him to the dungeons. You I found lying senseless in the alley behind the inn, where they had thrown you. Perhaps they thought that you were dead. But there you lay on the cobble-stones, your sword still gripped in your hands. I had my servants take you up and bring you to my house.”

“Why?”

The person did not reply directly.

“Khumri saved your life; do you wish to aid him?”

“A life for a life,” quoth the Cimmerian, smacking his lips over the wine. “He aided me; I will aid him, even to the death.”

It was no idle boast. Beyond the frontiers of civilization, obligations were real, and men aided men from dire necessity, until it had become a veritable religion among the barbarians to repay such debts. The crimson-robed one knew this, for he had roved far, and his wanderings had taken him much among the dark-haired peoples of the north.

“You have lain senseless for hours,” he said. “Are you able to run and fight now?”

The Cimmerian rose and stretched his massive arms, towering above the others.

“I have rested, eaten and drunk,” he grunted. “I am no Corinthian girl to fall down and die of a tap on the head.”

“Bring his sword,” ordered the leader, and it was brought. Conan thrust it into his scabbard with a grunt of satisfaction, at the same time involuntarily making sure that his great dagger was in place at his girdle. Then he looked inquiringly at the crimson-robed man.

“I am a friend of Khumri,” said the man. “My name is Akuros. Now harken to me. It is nearly midnight. I know where Khumri is confined. He is kept in a dungeon not far from the wharfs. In this prison there is an outer set of guards, and an inner guard. I will dispose of the outer guard; they are easily bought, and I will send a man to bribe them to desert their post. But the inner guard is composed of loyalists, and they can not be bribed. But there will be only three of them, and with cunning you can dispose of them.”

“Leave them to me,” growled the Cimmerian. “But where is this dungeon? And having gotten Ormraxes his liberty, what shall we do then?”

“I will send a man to guide you to the prison,” answered Akuros. “If you get Khumri free, the same man will be waiting to guide you to the wharfs, where a boat will await you. Turan is built upon islands, as you know, and you could never get through the gates of the wall which shuts the city from the mainland. I can not aid Khumri openly, but I will do all I can secretly.”

In a short time Conan was following a stealthy figure along dark winding alleys. The man went stealthily but for all his stature, the Cimmerian made no more noise than a wind whispering through a forest. Only occasionally enough starlight filtered between the slumbering walls to strike pale gleams from his corselet scales, helmet or sword. At last they halted in a shadowed alley-mouth and the guide pointed to a squat stone edifice before which a clump of mailed figures stood, in the light of torches guttering in niches in the stone wall. They were conversing with a man whose features were hidden by a mask, and a heavy, small bag, which sagged significantly, passed between them. Then the masked man wrapped his cloak about him and disappeared in the shadows, and the soldiers went quickly and silently in another direction.

“They will not return,” murmured Conan’s guide. “The lord Akuros had them given enough gold to allow them to desert the army. They’ll be drunk for weeks. Go quickly, my lord! There are more guards within.”

The Cimmerian glided from the alley and approached the prison, whose iron door was not bolted. He opened it cautiously, staring within. A few torches in niches lighted a bare corridor dimly. It was empty to its turn, but beyond the bend he heard a confused murmur of voices, and saw more light. He went silently down the corridor, and halted at the bend. A flight of stone steps went down, and in the lower corridor, he saw three broad-built, powerful figures in helmets and mail – black bearded men, with cruel, dominant features. He thought of an ancient foe, and his hair bristles as a hound bristles at sight of an enemy. They were gambling on the stone floor, and their words were in a strange tongue. But as he looked, a stocky individual came out of the shadows, and spoke in Turanian: “In an hour the king’s men will come for the prisoner.”

“Have you been questioning him?” one of them demanded in the same tongue.

“He’s stubborn like all his breed,” answered the Turanian. “Little matter; Sumuabi-usshir will be glad to receive him. What think you the great king’s greeting will be to the lord Khumri?”

“He will have him flayed alive,” answered the Khauranian, after a judicial pause.

“Well, see to him well. He’s shackled hand and foot, but he’s a very desert lion. I go to the king.”

The Khauranians bent to their game again, and the Turanian waddled up the stone steps. Conan glided back from the bend where the stair began, and flattened himself against the wall, in the shadows. The Turanian came up around the turn, started down the corridor – just as he was opposite the Cimmerian, so close that an outstretched hand would have touched him, some instinct caused him to wheel. The light was dim, the shadows ghostly. Perhaps the Turanian thought he saw a spectre. Perhaps the sight of the yellow-haired giant in his gleaming mail froze him for an instant. That instant was enough. Before a sound could come from his gaping mouth, Conan’s great sword cleft his skull and he fell at the Cimmerian’s feet.

Conan sprang back quickly to the angle of the wall. Below him he heard a clatter of falling dice as the Khauranians sprang up, startled. He dared not risk a look, but he heard a muffled babble of contention, then the sound of three men mounting the stair. Looking about desperately, the Cimmerian saw an iron ring in the wall above his head – doubtless used for the suspension of tortured prisoners. Leaping he caught it and drew himself up. His groping foot found a slight depression in the wall, where a bit of the masonry had crumbled, and digging his toe in, he hung precariously there. The Khauranians had climbed the stair and their language broke out afresh as they stumbled upon the body of the Turanian, lying in his own blood. Spears ready, they looked all about, but it did not occur to them to look up. One of them started toward the outer entrance, evidently in quest of the outer guard – it was at that moment that Conan’s foothold gave way.

In such crises the Cimmerian’s brain worked like lightning. Even as his foot slipped he released the ring, and as he fell he knew what he meant to do, whereas the soldiers, taken completely off guard, were caught flat-footed. Conan’s knee struck between the shoulders of one of them, crushing him to the floor; rebounding with catlike quickness, the Cimmerian avoided the wavering clumsy spear-thrust aimed at him by another, who was too amazed to be coordinate. Conan’s sword hummed and the point tore through the corselet scales, to stand out behind the soldier’s shoulders. But the very fury of that stroke almost proved the Cimmerian’s undoing. The other Khauranian, in the flashing instant that had transpired since the barbarian’s fall, had recovered his wits, and now ran fiercely at his enemy, spear ready for the death-thrust.

Conan tugged savagely at his hilt, but the blade was wedged in the dead man’s breast bone, and the charging Khauranian was looming upon him. Releasing the locked sword, Conan wheeled empty-handed to meet the charge. The driving spear broke on his mail, knocking the wind out of him with an explosive grunt, and the force of the Khauranian’s attack dashed him headlong against the Cimmerian. Conan staggered backward beneath the impact, and felt empty space under his feet. He had been borne back over the stairway, and now, close-clinched, they tumbled down the steps, heels over head, their armour clashing on the stone. In the headlong speed of that descent, there was no time for either to strike a blow or make any plan of action. A flashing, chaotic instant of helpless falling and then Conan realized that their descent had ceased, and that the soldier lay motionless beneath him. Dazedly the Cimmerian arose, groping instinctively for his helmet which had fallen off. The Khauranian lay still; his neck was broken.

Conan found and donned his helmet, then looked about. Cells opened on the corridor, but they were dark; but through a slit in the door of one, toward the other end of the corridor, a light shone dimly. A quick search proved that a bunch of heavy iron keys was fastened to the dead soldier’s girdle. With these Conan unlocked the door, and saw Ormraxes the Mede lying on the stone floor, weighted with heavy chains. The Mede was awake – indeed the sound of that fall of mailed men down the stair had almost wakened a dead man.

He grinned as Conan entered, but said nothing. The Cimmerian, after some fumbling, found the keys that unlocked the shackles, and Ormraxes, on Khumri, stood up free, stretching his limbs. His glance questioned the Cimmerian, who, motioning for silence, led the way up the corridor. At the head of the stair, Conan recovered his sword with much tugging and silent swearing, and Ormraxes took up a spear belonging to the slaughtered guards. They warily left the prison and went to the alley where the Cimmerian’s guide awaited them. He motioned them to follow and they went along through a shadowed labyrinth and emerged on an open space. Conan heard the lap of waters at hidden piles, and saw the starlight on the waves. They were standing on a small wharf.

A boat was drawn up there, the rowers at the oars. Conan and Ormraxes entered the boat, the guide following them, and the rowers pushed off. Behind them the lights of Turan blended into a sea of myriad dancing sparks. A breeze whispered across the bay. The tang of dawn was in the air. On the mainland ahead of them another light sprang up, and toward it the boatmen rowed.

As they approached this light was seen to be a torch held in the hand of one of a small group of men standing on the beach, near the water’s edge. They had left the city far to the left. The stretch of beach was deserted and bare even of fishing huts.

As the boat was grounded, and Conan followed Ormraxes ashore, he saw that one of the men was Akuros. Behind him his servants held horses.

“My lord,” said Akuros to Ormraxes, “my plan has worked out more perfectly than I had hoped.”

“Yes, thanks to this Cimmerian,” laughed the Mede.

“I could not venture to aid you more openly,” said the Turanian. “Even now my life is forfeit if I am not ten times more wary than a fox. But you -you will remember?”

“I will remember,” answered Ormraxes. “The princes of Khauran will not move against Turan after we have scattered the chariots of the Khauranian. And from you, Akuros, will I buy all cedar and lapis-lazuli and precious stones, even as I promised.”

“I know that the lord Khumri keeps his word,” said Akuros, with a deference Conan did not understand. “Here are horses, my lord. I dare not send an escort, lest I be suspected -”

“We need no escort, good Akuros,” broke in Ormraxes. “And now we bid you farewell; the dawn is nigh and we have far to ride.”

They swung into the saddle and headed eastward. Conan, looking back from his saddle, saw afar across the bay, the glittering ocean of lights that was Turan; and on the shore, limned in the torch-light, the crimson-robed figure of Akuros, hand lifted in salute.

The Hell-Spawn of Kara-Shehr

(Originally The Fire of Asshurbanipal)

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

Bourtai squinted carefully down the blue barrel of his Lee-Enfield, called devoutly on Yun and sent an arrow through the brain of a flying rider.

"Yun!"

The little Bourchikoun shouted in glee, waving his weapon above his head, "I have sent another one of the dogs to Hell!"

His companion peered cautiously over the rim of the sand-pit they had scooped with their hands. He was a Cimmerian, Conan by name.

"Good work," he said. "Four left. Look—they're drawing off."

The white-robed horsemen were indeed reining away, clustering together just out of accurate bow-range, as if in council. There had been seven when they had first swooped down on the comrades, but the fire from the two bows in the sand-pit had been deadly.

"Look —they abandon the fray!"

Bourtai stood up boldly and shouted taunts at the departing riders, one of whom whirled and sent an arrow that kicked up sand thirty feet in front of the pit.

"They shoot like the sons of dogs," said Bourtai in complacent self-esteem. "By Yun, did you see that rogue plunge from his saddle as my lead went home? Up, ; let us run after them and cut them down!"

Paying no attention to this outrageous proposal—for he knew it was but one of the gestures Bourchikoun nature continually demands—Conan rose, dusted off his breeches and gazing after the riders, now white specks far out on the desert, said musingly: "Those fellows ride as if they had some set purpose in mind—not a bit like men running from a licking."

"Aye," agreed Bourtai promptly and seeing nothing inconsistent with his present attitude and recent bloodthirsty suggestion, "they ride after more of their kind—they are hawks who give up their prey not quickly. We had best move our position quickly, Conan . They will come back—maybe in a few hours, maybe in a few days—it all depends on how far away lies the oasis of their tribe. But they will be back. We have bows and lives—they want both. And behold."

The Bourchikoun fitted another fletching upon the string of his bow.

"My last arrow, ."

Conan nodded. "I've got three left."

The raiders whom their arrows had knocked from the saddle had been looted by their own comrades. No use searching the bodies which lay in the sand for ammunition. Conan lifted his canteen and shook it. Not much water remained. He knew that Bourtai had only a little more than he, though the cripple, bred in a barren land, had used and needed less water than did the Cimmerian; although the latter, judged from a white man's standards, was hard and tough as a wolf. As Conan unscrewed the canteen cap and drank very sparingly, he mentally reviewed the chain of events that had led them to their present position.

Wanderers, soldiers of fortune, thrown together by chance and attracted to each other by mutual admiration, he and Bourtai had wandered from Khitai back through Hyrkania and down through the deserts bordering the Vilayet Sea, an oddly assorted but highly capable pair. Driven by the restless urge of inherent wanderlust, their avowed purpose—which they swore to and sometimes believed themselves—was the accumulation of some vague and undiscovered treasure, some pot of gold at the foot of some yet unborn rainbow.

Then in ancient Shiraz they had heard of the Fire of Asshurbanipal. From the lips of an ancient Iranistani trader, who only half believed what he repeated to them, they heard the tale that he in turn had heard from the babbling lips of delirium, in his distant youth. He had been a member of a caravan, fifty years before, which, wandering far on the southern shore of the Iranistan trading for pearls, had followed the tale of a rare pearl far into the desert.

The pearl, rumored found by a diver and stolen by a man of the interior, they did not find, but they did pick up a stranger who was dying of starvation, thirst and an arrow wound in the thigh. As, he died in delirium, he babbled a wild tale of a silent dead city of black stone set in the drifting sands of the desert far to the westward, and of a flaming gem clutched in the bony fingers of a skeleton on an ancient throne.

He had not dared bring it away with him, because of an overpowering brooding horror that haunted the place, and thirst had driven him into the desert again, where bandits had pursued and wounded him. Yet he had escaped, riding hard until his horse fell under him. He died without telling how he had reached the mythical city in the first place, but the old trader thought he must have come from the northwest—a deserter from the Turanian army, making a desperate attempt to reach the Gulf.

The men of the caravan had made no attempt to plunge still further into the desert in search of the city; for, said the old trader, they believed it to be the ancient, ancient City of Evil spoken of in the book of Skelos of the mad Ophirian Alhazred—the city of the dead on which an ancient curse rested. Legends named it vaguely: the Ophirians called it Beled-el-Djinn, the City of Devils, and the Turanians, Karashehr, the Black City. And the gem was that ancient and accursed jewel belonging to a king of long ago, whom the Argoseans called Sardanapalus and the Shemite peoples Asshurbanipal.

Conan had been fascinated by the tale. Admitting to himself that it was doubtless one of the ten thousand cock-and-bull myths booted about the East, still there was a possibility that he and Bourtai had stumbled onto a trace of that pot of rainbow gold for which they searched. And Bourtai had heard hints before of a silent city of the sands; tales had followed the eastbound caravans over the Hyrkanian uplands and across the sands of Turan, into the mountain country and beyond—vague tales; whispers of a black city of the djinn, deep in the hazes of a haunted desert.

So, following the trail of the legend, the companions had come from Shiraz to a village to the west of the Vilayet sea, and there had heard more from an old man who had been a pearl-diver in his youth. The loquacity of age was on him and he told tales repeated to him by wandering tribesmen who had them in turn from the wild nomads of the deep interior; and again Conan and Yar Ah heard of the still black city with giant beasts carved of stone, and the skeleton sultan who held the blazing gem.

And so, mentally swearing at himself for a fool, Conan had made the plunge, and Bourtai, secure in the knowledge that all things lay on the lap of Yun, had come with him. Their scanty supply of money had been just sufficient to provide riding-camels and provisions for a bold flying invasion of the unknown. Their only chart had been the vague rumors that placed the supposed location of Kara-Shehr.

There had been days of hard travel, pushing the beasts and conserving water and food. Then, deep in the desert they invaded, they had encountered a blinding sand-wind in which they had lost the camels. After that came long miles of staggering through the sands, battered by a flaming sun, subsisting on rapidly dwindling water from their canteens, and food Bourtai had in a pouch. No thought of finding the mythical city now. They pushed on blindly, in hope of stumbling upon a spring; they knew that behind them no oases lay within a distance they could hope to cover on foot. It was a desperate chance, but their only one.

Then white-clad hawks had swooped down on them, out of the haze of the skyline, and from a shallow and hastily scooped trench the adventurers had exchanged shots with the wild riders who circled them at top speed. The arrows of the bandits had skipped through their makeshift fortifications, knocking dust into their eyes and flicking bits of cloth from their garments, but by good chance neither had been hit.

Their one bit of luck, reflected Conan, as he cursed himself for a fool. What a mad venture it had been, anyway! To think that two men could so dare the desert and live, much less wrest from its abysmal bosom the secrets of the ages! And that crazy tale of a skeleton hand gripping a flaming jewel in a dead city! What utter nonsense! He must have been crazy himself to credit it, the Cimmerian decided with the clarity of view that suffering and danger bring.

"Well, Monkey-face," said Conan, lifting his bow, "let's get going. It's a toss-up if we die of thirst or get sniped off by the desert-brothers. Anyway, we're doin' no good here."

"God gives," agreed Bourtai cheerfully. "The sun sinks westward. Soon the coolness of night will be upon us. Perhaps we shall find water yet, . Look, the terrain changes to the south."

Conan shaded his eyes against the dying sun. Beyond a level, barren expanse of several miles width, the land did indeed become more broken; aborted hills were in evidence. The Cimmerian slung his bow over his arm and sighed.

"Heave ahead; we're food for the buzzards anyhow."

The sun sank and the moon rose, flooding the desert with weird silver light. Drifted sand glimmered in long ripples, as if a sea had suddenly been frozen into immobility. Conan, parched fiercely by a thirst he dared not fully quench, cursed beneath his breath. The desert was beautiful beneath the moon, with the beauty of a cold marble lorelei to lure men to destruction. What a mad quest! his weary brain reiterated; the Fire of Asshurbanipal retreated into the mazes of unreality with each dragging step. The desert became not merely a material wasteland, but the gray mists of the lost eons, in whose depths dreamed sunken things.

Conan stumbled and swore; was he failing already? Bourtai swung along with the easy, tireless stride of the mountain man, and Conan set his teeth, nerving himself to greater effort. They were entering the broken country at last, and the going became harder. Shallow gullies and narrow ravines knifed the earth with wavering patterns. Most of them were nearly filled with sand, and there was no trace of water.

"This country was once oasis country," commented Bourtai. "Yun knows how many centuries ago the sand took it, as the sand has taken so many cities in TuranianiStan."

They swung on like dead men in a gray land of death.

The moon grew red and sinister as she sank, and shadowy darkness settled over the desert before they had reached a point where they could see what lay beyond the broken belt. Even the big Bourchikoun's feet began to drag, and Conan kept himself erect only by a savage effort of will. At last they toiled up a sort of ridge, on the southern side of which the land sloped downward.

"We rest," declared Conan. "There's no water in this hellish country. No use in goin' on for ever. My legs are stiff as bow-barrels. I couldn't take another step to save my neck. Here's a kind of stunted cliff, about as high as a man's shoulder, facing south. We'll sleep in the lee of it.

"And shall we not keep watch, Conan ?"

"We don't," answered Conan. "If the Shemites cut our throats while we're asleep, so much the better. We're dead anyhow."

With which optimistic observation Conan lay down stiffly in the deep sand. But Bourtai stood, leaning forward, straining his eyes into the elusive darkness that turned the star-flecked horizons to murky wells of shadow.

"Something lies on the skyline to the south," he muttered uneasily. "A hill? I cannot tell, or even be sure that I see anything at all."

"You're seeing mirages already," said Conan irritably. "Lie down and sleep."

And so saying Conan slumbered.

The sun in his eyes awoke him. He sat up, yawning, and his first sensation was that of thirst. He lifted his canteen and wet his lips. One drink left. Bourtai still slept. Conan's eves wandered over the southern horizon and he started. He kicked the recumbent Bourchikoun.

"Hey, wake up. I reckon you weren't seeing things after all. There's your hill—and a strange-looking one, too."

The thief woke as a wild thing wakes, instantly and completely, his hand leaping to his long knife as he glared about for enemies. His gaze followed Conan's pointing fingers and his eves widened.

"By Yun and by Erlik!" he swore. "We have come into a land of djinn! That is no hill—it is a city of stone in the midst of the sands!"

Conan bounded to his feet like a steel spring released. As he gazed with bated breath, a fierce shout escaped his lips. At his feet the slope of the ridge ran down into a wide and level expanse of sand that stretched away southward. And far away, across those sands, to his straining sight the 'hill' slowly took shape, like a mirage growing from the drifting sands.

He saw great uneven walls, massive battlements; all about crawled the sands like a living, sensate thing, drifted high about the walls, softening the rugged outlines. No wonder that at first glance the whole had appeared like a hill.

"Kara-Shehr!" Conan exclaimed fiercely. "Beled-el-Djinn! The city of the dead! It wasn't a pipe-dream after all! We've found it—by Crom, we've found it! Come on! Let's go!"

Bourtai shook his head uncertainly and muttered something about evil djinn under his breath, but he followed. The sight of the ruins had swept from Conan his thirst and hunger, and the fatigue that a few hours' sleep had not fully overcome. He trudged on swiftly, oblivious to the rising heat, his eyes gleaming with the lust of the explorer. It was not altogether greed for the fabled gem that had prompted Conan to risk his life in that grim wilderness; deep in his soul lurked the age-old heritage of the white man, the urge to seek out the hidden places of the world, and that urge had been stirred to the depths by the ancient tales.

Now as they crossed the level wastes that separated the broken land from the city, they saw the shattered walls take clearer form and shape, as if they grew out of the morning sky. The city seemed built of huge blocks of black stone, but how high the walls had been there was no telling because of the sand that drifted high about their base; in many places they had fallen away and the sand hid the fragments entirely.

The sun reached her zenith and thirst intruded itself in spite of zeal and enthusiasm, but Conan fiercely mastered his suffering. His lips were parched and swollen, but he would not take that last drink until he had reached the ruined city. Bourtai wet his lips from his own canteen and tried to share the remainder with his friend. Conan shook his head and plodded on.

In the ferocious heat of the desert afternoon they reached the ruin, and passing through a wide breach in the crumbling wall, gazed on the dead city. Sand choked the ancient streets and lent fantastic form to huge fallen and half-hidden columns. So crumbled into decay and so covered with sand was the whole that the explorers could make out little of the original plan of the city; now it was but a waste of drifted sand and crumbling stone over which brooded, like an invisible cloud, an aura of unspeakable antiquity.

But directly in front of them ran a broad avenue, the outline of which not even the ravaging sands and winds of time had been able to efface. On either side of the wide way were ranged huge columns, not unusually tall, even allowing for the sand that hid their bases, but incredibly massive. On the top of each column stood a figure carved from solid stone—great, somber images, half human, half bestial, partaking of the brooding brutishness of the whole city. Conan cried out in amazement.

"The winged bulls of Nineveh. The bulls with men's heads! By the saints, Ali, the old tales are true! The Shemites did build this city! The whole tale's true! And look!"

He pointed down the broad street to the great building which reared at the other end, a colossal, brooding edifice whose columns and walls of solid black stone blocks defied the winds and sands of time. The drifting, obliterating sea washed about its foundations, overflowing into its doorways, but it would require a thousand years to inundate the whole structure.

"An abode of devils!" muttered Bourtai, uneasily.

"The temple of Bel!" exclaimed Conan. "Come on!—I was afraid we'd find all the palaces and temples hidden by the sand and have to dig for the gem."

"Little good it will do us," muttered Bourtai. "Here we die."

"I reckon so." Conan unscrewed the cap of his canteen. "Let's take our last drink. Anyway, we're safe from the Shemites. They'd never dare come here, with their superstitions. We'll drink and then we'll die, I reckon, but first we'll find the jewel. When I pass out, I want to have it in my hand. Maybe a few centuries later some lucky son-of-a-bow will find our skeletons—and the gem. Here's to him, whoever he is!"

With which grim jest Conan drained his canteen and Bourtai followed suit. They had played their last ace; the rest lay on the lap of Crom.

They strode up the broad way, and Bourtai, utterly fearless in the face of human foci, glanced nervously to tight and left, half expecting to see a horned and fantastic face leering at him from behind a column. Conan felt the somber antiquity of the place, and almost found himself fearing a rush of bronze war chariots down the forgotten streets, or to hear the sudden menacing flare of bronze trumpets. The silence in dead cities was so much more intense, he reflected, than that on the open desert.

They came to the portals of the great temple. Rows of immense columns flanked the wide doorway, which was ankle-deep in sand, and from which sagged massive bronze frameworks that had once braced mighty doors, whose polished woodwork had rotted away centuries ago. They passed into a mighty hall of misty twilight whose shadowy stone roof was upheld by columns like the trunks of forest trees. The whole effect of the architecture was one of awesome magnitude and sullen, breathtaking splendor, like a temple built by somber giants for the abode of dark gods.

The thief walked fearfully, as if he expected to awake sleeping gods, and Conan, without the thief's superstitions, yet felt the gloomy majesty of the place lay somber hands on his soul.

No trace of a footprint showed in the deep dust on the floor; half a century had passed since the affrighted and devilridden Turanian had fled these silent halls. As for the bandits, it was easy to see why those superstitious sons of the desert shunned this haunted city—and haunted it was, not by actual ghosts, perhaps, but by the shadows of lost splendors.

As they trod the sands of the hall, which seemed endless, Conan pondered many questions: How did these fugitives from the wrath of frenzied rebels build this city? How did they pass through the country of their foes—for Babylonia lay between Assyria and the manian desert. Yet there had been no other place for them to go; westward lay Shem and the sea, and north and east swarmed the dangerous foes, those fierce peoples whose aid had stiffened the arm of Shem to smite her foe to the dust.

Possibly, thought Conan, Kara-Shehr—whatever its name had been in those dim days—had been built as an outpost border city before the fall of an ancient Shemitish empire, whither survivals of that overthrow fled. At any rate it was possible that Kara-Shehr had outlasted others by some centuries—a strange, hermit city, no doubt, cut off from the rest of the world.

Surely, as Bourtai had said, this was once fertile country, watered by oases; and doubtless in the broken country they had passed over the night before, there had been quarries that furnished the stone for the building of the city.

Then what caused its downfall? Did the encroachment of the sands and the filling up of the springs cause the people to abandon it, or was Kara-Shehr a city of silence before the sands crept over the walls? Did the downfall come from within or without? Did civil war blot out the inhabitants, or were they slaughtered by some powerful foe from the desert? Conan shook his head in baffled chagrin. The answers to those questions were lost in the maze of forgotten ages.

"Yun!" They had traversed the great shadowy hall and at its further end they came upon a hideous black stone altar, behind which loomed an ancient god, bestial and horrific. Conan shrugged his shoulders as he recognized the monstrous aspect of the image—aye, that was Bel, on which black altar in other ages many a screaming, writhing, naked victim had offered up its naked soul. The idol embodied in its utter, abysmal and sullen bestiality the whole soul of this demoniac city. Surely, thought Conan, the builders of Nineveh and Kara-Shehr were cast in another mold from the people of today. Their art and culture were too ponderous, too grimly barren of the lighter aspects of humanity, to be wholly human, as modern man understands humanity.

Their architecture was repellent; of high skill, yet so massive, sullen and brutish in effect as to be almost beyond the comprehension of moderns.

The adventurers passed through a narrow door which opened in the end of the hall close to the idol, and came into a series of wide, dim, dusty chambers connected by column-flanked corridors. Along these they strode in the gray ghostly light, and came at last to a wide stair, whose massive stone steps led upward and vanished in the gloom. Here Bourtai halted.

"We have dared much, ," he muttered. "Is it wise to dare more?"

Conan, aquiver with eagerness, yet understood the Bourchikoun's mind. "You mean we shouldn't go up those stairs?"

"They have an evil look. To what chambers of silence and horror may they lead? When djinn haunt deserted buildings, they lurk in the upper chambers. At any moment a demon may bite off our heads."

"We're dead men anyhow," grunted Conan. "But I tell you—you go on back through the hall and watch for the Shemites while I go upstairs."

"Watch for a wind on the horizon," responded the Bourchikoun gloomily, shifting his bow and loosening his long knife in its scabbard. "No Bedouin comes here. Lead on, . Thou'rt mad after the manner of all Franks,—but I would not leave thee to face the djinn alone."

So the companions mounted the massive stairs, their feet sinking deep into the accumulated dust of centuries at each step. Up and up they went, to an incredible height until the depths below merged into a vague gloom.

"We walk blind to our doom, ," muttered Bourtai. “Nevertheless, I feel the presence of slumbering Evil and never again shall I hear the wind blowing up the Khitan Pass."

Conan made no reply. He did not like the breathless silence that brooded over the ancient temple, nor the grisly gray light that filtered from some hidden source.

Now above them the gloom lightened somewhat and they emerged into a vast circular chamber, grayly illumined by light that filtered in through the high, pierced ceiling. But another radiance lent itself to the illumination. A cry burst from Conan's lips, echoed by Bourtai.

Standing on the top step of the broad stone stair, they looked directly across the broad chamber, with its dustcovered heavy tile floor and bare black stone walls. From about the center of the chamber, massive steps led up to a stone dais, and on this dais stood a marble throne. About this throne glowed and shimmered an uncanny light, and the awestruck adventurers gasped as they saw its source. On the throne slumped a human skeleton, an almost shapeless mass of moldering bones. A fleshless hand sagged outstretched upon the broad marble throne-arm, and in its grisly clasp there pulsed and throbbed like a living thing, a great crimson stone.

The Fire of Asshurbanipal! Even after they had found the lost city Conan had not really allowed himself to believe that they would find the gem, or that it even existed in reality. Yet he could not doubt the evidence of his eyes, dazzled by that evil, incredible glow. With a fierce shout he sprang across the chamber and up the steps. Bourtai was at his heels, but when Conan would have seized the gem, the Bourchikoun laid a hand on his arm.

"Wait!" exclaimed the crippled thief. "Touch it not yet, ! A curse lies on ancient things—and surely this is a thing triply accursed! Else why has it lain here untouched in a country of thieves for so many centuries? It is not well to disturb the possessions of the dead."

"Pah!" snorted the Cimmerian. "Superstitions! The bandits were scared by the tales that have come down to them from their ancestors. Being desert-dwellers they mistrust cities anyway, and no doubt this one had an evil reputation in its lifetime. And nobody except bandits have seen this place before, except that Turanian, who was probably half demented with suffering.

"These bones may be those of the king mentioned in the legend—the dry desert air preserves such things indefinitely—but I doubt it. Maybe Shemitish—most likely Ophirian—some beggar that got the gem and then died on that throne for some reason or other."

The Bourchikoun scarcely heard him. He was gazing in fearful fascination at the great stone, as a hypnotized bird stares into a serpent's eye.

"Look at it, !" he whispered. "What is it? No such gem as this was ever cut by mortal hands! Look how it throbs and pulses like the heart of a cobra!"

Conan was looking, and he was aware of a strange undefined feeling of uneasiness. Well versed in the knowledge of precious stones, he had never seen a stone like this. At first glance he had supposed it to be a monster ruby, as told in the legends. Now he was not sure, and he had a nervous feeling that Bourtai was right, that this was no natural, normal gem: He could not classify the style in which it was cut, and such was the power of its lurid radiance that he found it difficult to gaze at it closely for any length of time. The whole setting was not one calculated to soothe restless nerves. The deep dust on the floor suggested an unwholesome antiquity; the gray light evoked a sense of unreality, and the heavy black walls towered grimly, hinting at hidden things.

"Let's take the stone, and go!" muttered Conan, an unaccustomed panicky dread rising in his bosom.

"Wait!" Bourtai's eyes were blazing, and he gazed, not at the gem, but at the sullen stone walls. "We are flies in the lair of the spider! Conan, as Yun lives, it is more than the ghosts of old fears that lurk over this city of horror! I feel the presence of peril, as I have felt it before—as I felt it in a jungle cavern where a python lurked unseen in the darkness—as I felt it in the temple of Thuggee where the hidden stranglers of Siva crouched to spring upon us—as I feel it now, tenfold!"

Conan's hair prickled. He knew that Bourtai was an accomplished thief, not to be stampeded by silly fear or senseless panic; he well remembered the incidents referred to by the Bourchikoun, as he remembered other occasions upon which Bourtai's Oriental telepathic instinct had warned him of danger before that danger was seen or heard.

"What is it, Bourtai?" he whispered.

The Bourchikoun shook his head, his eyes filled with a weird mysterious light as he listened to the dim occult promptings of his subconsciousness.

"I know not; I know it is close to us, and that it is very ancient and very evil. I think—" Suddenly he halted and wheeled, the eery light vanishing from his eyes to be replaced by a glare of wolf-like fear and suspicion.

"Hark, !" he snapped. "Ghosts or dead men mount the stair!"

Conan stiffened as the stealthy pad of soft sandals on stone reached his ear.

"By Yun!" he rapped; "something's out there—"

The ancient walls re-echoed to a chorus of wild yells as a horde of savage figures flooded the chamber. For one dazed insane instant Conan believed wildly that they were being attacked by re-embodied warriors of a vanished age; then the spiteful crack of an arrow past his ear and the acrid smell of blood told him that their foes were material enough. Conan cursed; in their fancied security—they had been caught like rats in a trap by the pursuing Shemites.

Even as the Cimmerian threw up his bow, Bourtai fired point-blank with deadly effect, hurled his empty bow into the horde and went down the steps like a hurricane, his three-foot knife shimmering in his hairy hand. Into his gusto for battle went real relief that his foes were human. An arrow ripped the turban from his head, but the man went down with a split skull beneath the thief's first, shearing stroke.

A tall figure aimed a bow to the Bourchikoun's side, but before he could release, Conan's arrow scattered his brains. The very number of the attackers hindered their onslaught on the crippled thief, whose tigerish quickness made shooting as dangerous to themselves as to him. The bulk of them swarmed about him, striking with scimitar and bow while others charged up the steps after Conan. At that range there was no need for bows; the Cimmerian simply thrust his knife into a bearded face and tore it into a ghastly ruin. The others came on, screaming like panthers.

And now as he prepared to unleash his final arrow, Conan saw two things in one flashing instant—a wild warrior who, with froth on his beard and a heavy scimitar uplifted, was almost upon him, and another who knelt on the floor drawing a careful bead on the plunging Bourtai. Conan made an instant choice and fired over the shoulder of the charging swordsman, killing the bowman—and voluntarily offering his own life for his friend's; for the scimitar was swinging at his own head. But even as the man swung, grunting with the force of the blow, his sandaled foot slipped on the marble steps and the curved blade, veering erratically from its arc, clashed on Conan's bow. In an instant the Cimmerian clubbed him with the bow, and as the Bedouin recovered his balance and again heaved up the scimitar, Conan struck with all his power, and limbs of the bow and the skull it impacted upon shattered together.

Then an arrow smacked into his shoulder, sickening him with the shock.

As he staggered dizzily, a figure whipped a turbancloth about his feet and jerked viciously. Conan pitched headlong down the steps, to strike with stunning force. A scimitar in a brown hand went up to dash out his brains, but an imperious command halted the blow.

"Slay him not, but bind him hand and foot."

As Conan struggled dazedly against many gripping hands, it seemed to him that somewhere he had heard that imperious voice before.

The Cimmerian's downfall had occurred in a matter of seconds. Even as Conan's second shot had cracked, Bourtai had half severed a raider's arm and himself received a numbing blow from a bow-stock on his left shoulder. His sheepskin coat, worn despite the desert heat, saved his hide from half a dozen slashing knives. A bow was discharged so close to his face that the powder burnt him fiercely, bringing a bloodthirsty yell from the maddened Bourchikoun. As Bourtai swung up his dripping blade the bowman, ashy-faced, lifted his bow above his head in both hands to parry the downward blow, whereat the thief, with a yelp of ferocious exultation, shifted as a junglecat strikes and plunged his long knife into the man's belly. But at that instant a scimitar, swung with all the hearty ill-will its wielder could evoke, crashed against the little thief's head, laying open the scalp and dashing him to his knees.

With the dogged and silent ferocity of his breed, Bourtai staggered blindly up again, slashing at foes he could scarcely see, but a storm of blows battered him down again, nor did his attackers cease beating him until he lay still. They would have finished him in short order then, but for another peremptory order from their chief; whereupon they bound the senseless knife-man and flung him down alongside Conan, who was fully conscious and aware of the savage hurt of the arrow in his shoulder.

He glared up at the tall man who stood looking down at him.

"Well," said this one—and Conan saw he was no Zuagir—"do you not remember me?"

Conan scowled; an arrow-wound is no aid to concentration.

"You look familiar—by Crom!—you are! Kai Shahh!"

"I am honored! The remembers!" Kai Shahh salaamed mockingly. "And you remember, no doubt, the occasion on which you made me a present of—this!"

The dark eyes shadowed with bitter menace and the man indicated a thin white scar on the angle of his jaw.

"I remember," snarled Conan, whom pain and anger did not tend to make docile. "It was in Somaliland, years ago. You were in the slave-trade then. A wretch of a nigger escaped from you and took refuge with me. You walked into my camp one night in your high-handed way, started a row and in the ensuing scrap you got a butcher-knife across your face. I wish I'd cut your lousy throat."

"You had your chance," answered the man. "Now the tables are turned."

"I thought your stamping-ground lay west," growled Conan.

"I quit the slave-trade long ago," answered the man. "It is an outworn game. I led a band of thieves in Hyrkania for a time; then again I was forced to change my location. I came here with a few faithful followers, and by Yun, those wild men nearly slit my throat at first. But I overcame their suspicions, and now I lead more men than have followed me in years.

"They whom you fought off yesterday were my men—scouts I had sent out ahead. My oasis lies far to the west. We have ridden for many days, for I was on my way to this very city. When my scouts rode in and told me of two wanderers, I did not alter my course, for I had business first in Beled-el-Djinn. We rode into the city from the west and saw your tracks in the sand. We followed there, and you were blind buffalo who heard not our coming."

Conan snarled. "You wouldn't have caught us so easy, only we thought no man would dare come into Kara-Shehr."

Kai Shahh nodded. "But I am no ordinary man. I have traveled far and seen many lands and many races, and I have read many books. I know that fear is smoke, that the dead are dead, and that djinn and ghosts and curses are mists that the wind blows away. It was because of the tales of the red stone that I came into this forsaken desert. But it has taken months to persuade my men to ride with me here.

"But—I am here! And your presence is a delightful surprize. Doubtless you have guessed why I had you taken alive; I have more elaborate entertainment planned for you and that Pathan swine. Now—I take the Fire of Asshurbanipal and we will go."

He turned toward the dais, and one of his men, a bearded one-eyed giant, exclaimed, "Hold, my lord! Ancient evil reigned here before the days of Acheron! The djinn howl through these halls when the winds blow, and men have seen ghosts dancing on the walls beneath the moon. No man of mortals has dared this black city for a thousand years—save one, half a century ago, who fled shrieking.

"You have come here from Hyrkania; you do not know the ancient curse on this foul city, and this evil stone, which pulses like the red heart of Satan! We have followed you here against our judgment, because you have proven yourself a strong man, and have said you hold a charm against all evil beings. You said you but wished to look on this mysterious gem, but now we see it is your intention to take it for yourself. Do not offend the djinn!"

"Nay, Kai Shahh, do not offend the djinn!" chorused the other bandits. The man's own hard-bitten ruffians, standing in a compact group somewhat apart from the bandits, said nothing; hardened to crimes and deeds of impiety, they were less affected by the superstitions of the desert men, to whom the dread tale of the accursed city had been repeated for centuries. Conan, even while hating Kai Shahh with concentrated venom, realized the magnetic power of the man, the innate leadership that had enabled him to overcome thus far the fears and traditions of ages.

"The curse is laid on infidels who invade the city," answered Kai Shahh, "not on the Faithful. See, in this chamber have we overcome our kafar foes!"

A white-bearded desert hawk shook his head.

"The curse is more ancient than Acheron, and recks not of race or creed. Evil men reared this black city in the dawn of the Beginnings of Days. They oppressed our ancestors of the black tents, and warred among themselves; aye, the black walls of this foul city were stained with blood, and echoed to the shouts of unholy revel and the whispers of dark intrigues.

"Thus came the stone to the city: there dwelt a magician at the court of Asshurbanipal, and the black wisdom of ages was not denied to him. To gain honor and power for himself, he dared the horrors of a nameless vast cavern in a dark, untraveled land, and from those fiendhaunted depths he brought that blazing gem, which is carved of the frozen flames of Hell! By reason of his fearful power in black magic, he put a spell on the demon which guarded the ancient gem, and so stole away the stone. And the demon slept in the cavern unknowing.

"So this magician—Xuthltan by name—dwelt in the court of the sultan Asshurbanipal and did magic and forecast events by scanning the lurid deeps of the stone, into which no eyes but his could look unblinded. And men called the stone the Fire of Asshurbanipal, in honor of the king.

"But evil came upon the kingdom and men cried out that it was the curse of the djinn, and the sultan in great fear bade Xuthltan take the gem and cast it into the cavern from which he had taken it, lest worse ill befall them.

"Yet it was not the magician's will to give up the gem wherein he read strange secrets of pre-Adamite days, and he fled to the rebel city of Kara-Shehr, where soon civil war broke out and men strove with one another to possess the gem. Then the king who ruled the city, coveting the stone, seized the magician and put him to death by torture, and in this very room he watched him die; with the gem in his hand the king sat upon the throne—even as he has sat upon the throne—even as he has sat throughout the centuries—even as now he sits!"

The man's finger stabbed at the moldering bones on the marble throne, and the wild desert men blenched; even Kai Shahh's own scoundrels recoiled, catching their breath, but the man showed no sign of perturbation.

"As Xuthltan died," continued the old Bedouin, "he cursed the stone whose magic had not saved him, and he shrieked aloud the fearful words which undid the spell he had put upon the demon in the cavern, and set the monster free. And crying out on the forgotten gods, Cthulhu and Koth and Yog-Sothoth, and all the pre-Adamite Dwellers in the black cities under the sea and the caverns of the earth, he called upon them—to take back that which was theirs, and with his dying breath pronounced doom on the false king, and that doom was that the king should sit on his throne holding in his hand the Fire of Asshurbanipal until the thunder of Judgment Day.

"Thereat the great stone cried out as a live thing cries, and the king and his soldiers saw a black cloud spinning up from the floor, and out of the cloud blew a fetid wind, and out of the wind came a grisly shape which stretched forth fearsome paws and laid them on the king, who shriveled and died at their touch. And the soldiers fled screaming, and all the people of the city ran forth wailing into the desert, where they perished or gained through the wastes to the far oasis towns. Kara-Shehr lay silent and deserted, the haunt of the lizard and the jackal. And when some of the desert people ventured into the city they found the king dead on his throne, clutching the blazing gem, but they dared not lay hand upon it, for they knew the demon lurked near to guard it through all the ages as he lurks near even as we stand here."

The warriors shuddered involuntarily and glanced about, and Kai Shahh said, "Why did he not come forth when the others entered the chamber? Is he deaf, that the sound of the combat has not awakened him?"

"We have not touched the gem," answered the old man, "nor had the others molested it. Men have looked on it and lived; but no mortal may touch it and survive."

Kai Shahh started to speak, gazed at the stubborn, uneasy faces and realized the futility of argument. His attitude changed abruptly.

"I am master here," he snapped, dropping a hand to his weapon. "I have not sweat and bled for this gem to be balked at the last by groundless fears! Stand back, all! Let any man cross me at the peril of his head!"

He faced them, his eyes blazing, and they fell back, cowed by the force of his ruthless personality. He strode boldly up the marble steps, and the Shemites caught their breath, recoiling toward the door; Bourtai, conscious at last, groaned dismally. God! thought Conan, what a barbaric scene!—bound captives on the dust-heaped floor, wild warriors clustered about, gripping their weapons, the raw acrid scent of blood and burnt powder still fouling the air, corpses strewn in a horrid welter of blood, brains and entrails—and on the dais, the hawk-faced man, oblivious to all except the evil crimson glow in the skeleton fingers that rested on the marble throne.

A tense silence gripped all as Kai Shahh stretched forth his hand slowly, as if hypnotized by the throbbing crimson light. And in Conan's subconsciousness there shuddered a dim echo, as of something vast and loathsome waking suddenly from an age-long slumber. The Cimmerian's eyes moved instinctively toward the grim cyclopean walls. The jewel's glow had altered strangely; it burned a deeper, darker red, angry and menacing.

"Heart of all evil," murmured the man, "how many princes died for thee in the Beginnings of Happenings? Surely the blood of kings throbs in thee. The sultans and the princesses and the generals who wore thee, they are dust and are forgotten, but thou blazest with majesty undimmed, fire of the world—"

Kai Shahh seized the stone. A shuddery wail broke from the Shemites, cut through by a sharp inhuman cry. To Conan it seemed, horribly, that the great jewel had cried out like a living thing! The stone slipped from the man's hand. Kai Shahh might have dropped it; to Conan it looked as though it leaped convulsively, as a live thing might leap. It rolled from the dais, bounding from step to step, with Kai Shahh springing after it, cursing as his clutching hand missed it. It struck the floor, veered sharply, and despite the deep dust, rolled like a revolving ball of fire toward the back wall. Kai Shahh was close upon it—it struck the wall—the man's hand reached for it.

A scream of mortal fear ripped the tense silence. Without warning the solid wall had opened. Out of the black wall that gaped there, a tentacle shot and gripped the man's body as a python girdles its victim, and jerked him headlong into the darkness. And then the wall showed blank and solid once more; only from within sounded a hideous, high-pitched, muffled screaming that chilled the blood of the listeners. Howling wordlessly, the Shemites stampeded, jammed in a battling, screeching mass in the doorway, tore through and raced madly down the wide stairs.

Conan and Bourtai, lying helplessly, heard the frenzied clamor of their flight fade away into the distance, and gazed in dumb horror at the grim wall. The shrieks had faded into a more horrific silence. Holding their breath, they heard suddenly a sound that froze the blood in their veins—the soft sliding of metal or stone in a groove. At the same time the hidden door began to open, and Conan caught a glimmer in the blackness that might have been the glitter of monstrous eyes. He closed his own eyes; he dared not look upon whatever horror slunk from that hideous black well. He knew that there are strains the human brain cannot stand, and every primitive instinct in his soul cried out to him that this thing was nightmare and lunacy. He sensed that Bourtai likewise closed his eyes, and the two lay like dead men.

Conan heard no sound, but he sensed the presence of a horrific evil too grisly for human comprehension—of an Invader from Outer Gulfs and far black reaches of cosmic being. A deadly cold pervaded the chamber, and Conan felt the glare of inhuman eyes sear through his closed lids and freeze his consciousness. If he looked, if he opened his eyes, he knew stark black madness would be his instant lot.

He felt a soul-shakingly foul breath against his face and knew that the monster was bending close above him, but he lay like a man frozen in a nightmare. He clung to one thought: neither he nor Bourtai had touched the jewel this horror guarded.

Then he no longer smelled the foul odor, the coldness in the air grew appreciably less, and he heard again the secret door slide in its groove. The fiend was returning to its hiding-place. Not all the legions of Hell could have prevented Conan's eyes from opening a tbow. He had only a glimpse as the hidden door slid to—and that one glimpse was enough to drive all consciousness from his brain. Conan, iron-nerved adventurer, fainted for the only time in his checkered life.

How long he lay there Conan never knew, but it could not have been long, for he was roused by Bourtai's whisper, "Lie still, , a little shifting of my body and I can reach thy cords with my teeth."

Conan felt the Bourchikoun's powerful teeth at work on his bonds, and as he lay with his face jammed into the thick dust, and his wounded shoulder began to throb agonizingly—he had forgotten it until now—he began to gather the wandering threads of his consciousness, and it all came back to him. How much, he wondered dazedly, had been the nightmares of delirium, born from suffering and the thirst that caked his throat? The fight with the Shemites had been real—the bonds and the wounds showed that—but the grisly doom of the man—the thing that had crept out of the black entrance in the wall—surely that had been a figment of delirium. Kai Shahh had fallen into a well or pit of some sort—Stave felt his hands were free and he rose to a sitting posture, fumbling for a pocket-knife the Shemites had overlooked. He did not look up or about the chamber as he slashed the cords that bound his ankles, and then freed Bourtai, working awkwardly because his left arm was stiff and useless.

"Where are the bandits?" he asked, as the Bourchikoun rose, lifting him to his feet.

"Yun, ," whispered Bourtai, "are you mad? Have you forgotten? Let us go quickly before the djinn returns!"

"It was a nightmare," muttered Conan. "Look—the jewel is back on the throne—" His voice died out. Again that red glow throbbed about the ancient throne, reflecting from the moldering skull; again in the outstretched finger-bones pulsed the Fire of Asshurbanipal. But at the foot of the throne lay another object that had not been there before—the severed head of Kai Shahh el Mekru stared sightlessly up at the gray light filtering through the stone ceiling. The bloodless lips were drawn back from the teeth in a ghastly grin, the staring eyes mirrored an intolerable horror. In the thick dust of the floor three spoors showed—one of the man's where he had followed the red jewel as it rolled to the wall, and above it two other sets of tracks, coming to the throne and returning to the wall—vast, shapeless tracks, as of splayed feet, taloned and gigantic, neither human nor animal.

"By Crom!" choked Conan. "It was true—and the Thing—the Thing I saw—"

Conan remembered the flight from that chamber as a rushing nightmare, in which he and his companion hurtled headlong down an endless stair that was a gray well of fear, raced blindly through dusty silent chambers, past the glowering idol in the mighty hall and into the blazing light of the desert sun, where they fell slavering, fighting for breath.

Again Conan was roused by the thief's voice: "Sahib, , in the Name of Yun the Compassionate, our luck has turned!"

Conan looked at his companion as a man might look in a trance: The Bourchikoun's garments were in tatters, and blood-soaked. He was stained with dust and caked with blood, and his voice was a croak. But his eyes were alight with hope and he pointed with a trembling finger.

"In the shade of yon ruined wall!" he croaked, striving to moisten his blackened lips. "Yun il allah! The horses of the men we killed! With canteens and food-pouches at the saddle-horns! Those dogs fled without halting for the steeds of their comrades!"

New life surged up into Conan's bosom and he rose, staggering.

"Out of here," he mumbled. "Out of here, quick!"

Like dying men they stumbled to the horses, tore them loose and climbed fumblingly into the saddles.

"We'll lead the spare mounts," croaked Conan, and Bourtai nodded emphatic agreement.

"Belike we shall need them ere we sight the coast."

Though their tortured nerves screamed for the water that swung in canteens at the saddle-horns, they turned the mounts aside and, swaying in the saddle, rode like flying corpses down the long sandy street of Kara-Shehr, between the ruined palaces and the crumbling columns, crossed the fallen wall and swept out into the desert. Not once did either glance back toward that black pile of ancient horror, nor did either speak until the ruins faded into the hazy distance. Then and only then did they draw rein and ease their thirst.

"By Yun!" said Bourtai. "Those dogs have beaten me until it is as though every bone in my body were broken. Dismount, I beg thee, , and let me probe for that accursed arrow, and dress thy shoulder to the best of my meager ability."

While this was going on, Bourtai spoke, avoiding his friend's eye, "You said, , you said something about—about seeing? What saw ye, in Yun's name?"

A strong shudder shook the Cimmerian's steely fray "You didn't look when—when the—the Thing put back the jewel in the skeleton's hand and left Kai Shahh's head on the dais?"

"By Yun, not I!" swore Bourtai. "My eyes were as closed as if they had been welded together by the molten irons of Erlik!"

Conan made no reply until the comrades had once more swung into the saddle and started on their long trek for the coast, which, with spare horses, food, water and weapons, they had a good chance to reach.

"I looked," the Cimmerian said somberly. "I wish I had not; I know I'll dream about it for the rest of my life. I had only a glance; I couldn't describe it as a man describes an earthly thing. Crom help me, it wasn't earthly or sane either. Mankind isn't the first owner of the earth; there were Beings here before his coming—and now, survivals of hideously ancient epochs. Maybe spheres of alien dimensions press unseen on this material universe today. Sorcerers have called up sleeping devils before now and controlled them with magic. It is not unreasonable to suppose a magician could invoke an elemental demon out of the earth to avenge him and guard something that must have come out of Hell in the first place."

"I'll try to tell you what I glimpsed; then we'll never speak of it again. It was gigantic and black and shadowy; it was a hulking monstrosity that walked upright like a man, but it was like a toad, too, and it was winged and tentacled. I saw only its back; if I'd seen the front of it—its face—I'd have undoubtedly lost my mind. The old man was right; God help us, it was the monster that Xuthltan called up out of the dark blind caverns of the earth to guard the Fire of Asshurbanipal!"

The Shadow of the Vulture

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

“Are the dogs dressed and gorged?”

“Aye, Protector of the Faithful.”

“Then let them crawl into the Presence.”

I

So they brought the envoys, pallid from months of imprisonment, before the canopied throne of Yezdigerd the Magnificent, king of Turan, who considered himself the mightiest monarch in an age of mighty monarchs. Under the great purple dome of the royal chamber gleamed the throne before which the world trembled – gold-panelled, pearl-inlaid. An emperor’s wealth in gems was sewn into the silken canopy from which depended a shimmering string of pearls ending a frieze of emeralds which hung like a halo of glory above Yezdigerd’s head. Yet the splendor of the throne was paled by the glitter of the figure upon it, bedecked in jewels, the aigret feather rising above the diamonded white turban. About the throne stood his nine viziers, in attitudes of humility, and warriors of the imperial bodyguard ranged the dais – troops in armor, black and white and scarlet plumes nodding above the gilded helmets.

The envoys were properly impressed – the more so as they had had nine weary months for reflection in the grim Castle of the Seven Towers that overlooks the Sea of Marmora. The head of the embassy choked down his choler and cloaked his resentment in a semblance of submission – a strange cloak on the shoulders of Habordansky. His rugged head bristled incongruously from the flaming silk robes presented him by the contemptuous king, as he was brought before the throne, his arms gripped fast by stalwart soldiers. Thus were foreign envoys presented to the kings, ever since that red day when Kabilovitch had slain the conqueror Murad with a hidden dagger.

The king regarded Habordansky with scant favor. Yezdigerd was a tall, slender man, with a thin down-curving nose and a thin straight mouth, the resolution of which his drooping mustachios did not soften. His narrow outward-curving chin was shaven. The only suggestion of weakness was in the slender, remarkably long neck, but that suggestion was belied by the hard lines of the slender figure, the glitter of the dark eyes. Born to the purple, heir to what he boasted was the mightiest military power in the world, he was crested with authority and cloaked in pride that recognized no peer beneath the gods.

Under his eagle gaze old Habordansky bent his head to hide the sullen rage in his eyes. Nine months before, the general had come to Aghrapur representing his master, with proposals for truce and the disposition of the iron crown, torn from the dead king's head on the bloody field, where the king's armies opened the road to other nations. There had been another emissary before him – Lasczky, the count palatine. Habordansky, with the bluntness of his breed, had claimed the crown for his master, rousing Yezdigerd’s ire. Lasczky had, like a suppliant, asked on his bended knees that crown for his countrymen.

To Lasczky had been given honor, gold and promises of patronage, for which he had paid with pledges abhorrent even to his avaricious soul – selling his ally’s subjects into slavery, and opening the road through the subject territory to the very heart of Hyboria.

All this was made known to Habordansky, frothing with fury in the prison to which the arrogant resentment of the king had assigned him. Now Yezdigerd looked contemptuously at the staunch old general, and dispensed with the usual formality of speaking through the mouthpiece of the Grand Vizier. A royal Turanian would not deign to admit knowledge of any other tongue, but Habordansky understood theirs. The king’s remarks were brief and without preamble.

“Say to your master that I now make ready to visit him in his own lands, and that if he fails to meet me there, I will meet him beneath the walls.”

Habordansky bowed, not trusting himself to speak. At a scornful wave of the imperial hand, an officer of the court came forward and bestowed upon the general a small gilded bag containing two hundred ducats. Each member of his retinue, waiting patiently at the other end of the chamber, under the spears of the soldiers, was likewise so guerdoned. Habordansky mumbled thanks, his knotty hands clenched about the gift with unnecessary vigor. The king grinned thinly, well aware that the ambassador would have hurled the coins into his face, had he dared. He half-lifted his hand, in token of dismissal, then paused, his eyes resting on the group of men who composed the general’s suite – or rather, on one of these men. This man was the tallest in the room, strongly built, wearing his Turanian gift-garments clumsily. At a gesture from the king he was brought forward in the grasp of the soldiers.

Yezdigerd stared at him narrowly. The Turanian vest and voluminous khalat could not conceal the lines of massive strength. His dark mane was square cut, set above volcanic blue eyes and a stubborn chin. They seemed strangely clouded; it was as if the man slept on his feet, with his eyes open.

“Do you speak our tongue?” The king did the fellow the stupendous honor of addressing him directly. Through all the pomp of the court there remained in the king some of the simplicity of his ancestors.

“Yes, your majesty,” answered the Cimmerian.

“Who are you?”

“Men name me Conan.”

Yezdigerd scowled and unconsciously his fingers wandered to his shoulder, where, under his silken robes, he could feel the outlines of an old scar.

“I do not forget faces. Somewhere I have seen yours – under circumstances that etched it into the back of my mind. But I am unable to recall those circumstances.”

“We met in battle,” offered the Cimmerian.

“Many men have I met in battle,” snapped Yezdigerd.

“Aye,” agreed Conan tranquilly. “Few men meet me in battle and live.”

The envoys were backed out of the Presence and the incident was closed. The Cimmerian would be escorted out of Aghrapur, and to the nearest boundaries of the empire. The Turanian’s warning would be carried post-haste and soon on the heels of that warning would come the armies. Yezdigerd’s officers knew that the king had more in mind than merely establishing his puppet on a conquered throne. Yezdigerd’s ambitions embraced all of Hyboria – including those stubborn lands which had for centuries sporadically poured forth hordes chanting and pillaging into the East, whose illogical and wayward peoples had again and again seemed ripe for conquest, yet who had always emerged, if not victorious, at least unconquered.

It was the evening of the morning on which the emissaries departed that Yezdigerd, brooding on his throne, raised his lean head and beckoned his Grand Vizier Sulimar, who approached with confidence. The Grand Vizier was always sure of his master’s approbation; was he not cup-companion and boyhood comrade of the king? Sulimar had but one rival in his master’s favor – the red-haired girl, Khurrem the Joyous, whom the rest of the land knew as Roxelana, whom slavers had dragged from her father’s house to be the king’s harim favorite.

“I remember the infidel at last,” said Yezdigerd. “Do you recall the first charge of the knights at Kahwarizim?”

Sulimar winced slightly at the allusion.

“Oh, Protector of the Pitiful, is it likely that I should forget an occasion on which the divine blood of my master was spilt by an unbeliever?”

“Then you remember that thirty-two knights, the barbarians, drove headlong into our array, each having pledged his life to cut down our person. By Erlik, they rode like men riding to a wedding, their great horses and long lances overthrowing all who opposed them, and their plate-armor turned the finest steel. Yet they fell as the crossbows spoke until only three were left in the saddle – the knight Marczali and two companions. These barbarians cut down my troops like ripe grain, but Marczali and one of his companions fell – almost at my feet.

“Yet one knight remained, though his vizored helmet had been torn from his head and blood started from every joint in his armor. He rode full at me, swinging his great two-handed sword, and I swear by the beard of the Prophet, death was so nigh me that I felt the burning breath of Erlik on my neck!

“His sword flashed like lightning in the sky, and glancing from my casque, whereby I was half stunned so that blood gushed from my nose, rent the mail on my shoulder and gave me this wound, which irks me yet when the rains come. The soldiers who swarmed around him cut the hocks of his horse, which brought him to earth as it went down, and the remnants of my troops bore me back out of the melee. Then the host came on, and I saw not what became of the knight. But today I saw him again.”

Sulimar started with an exclamation of incredulity.

“Nay, I could not mistake those blue eyes. How it is I know not, but the knight that wounded me at Kahwarizim was this Cimmerian, Conan.”

“But, Defender of the Faith,” protested Sulimar, “the heads of those dog-knights were heaped before thy royal pavilion –”

“And I counted them and said nothing at the time, lest men think I held thee in blame,” answered Yezdigerd. “There were but thirty-one. Most were so mutilated I could tell little of the features. But somehow the infidel escaped, who gave me this blow. I love brave men, but our blood is not so common that an unbeliever may with impunity spill it on the ground for the dogs to lap up. See ye to it.”

Sulimar salaamed deeply and withdrew. He made his way through broad corridors to a blue-tiled chamber whose gold-arched windows looked out on broad galleries, shaded by cypress and plane-trees, and cooled by the spray of silvery fountains. There at his summons came one Yaruk Khan, a slant-eyed impassive figure in harness of lacquered leather and burnished bronze.

“Dog-brother,” said the Vizier, “did thy koumiss-clouded gaze mark the tall Cimmerian lord who served the emir Habordansky – the lord whose hair is as a lion’s mane?”

“Aye, the barbarian who is called Amra by some.”

“Amra the Lion I know! Take a force of thy dog-brothers and go after this Amra the Cimmerian. Bring back this man and thou shalt be rewarded. The persons of envoys are sacred, but this matter is not official,” he added cynically.

“To hear is to obey!” With a salaam as profound as that accorded to the king himself, Yaruk Khan backed out of the presence of the second man of the empire.

He returned some days later, dusty, travel-stained, and without his prey. On him Sulimar bent an eye full of menace, and the man prostrated himself before the silken cushions on which the Grand Vizier sat, in the blue chamber with the gold-arched windows.

“Grand Vizier, let not thine anger consume thy slave. The fault was not mine, by the beard of the Prophet.”

“Squat on thy mangy haunches and bay out the tale,” ordered Sulimar considerately.

“Thus it was, my lord,” began Yaruk Khan. “I rode swiftly, and though the Cimmerian and the envoy had a long start, and pushed on through the night without halting, I came up with them the next midday. But lo, Amra was not among them, and when I inquired after him, the barbarian Habordansky replied only with many great oaths, like to the roaring of a cannon. So I spoke with various of the escort who understood the speech of these infidels, and learned what had come to pass. Yet I would have my lord remember that I only repeat the words of the Spahis of the escort, who are men without honor and lie like –”

“Like a Zamorian,” said Sulimar.

Yaruk Khan acknowledged the compliment with a wide dog-like grin, and continued, “This they told me. At dawn Amra drew horse away from the rest, and the emir Habordansky demanded of him the reason. Then Amra laughed in the manner of the Cimmerians – huh! huh! huh! – so. And Amra said, ‘The devil of good your service has done me, so I cool my heels for weeks in a Turanian prison. Yezdigerd has given us safe conduct over the border and I am not compelled to ride with you.’ ‘You dog,’ said the emir, ‘there is war in the wind and the Archduke has need of your sword.’ ‘Devil eat the Archduke,’ answered Amra; ‘Zapolya is a dog because he stood aside at Kahwarizim, and let us, his comrades, be cut to pieces, but your Duke is a dog too. When I am penniless I sell him my sword. Now I have two hundred ducats and these robes which I can sell to any merchant for a handful of silver, and may the devil bite me if I draw sword for any man while I have a penny left. I’m for the nearest tavern, and you and the Archduke may go to the devil.’ Then the emir cursed him with many great curses, and Amra rode away laughing, huh! huh! huh!, and singing a song about a cockroach named –”

“Enough!” Sulimar’s features were dark with rage. He plucked savagely at his beard, reflecting that in the allusion to Kahwarizim, Conan had practically clinched Yezdigerd’s suspicion. That matter of thirty-one heads when there should have been thirty-two was something no Turanian king would be likely to overlook. Officials had lost positions and their own heads over more trivial matters. The manner in which Yezdigerd had acted showed his almost incredible fondness and consideration for his Grand Vizier, but Sulimar, vain though he was, was shrewd and wished no slightest shadow to come between him and his sovereign.

“Could you not have tracked him down, dog?” he demanded.

“By Erlik,” swore the uneasy scout, “he must have ridden on the wind. He crossed the border hours ahead of me, and I followed him as far as I dared –”

“Enough of excuses,” interrupted Sulimar. “Send Mikhal Oglu to me.”

The scout departed thankfully. Sulimar was not tolerant of failure in any man.

The Grand Vizier brooded on his silken cushions until the shadow of a pair of vulture wings fell across the marble-tiled floor, and the lean figure he had summoned bowed before him. The man whose very name was a shuddering watchword of horror to all western Hyboria was soft-spoken and moved with the mincing ease of a cat, but the stark evil of his soul showed in his dark countenance, gleamed in his narrow slit eyes. He was the chief of the vultures, those wild riders whose raids spread fear and desolation throughout all lands beyond the king's borders. He stood in full armor, a jeweled helmet on his narrow head, the wide vulture wings made fast to the shoulders of his gilded chain-mail hauberk. Those wings spread wide in the wind when he rode, and under their pinions lay the shadows of death and destruction. It was Yezdigerd’s scimitar-tip, the most noted slayer of a nation of slayers, who stood before the Grand Vizier.

“Soon you will precede the hosts of our master into the lands of the infidel,” said Sulimar. “It will be your order, as always, to strike and spare not. You will waste the fields and the vineyards of the Caphars, you will burn their villages, you will strike down their men with arrows, and lead away their wenches captive. Lands beyond our line of march will cry out beneath your heel.”

“That is good hearing, Favored of Erlik,” answered Mikhal Oglu in his soft courteous voice.

“Yet there is an order within the order,” continued Sulimar, fixing a piercing eye on the vultures. “You know the Cimmerian, Conan?”

“Aye – Amra as the sailors call him.”

“Indeed, the pirate dog is one and the same as this Conan. This is my command – whoever fights or flees, lives or dies – this man must not live. Search him out wherever he lies, though the hunt carry you to the very depths of the Vilayet. When you bring me his head, your reward shall be thrice its weight in gold.”

“To hear is to obey, my lord. Men say he is the vagabond son of a noble Cimmerian family, whose ruin has been wine and women. They say he was once a Knight of our fair Turan, until cast forth and –”

“Do not underrate him,” answered Sulimar grimly. “Outcast he may be, but if he rode with Marczali, he is not to be despised. See thou to it!”

“There is no den where he can hide from me, oh Favored of Erlik,” declared Mikhal Oglu, “no night dark enough to conceal him, no forest thick enough. If I bring you not his head, I give him leave to send you mine.”

“Enough!” Sulimar grinned and tugged at his beard, well pleased. “You have my leave to go.”

The sinister vulture-winged figure went springily and silently from the blue chamber, nor could Sulimar guess that he was taking the first steps in a feud which should spread over years and far lands, swirling in dark tides to draw in thrones and kingdoms and red-haired women more beautiful than the flames of hell.

II

In a small thatched hut in a village not far from a river, lusty snores resounded where a figure reclined in state on a ragged cloak thrown over a heap of straw. It was Conan who slept the sleep of innocence and ale. The velvet vest, voluminous silken trousers, khalat and shagreen boots, gifts from a contemptuous king, were nowhere in evidence. The barbarian was clad in worn leather and rusty mail. Hands tugged at him, breaking his sleep, and he swore drowsily.
“Wake up, my lord! Oh, wake, good knight – good pig – good dog-soul – will you wake, then?”

“Fill my flagon, host,” mumbled the slumberer. “Who? – what? May the dogs bite you, Ivga! I’ve not another asper – not a penny. Go off like a good lass and let me sleep.”

The girl renewed her tugging and shaking.

“Oh dolt! Rise! Gird on your spit! There are happenings forward!”

“Ivga,” muttered Conan, pulling away from her attack, “take my burganet to the innkeep. He’ll give you enough for it to get drunk again.”

“Fool!” she cried in despair. “It isn’t money I want! The whole east is aflame, and none knows the reason thereof!”

“Has the rain ceased?” asked Conan, taking some interest in the proceedings at last.

“The rain ceased hours ago. You can only hear the drip from the thatch. Put on your sword and come out into the street. The men of the village are all drunk on your last silver, and the women know not what to think or do. Ah!”

The exclamation was broken from her by the sudden upleaping of a weird illumination which shone through the crevices of the hut. The Cimmerian got unsteadily to his feet, quickly girt on the great two-handed sword and stuck his dented burganet on his cropped locks. Then he followed the girl into the straggling street. She was a slender young thing, barefooted, clad only in a short tunic-like garment, through the wide rents of which gleamed generous expanses of white flesh.

There seemed no life or movement in the village. Nowhere showed a light. Water dripped steadily from the eaves of the thatched roofs. Puddles in the muddy streets gleamed black. Wind sighed and moaned eerily through the black sodden branches of the trees which pressed in bulwarks of darkness about the little village, and in the southeast, towering higher into the leaden sky, rose the lurid crimson glow that set the dank clouds to smoldering. The girl Ivga cringed close to the tall Cimmerian, whimpering.

“I’ll tell you what it is, my girl,” said he, scanning the glow. “It’s Yezdigerd’s devils. They’ve crossed the river and they’re burning the villages. Aye, I’ve seen glares like that in the sky before. I’ve expected him before now, but these cursed rains we’ve had for weeks must have held him back. Aye, it’s the vultures, right enough, and they won’t stop this side of Turan. Look you, my girl, go quickly and quietly to the stable behind the hut and bring me my gray stallion. We’ll slip out like mice from between the devil’s fingers. The stallion will carry us both, easily.”

“But the people of the village!” she sobbed, wringing her hands.

“Eh, well,” he said, “Crom rest them; the men have drunk my ale valiantly and the women have been kind – but horns of Satan, girl, the gray nag won’t carry a whole village!”

“Go you!” she returned. “I’ll stay and die with my people!”

“The Turanians won’t kill you,” he answered. “They’ll sell you to a fat old merchant who’ll beat you. I won’t stay to be cut open, and neither shall you –”

A terrible scream from the girl cut him short and he wheeled at the awful terror in her flaring eyes. Even as he did so, a hut at the lower end of the village sprang into flames, the sodden material burning slowly. A medley of screams and maddened yells followed the cry of the girl. In the sluggish light figures danced and capered wildly. Conan, straining his eyes in the shadows, saw shapes swarming over the low mud wall which drunkenness and negligence had left unguarded.

“Damnation!” he muttered. “The accursed ones have ridden ahead of their fire. They’ve stolen on the village in the dark – come on, girl –”

But even as he caught her white wrist to drag her away, and she screamed and fought against him like a wild thing, mad with fear, the mud wall crashed at the point nearest them. It crumpled under the impact of a score of horses, and into the doomed village reined the riders, distinct in the growing light. Huts were flaring up on all hands, screams rising to the dripping clouds as the invaders dragged shrieking women and drunken men from their hovels and cut their throats. Conan saw the lean figures of the horsemen, the firelight gleaming on their burnished steel; he saw the vulture wings on the shoulders of the foremost. Even as he recognized Mikhal Oglu, he saw the chief stiffen and point.

“At him, dogs!” yelled the vultures, his voice no longer soft, but strident as the rasp of a drawn saber. “It is Amra! Five hundred aspers to the man who brings me his head!”

With a curse Conan bounded for the shadows of the nearest hut, dragging the screaming girl with him. Even as he leaped, he heard the twang of bowstrings, and the girl sobbed and went limp in his grasp. She sank down at his feet, and in the lurid glare he saw the feathered end of an arrow quivering under her heart. With a low rumble he turned toward his assailants as a fierce bear turns at bay. An instant he stood, head out-thrust truculently, sword gripped in both hands; then, as a bear gives back from the onset of the hunters, he turned and fled about the hut, arrows whistling about him and glancing from the rings of his mail. There were no shots; the ride through that dripping forest had dampened the powder-flasks of the raiders.

Conan quartered about the back of the hut, mindful of the fierce yells behind him, and gained the shed behind the hut he had occupied, wherein he stabled his gray stallion. Even as he reached the door, someone snarled like a panther in the semi-dark and cut viciously at him. He parried the stroke with the lifted sword and struck back with all the power of his broad shoulders. The great blade glanced stunningly from the vultures’s polished helmet and rent through the mail links of his hauberk, tearing the arm from the shoulder. The Turanian sank down with a groan, and the Cimmerian sprang over his prostrate form. The gray stallion, wild with fear and excitement, neighed shrilly and reared as his master sprang on his back. No time for saddle or bridle. Conan dug his heels into the quivering flanks and the great steed shot through the door like a thunderbolt, knocking men right and left like tenpins. Across the firelit open space between the burning huts he raced, clearing crumpled corpses in his stride, splashing his rider from heel to head as he thrashed through the puddles.

The vultures made after the flying rider, loosing their shafts and giving tongue like hounds. Those mounted spurred after him, while those who had entered the village on foot ran through the broken wall for their horses.

Arrows flickered about Conan’s head as he put his steed at the only point open to him – the unbroken western wall. It was touch and go, for the footing was tricky and treacherous and never had the gray stallion attempted such a leap. Conan held his breath as he felt the great body beneath him gathering and tensing in full flight for the desperate effort; then with a volcanic heave of mighty thews the stallion rose in the air and cleared the barrier with scarce an inch to spare. The pursuers yelled in amazement and fury, and reined back. Born horsemen though they were, they dared not attempt that break-neck leap. They lost time seeking gates and breaks in the wall, and when they finally emerged from the village, the black, dank, whispering, dripping forest had swallowed up their prey.

Mikhal Oglu swore like a fiend and leaving his lieutenant Othman in charge with instructions to leave no living human being in the village, he pressed on after the fugitive, following the trail, by torches, in the muddy mold, and swearing to run him down, if the road led under the very walls of Makkalet.

III

Erlik did not will it that Mikhal Oglu should take Conan’s head in the dark, dripping forest. He knew the country better than they, and in spite of their zeal, they lost his trail in the darkness. Dawn found Conan riding through terror-stricken farmlands, with the flame of a burning world lighting the east and south. The country was thronged with fugitives, staggering under pitiful loads of household goods, driving bellowing cattle, like people fleeing the end of the world. The torrential rains that had offered false promise of security had not long stayed the march of the king.

With a quarter-million followers he was ravaging the eastern marches. While Conan had loitered in the taverns of isolated villages, drinking up the king’s bounty, cities had fallen, the men of the latter having been slaughtered by the soldiers, after promises of safety sworn by Yezdigerd, whom men named the Generous.

While the Archduke and the nobles and bishops squabbled among themselves, the elements alone seemed to war for them. Rain fell in torrents, and through the floods that changed plains and forest-bed to dank morasses, the Turanians struggled grimly. They drowned in raging rivers, and lost great stores of ammunition, ordnance and supplies when boats capsized, bridges gave way, and wagons mired. But on they came, driven by the implacable will of Yezdigerd, and now the Turanian swept upon them, with the vultures – ravaging the land like the drift ahead of a storm.

This in part Conan learned from the fugitives as he pushed his weary stallion toward the city which was the only sanctuary for the panting thousands. Behind him the skies flamed red and the screams of butchered victims came dimly down the wind to his ears. Sometimes he could even make out the swarming black masses of wild horsemen. The wings of the vulture beat horrifically over that butchered land and the shadows of those great wings fell across all Europe. Again the destroyer was riding out of the blue mysterious East as his brothers had ridden before him. But never before had such a storm risen against the West.

Before the waving vulture wings the road thronged with wailing fugitives; behind them it ran red and silent, strewn with mangled shapes that cried no more. The killers were not a half-hour behind him when Conan rode his reeling stallion through the gates of Makkalet. The people on the walls had heard the wailing for hours, rising awfully on the wind, and now afar they saw the sun flicker on the points of lances as the horsemen rode in amongst the masses of fugitives toiling down from the hills into the plain which girdles the city. They saw the play of naked steel like sickles among ripe grain.

Conan found the city in turmoil, the people swirling and screaming about Count Nikolas Salm, the seventy-years-old warhorse who commanded Makkalet, and his aides, Roggendrof, Zrinyi and Bakics. Salm was working with frantic haste, levelling houses near the walls and using their material to brace the ramparts, which were old and unstable, nowhere more than six feet thick, and in many places crumbling and falling down. The outer palisade was so frail it bore the name of the city hedge.

But under the lashing energy of Count Salm, a new wall twenty feet high was thrown up from the Stuben to the Karnthner Gate. Ditches interior to the old moat were dug, and ramparts erected from the drawbridge to the Salz Gate. Roofs were stripped of shingles, to lessen the chances of fire, and paving was ripped up to soften the impact of rock bombardment.

The suburbs had been deserted, and now they were fired lest they give shelter to the besiegers. In the process, which was carried out in the very teeth of the oncoming Sackmen, conflagrations broke out in the city and added to the delirium. It was all hell and bedlam turned loose, and in the midst of it, five thousand wretched noncombatants, old men and women and children, were ruthlessly driven from the gates to shift for themselves, and their screams, as the vultures swooped down, maddened the people within the walls. These hellions were arriving by thousands, topping the sky-lines and sweeping down on the city in irregular squadrons, like their namesake gathering about a dying camel. Within an hour after the first swarm had appeared, no man remained alive outside the gates, except those bound by long ropes to the saddle-peaks of their captors and forced to run at full speed or be dragged to death. The wild riders swirled about the walls, yelling and loosing their shafts. Men on the towers recognized the dread Mikhal Oglu by the wings on his cuirass, and noted that he rode from one heap of dead to another, avidly scanning each corpse in turn, pausing to glare questioningly at the battlements.

Meanwhile, from the west, a band of troops cut their way through a cordon and marched into the streets to the accompaniment of frenzied cheers, the Palgrave at their head.

Conan leaned on his sword and watched them pass in their gleaming breastplates and plumed crested helmets, with long crossbows on their shoulders and two-handed swords strapped to their steel-clad backs. He was a curious contrast in his rusty chain-mail, old-fashioned harness picked up here and there and slovenly pieced together – he seemed like a figure out of the past, rusty and tarnished, watching a newer, brighter generation go by. Yet their leader saluted him, with a glance of recognition, as the shining column swung past.

Conan started toward the walls, where the gunners were firing frugally at the vultures, who showed some disposition to climb upon the bastions on lariats thrown from their saddles. But on the way he heard that Salm was impressing nobles and soldiers in the task of digging moats and rearing new earthworks, and in great haste he took refuge in a tavern, where he bullied the host, a knock-kneed and apprehensive Wallachian, into giving him credit, and rapidly drank himself into a state where no one would have considered asking him to do work of any kind.

Shots, shouts and screams reached his ears, but he paid scant heed. He knew that the vultures would strike and pass on, to ravage the country beyond. He learned from the tavern talk that Salm had twenty thousand pikemen, two thousand horsemen and near a thousand volunteer citizens to oppose Yezdigerd’s hordes, together with seventy catapults. The news of the Turanians’ numbers numbed all hearts with dread – all but Conan’s. He was a fatalist in his way. But he discovered a conscience in ale, and was presently brooding over the people that had driven forth to perish. The more he drank the more melancholy he became.

At last he rose unsteadily and took up his great sword, muzzily intent on challenging Count Salm to a duel because of the matter. He bellowed down the timid importunities of the Wallachian and weaved out on the street. To his groggy sight the towers and spires cavorted crazily; people jostled him, knocking him aside as they ran about aimlessly. The Palgrave strode by clanking in his armor, the keen dark faces of his Spaniards contrasting with the square, florid countenances of the Lanzknechts.

“Shame on you, Conan!” said the armoured man sternly. “The Turanians are upon us, and you keep your snout shoved in an ale-pot!”

“Whose snout is in what ale-pot?” demanded Conan, weaving in an erratic half-circle as he fumbled at his sword. “Devil bite you, I’ll rap your pate for that –”

The Palgrave was already out of sight, and eventually Conan found himself on the Karnthner Tower, only vaguely aware of how he had got there. But what he saw sobered him suddenly. The Turanians were indeed upon Makkalet. The plain was covered with his tents, thirty thousand, some said, and swore that from the lofty spire of Saint Stephen’s cathedral a man could not see their limits. Four hundred of his boats lay on the river, and Conan heard men cursing the fleet which lay helpless far upstream, because its sailors, long unpaid, refused to man the ships. He also heard that Salm had made no reply at all to Yezdigerd’s demand to surrender.

Now, partly as a gesture, partly to awe the dogs, the king's array was moving in orderly procession before the ancient walls before settling down to the business of the siege. The sight was enough to awe the stoutest. The low-swinging sun struck fire from polished helmet, jeweled saber-hilt and lance-point. It was as if a river of shining steel flowed leisurely and terribly past the walls of Makkalet.

The vultures, who ordinarily formed the vanguard of the host, had swept on, but in their place rode a different kind of force, crouching on their high-peaked, short-stirruped saddles, their gnome-like heads guarded by iron helmets, their stocky bodies with bronze breastplates and lacquered leather. Behind them came the irregular infantry, a wild motley horde. Then their brothers, wild men on tough ponies fantastically adorned with fur and feathers. The riders wore caps and mantles of leopard skin; their unshorn hair hung in tangled strands about their high shoulders, and over their matted beards their eyes glared the madness of fanaticism and bhang.

After them came the real body of the army. First the knights with their retainers – horsemen and footmen from the feudal fiefs. Then the heavy cavalry, on splendid steeds. And last of all the real strength of the Turanian empire – the most terrible military organization in the world – the soldiers. On the walls men spat in black fury, recognizing kindred blood. For the soldiers were not Turanians. With a few exceptions, where Turanian parents had smuggled their offspring into the ranks to save them from the grinding life of a peasant, they were sons stolen in infancy and raised in the ranks of Turan, knowing but one master – the king; but one occupation – slaughter.

Their beardless features contrasted with those of their masters. Many had blue eyes and yellow mustaches. But all their faces were stamped with the wolfish ferocity to which they had been reared. Under their dark blue cloaks glinted fine mail, and many wore steel skull-caps under their curious high-peaked hats, from which depended a white sleeve-like piece of cloth, and through which was thrust a copper spoon. Long bird-of-paradise plumes likewise adorned these strange head-pieces.

Besides scimitars, bows and daggers, each soldier bore a crossbow, and their officers carried pots of coals for the lighting of the matches. Up and down the ranks scurried the dervishes, clad only in kalpaks of camel-hair and green aprons fringed with ebony beads, exhorting the Faithful. Military bands, the invention of the Turanian, marched with the columns, cymbals clashing, lutes twanging. Over the flowing sea the banners tossed and swayed – the crimson flag of the Spahis, the white banner of the soldiers with its two-edged sword worked in gold, and the horse-tail standards of the rulers – seven tails for the king, six for the Grand Vizier, three for the Agha of the soldiers. So Yezdigerd paraded his power before despairing Caphar eyes.

But Conan’s gaze was centered on the groups that labored to set up the ordnance of the king. And he shook his head in bewilderment.

“I see many bows and combustibles” he grunted. “Where the devil’s all the heavy catapults that Yezdigerd’s so proud of?”

“At the bottom of the river!” A pikeman grinned fiercely and spat as he answered. “Wulf Hagen sank that part of the Soldan’s flotilla. The rest of his siege weapons, they say, were mired because of the rains.”

A slow grin bristled Conan’s face.

“What was Yezdigerd’s word to Salm?”

“That he’d eat breakfast in Makkalet day after tomorrow.”

Conan shook his head ponderously.

IV

The siege commenced, with the roaring of cannons, the whistling of arrows, and the blasting crash of crossbows. The soldiers took possession of the ruined suburbs, where fragments of walls gave them shelter. Under a screen of irregulars and a volley of arrow-fire, they advanced methodically just after dawn.

On the threatened wall, leaning on his great sword, Conan watched an archer being carried off the wall, his brains oozing from a hole in his head; a Turanian rock had spoken too near the walls. The field-pieces of the king were barking like deep-toned dogs, knocking chips off the battlements. The soldiers were advancing, kneeling, firing, reloading as they came on. Missiles glanced from the crenelles and whined off venomously into space. One flattened against Conan’s hauberk, bringing an outraged grunt from him. Turning, he saw a colorful, incongruous figure bending over the massive breech.

It was a woman, dressed as Conan had not seen even the dandies of Makkalet dressed. She was tall, splendidly shaped, but lithe. From under a steel cap escaped rebellious tresses that rippled red gold in the sun over her compact shoulders. High boots of Cordovan leather came to her mid-thighs, which were cased in baggy breeches. She wore a shirt of fine Turanian mesh-mail tucked into her breeches. Her supple waist was confined by a flowing sash of green silk, into which were thrust a brace of daggers, and from which depended a long saber. Over all was carelessly thrown a scarlet cloak.

This surprizing figure was bending a huge siege crossbow, sighting it, in a manner betokening more than a passing familiarity, at a group of Turanians who were wheeling a carriage-catapult just within range.

“Eh, Red Sonja!” shouted a man-at-arms, waving his pike. “Give ’em hell, my lass!”

“Trust me, dog-brother,” she retorted as she applied the glowing match to the vent. “But I wish my mark was the king–”

A terrific detonation drowned her words and a swirl of smoke blinded every one on the turret, as the terrific recoil of the overcharged cannon knocked the firer flat on her back. She sprang up like a spring rebounding and rushed to the embrasure, peering eagerly through the dust, which clearing, showed the ruin of the crew. The huge bolt, bigger than a man’s head, had smashed full into the group clustered about the saker, and now they lay on the torn ground, their skulls blasted by the impact, or their bodies mangled by the flying iron splinters from their shattered gun. A cheer went up from the towers, and the woman called Red Sonja yelled with sincere joy and did the steps of a Hykanian dance.

Conan approached, eying in open admiration the splendid swell of her bosom beneath the pliant mail, the curves of her ample hips and rounded limbs. She stood as a man might stand, booted legs braced wide apart, thumbs hooked into her girdle, but she was all woman. She was laughing as she faced him, and he noted with fascination the dancing sparkling lights and changing colors of her eyes. She raked back her rebellious locks with a powder-stained hand and he wondered at the clear pinky whiteness of her firm flesh where it was unstained.

“Why did you wish for the king for a target, my girl?” he asked.

“Because he has my sister, the slut!” answered Sonja.

At that instant a great cry thundered over the walls and the girl started like a wild thing, ripping out her blade in a long flash of silver in the sun.

“I’ve heard that bellow!” she cried. “The soldiers –”

Conan was already on his way to the embrasures. He too had heard before the terrible soul-shaking shout of the charging soldiers. Yezdigerd meant to waste no time on the city that barred him from helpless Europe. He meant to crush its frail walls in one storm. The bashi-bazouki, the irregulars, died like flies to screen the main advance, and over heaps of their dead, the soldiers thundered against Makkalet. In the teeth of bow fire they surged on, crossing the moats on scaling-ladders laid across, bridge-like. Whole ranks went down as the wall-mounted ballistae twanged, but now the attackers were under the walls and the cumbrous bolts whirred over their heads, to work havoc in the rear ranks.

The Spanish crossbow men, firing almost straight down, took ghastly toll, but now the ladders gripped the walls, and the chanting madmen surged upward. Arrows whistled, striking down the defenders. Behind them the Turanian catapults fired, careless of injury to friend as well as foe. Conan, standing at an embrasure, was overthrown by a sudden terrific impact. A rock had smashed the merlon, braining half a dozen defenders.

Conan rose, half stunned, out of the debris of masonry and huddled corpses. He looked down into an uprushing waste of snarling, impassioned faces, where eyes glared like mad dogs’ and blades glittered like sunbeams on water. Bracing his feet wide, he heaved up his great sword and lashed down. The five-foot blade caved in steel caps and skulls, lashing through uplifted bucklers and iron shoulder-pieces. Men fell from the ladders, their nerveless fingers slipping from the bloody rungs.

But they swarmed through the breach on either side of him. A terrible cry announced that the Turanians had a foothold on the wall. But no man dared leave his post to go to the threatened point. To the dazed defenders it seemed that Makkalet was ringed by a glittering tossing sea that roared higher and higher about the doomed walls.

Stepping back to avoid being hemmed in, Conan grunted and lashed right and left. His eyes were no longer cloudy; they blazed like blue bale-fire. Three soldiers were down at his feet; his broadsword clanged in a forest of slashing scimitars. A blade splintered on his basinet, filling his eyes with fire-shot blackness. Staggering, he struck back and felt his great blade crunch home. Blood jetted over his hands and he tore his sword clear. Then with a yell and a rush someone was at his side and he heard the quick splintering of mail beneath the madly flailing strokes of a saber that flashed like silver lightning before his clearing sight.

It was Red Sonja who had come to his aid, and her onslaught was no less terrible than that of a she-panther. Her strokes followed each other too quickly for the eye to follow; her blade was a blur of white fire, and men went down like ripe grain before the reaper. With a deep roar Conan strode to her side, bloody and terrible, swinging his great blade. Forced irresistibly back, the Moslems wavered on the edge of the wall, then leaped for the ladders or fell screaming through empty space.

Oaths flowed in a steady stream from Sonja’s red lips and she laughed wildly as her saber sang home and blood spurted along the edge. The last Turanian on the battlement screamed and parried wildly as she pressed him; then dropping his scimitar, his clutching hands closed desperately on her dripping blade. With a groan he swayed on the edge, blood gushing from his horribly cut fingers.

“Hell to you, dog-soul!” she laughed. “The devil can stir your broth for you!”

With a twist and a wrench she tore away her saber, severing the wretch’s fingers; with a moaning cry he pitched backward and fell headlong.

On all sides the soldiers were falling back. The field-pieces, halted while the fighting went on upon the walls, were booming again, and the Spaniards, kneeling at the embrasures, were returning the fire with their long crossbows.

Conan approached Red Sonja, who was cleansing her blade, swearing softly.

“By God, my girl,” said he, extending a huge hand, “had you not come to my aid, I think I’d have supped in hell this night. I thank –”

“Thank the devil!” retorted Sonja rudely, slapping his hand aside. “The Turanians were on the wall. Don’t think I risked my hide to save yours, dog-brother!”

And with a scornful flirt of her wide coat-tails, she swaggered off down the battlements, giving back promptly and profanely the rude sallies of the soldiers. Conan scowled after her, and a soldier slapped him jovially on the shoulder.

“Eh, she’s a devil, that one! She drinks the strongest head under the table and outswears anyone. She’s no man’s light o’ love. Cut – slash – death to you, dog-soul! There’s her way.”

“Who is she, in the devil’s name?” growled Conan.

“Red Sonja, the She-Devil of Hyrkania – that’s all we know. Marches and fights like a man – God knows why. Swears she’s sister to Roxelana, the Soldan’s favorite. If the Tatars who grabbed Roxelana that night had got Sonja, by Saint Piotr! Yezdigerd would have had a handful! Let her alone, sir brother; she’s a wildcat. Come and have a tankard of ale.”

The soldiers, summoned before the Grand Vizier to explain why the attack failed after the wall had been scaled at one place, swore they had been confronted by a devil in the form of a red-headed woman, aided by a giant in rusty mail. Sulimar discounted the woman, but the description of the man woke a half-forgotten memory in his mind. After dismissing the soldiers, he summoned the scout, Yaruk Khan, and dispatched him up-country to demand of Mikhal Oglu why he had not sent a certain head to the royal tent.

V

Yezdigerd did not eat his breakfast in Makkalet on the morning of the 29th. He stood on the height of Semmering, before his rich pavilion with its gold-knobbed pinnacles and its guard of five hundred troops, and watched his light batteries pecking away vainly at the frail walls; he saw his irregulars wasting their lives like water, striving to fill the fosse, and he saw his sappers burrowing like moles, driving mines and counter-mines nearer and nearer the bastions.

Within the city there was little ease. Night and day the walls were manned. In their cellars the Viennese watched the faint vibrations of peas on drumheads that betrayed the sounds of digging in the earth that told of Turanian mines burrowing under the walls. They sank their counter-mines accordingly, and men fought no less fiercely under the earth than above.

Makkalet was the one Christian island in a sea of infidels. Night by night men watched the horizons burning where the vultures yet scoured the agonized land. Occasionally word came from the outer world – slaves escaping from the camp and slipping into the city. Always their news was fresh horror. In Upper Austria less than a third of the inhabitants were left alive; Mikhal Oglu was outdoing himself. And the people said that it was evident the vulture-winged one was looking for someone in particular. His slayers brought men’s heads and heaped them high before him; he avidly searched among the grisly relics, then, apparently in fiendish disappointment, drove his devils to new atrocities.

These tales, instead of paralyzing the Austrians with dread, fired them with the mad fury of desperation. Mines exploded, breaches were made and the Turanians swarmed in, but always the desperate Christians were there before them, and in the choking, blind, wild-beast madness of hand-to-hand fighting they paid in part the red debt they owed.

September dwindled into October; the leaves turned brown and yellow on Wiener Wald, and the winds blew cold. The watchers shivered at night on the walls that whitened to the bite of the frost; but still the tents ringed the city; and still Yezdigerd sat in his magnificent pavilion and glared at the frail barrier that barred his imperial path. None but Sulimar dared speak to him; his mood was black as the cold nights that crept down from the northern hills. The wind that moaned outside his tent seemed a dirge for his ambitions of conquest.

Sulimar watched him narrowly, and after a vain onset that lasted from dawn till midday, he called off the soldiers and bade them retire into the ruined suburbs and rest. And he sent a bowman to shoot a very certain shaft into a very certain part of the city, where certain persons were waiting for just such an event.

No more attacks were made that day. The siege weapons which had been pounding at the gate for days, were shifted northward, to hammer another part. As an assault on that part of the wall seemed imminent, the bulk of the soldiery was shifted there. But the onslaught did not come, though the siege machines kept up a steady fire, hour after hour. Whatever the reason, the soldiers gave thanks for the respite; they were dizzy with fatigue, mad with raw wounds and lack of sleep.

That night the great square, the Am Hof market, seethed with soldiers, while civilians looked on enviously. A great store of wine had been discovered hidden in the cellars of a rich Zamoran merchant, who hoped to reap triple profit when all other liquor in the city was gone. In spite of their officers, the half-crazed men rolled the great hogsheads into the square and broached them. Salm gave up the attempt to control them. Better drunkenness, growled the old warhorse, than for the men to fall in their tracks from exhaustion. He paid the Zamoran from his own purse. In relays the soldiers came from the walls and drank deep.

In the glare of cressets and torches, to the accompaniment of drunken shouts and songs, to which the occasional rumble of a cannon played a sinister undertone, Conan dipped his basinet into a barrel and brought it out brimful and dripping. Sinking his mouth into the liquid, he paused as his clouded eyes, over the rim of the steel cap, rested on a strutting figure on the other side of the hogshead. Resentment touched his expression. Red Sonja had already visited more than one barrel. Her burganet was thrust sidewise on her rebellious locks, her swagger was wilder, her eyes more mocking.

“Ha!” she cried scornfully. “It’s the Turanian-killer, with his nose deep in the keg, as usual! Devil bite all topers!”

She consistently thrust a jeweled goblet into the crimson flood and emptied it at a gulp. Conan stiffened resentfully. He had had a tilt with Sonja already, and he still smarted.

“Why should I even look at you, in your ragged harness and empty purse,” she had mocked, “when even Bakics is mad for me? Go along, guzzler, beer-keg!”

“Be damned to you,” he had retorted. “You needn’t be so high, just because your sister is the king's mistress –”

At that she had flown into an awful passion, and they had parted with mutual curses. Now, from the devil in her eyes, he saw that she intended making things further uncomfortable for him.

“Hussy!” he growled. “I’ll drown you in this hogshead.”

“Nay, you’ll drown yourself first, boar-pig!” she shouted amid a roar of rough laughter. “A pity you aren’t as valiant against the Turanians as you are against the wine-butts!”

“Dogs bite you, slut!” he roared. “How can I break their heads when they stand off and pound us with rocks from catapults? Shall I throw my dagger at them from the wall?”

“There are thousands just outside,” she retorted, in the grip of madness induced by drink and her own wild nature, “if any had the guts to go to them.”

“By God!” the maddened giant dragged out his great sword. “No baggage can call me coward, sot or not! I’ll go out upon them, if never a man follow me!”

Bedlam followed his bellow; the drunken temper of the crowd was fit for such madness. The nearly empty hogsheads were deserted as men tipsily drew sword and reeled toward the outer gates. Wulf Hagen fought his way into the storm, buffeting men right and left, shouting fiercely, “Wait, you drunken fools! Don’t surge out in this shape! Wait –” They brushed him aside, sweeping on in a blind senseless torrent.

Dawn was just beginning to tip the eastern hills. Somewhere in the strangely silent Turanian camp a drum began to throb. Turanian sentries stared wildly and loosed their crossbows in the air to warn the camp, appalled at the sight of the horde pouring over the narrow drawbridge, eight thousand strong, brandishing swords and ale tankards. As they foamed over the moat a terrific explosion rent the din, and a portion of the wall near the gate seemed to detach itself and rise into the air. A great shout rose from the Turanian camp, but the attackers did not pause.

They rushed headlong into the suburbs, and there they saw the soldiers, not rousing from slumber, but fully clad and armed, being hurriedly drawn up in charging lines. Without pausing, they burst headlong into the half-formed ranks. Far outnumbered, their drunken fury and velocity was yet irresistible. Before the madly thrashing axes and lashing broadswords, the soldiers reeled back dazed and disordered. The suburbs became a shambles where battling men, slashing and hewing at one another, stumbled on mangled bodies and severed limbs. Yezdigerd and Sulimar, on the height of Semmering, saw the invincible soldiers in full retreat, streaming out toward the hills.

In the city the rest of the defenders were working madly to repair the great breach the mysterious explosion had torn in the wall. Salm gave thanks for that drunken sortie. But for it, the soldiers would have been pouring through the breach before the dust settled.

All was confusion in the Turanian camp. Yezdigerd ran to his horse and took charge in person, shouting at the Spahis. They formed ranks and swung down the slopes in orderly squadrons. The warriors, still following their fleeing enemies, suddenly awakened to their danger. Before them the soldiers were still falling back, but on either flank the horsemen were galloping to cut them off. Fear replaced drunken recklessness. They began to fall back, and the retreat quickly became a rout. Screaming in blind panic they threw away their weapons and fled for the drawbridge. The Turanians rode them down to the water’s edge, and tried to follow them across the bridge, into the gates which were opened for them. And there at the bridge Wulf Hagen and his retainers met the pursuers and held them hard. The flood of the fugitives flowed past him to safety; on him the Turanian tide broke like a red wave. He loomed, a steel-clad giant, in a waste of spears.

Conan did not voluntarily quit the field, but the rush of his companions swept him along the tide of flight, blaspheming bitterly. Presently he lost his footing and his panic-stricken comrades stampeded across his prostrate frame. When the frantic heels ceased to drum on his mail, he raised his head and saw that he was near the city, and naught but Turanians about him. Rising, he ran lumberingly toward the moat, into which he plunged unexpectedly, looking back over his shoulder at a pursuing Turanian.

He came up floundering and spluttering, and made for the opposite bank, splashing water like a buffalo. The blood-mad Turanian was close behind him – a corsair, as much at home in water as out. The stubborn Cimmerian would not drop his great sword, and burdened by his mail, just managed to reach the other bank, where he clung, utterly exhausted and unable to lift a hand in defense as the man swirled in, dagger gleaming above his naked shoulder. Then someone swore heartily on the bank hard by. A slim hand thrust a loaded crossbow into the Algerian’s face; he screamed as it exploded, making a ghastly ruin of his head. Another slim strong hand gripped the sinking Cimmerian by the scruff of his mail.

“Grab the bank, fool!” gritted a voice, indicative of great effort. “I can’t heave you up alone; you must weigh a ton. Pull, dolt, pull!”

Blowing, gasping and floundering, Conan half clambered, was half lifted, out of the moat. He showed some disposition to lie on his belly and retch, what of the dirty water he had swallowed, but his rescuer urged him to his feet.

“The Turanians are crossing the bridge and the lads are closing the gates against them – haste, before we’re cut off.”

Inside the gate Conan stared about, as if waking from a dream.

“Where’s Wulf Hagen? I saw him holding the bridge.”

“Lying dead among twenty dead Turanians,” answered Red Sonja.

Conan sat down on a piece of fallen wall, and because he was shaken and exhausted, and still mazed with drink and blood-lust, he sank his face in his huge hands and wept. Sonja kicked him disgustedly.

“In the name of Erlik, man, don’t sit and blubber like a spanked schoolgirl. You drunkards had to play the fool, but that can’t be mended. Come – let’s go to the tavern and drink ale.”

“Why did you pull me out of the moat?” he asked.

“Because a great oaf like you never can help himself. I see you need a wise person like me to keep life in that hulking frame.”

“But I thought you despised me!”

“Well, a woman can change her mind, can’t she?” she snapped.

Along the walls the pikemen were repelling the frothing Turanians, thrusting them off the partly repaired breach. In the royal pavilion Sulimar was explaining to his master that the devil had undoubtedly inspired that drunken sortie just at the right moment to spoil the Grand Vizier’s carefully laid plans. Yezdigerd, wild with fury, spoke shortly to his friend for the first time.

“Nay, thou hast failed. Have done with thine intrigues. Where craft has failed, sheer force shall prevail. Send a rider for the vultures; they are needed here to replace the fallen. Bid the hosts to the attack again.”

VI

The preceding onslaughts were naught to the storm that now burst on Makkalet’s reeling walls. Night and day the cannons flashed and thundered. Bombs burst on roofs and in the streets. When men died on the walls there was none to take their places. Fear of famine stalked the streets and the darker fear of treachery ran black-mantled through the alleys. Investigation showed that the blast that had rent the wall had not been fired from without. In a mine tunnelled from an unsuspected cellar inside the city, a heavy charge of powder had been exploded beneath the wall. One or two men, working secretly, might have done it. It was now apparent that the bombardment of the north wall had been merely a gesture to draw attention away from the gate, to give the traitors an opportunity to work undiscovered.

Count Salm and his aides did the work of giants. The aged commander, fired with superhuman energy, trod the walls, braced the faltering, aided the wounded, fought in the breaches side by side with the common soldiers, while death dealt his blows unsparingly.

But if death supped within the walls, he feasted full without. Yezdigerd drove his men as relentlessly as if he were their worst foe. Plague stalked among them, and the ravaged countryside yielded no food. The cold winds howled down from the mountains and the warriors shivered in their light garb. In the frosty nights the hands of the sentries froze to their crossbows. The ground grew hard as flint and the sappers toiled feebly with blunted tools. Rain fell, mingled with sleet, turning the plain outside the city to a muddy wallow, where rotting corpses sickened the living.

Yezdigerd shuddered as with an ague, as he looked out over the camp. He saw his warriors, worn and haggard, toiling in the muddy plain like ghosts under the gloomy leaden skies. The stench of his slaughtered thousands was in his nostrils. In that instant it seemed to the king that he looked on a gray plain of the dead, where corpses dragged their lifeless bodies to an outworn task, animated only by the ruthless will of their master. For an instant he shook with fear. Then his lean jaws set. The walls of Makkalet staggered drunkenly, patched and repaired in a score of places. How could they stand?

“Sound for the onslaught. Thirty thousand aspers to the first man on the walls!”

The Grand Vizier spread his hands helplessly. “The spirit is gone out of the warriors. They can not endure the miseries of this icy land.”

“Drive them to the walls with whips,” answered Yezdigerd, grimly. “This is the gate to the rest of Hyrkania. It is through it we must ride the road to empire.”

Drums thundered through the camp. The weary defenders of Christendom rose up and gripped their weapons, electrified by the instinctive knowledge that the death-grip had come.

In the teeth of roaring crossbows and swinging broadswords, the officers of the king drove the Moslem hosts. Whips cracked and men cried out blasphemously up and down the lines. Maddened, they hurled themselves at the reeling walls, riddled with great breaches, yet still barriers behind which desperate men could crouch. Charge after charge rolled on over the choked fosse, broke on the staggering walls, and rolled back, leaving its wash of dead. Night fell unheeded, and through the darkness, lighted by blaze of cannon and flare of torches, the battle raged. Driven by Yezdigerd’s terrible will, the attackers fought throughout the night, heedless of all Moslem tradition.

Dawn rose as on Armageddon. Before the walls of Makkalet lay a vast carpet of steel-clad dead. Their plumes waved in the wind. And across the corpses staggered the hollow-eyed attackers to grapple with the dazed defenders.

The steel tides rolled and broke, and rolled on again, till the very gods must have stood aghast at the giant capacity of men for suffering and enduring. It was the Armageddon of races – Asia against Europe. About the walls raved a sea of faces, snarling, screaming, dying before the roaring crossbows of the Hyrkanians, who also swung their two-handed swords like reapers mowing ripe grain. Those within the walls were no more heroic than those without, stumbling among fields of their own dead.

To Conan, life had faded to a single meaning – the swinging of his great sword. In the wide breach by the Karnthner Tower he fought until time lost all meaning. For long ages maddened faces rose snarling before him, the faces of devils, and scimitars flashed before his eyes everlastingly. He did not feel his wounds, nor the drain of weariness. Gasping in the choking dust, blind with sweat and blood, he dealt death like a harvest, dimly aware that at his side a slim pantherish figure swayed and smote – at first with laughter, curses and snatches of song, later in grim silence.

His identity as an individual was lost in that cataclysm of swords. He hardly knew it when Count Salm was death-stricken at his side by a projectile. He was not aware when night crept over the hills, nor did he realize at last that the tide was slackening and ebbing. He was only dimly aware that Zrinyi tore him away from the corpse-choked breach, saying, “Go and sleep. We’ve beaten them off – for the time being, at least.”

He found himself in a narrow, winding street, all dark and forsaken. He had no idea of how he had got there, but seemed vaguely to remember a hand on his elbow, tugging, guiding. The weight of his mail pulled at his sagging shoulders. He could not tell if the sound he heard were the cannon fitfully roaring, or a throbbing in his own head. It seemed there was someone he should look for – someone who meant a great deal to him. But all was vague. Somewhere, sometime, it seemed long, long ago, a sword-stroke had cleft his basinet. When he tried to think he seemed to feel again the impact of that terrible blow, and his brain swam. He tore off the dented head-piece and cast it into the street.

Again the hand was tugging at his arm. A voice urged, “Wine, my lord – drink!”

Dimly he saw a lean, black-mailed figure extending a tankard. With a gasp he caught at it and thrust his muzzle into the stinging liquor, gulping like a man dying of thirst. Then something burst in his brain. The night filled with a million flashing sparks, as if a powder magazine had exploded in his head. After that, darkness and oblivion.

He came slowly to himself, aware of a raging thirst, an aching head, and an intense weariness that seemed to paralyze his limbs. He was bound hand and foot, and gagged. Twisting his head, he saw that he was in a small bare dusty room, from which a winding stone stair led up. He deduced that he was in the lower part of the tower.

Over a guttering candle on a crude table stooped two men. They were both lean and hook-nosed, clad in plain black garments. Conan listened to their low-toned conversation. He had picked up many languages in his wanderings. He recognized them – Tshoruk and his son Rhupen, merchants. He remembered that he had seen Tshoruk often in the last week or so, ever since the domed helmets of the vultures had appeared in Yezdigerd’s camp. Evidently the merchant had been shadowing him, for some reason. Tshoruk was reading what he had written on a bit of parchment.

“My lord Yezdigerd, though I blew up their wall in vain, yet I have news to make my lord’s heart glad. My son and I have taken the Cimmerian, Conan. As he left the wall, dazed with fighting, we followed, guiding him subtly to the ruined tower whereof you know, and giving him drugged wine, bound him fast. Let my lord send the emir Mikhal Oglu to the wall by the tower, and we will give him into thy hands. We will bind him on the old mangonel and cast him over the wall like a tree trunk.”

The man took up an arrow and began to bind the parchment about the shaft with light silver wire.

“Take this to the roof, and shoot it toward the mantlet, as usual,” he began, when Rhupen exclaimed, “Hark!” and both froze, their eyes glittering like those of trapped vermin – fearful yet vindictive.

Conan gnawed at the gag; it slipped. Outside he heard a familiar voice. “Conan! Where the devil are you?”

His breath burst from him in a stentorian roar. “Hey, Sonja! Name of the devil! Be careful, girl –”

Tshoruk snarled like a wolf and struck him savagely on the head with a scimitar hilt. Almost instantly, it seemed, the door crashed inward. As in a dream Conan saw Red Sonja framed in the doorway, pistol in hand. Her face was drawn and haggard; her eyes burned like coals. Her basinet was gone, and her scarlet cloak. Her mail was hacked and red-clotted, her boots slashed, her silken breeches splashed and spotted with blood.

With a croaking cry Tshoruk ran at her, scimitar lifted. Before he could strike, she crashed down the barrel of the empty pistol on his head, felling him like an ox. From the other side Rhupen slashed at her with a curved Turanian dagger. Dropping the pistol, she closed with the young Oriental. Moving like someone in a dream, she bore him irresistibly backward, one hand gripping his wrist, the other his throat. Throttling him slowly, she inexorably crashed his head again and again against the stones of the wall, until his eyes rolled up and set. Then she threw him from her like a sack of loose salt.

“Erlik!” she muttered thickly, reeling an instant in the center of the room, her hands to her head. Then she went to the captive and sinking stiffly to her knees, cut his bonds with fumbling strokes that sliced his flesh as well as the cords.

“How did you find me?” he asked stupidly, clambering stiffly up.

She reeled to the table and sank down in a chair. A flagon of wine stood at her elbow and she seized it avidly and drank. Then she wiped her mouth on her sleeve and surveyed him wearily but with renewed life.

“I saw you leave the wall and followed. I was so drunk from the fighting I scarce knew what I did. I saw those dogs take your arm and lead you into the alleys, and then I lost sight of you. But I found your burganet lying outside in the street, and began shouting for you. What the hell’s the meaning of this?”

She picked up the arrow, and blinked at the parchment fastened to it. Evidently she could read the Turanian characters, but she scanned it half a dozen times before the meaning became apparent to her exhaustion-numbed brain. Then her eyes flickered dangerously to the men on the floor. Tshoruk sat up, dazedly feeling the gash in his scalp; Rhupen lay retching and gurgling on the floor.

“Tie them up, brother,” she ordered, and Conan obeyed. The victims eyed the woman much more apprehensively than him.

“This missive is addressed to Yezdigerd,” she said abruptly. “Why does he want Conan’s head?”

“Because this Conan is Amra the Lion of the Red Brotherhood” muttered Tshoruk uneasily.

“And you, you lower-than-a-dog,” she smiled mirthlessly, “you fired the mine by the Karnthner! You and your spawn are the traitors among us.” She drew and primed a crossbow. “When Zrinyi learns of you,” she said, “your end will be neither quick nor sweet. But first, you old swine, I’m going to give myself the pleasure of blowing out your cub’s brains before your eyes –”

The older Armenian gave a choking cry. “God of my fathers, have mercy! Kill me – torture me – but spare my son!”

At that instant a new sound split the unnatural quiet – a great peal of bells shattered the air.

“What’s this?” roared Conan, groping wildly at his empty scabbard.

“The bells!” cried Sonja. “They peal for victory!”

She sprang for the sagging stair and he followed her up the perilous way. They came out on a sagging shattered roof, on a firmer part of which stood an ancient stone-casting machine, relic of an earlier age, and evidently recently repaired. The tower overlooked an angle of the wall, at which there were no watchers. A section of the ancient glacis, and a ditch interior to the main moat, coupled with a steep natural pitch of the earth beyond, made the point practically invulnerable. The spies had been able to exchange messages here with little fear of discovery, and it was easy to guess the method used. Down the slope, just within long arrow-shot, stood up a huge mantlet of bullhide stretched on a wooden frame, as if abandoned there by chance. Conan knew that message-laden arrows were loosed from the tower roof into this mantlet. But just then he gave little thought to that. His attention was riveted on the Turanian camp. There a leaping glare paled the spreading dawn; above the mad clangor of the bells rose the crackle of flames, mingled with awful screams.

“The soldiers are burning their prisoners,” said Red Sonja.

“Judgment Day in the morning,” muttered Conan, awed at the sight that met his eyes.

From their eyrie the companions could see almost all the plain. Under a cold gray leaden sky, tinged a somber crimson with dawn, it lay strewn with Turanian corpses as far as sight carried. And the hosts of the living were melting away. From Semmering the great pavilion had vanished. The other tents were coming down swiftly. Already the head of the long column was out of sight, moving into the hills through the cold dawn. Snow began falling in light swift flakes.

The soldiers were glutting their mad disappointment on their helpless captives, hurling men, women and children living into the flames they had kindled under the somber eyes of their master, the monarch men called the Magnificent, the Merciful. All the time the bells of Makkalet clanged and thundered as if their bronze throats would burst.

“They shot their bolt last night,” said Red Sonja. “I saw their officers lashing them, and heard them cry out in fear beneath our swords. Flesh and blood could stand no more. Look!” She clutched her companion’s arm. “The vultures will form the rear-guard.”

Even at that distance they made out a pair of vulture wings moving among the dark masses; the sullen light glimmered on a jeweled helmet. Sonja’s powder-stained hands clenched so that the pink, broken nails bit into the white palms, and she spat out a Cossack curse that burned like vitriol.

“There he goes, the bastard, that made Austria a desert! How easily the souls of the butchered folk ride on his cursed winged shoulders! Anyway, old warhorse, he didn’t get your head.”

“While he lives it’ll ride loose on my shoulders,” rumbled the giant.

Red Sonja’s keen eyes narrowed suddenly. Seizing Conan’s arm, she hurried downstairs. They did not see Zrinyi and Bakics ride out of the gates with their tattered retainers, risking their lives in sorties to rescue prisoners. Steel clashed along the line of march, and the vultures retreated slowly, fighting a good rear-guard action, balking the headlong courage of the attackers by their very numbers. Safe in the depths of his horsemen, Mikhal Oglu grinned sardonically. But Yezdigerd, riding in the main column, did not grin. His face was like a death-mask.

Back in the ruined tower, Red Sonja propped one booted foot on a chair, and cupping her chin in her hand, stared into the fear-dulled eyes of Tshoruk.

“What will you give for your life?”

The man made no reply.

“What will you give for the life of your whelp?”

The merchant stared as if stung. “Spare my son, princess,” he groaned. “Anything – I will pay – I will do anything.”

She threw a shapely booted leg across the chair and sat down.

“I want you to bear a message to a man.”

“What man?”

“Mikhal Oglu.”

He shuddered and moistened his lips with his tongue.

“Instruct me; I obey,” he whispered.

“Good. We’ll free you and give you a horse. Your son shall remain here as hostage. If you fail us, I’ll give the cub to the rest of my Hyrkanians to play with –”

Again the old Armenian shuddered.

“But if you play squarely, we’ll let you both go free, and my pal and I will forget about this treachery. I want you to ride after Mikhal Oglu and tell him –”

Through the slush and driving snow, the Turanian column plodded slowly. Horses bent their heads to the blast; up and down the straggling lines camels groaned and complained, and oxen bellowed pitifully. Men stumbled through the mud, leaning beneath the weight of their arms and equipment. Night was falling, but no command had been given to halt. All day the retreating host had been harried by the daring cuirassiers who darted down upon them like wasps, tearing captives from their very hands.

Grimly rode Yezdigerd among his troops. He wished to put as much distance as possible between himself and the scene of his first defeat, where the rotting bodies of thirty thousand Muhammadans reminded him of his crushed ambitions. Lord of western Asia he was; master of Europe he could never be. Those despised walls had saved the Western world from Moslem dominion, and Yezdigerd knew it. The rolling thunder of the power re-echoed around the world, paling the glories of other empires. But in the West the barbarian hordes stood unshaken. It was not written that the Turanian should rule beyond the Vilayet sea.

Yezdigerd had seen this written in blood and fire, as he stood and saw his warriors fall back from the ramparts, despite the flailing lashes of their officers. It had been to save his authority that he gave the order to break camp – it burned his tongue like gall, but already his soldiers were burning their tents and preparing to desert him. Now in darkly brooding silence he rode, not even speaking to Sulimar.

In his own way Mikhal Oglu shared their savage despondency. It was with a ferocious reluctance that he turned his back on the land he had ruined, as a half-glutted panther might be driven from its prey. He recalled with satisfaction the blackened, corpse-littered wastes – the screams of tortured men – the cries of girls writhing in his iron arms; recalled with much the same sensations the death-shrieks of those same girls in the blood-fouled hands of his killers.

But he was stung with the disappointment of a task undone – for which the Grand Vizier had lashed him with stinging words. He was out of favor with Sulimar. For a lesser man that might have meant a bowstring. For him it meant that he would have to perform some prodigious feat to reinstate himself. In this mood he was dangerous and reckless as a wounded panther.

Snow fell heavily, adding to the miseries of the retreat. Wounded men fell in the mire and lay still, covered by a growing white mantle. Mikhal Oglu rode among his rearmost ranks, straining his eyes into the darkness. No foe had been sighted for hours. The victorious Hyrkanians had ridden back to their city.

The columns were moving slowly through a ruined village, whose charred beams and crumbling fire-seared walls stood blackly in the falling snow. Word came back down the lines that the king would pass on through and camp in a valley which lay a few miles beyond.

The quick drum of hoofs back along the way they had come caused the vultures to grip their lances and glare slit-eyed into the flickering darkness. They heard but a single horse, and a voice calling the name of Mikhal Oglu. With a word the chief stayed a dozen lifted bows, and shouted in return. A tall gray stallion loomed out of the flying snow, a black-mantled figure crouched grotesquely atop of it.

“Tshoruk! You dog! What in the name of Erlik –”

The merchant rode close to Mikhal Oglu and whispered urgently in his ear. The cold bit through the thickest garments. The vultures noted that Tshoruk was trembling violently. His teeth chattered and he stammered in his speech. But the Turanian’s eyes blazed at the import of his message.

“Dog, do you lie?”

“May I rot in hell if I lie!” A strong shudder shook Tshoruk and he drew his kaftan close about him. “He fell from his horse, riding with the cuirassiers to attack the rear-guard, and lies with a broken leg in a deserted peasant’s hut, some three miles back – alone except for his mistress Red Sonja, and three or four soldiers, who are drunk on wine they found in the deserted camp.”

Mikhal Oglu wheeled his horse with sudden intent.

“Twenty men to me!” he barked. “The rest ride on with the main column. I go after a head worth its weight in gold. I’ll overtake you before you go into camp.”

Othman caught his jeweled rein. “Are you mad, to ride back now? The whole country will be on our heels –”

He reeled in his saddle as Mikhal Oglu slashed him across the mouth with his riding-whip. The chief wheeled away, followed by the men he had designated. Like ghosts they vanished into the spectral darkness.

Othman sat his horse uncertainly, looking after them. The snow shafted down, the wind sobbed drearily among the bare branches. There was no sound except the receding noises of the trudging column. Presently these ceased. Then Othman started. Back along the way they had come, he heard a distant reverberation, a roar as of forty or fifty crossbows speaking together. In the utter silence which followed, panic came upon Othman and his warriors. Whirling away they fled through the ruined village after the retreating horde.

VII

None noticed when night fell on on the city, for the splendor of Yezdigerd made night no less glorious than day. Through gardens that were riots of blossoms and perfume, cressets twinkled like myriad fireflies. Khitan fireworks turned it into a realm of shimmering magic, above which the minarets of five hundred mosques rose like towers of fire in an ocean of golden foam. Tribesmen on hills gaped and marvelled at the blaze that pulsed and glowed afar, paling the very stars. The streets were thronged with crowds in the attire of holiday and rejoicing. The million lights shone on jeweled turban and striped khalat – on dark eyes sparkling over filmy veils – on shining palanquins borne on the shoulders of huge ebony-skinned slaves.

All that splendor centered in the Hippodrome, where in lavish pageants the horsemen of Turan ancompeted in breath-taking races with the riders of Stygia and beyond, where warriors in glittering mail spilled one another’s blood on the sands, where swordsmen were matched against wild beasts, and lions were pitted against tigers from Bengal and boars from northern forests. One might have deemed the imperial pageantry of Aquilonia revived in Eastern garb.

On a golden throne, set upon lapis lazuli pillars, Yezdigerd reclined, gazing on the splendors, as purple-togaed Caesars had gazed before him. About him bowed his viziers and officers, and the ambassadors from foreign courts. They came to congratulate him on his victory. For this grand fete was in celebration of that victory, as set forth in a manifesto under the king’s hand, which stated, in part, that the other having made submission and sued for pardon on their knees, and the Hyrkanian realms being so distant from the Turanian empire, “the Faithful would not trouble to clean out the fortress of Makkalet, or purify, improve, and put it in repair.” Therefore the king had accepted the submission of the contemptible foe, and left them in possession of their paltry “fortress”!

Yezdigerd was blinding the eyes of the world with the blaze of his wealth and glory, and striving to make himself believe that he had actually accomplished all he had intended. He had not been beaten on the field of open battle; he had set his puppet on the throne; he had devastated Hyrkania; the markets were full of their slaves. With this knowledge he soothed his vanity, ignoring the fact that thirty thousand of his subjects rotted before Makkalet, and that his dreams of conquest had been shattered.

Behind the throne shone the spoils of war – silken and costly tapestries, heavy with gold embroidery. At his feet were heaped the gifts and tributes of subject and allied princes. There were vests of velvet, golden goblets crusted with jewels from the courts of Shadizar, ermine-lined kaftans, carven jade, silver helmets with horse-hair plumes, turban-cloths, cunningly sewn with gems, from Stygia, curved blades of watered steel, crossbows worked richly in chased silver, breastplates and shields of steel and rare furs. The throne was flanked on either hand by a long rank of youthful slaves, made fast by golden collars to a single, long silver chain. One file was composed of young boys, the other of girls; all clad only in plumed head-pieces and jeweled ornaments intended to emphasize their nudity.

Eunuchs in flowing robes, their rotund bellies banded by cloth-of-gold sashes, knelt and offered the royal guests sherbets in gemmed goblets, cooled with snow from the mountains. The torches danced and flickered to the roars of the multitudes. Around the courses swept the horses, foam flying from their bits; wooden castles reeled and went up in flames as the soldiers clashed in mock warfare. Officers passed among the shouting people, tossing showers of copper and silver coins amongst them. None hungered or thirsted in Aghrapur that night except the miserable Caphar captives. The minds of the foreign envoys were numbed by the bursting sea of splendour, the thunder of imperial magnificence. About the vast arena stalked trained elephants, almost covered with housings of gold-worked leather, and from the jeweled towers on their backs, fanfares of trumpets vied with the roar of the throngs and the bellowing of lions. The tiers of the Hippodrome were a sea of faces, all turning toward the jeweled figure on the shining throne, while thousands of tongues wildly thundered his acclaim.

As he impressed the envoys, Yezdigerd knew he impressed both the world and prince Yezdigerd. In the blaze of his magnificence, men would forget that a handful of desperate soldiers behind rotting walls had closed his road to empire. Yezdigerd accepted a goblet of the forbidden wine, and spoke aside to the Grand Vizier, who stepped forth and lifted his arms.

“Oh, guests of my master, who forgets not the humblest in the hour of rejoicing. To the officers who led his hosts against the infidels, he has made rare gifts. Now he gives two hundred and forty thousand ducats to be distributed among the common soldiers, and likewise to each soldier he gives a thousand aspers.”

In the midst of the roar that went up, a eunuch knelt before the Grand Vizier, holding up a large round package, carefully bound and sealed. A folded piece of parchment, held shut by a red seal, accompanied it. The attention of the king was attracted.

“Oh, friend, what has thou there?”

Sulimar salaamed. “The rider of the post delivered it, oh Lion of Turan. Apparently it is a gift of some sort from the Austrian dogs. Infidel riders, I understand, gave it into the hands of the border guard, with instructions to send it straightway to Aghrapur.”

“Open it,” directed Yezdigerd, his interest roused. The eunuch salaamed to the floor, then began breaking the seals of the package. A scholarly slave opened the accompanying note and read the contents, written in a bold yet feminine hand:

To King Yezdigerd and his Wezir Sulimar and to the hussy Roxelana we who sign our names below send a gift in token of our immeasurable fondness and kind affection. - Red Sonja of Hykania, and Conan of Cimmeria

Yezdigerd, who had started up at the name of his favorite, his features suddenly darkening with wrath, gave a choking cry, which was echoed by Sulimar. The eunuch had torn the seals of the bale, disclosing what lay within. A pungent scent of herbs and preservative spices filled the air, and the object, slipping from the horrified eunuch’s hands, tumbled among the heaps of presents at Yezdigerd’s feet, offering a ghastly contrast to the gems, gold and velvet bales. The king stared down at it and in that instant his shimmering pretense of triumph slipped from him; his glory turned to tinsel and dust. Sulimar tore at his beard with a gurgling, strangling sound, purple with rage.

At the king’s feet, the features frozen in a death-mask of horror, lay the severed head of Mikhal Oglu, Vulture of the king.

The Blood of Belshazzar

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

It shone on the breast of the Iranistan king.

It lighted Iskander’s road;

It blazed where the spears were splintering.

A lure and a maddening goad.

And down through the crimson, changing years

It draws men, soul and brain;

They drown their lives in blood and tears.

And they break their hearts in vain.

Oh, it flames with the blood of strong men’s hearts

Whose bodies are clay again.

—- The Song of the Red Stone

I

Once it was called Eski-Hissar, the Old Castle, for it was very ancient even when the first Turanians swept out of the east, and not even the Shemites, who rebuilt that crumbling pile in the days of Abu Bekr, knew what hands reared those massive bastions among the frowning foothills of the Taurus. Now, since the old keep had become a bandit’s hold, men called it Bab-El-Shaithan, the Gate of the Devil, and with good reason.

That night there was feasting in the great hall. Heavy tables loaded with wine pitchers and jugs, and huge platters of food, stood flanked by crude benches for such as ate in that manner, while on the floor large cushions received the reclining forms of others. Trembling slaves hastened about, filling goblets from wineskins and bearing great joints of roasted meat and loaves of bread.

Here luxury and nakedness met, the riches of degenerate civilizations and the stark savagery of utter barbarism. Men clad in stenching sheepskins lolled on silken cushions, exquisitely brocaded, and guzzled from solid golden goblets, fragile as the stem of a desert flower. They wiped their bearded lips and hairy hands on velvet tapestries worthy of a shah’s palace.

All the races of eastern Hyboria met here. Here were slim, lethal Iranistanis, dangerous-eyed Turanians in mail shirts, lean Shemites, tall ragged Afghulis and Khauranians in sweaty sheepskins, fiercely mustached Khorajans, even a few Brythunians, with hawk-faces and devilish tempers.

Among them was one who stood out boldly from all the rest. He sat at a table drinking wine from a huge goblet, and the eyes of the others strayed to him continually. Even among these tall sons of the desert and mountains his height seemed particularly great, well above six feet. The breadth and thickness of him were gigantic. His shoulders were broader, his limbs more massive than any other warrior there.

His mail coif was thrown back, revealing a lion-like head and a great corded throat. Though browned by the sun, his face was not as dark as those about him and his eyes were a volcanic blue, which smoldered continually as if from inner fires of wrath. Square-cut black hair like a lion’s mane crowned a low, broad forehead.

He ate and drank apparently oblivious to the questioning glances flung toward him. Not that any had as yet challenged his right to feast in Bab-El-Shaithan, for this was a lair open to all refugees and outlaws. And this Cimmerian was Conan, outlawed and hunted throughout the land. The ex-pirate was armed in close-meshed chain mail from head to foot. A heavy sword hung at his hip, and his kite-shaped shield with the grinning skull wrought in the center lay with his heavy vizorless helmet, on the bench beside him. There was no hypocrisy of etiquette in Bab-El-Shaithan. Its occupants went armed to the teeth at all times and no one questioned another’s right to sit down to meat with his sword at hand.

Conan, as he ate, scanned his fellow-feasters openly. Truly Bab-El-Shaithan was a lair of the spawn of Hell, the last retreat of men so desperate and bestial that the rest of the world had cast them out in horror. Conan was no stranger to savage men; in his native Cimmeria he had sat among barbaric figures in the gatherings of chiefs and reavers in the hills. But the wild-beast appearance and utter inhumanness of some of these men impressed even the fierce Cimmerian warrior.

There, for instance, was a creature, hairy as an ape, tearing at a half-raw joint of meat with yellow fangs like a wolf’s. Mahmoud, the fellow’s name was, and Conan wondered briefly if such a thing could have a human soul. Or that shaggy man beside him, whose lip, twisted back by a sword scar into a permanent snarl, bared a tooth like a boar’s tusk. Surely no divine spark of soul-dust animated these men, but the merciless and soulless spirit of the grim land that bred them. Eyes, wild and cruel as the eyes of wolves, glared through lank strands of tangled hair, hairy hands unconsciously gripped the hilts of knives even while the owners gorged and guzzled.

Conan glanced from the rank and file to scrutinize the leaders of the band—those whom superior wit or war-skill had placed high in the confidence of their terrible chief, Skol Abdhur, the Butcher. Not one but had a whole volume of black and bloody history behind him. There was that slim Iranistani, whose tone was so silky, whose eyes were so deadly, and whose small, shapely head was that of a human panther—Nadir Tous, once an emir high in the favor of the Shah. And that Turanian, with his silvered mail shirt, peaked helmet and jewel-hilted scimitar—Kai Shah; he had ridden at Yildiz' side in high honor once, and it was said that the scar which showed white in the angle of his jaw had been made by the sword of Brian of Brythunia in that great battle before the walls. And that wiry, tall, eagle-faced Shemite, Yussef el Mekru—he had been a great sheikh once and had even led a revolt against the Sultan himself.

But at the head of the table at which Conan sat was one whose history for strangeness and vivid fantasy dimmed them all. Tisolino di Strozza, trader, captain of Hyrkanian warships, pirate, outlaw—what a red trail the man had followed to his present casteless condition! Di Strozza was tall and thin and saturnine in appearance, with a hook-nosed, thin-nostriled face of distinctly predatory aspect. His armor, now worn and tarnished, was of costly Hyrkanian make, and the hilt of his long narrow sword had once been set with gems. He was a man of restless soul, thought Conan, as he watched the Hyrkanian's dark eyes dart continually from point to point, and the lean hand repeatedly lifted to twist the ends of the thin mustache.

Conan’s gaze wandered to the other chiefs—wild reavers, born to the red trade of pillage and murder, whose pasts were black enough, but lacked the varied flavor of the other four. He knew these by sight or reputation—Kojar Mirza, a brawny man; Shalmar Khor, a tall swaggering Circassian; and Jusus Zehor, a renegade Georgian who wore half a dozen knifes in his girdle.

There was one not known to him, a warrior who apparently had no standing among the bandits, yet who carried himself with the assurance born of prowess. He was of a type rare—a stocky, strongly built man whose head would come no higher than Conan’s shoulder. Even as he ate, he wore a helmet with a lacquered leather drop, and Conan caught the glint of mail beneath his sheepskins; through his girdle was thrust a short wide-bladed sword, not curved as much as the scimitars. His powerful bowed legs, as well as the slanting black eyes set in an inscrutable brown face, betrayed the Hyrkanian.

He, like Conan, was a newcomer; riding from the east he had arrived at Bab-El-Shaithan that night at the same time that the Cimmerian warrior had ridden in from the south. His name, as given in guttural Turanian, was Toghrul Khan.

A slave whose scarred face and fear-dulled eyes told of the brutality of his masters, tremblingly filled Conan’s goblet. He started and flinched as a sudden scream faintly knifed the din; it came from somewhere above, and none of the feasters paid any attention. The Cimmerian wondered at the absence of women-slaves. Skol Abdhur’s name was a terror in that part of Hyboria and many caravans felt the weight of his fury. Many women had been stolen from raided villages and camel-trains, yet now there were apparently only men in Bab-El-Shaithan. This, to Conan, held a sinister implication. He recalled dark tales, whispered under the breath, relating to the cryptic inhumanness of the robber chief—mysterious hints of foul rites in black caverns, of naked white victims writhing on hideously ancient altars, of blood-chilling sacrifices beneath the midnight moon. But that cry had been no woman’s scream.

Kai Shah was close to di Strozza’s shoulder, talking very rapidly in a guarded tone. Conan saw that Nadir Tous was only pretending to be absorbed in his wine cup; the Iranistani's eyes, burning with intensity, were fixed on the two who whispered at the head of the table. Conan, alert to intrigue and counter-plot, had already decided that there were factions in Bab-El-Shaithan. He had noticed that di Strozza, Kai Shah, a lean Khauranian scribe named Musa bin Daoud, and the wolfish Mahmoud, stayed close to each other, while Nadir Tous had his own following among the lesser bandits, wild ruffians, mostly Iranistanis, and Kojar Mirza was surrounded by a number of even wilder mountain folk. The manner of the Hyrkanian and Nadir Tous toward each other was of a wary courtesy that seemed to mask suspicion, while the chief wore an aspect of truculent defiance toward both.

As these thoughts passed through Conan’s mind, an incongruous figure appeared on the landing of the broad stairs. It was Jacob, Skol Abdhur’s majordomo—a short, very fat Zamoran attired in gaudy and costly robes which had once decked a Khauranian harem master. All eyes turned toward him, for it was evident he had brought word from his master—not often did Skol Abdhur, wary as a hunted wolf, join his pack at their feasts.

“The great prince, Skol Abdhur,” announced Jacob in pompous and sonorous accents, “would grant audience to the barbarian who rode in at dusk—the lord Conan of Cimmeria.”

The Cimmerian finished his goblet at draft and rose deliberately, taking up his shield and helmet.

“And what of me, Yahouda?” It was the guttural voice of the Hyrkanian. “Has the great prince no word for Toghrul Khan, who has ridden far and hard to join his horde? Has he said naught of an audience with me?”

The Zamoran scowled. “Lord Skol said naught of any steppe man,” he answered shortly. “Wait until he sends for you, as he will do—if it so pleases him.”

The answer was as much an insult to the haughty pagan as would have been a slap in the face. He half-made to rise then sank back, his face, schooled to iron control, showing little of his rage. But his serpent-like eyes glittering devilishly, took in not only the Zamoran but Conan as well, and the Cimmerian knew that he himself was included in Toghrul Khan’s black anger. Hyrkanian pride and Hyrkanian wrath are beyond the ken of the Western mind, but Conan knew that in his humiliation, the nomad hated him as much as he hated Jacob.

But Conan could count his friends on his fingers and his personal enemies by the scores. A few more foes made little difference and he paid no heed to Toghrul Khan as he followed the Zamoran up the broad stairs, and along a winding corridor to a heavy, metal-braced door before which stood, like an image carven of black basalt, a huge naked Keshan who held a two-handed scimitar whose five-foot blade was a foot wide at the tip.

Jacob made a sign to the Keshan, but Conan saw that the Zamoran was trembling and apprehensive.

“In God’s name,” Jacob whispered to the Cimmerian, “speak him softly; Skol is in a devilish temper tonight. Only a little while ago he tore out the eyeball of a slave with his hands.”

“That was that scream I heard then,” grunted Conan. “Well, don’t stand there chattering; tell that black beast to open the door before I knock it down.”

Jacob blenched; but it was no idle threat. It was not the Cimmerian’s nature to wait meekly at the door of any man—he who had been cup-companion to kings. The majordomo spoke swiftly to the mute, who swung the door open. Conan pushed past his guide and strode across the threshold.

And for the first time he looked on Skol Abdhur the Butcher, whose deeds of blood had already made him a semi-mythical figure. The Cimmerian saw a bizarre giant reclining on a silken divan, in the midst of a room hung and furnished like a king’s. Erect, Skol would have towered half a head taller than Conan, and though a huge belly marred the symmetry of his figure, he was still an image of physical prowess. His short, naturally black beard had been stained to a bluish tint; his wide black eyes blazed with a curious wayward look not altogether sane at times.

He was clad in cloth-of-gold slippers whose toes turned up extravagantly, in voluminous Iranistani trousers of rare silk, and a wide green silken sash, heavy with golden scales, was wrapt about his waist. Above this he wore a sleeveless jacket, richly brocaded, open in front, but beneath this his huge torso was naked. His blue-black hair, held by a gemmed circlet of gold, fell to his shoulders, and his fingers were gleaming with jewels, while his bare arms were weighted with heavy gem-crusted armlets. Women’s earrings adorned his ears.

Altogether his appearance was of such fantastic barbarism as to inspire in Conan an amazement which in an ordinary man would have been a feeling of utmost horror. The apparent savagery of the giant, together with his fantastic finery which heightened rather than lessened the terror of his appearance, lent Skol Abdhur an aspect which set him outside the pale of ordinary humanity. The effect of an ordinary man, so garbed, would have been merely ludicrous; in the robber chieftain it was one of horror.

Yet as Jacob salaamed to the floor in a very frenzy of obeisance, he was not sure that Skol looked any more formidable than the mail-clad Cimmerian with his aspect of dynamic and terrible strength directed by a tigerish nature.

“The lord Conan of Cimmeria, oh mighty prince,” proclaimed Jacob, while Conan stood like an iron image not deigning even to incline his lion-like head.

“Yes, fool, I can see that,” Skol’s voice was deep and resonant. “Take yourself hence before I crop your ears. And see that those fools downstairs have plenty of wine.”

From the stumbling haste with which Jacob obeyed, Conan knew the threat of cropping ears was no empty one. Now his eyes wandered to a shocking and pitiful figure—the slave standing behind Skol’s divan ready to pour wine for his grim master. The wretch was trembling in every limb as a wounded horse quivers, and the reason was apparent—a ghastly gaping socket from which the eye had been ruthlessly ripped. Blood still oozed from the rim to join the stains which blotched the twisted face and spotted the silken garments. Pitiful finery! Skol dressed his miserable slaves in apparel rich merchants might envy. And the wretch stood shivering in agony, yet not daring to move from his tracks, though with the pain-misted half-sight remaining him, he could scarcely see to fill the gem-crusted goblet Skol lifted.

“Come and sit on the divan with me, Conan,” hailed Skol. “I would speak to you. Dog! Fill the lord Cimmerian’s goblet, and haste, lest I take your other eye.”

“I drink no more this night,” growled Conan, thrusting aside the goblet Skol held out to him. “And send that slave away. He’ll spill wine on you in his blindness.”

Skol stared at Conan a moment and then with a sudden laugh waved the pain-sick slave toward the door. The man went hastily, whimpering in agony.

“See,” said Skol, “I humor your whim. But it was not necessary. I would have wrung his neck after we had talked, so he could not repeat our words.”

Conan shrugged his shoulders. Little use to try to explain to Skol that it was pity for the slave and not desire for secrecy that prompted him to have the man dismissed.

“What think you of my kingdom, Bab-El-Shaithan?” asked Skol suddenly.

“It would be hard to take,” answered the Cimmerian.

Skol laughed wildly and emptied his goblet.

“So the Turanians have found,” he hiccupped. “I took it years ago by a trick from the Turanian who held it. Before the Turanians came the Shemites held it and before them—the devil knows. It is old—the foundations were built in the long ago by the descendants of Atlantis. Then centuries later came the Acheronians—who added to it. Iranistanis, Shemites, Turanians—all have shed blood on its walls. Now it is mine, and while I live, mine it shall remain! I know its secrets—and its secrets,” he cast the Cimmerian a sly and wicked glance full of sinister meaning, “are more than most men reckon—even those fools Nadir Tous and di Strozza, who would cut my throat if they dared.”

“How do you hold supremacy over these wolves?” asked Conan bluntly.

Skol laughed and drank once more.

“I have something each wishes. They hate each other; I play them against one another. I hold the key to the plot. They do not trust each other enough to move against me. I am Skol Abdhur! Men are puppets to dance on my strings. And women”—a vagrant and curious glint stole into his eyes—“women are food for the gods,” he said strangely.

“Many men serve me,” said Skol Abdhur, “emirs and generals and chiefs, as you saw. How came they here to Bab-El-Shaithan where the world ends? Ambition—intrigues—women—jealousy—hatred—now they serve the Butcher. And what brought you here, my brother? That you are an outlaw I know—that your life is forfeit to many. But only when hope is dead do men ride to Bab-El-Shaithan. There are cycles within cycles, outlaws beyond the pale of outlawry, and Bab-El-Shaithan is the end of the world.”

“Well,” growled Conan, “one man can not raid the caravans. An ally of mine is captive to the Turanian chief Bahadur, and the Turanian refuses to ransom him for the gold that has been offered. You ride far, and fall on the caravans that bring the treasures of beyond. With you I may find some treasure so rare that the Turanian will accept it as a ransom. If not, with my share of the loot I will hire enough bold rogues to mount a rescue.”

Skol shrugged his shoulders. “Cimmerians are mad,” said he, “but whatever the reason, I am glad you rode hither. I have heard you are faithful to the lord you follow, and I need such a man. Just now I trust no one but Abdullah, the black mute that guards my chamber.”

It was evident to Conan that Skol was fast becoming drunk. Suddenly he laughed wildly.

“You asked me how I hold my wolves in leash? Not one but would slit my throat. But look—so far I trust you I will show you why they do not!”

He reached into his girdle and drew forth a huge jewel which sparkled like a tiny lake of blood in his great palm. Even Conan’s eyes narrowed at the sight.

“Crom!” he muttered. “That can be naught but the ruby called—”

“Aye!” exclaimed Skol Abdhur. “Aye, the gem Cyrus the Iranistani ripped from the sword-gashed bosom of the great king on that red night when Babylon fell! It is the most ancient and costly gem in the world. Ten thousand pieces of heavy gold could not buy it.

“Hark, Cimmerian,” again Skol drained a goblet, “I will tell you the tale of the Blood of Belshazzar. See you how strangely it is carved?”

He held it up and the light flashed redly from its many facets. Conan shook his head, puzzled.

The carving was strange indeed, corresponding to nothing he had ever seen, east or west. It seemed that the ancient carver had followed some plan entirely unknown and apart from that of modern lapidary art. It was basically different with a difference Conan could not define.

“No mortal cut that stone!” said Skol, “but the djinn of the sea! For once in the long, long ago, in the very dawn of happenings, the great king, even Belshazzar, went from his palace on pleasure bent and coming to the Green Sea—the gulf—went thereon in a royal galley, golden-prowed and rowed by a hundred slaves. Now there was one Naka, a diver of pearls, who desiring greatly to honor his king, begged the royal permission to seek the ocean bottom for rare pearls for the king, and Belshazzar granting his wish, Naka dived. Inspired by the glory of the king, he went far beyond the depth of divers, and after a time floated to the surface, grasping in his hand a ruby of rare beauty—aye, this very gem.

“Then the king and his lords, gazing on its strange carvings, were amazed, and Naka, nigh to death because of the great depth to which he had gone, gasped out a strange tale of a silent, seaweed-festooned city of marble and lapis lazuli far below the surface of the sea, and of a monstrous mummied king on a jade throne from whose dead taloned hand Naka had wrested the ruby. And then the blood burst from the diver’s mouth and ears and he died.

“Then Belshazzar’s lords entreated him to throw the gem back into the sea, for it was evident that it was the treasure of the djinn of the sea, but the king was as one mad, gazing into the crimson deeps of the ruby, and he shook his head.

“And lo, soon evil came upon him, for the Iranistanis broke his kingdom, and Cyrus, looting the dying monarch, wrested from his bosom the great ruby which seemed so gory in the light of the burning palace that the soldiers shouted: ‘Lo, it is the heart’s blood of Belshazzar!’ And so men came to call the gem the Blood of Belshazzar.

“Blood followed its course. When Cyrus fell on the Jaxartes, Queen Tomyris seized the jewel and for a time it gleamed on the naked bosom of the queen. But she was despoiled of it by a rebel general; in a battle against the Iranistanis he fell and it went into the hands of Cambyses, who carried it with him into Egypt, where a priest of Bast stole it. A Kushite mercenary murdered him for it, and by devious ways it came back to Iranistan once more. It gleamed on Xerxes’ crown when he watched his army destroyed.

“A chance sword blow struck it from his breastplate in a battle and for centuries the Blood of Belshazzar was lost to sight. Somewhere far to the east, we know, its gleams shone on a road of blood and rapine, and men slew men and dishonored women for it. For it, as of old, women gave up their virtue, men their lives and kings their crowns.

“But at last its road turned to the west once more, and I took it from the body of a Turanian chief I slew in a raid far to the east. How he came by it, I do not know. But now it is mine!”

Skol was drunk; his eyes blazed with inhuman passion; more and more he seemed like some foul bird of prey.

“It is my balance of power! Men come to me from palace and hovel, each hoping to have the Blood of Belshazzar for his own. I play them against each other. If one should slay me for it, the others would instantly cut him to pieces to gain it. They distrust each other too much to combine against me. And who would share the gem with another?”

He poured himself wine with an unsteady hand.

“I am Skol the Butcher!” he boasted, “a prince in my own right! I am powerful and crafty beyond the knowledge of common men. For I am the most feared chieftain in all the Taurus, I who was dirt beneath men’s feet, the disowned and despised son of a renegade Iranistani noble and a slave-girl.

“Bah—these fools who plot against me—the Hyrkanian, Kai Shah, Musa bin Daoud and Mahmoud—over against them I play Nadir Tous, that polished cutthroat, and Kojar Mirza. The Iranistani and the man hate me and they hate di Strozza, but they hate each other even more. And Shalmar Khor hates them all.”

“And what of Seosamh el Mekru?” Conan could not twist his Cimmerian tongue to the Shemitic.

“Who knows what is in an Shemite’s mind?” growled Skol. “But you may be certain he is a jackal for loot, like all his kind, and will watch which way the feather falls, to join the stronger side—and then betray the winners.

“But I care not!” the robber roared suddenly. “I am Skol the Butcher! Deep in the deeps of the Blood have I seen misty, monstrous shapes and read dark secrets! Aye—in my sleep I hear the whispers of that dead, half-human king from whom Naka the diver tore the jewel so long ago. Blood! That is a drink the ruby craves! Blood follows it; blood is drawn to it! Not the head of Cyrus did Queen Tomyris plunge into a vessel of warm blood as the legends say, but the gem she took from the dead king! He who wears it must quench its thirst or it will drink his own blood! Aye, the heart’s flow of kings and queens have gone into its crimson shadow!

“And I have quenched its thirst! There are secrets of Bab-El-Shaithan none knows but I—and Abdullah whose withered tongue can never speak of the sights he has looked upon, the shrieks his ears have heard in the blackness below the castle when midnight holds the mountains breathless. For I have broken into secret corridors, sealed up by the Shemites who rebuilt the hold, and unknown to the Turanians who followed them.”

He checked himself as if he had said too much. But the crimson dreams began to weave again their pattern of insanity.

“You have wondered why you see no women here? Yet hundreds of fair girls have passed through the portals of Bab-El-Shaithan. Where are they now? Ha ha ha!” the giant’s sudden roar of ghastly laughter thundered in the room.

“Many went to quench the ruby’s thirst,” said Skol, reaching for the wine jug, “or to become the brides of the Dead, the concubines of ancient demons of the mountains and deserts, who take fair girls only in death throes. Some I or my warriors merely wearied of, and they were flung to the vultures.”

Conan sat, chin on mailed fist, his dark brows lowering in disgust.

“Ha!” laughed the robber. “You do not laugh—are you thin-skinned, lord Cimmerian? I have heard you spoken of as a desperate man. Wait until you have ridden with me for a few moons! Not for nothing am I named the Butcher! I have built a pyramid of skulls in my day! I have severed the necks of old men and old women, I have dashed out the brains of babes, I have ripped up women, I have burned children alive and sat them by scores on pointed stakes! Pour me wine, Cimmerian.”

“Pour your own damned wine,” growled Conan, his lip writhing back dangerously.

“That would cost another man his head,” said Skol, reaching for his goblet. “You are rude of speech to your host and the man you have ridden so far to serve. Take care—rouse me not.” Again he laughed his horrible laughter.

“These walls have re-echoed to screams of direst agony!” his eyes began to burn with a reckless and maddened light. “With these hands have I disemboweled men, torn out the tongues of children and ripped out the eyeballs of girls—thus!”

With a shriek of crazed laughter his huge hand shot at Conan’s face. With an oath the Cimmerian caught the giant’s wrist and bones creaked in that iron grip. Twisting the arm viciously down and aside with a force that nearly tore it from its socket, Conan flung Skol back on the divan.

“Save your whims for your slaves, you drunken fool,” the Cimmerian rasped.

Skol sprawled on the divan, grinning like an idiotic ogre and trying to work his fingers which Conan’s savage grasp had numbed. The Cimmerian rose and strode from the chamber in fierce disgust; his last backward glance showed Skol fumbling with the wine jug, with one hand still grasping the Blood of Belshazzar, which cast a sinister light all over the room.

The door shut behind Conan and the Keshan cast him a sidelong, suspicious glance. The Cimmerian shouted impatiently for Jacob, and the Zamoran bobbed up suddenly and apprehensively. His face cleared when Conan brusquely demanded to be shown his chamber. As he tramped along the bare, torchlighted corridors, Conan heard sounds of revelry still going on below. Knives would be going before morning, reflected Conan, and some would not see the rising of the sun. Yet the noises were neither as loud nor as varied as they had been when he left the banquet hall; no doubt many were already senseless from strong drink.

Jacob turned aside and opened a heavy door, his torch revealing a small cell-like room, bare of hangings, with a sort of bunk on one side; there was a single window, heavily barred, and but one door. The Zamoran thrust the torch into a niche of the wall.

“Was the lord Skol pleased with you, my lord?” he asked nervously.

Conan cursed. “I rode over a hundred miles to join the most powerful raider in the Taurus, and I find only a wine-bibbing, drunken fool, fit only to howl bloody boasts and blasphemies to the roof.”

“Be careful, for God’s sake, sir,” Jacob shook from head to foot. “These walls have ears! The great prince has these strange moods, but he is a mighty fighter and a crafty man for all that. Do not judge him in his drunkenness. Did—did—did he speak aught of me?”

“Aye,” answered Conan at random, a whimsical grim humor striking him. “He said you only served him in hopes of stealing his ruby some day.”

Jacob gasped as if Conan had hit him in the belly and the sudden pallor of his face told the Cimmerian his chance shot had gone home. The majordomo ducked out of the room like a scared rabbit and it was in somewhat better humor that his tormentor turned to retire.

Looking out the window, Conan glanced down into the courtyard where the animals were kept, at the stables wherein he had seen that his great black stallion had been placed. Satisfied that the steed was well sheltered for the night, he lay down on the bunk in full armor, with his shield, helmet and sword beside him, as he was wont to sleep in strange holds. He had barred the door from within, but he put little trust in bolts and bars.

II

Conan had been asleep less than an hour when a sudden sound brought him wide awake and alert. It was utterly dark in the chamber; even his keen eyes could make out nothing, but someone or something was moving on him in the darkness. He thought of the evil reputation of Bab-El-Shaithan and a momentary shiver shook him—not of fear but of superstitious revulsion.

Then his practical mind asserted itself. It was that fool Toghrul Khan who had slipped into his chamber to cleanse his strange nomadic honor by murdering the man who had been given priority over him. Conan cautiously drew his legs about and lifted his body until he was sitting on the side of the bunk. At the rattle of his mail, the stealthy sounds ceased, but the Cimmerian could visualize Toghrul Khan’s slant eyes glittering snake-like in the dark. Doubtless he had already slit the throat of Jacob the Zamoran.

As quietly as possible, Conan eased the heavy sword from its scabbard. Then as the sinister sounds recommenced, he tensed himself, made a swift estimate of location, and leaped like a huge tiger, smiting blindly and terribly in the dark. He had judged correctly. He felt the sword strike solidly, crunching through flesh and bone, and a body fell heavily in the darkness.

Feeling for flint and steel, he struck fire to tinder and lighted the torch, then turning to the crumpled shape in the center of the room, he halted in amazement. The man who lay there in a widening pool of crimson was tall, powerfully built and hairy as an ape—Mahmoud. The man’s scimitar was in his scabbard, but a wicked dagger lay by his right hand.

“He had no quarrel with me,” growled Conan, puzzled. “What—” He stopped again. The door was still bolted from within, but in what had been a blank wall to the casual gaze, a black opening gaped—a secret doorway through which Mahmoud had come. Conan closed it and with sudden purpose pulled his coif in place and donned his helmet. Then taking up his shield, he opened the door and strode forth into the torchlighted corridor. All was silence, broken only by the tramp of his iron-clad feet on the bare flags. The sounds of revelry had ceased and a ghostly stillness hung over Bab-El-Shaithan.

In a few minutes he stood before the door of Skol Abdhur’s chamber and saw there what he had half-expected. The Keshan Abdullah lay before the threshold, disemboweled, and his woolly head half severed from his body. Conan thrust open the door; the candles still burned. On the floor, in the blood-soaked ruins of the torn divan lay the gashed and naked body of Skol Abdhur the Butcher. The corpse was slashed and hacked horribly, but it was evident to Conan that Skol had died in drunken sleep with no chance to fight for his life. It was some obscure hysteria or frantic hatred that had led his slayer or slayers to so disfigure his dead body. His garments lay near him, ripped to shreds. Conan smiled grimly, nodding.

“So the Blood of Belshazzar drank your life at last, Skol,” said he.

Turning toward the doorway he again scanned the body of the Keshan.

“More than one slew these men,” he muttered, “and the Keshan gave scathe to one, at least.”

The black still gripped his great scimitar, and the edge was nicked and bloodstained.

At that moment a quick rattle of steps sounded on the flags and the affrighted face of Jacob peered in at the door. His eyes flared wide and he opened his mouth to the widest extent to give vent to an ear-piercing screech.

“Shut up, you fool,” snarled Conan disgusted, but Jacob gibbered wildly.

“Spare my life, most noble lord! I will not tell anyone that you slew Skol—I swear—”

“Be quiet, Zamoran,” growled Conan. “I did not slay Skol and I will not harm you.”

This somewhat reassured Jacob, whose eyes narrowed with sudden avarice.

“Have you found the gem?” he chattered, running into the chamber. “Swift, let us search for it and begone—I should not have shrieked but I feared the noble lord would slay me—yet perchance it was not heard—”

“It was heard,” growled the Cimmerian. “And here are the warriors.”

The tramp of many hurried feet was heard and a second later the door was thronged with bearded faces. Conan noted the men blinked and gaped like owls, more like men roused from deep sleep than drunken men. Bleary-eyed, they gripped their weapons and ogled, a ragged, bemused horde. Jacob shrank back, trying to flatten himself against the wall, while Conan faced them, bloodstained sword still in his hand.

“Erlik!” ejaculated the man, rubbing his eyes. “The Cimmerian and the Zamoran have murdered Skol!”

“A lie,” growled Conan menacingly. “I know not who slew this drunkard.”

Tisolino di Strozza came into the chamber, followed by the other chiefs. Conan saw Nadir Tous, Kojar Mirza, Shalmar Khor, Yussef el Mekru and Justus Zenor. Toghrul Khan, Kai Shah and Musa bin Daoud were nowhere in evidence, and where Mahmoud was, the Cimmerian well knew.

“The jewel!” exclaimed a man excitedly. “Let us look for the gem!”

“Be quiet, fool,” snapped Nadir Tous, a light of baffled fury growing in his eyes. “Skol has been stripped; be sure who slew him took the gem.”

All eyes turned toward Conan.

“Skol was a hard master,” said Tisolino. “Give us the jewel, lord Conan, and you may go your way in peace.”

Conan swore angrily; had not, he thought, even as he replied, the Hyrkanian's eyes widened when they first fell on him?

“I have not your cursed jewel; Skol was dead when I came to his room.”

“Aye,” jeered Kojar Mirza, “and blood still wet on your blade.” He pointed accusingly at the weapon in Conan’s hand, whose blue steel, traced with Norse runes, was stained a dull red.

“That is the blood of Mahmoud,” growled Conan, “who stole into my cell to slay me and whose corpse now lies there.”

His eyes were fixed with fierce intensity on di Strozza’s face but the Hyrkanian's expression altered not a whit.

“I will go to the chamber and see if he speaks truth,” said di Strozza, and Nadir Tous smiled a deadly smile.

“You will remain here,” said the Iranistani, and his ruffians closed menacingly around the tall Hyrkanian. “Go you, Selim.” And one of his men went grumbling. Di Strozza shot a swift glance of terrible hatred and suppressed wrath at Nadir Tous, then stood imperturbably; but Conan knew that the Hyrkanian was wild to escape from that room.

“There have been strange things done tonight in Bab-El-Shaithan,” growled Shalmar Khor. “Where are Kai Shah and the Khauranian—and that pagan from who knows where? And who drugged the wine?”

“Aye!” exclaimed Nadir Tous, “who drugged the wine which sent us all into the sleep from which we but a few moments ago awakened? And how is it that you, di Strozza, were awake when the rest of us slept?”

“I have told you, I drank the wine and fell asleep like the rest of you,” answered the Hyrkanian coldly. “I awoke a few moments earlier, that is all, and was going to my chamber when the horde of you came along.”

“Mayhap,” answered Nadir Tous, “but we had to put a scimitar edge to your throat before you would come with us.”

“Why did you wish to come to Skol’s chamber anyway?” countered di Strozza.

“Why,” answered the Iranistani, “when we awoke and realized we had been drugged, Shalmar Khor suggested that we go to Skol’s chamber and see if he had flown with the jewel—”

“You lie!” exclaimed the Circassian. “That was Kojar Mirza who said that—”

“Why this delay and argument!” cried Kojar Mirza. “We know this Cimmerian was the last to be admitted to Skol this night. There is blood on his blade—we found him standing above the slain! Cut him down!”

And drawing his scimitar he stepped forward, his warriors surging in behind him. Conan placed his back to the wall and braced his feet to meet the charge. But it did not come; the tense figure of the giant Cimmerian was so fraught with brooding menace, the eyes glaring so terribly above the skull-adorned shield, that even the wild man faltered and hesitated, though a score of men thronged the room and many more than that number swarmed in the corridor outside. And as he wavered the Iranistani Selim elbowed his way through the band, shouting: “The Cimmerian spoke truth! Mahmoud lies dead in the lord Conan’s chamber!”

“That proves nothing,” said the Hyrkanian quietly. “He might have slain Skol after he slew the Lur.”

An uneasy and bristling silence reigned for an instant. Conan noted that now Skol lay dead, the different factions made no attempt to conceal their differences. Nadir Tous, Kojar Mirza and Shalmar Khor stood apart from each other and their followers bunched behind them in glaring, weapon-thumbing groups. Yussef el Mekru and Justus Zehor stood aside, looking undecided; only di Strozza seemed oblivious to this cleavage of the robber band.

The Hyrkanian was about to say more, when another figure shouldered men aside and strode in. It was the Seljuk, Kai Shah, and Conan noted that he lacked his mail shirt and that his garments were different from those he had worn earlier in the night. More, his left arm was bandaged and bound close to his chest and his dark face was somewhat pale.

At the sight of him di Strozza’s calm for the first time deserted him; he started violently.

“Where is Musa bin Daoud?” he exclaimed.

“Aye!” answered the Turanian angrily. “Where is Musa bin Daoud?”

“I left him with you!” cried di Strozza fiercely, while the others gaped, not understanding this byplay.

“But you planned with him to elude me,” accused the Seljuk.

“You are mad!” shouted di Strozza, losing his self-control entirely.

“Mad?” snarled the Turanian. “I have been searching for the dog through the dark corridors. If you and he are acting in good faith, why did you not return to the chamber, when you went forth to meet Mahmoud whom we heard coming along the corridor? When you came not back I stepped to the door to peer out for you, and when I turned back, Musa had darted through some secret opening like a rat—”

Di Strozza almost frothed at the mouth. “You fool!” he screamed, “keep silent!”

“I will see you in Gehennum and all our throats cut before I let you cozen me!” roared the Turanian, ripping out his scimitar. “What have you done with Musa?”

“You fool of Hell,” raved di Strozza, “I have been in this chamber ever since I left you! You knew that Khauranian dog would play us false if he got the opportunity and—”

And at that instant when the air was already supercharged with tension, a terrified slave rushed in at a blind, stumbling run, to fall gibbering at di Strozza’s feet.

“The gods!” he howled. “The black gods! Aie! The cavern under the floors and the djinn in the rock!”

“What are you yammering about, dog?” roared the Hyrkanian, knocking the slave to the floor with an open-handed blow.

“I found the forbidden door open,” screeched the fellow. “A stair goes down—it leads into a fearful cavern with a terrible altar on which frown gigantic demons—and at the foot of the stairs—the lord Musa—”

“What!” di Strozza’s eyes blazed and he shook the slave as a dog shakes a rat.

“Dead!” gasped the wretch between chattering teeth.

Cursing terribly, di Strozza knocked men aside in his rush to the door; with a vengeful howl Kai Shah pelted after him, slashing right and left to clear a way. Men gave back from his flashing blade, howling as the keen edge slit their skins. The Hyrkanian and his erstwhile comrade ran down the corridor, di Strozza dragging the screaming slave after him, and the rest of the pack gave tongue in rage and bewilderment and took after them. Conan swore in amazement and followed, determined to see the mad game through.

Down winding corridors di Strozza led the pack, down broad stairs, until he came to a huge iron door that now swung open. Here the horde hesitated.

“This is in truth the forbidden door,” muttered an soldier. “The brand is on my back that Skol put there merely because I lingered too long before it once.”

“Aye,” agreed a Iranistani. “It leads into places once sealed up by the Shemites long ago. None but Skol ever passed through that door—he and the Keshan and the captives who came not forth. It is a haunt of devils.”

Di Strozza snarled in disgust and strode through the doorway. He had snatched a torch as he ran and he held this high in one hand. Broad steps showed, leading downward, and cut out of solid rock. They were on the lower floor of the castle; these steps led into the bowels of the earth. As di Strozza strode down, dragging the howling, naked slave, the high-held torch lighting the black stone steps and casting long shadows into the darkness before them, the Hyrkanian looked like a demon dragging a soul into Hell.

Kai Shah was close behind him with his drawn scimitar, with Nadir Tous and Kojar Mirza crowding him close. The ragged crew had, with unaccustomed courtesy, drawn back to let the lord Conan through and now they followed, uneasily and casting apprehensive glances to all sides.

Many carried torches, and as their light flowed into the depths below a medley of affrighted yells went up. From the darkness huge evil eyes glimmered and titanic shapes loomed vaguely in the gloom. The mob wavered, ready to stampede, but di Strozza strode stolidly downward and the pack called on Allah and followed. Now the light showed a huge cavern in the center of which stood a black and utterly abhorrent altar, hideously stained, and flanked with grinning skulls laid out in strangely systematic lines. The horrific figures were disclosed to be huge images, carved from the solid rock of the cavern walls, strange, bestial, gigantic gods, whose huge eyes of some glassy substance caught the torchlight.

The blood in Conan sent a shiver down his spine. Acheron built the foundations of this fortress? Bah—no ancient race ever carved such gods as these. No; an aura of unspeakable antiquity brooded over this grim cavern, as if the forbidden door were a mystic threshold over which the adventurer stepped into an elder world. No wonder mad dreams were here bred in the frenzied brain of Skol Abdhur. These gods were grim vestiges of an older, darker race than Acheron or Atlantis—a people long faded into the gloom of antiquity. Some still more ancient, more abysmal people.

The age of Hyboria was as dawn before these ancient figures, yet doubtless many kings bowed to these gods, as Yildiz bowed to many gods before his maddened brain made himself a deity.

At the foot of the stairs lay a crumpled shape—Musa bin Daoud. His face was twisted in horror. A medley of shouts went up: “The djinn have taken the Khauranian! Let us begone! This is an evil place!”

“Be silent, you fools!” roared Nadir Tous. “A mortal blade slew Musa—see, he has been slashed through the breast and his bones are broken. See how he lies. Someone slew him and flung him down the stairs—”

The Iranistani'svoice trailed off, as his gaze followed his own pointing fingers. Musa’s left arm was outstretched and his fingers had been hacked away.

“He held something in that hand,” whispered Nadir Tous. “So hard he gripped it that his slayer was forced to cut off his fingers to obtain it—”

Men thrust torches into niches on the wall and crowded nearer, their superstitious fears forgotten.

“Aye!” exclaimed Conan, having pieced together some of the bits of the puzzle in his mind. “It was the gem! Musa and Kai Shah and di Strozza killed Skol, and Musa had the gem. There was blood on Abdullah’s sword and Kai Shah has a broken arm—shattered by the sweep of the Keshan’s great scimitar. Whoever slew Musa has the gem.”

Di Strozza screamed like a wounded panther. He shook the wretched slave.

“Dog, have you the gem?”

The slave began a frenzied denial, but his voice broke in a ghastly gurgle as di Strozza, in a very fit of madness, jerked his sword edge across the wretch’s throat and flung the blood-spurting body from him. The Hyrkanian whirled on Kai Shah.

“You slew Musa!” he screamed. “He was with you last! You have the gem!”

“You lie!” exclaimed the Turanian, his dark face an ashy pallor. “You slew him yourself—”

His words ended in a gasp as di Strozza, foaming at the mouth and all sanity gone from his eyes, ran his sword straight through the Turanian’s body. Kai Shah swayed like a sapling in the wind; then as di Strozza withdrew the blade, the Seljuk hacked through the Hyrkanian's temple, and as Kai Shah reeled, dying on his feet but clinging to life with the tenacity of the Turanian, Nadir Tous leaped like a panther and beneath his flashing scimitar Kai Shah dropped dead across the dead Hyrkanian.

Forgetting all else in his lust for the gem, Nadir Tous bent over his victim, tearing at his garments—bent further as if in a deep salaam and sank down on the dead men, his own skull split to the teeth by Kojar Mirza’s stroke. The man bent to search the Turanian, but straightened swiftly to meet the attack of Shalmar Khor. In an instant the scene was one of ravening madness, where men hacked and slew and died blindly. The flickering torches lit the scene, and Conan, backing away toward the stairs, swore amazedly. He had seen men go mad before, but this exceeded anything he had ever witnessed.

Kojar Mirza slew Selim and wounded another, but Shalmar Khor slashed through his arm-muscles, Justus Zehor ran in and stabbed the man in the ribs, and Kojar Mirza went down, snapping like a dying wolf, to be hacked to pieces.

Justus Zehor and Yussef el Mekru seemed to have taken sides at last; he had thrown in his lot with Shalmar Khor, while the Shemite rallied to him some Turanians. But besides these loosely knit bands of rivals, various warriors, mainly the Iranistanis of Nadir Tous, raged through the strife, foaming at the mouth and striking all impartially. In an instant a dozen men were down, dying and trampled by the living. Justus Zehor fought with a long knife in each hand and he wrought red havoc before he sank, skull cleft, throat slashed and belly ripped up.

Even while they fought, the warriors had managed to tear to shreds the clothing of Kai Shah and di Strozza. Finding naught there, they howled like wolves and fell to their deadly work with new frenzy. A madness was on them; each time a man fell, others seized him, ripping his garments apart in search for the gem, slashing at each other as they did so.

Conan saw Jacob trying to steal to the stairs, and even as the Cimmerian decided to withdraw himself, a thought came to the brain of Yussef el Mekru. Shemite-like, the Yemenite had fought more coolly than the others, and perhaps he had, even in the frenzy of combat, decided on his own interests. Possibly, seeing that all the leaders were down except Shalmar Khor, he decided it would be best to reunite the band, if possible, and it could be best done by directing their attention against a common foe. Perhaps he honestly thought that since the gem had not been found, Conan had it. At any rate, the Sheikh suddenly tore away and pointing a lean arm toward the giant figure at the foot of the stairs, screamed: “There, there! There stands the thief! Slay the Nazarene!”

It was good psychology. There was an instant of bewildered pause in the battle, then a bloodthirsty howl went up and from a tangled battle of rival factions, the brawl became instantly a charge of a solid compact body that rushed wild-eyed on Conan howling: “Slay the Cimmerian!”

Conan snarled in disgusted irritation. He should have anticipated that. No time to escape now; he braced himself and met the charge. A man, rushing in headlong, was impaled on the Cimmerian’s long blade, and a giant Circassian, hurling his full weight on the kite-shaped shield, rebounded as from an iron tower. Conan thundered his battle cry in a deep-toned roar that drowned the howls of the attackers; he freed his blade and swung the heavy weapon in a crashing arc. Swords shivered to singing sparks and the warriors gave back. They plunged on again as Yussef el Mekru lashed them with burning words. A big soldier broke his sword on Conan’s helmet and went down with his skull split. A Turanian slashed at the Cimmerian’s face and howled as his wrist was caught on the sword, and the hand flew from it.

Conan’s defense was his armor, the unshakable immovability of his stance, and his crashing blows. Head bent, eyes glaring above the rim of his shield, he made scant effort to parry or avoid blows. He took them on his helmet or his shield and struck back with thunderous power. Now Shalmar Khor smote full on his helmet with every ounce of his great rangy body behind the blow, and the scimitar bit through the steel cap, notching on the coif links beneath. It was a blow that might have felled an ox, yet Conan, though half-stunned, stood like a man of iron and struck back with all the power of arm and shoulders. The foe flung up his round buckler but it availed not. Conan’s heavy sword sheared through the buckler, severed the arm that held it and crashed full on the Circassian’s helmet, shattering both steel cap and the skull beneath.

But fired by fanatical fury as well as greed, the others pressed in. They got behind him. Conan staggered as a heavy weight landed full on his shoulders. A man had stolen up the stairs and leaped from them full on to the Cimmerian’s back. Now he clung like an ape, slavering curses and hacking wildly at Conan’s neck with his long knife.

The Cimmerian’s sword was wedged deep in a split breastbone and he struggled fiercely to free it. His hood was saving him so far from the knife strokes of the man on his back, but men were hacking at him from all sides and Yussef el Mekru, foam on his beard, was rushing upon him. Conan drove his shield upward, catching a frothing rogue under the chin with the rim and shattering his jawbone, and almost at the same instant the Cimmerian bent his helmeted head forward and jerked it back with all the strength of his mighty neck, and the back of his helmet crushed the face of the man on his back. Conan felt the clutching arms relax; his sword was free, but a Lur was clinging to his right arm—they hemmed him in so he could not step back, and Yussef el Mekru was hacking at his face and throat. He set his teeth and lifted his sword-arm, swinging the clinging man clear of the floor. Yussef’s scimitar rasped on his bent helmet—his hauberk—his coif links—the Shemite’s swordplay was like the flickering of light and in a moment it was inevitable that the flaming blade would sink home. And still the Lur clung, ape-like, to Conan’s mighty arm.

Something whispered across the Cimmerian’s shoulder and thudded solidly. Yussef el Mekru gasped and swayed, clawing at the thick shaft that protruded from his heavy beard. Blood burst from his parted lips and he fell dying. The man clinging to Conan’s arm jerked convulsively and fell away. The press slackened. Conan, panting, stepped back and gained the stairs. A glance upward showed him Toghrul Khan standing on the landing bending a heavy bow. The Cimmerian hesitated; at that range the Hyrkanian could drive a shaft through his mail.

“Haste, Cimmerian,” came the nomad’s gutturals. “Up the stairs!”

At that instant Jacob started running fleetly for the darkness beyond the flickering torches; three steps he took before the bow twanged. The Zamoran screamed and went down as though struck by a giant’s hand; the shaft had struck between his fat shoulders and gone clear through him.

Conan was backing warily up the stairs, facing his foes who clustered at the foot of the steps, dazed and uncertain. Toghrul Khan crouched on the landing, beady eyes a-glitter, shaft on string, and men hesitated. But one dared—a tall Turanian with the eyes of a mad dog. Whether greed for the gem he thought Conan carried, or fanatical hate sent him leaping into the teeth of sword and arrow, he sprang howling up the stairs, lifting high a heavy iron-braced shield. Toghrul Khan loosed, but the shaft glanced from the metal work, and Conan, bracing his legs again, struck downward with all his power. Sparks flashed as the down-crashing sword shattered the shield and dashed the onrushing Turanian headlong to lie stunned and bloodied at the foot of the stairs.

Then as the warriors fingered their weapons undecidedly, Conan gained the landing, and Cimmerian and Hyrkanian backed together out of the door which Toghrul Khan slammed behind them. A wild medley of wolfish yells burst out from below and the Hyrkanian, slamming a heavy bolt in place, growled: “Swiftly, Cimmerian! It will be some minutes before those dog-brothers can batter down the door. Let us begone!”

He led the way at a swift run along a corridor, through a series of chambers, and flung open a barred door. Conan saw that they had come into the courtyard, flooded now by the gray light of dawn. A man stood near, holding two horses—the great black stallion of Conan’s and the Hyrkanian’s wiry roan. Leaning close Conan saw that the man’s face was bandaged so that only one eye showed.

“Haste,” Toghrul Khan was urging. “The slave saddled my mount, but yours he could not saddle because of the savagery of the beast. The serf is to go with us.”

Conan made haste to comply; then swinging into the saddle he gave the fellow a hand and the slave sprang up behind him. The strangely assorted companions thundered across the courtyard just as raging figures burst through the doorway through which they had come.

“No sentries at the gates this night,” grunted the Hyrkanian.

They pulled up at the wide gates and the slave sprang down to open them. He swung the portals wide, took a single step toward the black stallion and went down, dead before he struck the ground. A crossbow bolt had shattered his skull, and Conan, wheeling with a curse, saw a rogue kneeling on one of the bastions, aiming his weapon. Even as he looked, Toghrul Khan rose in his stirrups, drew a shaft to the head and loosed. The rogue dropped his arbalest and pitched headlong from the battlement.

With a fierce yell the Hyrkanian wheeled away and charged through the gates, Conan close at his heels. Behind them sounded a wild and wolfish babble as the warriors rushed about the courtyard, seeking to find and saddle mounts.

III

“Look!” The companions had covered some miles of wild gorges and treacherous slopes, without hearing any sound of pursuit. Toghrul Khan pointed back. The sun had risen in the east, but behind them a red glow rivaled the sun.

“The Gate of Erlik burns,” said the Hyrkanian. “They will not hunt us, those dog-brothers. They stopped to loot the castle and fight one another; some fool has set the hold on fire.”

“There is much I do not understand,” said Conan slowly. “Let us sift truth from lies. That di Strozza, Kai Shah and Musa killed Skol is evident, also that they sent Mahmoud to slay me—why, I know not. But I do not understand what Kai Shah meant by saying that they heard Mahmoud coming down the corridor, and that di Strozza went forth to meet him, for surely at that moment Mahmoud lay dead on my chamber floor. And I believe that both Kai Shah and the Hyrkanian spoke truth when they denied slaying Musa.”

“Aye,” acknowledged the Hyrkanian. “Harken, lord Cimmerian: scarcely had you gone up to Skol’s chamber last night, when Musa the scribe left the banquet hall and soon returned with slaves who bore a great bowl of spiced wine—prepared in the Khauranian way, said the scribe, and the steaming scent of it was pleasant.

“But I noted that neither he nor Mahmoud drank of it, and when Kai Shah and di Strozza plunged in their goblets, they only pretended to drink. So when I raised my goblet to my lips, I sniffed long and secretly and smelled therein a very rare drug—aye, one I had thought was known only to the magicians of Stygia. It makes deep sleep and Musa must have obtained a small quantity in some raid on a caravan from the East. So I did not drink of the wine, but all the others drank saving those I have mentioned, and soon men began to grow drowsy, though the drug acted slowly, being weak in that it was distributed among so many.

“Soon I went to my chamber which a slave showed me, and squatting on my bunk, devised a plan of vengeance in my mind, for because that dog of a Zamoran put shame upon me before the lords, hot anger burned in my heart so that I could not sleep. Soon I heard one staggering past my door as a drunkard staggers, but this one whined like a dog in pain. I went forth and found a slave whose eye, he said, his master had torn out. I have some knowledge of wounds, so I cleansed and bandaged his empty socket, easing his pain, for which he would have kissed my feet.

“Then I bethought me of the insult which had been put upon me, and desired the slave to show me where slept the fat hog, Jacob. He did so, and marking the chamber in my mind, I turned again and went with the slave into the courtyard where the beasts were kept. None hindered us, for all were in the feasting-hall and their din was growing lesser swiftly. In the stables I found four swift horses, ready saddled—the mounts of di Strozza and his comrades. And the slave told me, furthermore, that there were no guards at the gates that night—di Strozza had bidden all to feast in the great hall. So I bade the slave saddle my steed and have it ready, and also your black stallion which I coveted.

“Then I returned into the castle and heard no sound; all those who had drunk of the wine slept in the sleep of the drug. I mounted to the upper corridors, even to Jacob’s chamber, but when I entered to slit his fat throat, he was not sleeping there. I think he was guzzling wine with the slaves in some lower part of the castle.

“I went along the corridors searching for him, and suddenly saw ahead of me a chamber door partly open, through which shone light, and I heard the voice of the Hyrkanian speak: ‘Mahmoud is approaching; I will bid him hasten.’

“I did not desire to meet these men, so I turned quickly down a side corridor, hearing di Strozza call the name of Mahmoud softly and as if puzzled. Then he came swiftly down the corridor, as if to see whose footfalls it was he heard, and I went hurriedly before him, crossing the landing of a wide stair which led up from the feasting-hall, and entered another corridor where I halted in the shadows and watched.

“Di Strozza came to the landing and paused, like a man bewildered, and at that moment an outcry went up from below. The Hyrkanian turned to escape but the waking drunkards had seen him. Just as I had thought, the drug was too weak to keep them sleeping long, and now they realized they had been drugged and stormed bewilderedly up the stairs and laid hold on di Strozza, accusing him of many things and making him accompany them to Skol’s chamber. Me they did not spy.

“Still seeking Jacob, I went swiftly down the corridor at random and coming onto a narrow stairway, came at last to the ground floor and a dark tunnel-like corridor which ran past a most strange door. And then sounded quick footsteps and as I drew back in the shadows, there came one in panting haste—the Khauranian Musa, who gripped a scimitar in his right hand and something hidden in his left.

“He fumbled with the door until it opened; then lifting his head, he saw me and crying out wildly he slashed at me with his scimitar. Erlik! I had no quarrel with the man, but he was as one maddened by fear. I struck with the naked steel, and he, being close to the landing inside the door, pitched headlong down the stairs.

“Then I was desirous of learning what he held so tightly in his left hand, so I followed him down the stairs. Erlik! That was an evil place, dark and full of glaring eyes and strange shadows. The hair on my head stood up but I gripped my steel, calling on the Lords of Darkness and the high places. Musa’s dead hand still gripped what he held so firmly that I was forced to cut off the fingers. Then I went back up the stairs and out the same way by which we later escaped from the castle, and found the slave ready with my mount, but unable to saddle yours.

“I was loath to depart without avenging my insult, and as I lingered I heard the clash of steel within the hold. And I stole back and came to the forbidden stair again while the fighting was fiercest below. All were assailing you, and though my heart was hot against you, because you had been given preference over me, I warmed to your valor. Aye, you are a hero, barbarian!”

“Then it was thus, apparently,” mused the Cimmerian, “di Strozza and his comrades had it well planned out—they drugged the wine, called the guards from the walls, and had their horses ready for swift flight. As I had not drunk the drugged wine, they sent the Lur to slay me. The other three killed Skol and in the fight Kai Shah was wounded—Musa took the gem doubtless because neither Kai Shah nor the Hyrkanian would trust it to the other.

“After the murder, they must have retired into a chamber to bandage Kai Shah’s arm, and while there they heard you coming along the corridor and thought it the Lur. Then when di Strozza followed he was seized by the waking bandits, as you say—no wonder he was wild to be gone from Skol’s chamber! And meanwhile Musa gave Kai Shah the slip somehow, meaning to have the gem for himself. But what of the gem?”

“Look!” the nomad held out his hand in which a sinister crimson glow throbbed and pulsed like a living thing in the early sun.

“Aye,” said Toghrul Khan. “Greed for this slew Skol and fear born of this evil thing slew Musa; for, escaping from his comrades, he thought the hand of all men against him and attacked me, when he could have gone on unmolested. Did he think to remain hidden in the cavern until he could slip away, or does some tunnel admit to outer air?

“Well, this red stone is evil—one can not eat it or drink it or clothe himself with it, or use it as a weapon, yet many men have died for it. Look—I will cast it away.” The Hyrkanian turned to fling the gem over the verge of the dizzy precipice past which they were riding. Conan caught his arm.

“Nay—if you do not want it, let me have it.”

“Willingly,” but the Hyrkanian frowned. “My brother would wear the gaud?”

Conan laughed shortly and Toghrul Khan smiled.

“I understand; you will buy favor from your sultan.”

“Bah!” Conan growled, “I buy favor with my sword. No.” He grinned, well pleased. “This trinket will pay the ransom of my ally to the chief who now holds him captive.”

The House of Arabu

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

To the house whence no one issues,

To the road from whence there is no return,

To the house whose inhabitants are deprived of light,

The place where dust is their nourishment, their food clay,

They have no light, dwelling in dense darkness,

And they are clothed, like birds, in a garment of feathers,

Where, over gate and bolt, dust is scattered.

—Babylonian Legend of Ishtar

“Has he seen a night-spirit, is he listening to the whispers of them who dwell in darkness?”

Strange words to be murmured in the feast-hall of Naram-ninub, amid the strain of lutes, the patter of fountains, and the tinkle of women’s laughter. The great hall attested the wealth of its owner, not only by its vast dimensions, but by the richness of its adornment. The glazed surface of the walls offered a bewildering variegation of colors—blue, red, and orange enamels set off by squares of hammered gold. The air was heavy with incense, mingled with the fragrance of exotic blossoms from the gardens without. The feasters, silk-robed nobles of Iranistan, lounged on satin cushions, drinking wine poured from alabaster vessels, and caressing the painted and bejeweled playthings which Naram-ninub’s wealth had brought from all parts of the East.

There were scores of these; their white limbs twinkled as they danced, or shone like ivory among the cushions where they sprawled. A jeweled tiara caught in a burnished mass of night-black hair, a gem-crusted armlet of massive gold, earrings of carven jade—these were their only garments. Their fragrance was dizzying. Shameless in their dancing, feasting and lovemaking, their light laughter filled the hall in waves of silvery sound.

On a broad cushion-piled dais reclined the giver of the feast, sensuously stroking the glossy locks of a lithe Shemite who had stretched herself on her supple belly beside him. His appearance of sybaritic languor was belied by the vital sparkling of his dark eyes as he surveyed his guests. He was thick-bodied, with a short blue-black beard: a Khauranian of the many drifting yearly into She.

With one exception his guests were Iranistani, shaven of chin and head. Their bodies were padded with rich living, their features smooth and placid. The exception among them stood out in startling contrast. Taller than they, he had none of their soft sleekness. He was made with the economy of relentless Nature. His physique was of the primitive, not of the civilized athlete. He was an incarnation of Power, raw, hard, wolfish—in the sinewy limbs, the corded neck, the great arch of the breast, the broad hard shoulders. Beneath his tousled dark mane his eyes were like blue ice. His strongly chiselled features reflected the wildness his frame suggested. There was about him nothing of the measured leisure of the other guests, but a ruthless directness in his every action. Whereas they sipped, he drank in great gulps. They nibbled at tid-bits, but he seized whole joints in his fingers and tore at the meat with his teeth. Yet his brow was shadowed, his expression moody. His magnetic eyes were introspective. Wherefore Prince lbi-Engur lisped again in Naram-ninub’s ear: “Has the lord, Conan, heard the whispering of night-things?”

Naram-ninub eyed his friend in some worriment. “Come, my lord,” said he, “you are strangely distraught. Has any here done aught to offend you?”

Conan roused himself as from some gloomy meditation and shook his head. “Not so, friend; if I seem distracted it is because of a shadow that lies over my own mind.” His accent was barbarous, but the timbre of his voice was strong and vibrant.

The others glanced at him in interest. He was Eannatum’s general of mercenaries, a barbarian whose saga was epic.

“Is it a woman, lord Conan?” asked Prince Enakalli with a laugh. Conan fixed him with his gloomy stare and the prince felt a cold wind blowing on his spine.

“Aye, a woman,” muttered the barbarian. “One who haunts my dreams and floats like a shadow between me and the moon. In my dreams I feel her teeth in my neck, and I wake to hear the flutter of wings and the cry of an owl.”

A silence fell over the group on the dais. Only in the great hall below rose the babble of mirth and conversation and the tinkling of lutes, and a girl laughed loudly, with a curious note in her laughter.

“A curse is upon him,” whispered the Shemite girl. Naram-ninub silenced her with a gesture, and was about to speak, when Ibi-Engur lisped: “My lord Conan, this has an uncanny touch, like the vengeance of a god. Have you done aught to offend a deity?”

Naram-ninub bit his lip in annoyance. It was well known that in his recent campaign against Erech, the barbarian had cut down a priest of Anu in his shrine. Conan’ maned head jerked up and he glared at Ibi-Engur as if undecided whether to attribute the remark to malice or lack of tact. The prince began to pale, but the slim Shemite rose to her knees and caught at Naram-ninub’s arm.

“Look at Belibna!” She pointed at the girl who had laughed so wildly an instant before.

Her companions were drawing away from this girl apprehensively. She did not speak to them, or seem to see them. She tossed her jeweled head and her shrill laughter rang through the feast-hall. Her slim body swayed back and forth, her bracelets clanged and jangled together as she tossed up her white arms. Her dark eyes gleamed with a wild light, her red lips curled with her unnatural mirth.

“The hand of Arabu is on her,” whispered the Shemite uneasily.

“Belibna?” Naram-ninub called sharply. His only answer was another burst of wild laughter, and the girl cried stridently: “To the home of darkness, the dwelling of Irhalla; to the road whence there is no return; oh, Apsu, bitter is thy wine!” Her voice snapped in a terrible scream, and bounding from among her cushions, she leaped up on the dais, a dagger in her hand. Courtesans and guests shrieked and scrambled madly out of her way. But it was at Conan the girl rushed, her beautiful face a mask of fury. The barbarian caught her wrist, and the abnormal strength of madness was futile against the barbarian’s iron thews. He tossed her from him, and down the cushion-strewn steps, where she lay in a crumpled heap, her own dagger driven into her heart as she fell.

The hum of conversation which had ceased suddenly, rose again as the guards dragged away the body, and the painted dancers came back to their cushions. But Conan turned and taking his wide crimson cloak from a slave, threw it about his shoulders.

“Stay, my friend,” urged Naram-ninub. “Let us not allow this small matter to interfere with our revels. Madness is common enough.”

Conan shook his head irritably. “Nay, I’m weary of swilling and gorging. I’ll go to my own house.”

“Then the feasting is at an end,” declared the Semite, rising and clapping his hands. “My own litter shall bear you to the house the king has given you—nay, I forgot you scorn the ride on other men’s backs. Then I shall myself escort you home. My lords, will you—accompany us?”

“Walk, like common men?” stuttered Prince Ur-ilishu. “By Enlil, I will come. It will be a rare novelty. But I must have a slave to bear the train of my robe, lest it trail in the dust of the street. Come, friends, let us see the lord Conan home, by Ishtar!”

“A strange man,” Ibi-Engur lisped to Libit-ishbi, as the party emerged from the spacious palace, and descended the broad tiled stair, guarded by bronze lions. “He walks the streets, unattended, like a very tradesman.”

“Be careful,” murmured the other. “He is quick to anger, and he stands high in the favor of Eannatum.”

“Yet even the favored of the king had best beware of offending the god Anu,” replied Ibi-Engur in an equally guarded voice.

The party were proceeding leisurely down the broad white street, gaped at by the common folk who bobbed their shaven heads as they passed. The sun was not long up, but the people of Iranistan were well astir. There was much coming and going between the booths where the merchants spread their wares: a shifting panorama, woven of craftsmen, tradesmen, slaves, harlots, and soldiers in copper helmets. There went a merchant from his warehouse, a staid figure in sober woolen robe and white mantle; there hurried a slave in a linen tunic; there minced a painted hoyden whose short slit skirt displayed her sleek flank at every step. Above them the blue of the sky whitened with the heat of the mounting sun. The glazed surfaces of the buildings shimmered. They were flatroofed, some of them three or four stories high. Iranistan was a city of sun-dried brick, but its facings of enamel made it a riot of bright color.

Somewhere a priest was chanting: “Oh, Babbat, righteousness lifteth up to thee its head—”

Conan swore under his breath. They were passing the great temple of Enlil, towering up three hundred feet in the changeless blue sky.

“The towers stand against the sky like part of it,” he swore, raking back a damp lock from his forehead. “The sky is enameled, and this is a world made by man.”

“Nay, friend,” demurred Naram-ninub. “Ea built the world from the body of Tiamat.”

“I say men built Ansham!” exclaimed Conan, the wine he had drunk shadowing his eyes. “A flat land—a very banquet-board of a land—with rivers and cities painted upon it, and a sky of blue enamel over it. By Ymir, I was born in a land the gods built! There are great blue mountains, with valleys lying like long shadows between, and snow peaks glittering in the sun. Rivers rush foaming down the cliffs in everlasting tumult, and the broad leaves of the trees shake in the strong winds.”

“I, too, was born in a broad land, Conan,” answered the Shemite. “By night the desert lies white and awful beneath the moon, and by day it stretches in brown infinity beneath the sun. But it is in the swarming cities of men, these hives of bronze and gold and enamel and humanity, that wealth and glory lie.”

Conan was about to speak, when a loud wailing attracted his attention. Down the street came a procession, bearing a carven and painted litter on which lay a figure hidden by flowers. Behind came a train of young women, their scanty garments rent, their black hair flowing wildly. They beat their naked bosoms and cried: “Ailanu! Thammuz is dead!” The throngs in the street took up the shout. The litter passed, swaying on the shoulders of the bearers; among the high-piled flowers shone the painted eyes of a carven image. The cry of the worshippers echoed down the street, dwindling in the distance.

Conan shrugged his mighty shoulders. “Soon they will be leaping and dancing and shouting, ‘Adonis is living!’ and the wenches who howl so bitterly now will give themselves to men in the streets for exultation. How many gods are there, in the devil’s name?”

Naram-ninub pointed to the great zikkurat of Enlil, brooding over all like the brutish dream of a mad god.

“See ye the seven tiers: the lower black, the next of red enamel, the third blue, the fourth orange, the fifth yellow, while the sixth is faced with silver, and the seventh with pure gold which flames in the sunlight? Each stage in the temple symbolizes a deity: the sun, the moon, and the five planets Enlil and his tribe have set in the skies for their emblems. But Enlil is greater than all, and Iranistan is his favored city.”

“Greater than Anu?” muttered Conan, remembering a flaming shrine and a dying priest that gasped an awful threat.

“Which is the greatest leg of a tripod?” parried Naram-ninub.

Conan opened his mouth to reply, then recoiled with a curse, his sword flashing out. Under his very feet a serpent reared up, its forked tongue flickering like a jet of red lightning.

“What is it, friend?” Naram-ninub and the princes stared at him in surprise.

“What is it?” He swore. “Don’t you see that snake under your very feet? Stand aside —and give me a clean swing at it.”

His voice broke off and his eyes clouded with doubt.

“It’s gone,” he muttered.

“I saw nothing,” said Naram-ninub, and the others shook their heads, exchanging wondering glances.

The barbarian passed his hand across his eyes, shaking his head.

“Perhaps it’s the wine,” he muttered. “Yet there was an adder, I swear by the heart of Ymir. I am accursed.”

The others drew away from him, glancing at him strangely.

There had always been a restlessness in the soul of Conan the barbarian, to haunt his dreams and drive him out on his long wanderings. It had brought him from the blue mountains of his race, southward into the fertile valleys and sea-fringing plains where rose the great buildings of Aquilonia; thence into Shem, where, in a rude town of rough stone and wood, a swart fishing people bartered with the ships of Stygia; by those ships he had gone into Stygia, where men toiled beneath the lash to rear the first pyramids, and where, in the ranks of the white-skinned mercenaries, he learned further the arts of war. But his wanderlust drove him again across the sea, to a mud-walled trading village on the coast of the Vilayet sea, whence he drifted southward into the pillage and carnage of Afghulistan where the original dwellers —in the land were trampled under by the barbaric Wazulis out of the East. So by devious ways he came at last to the plains of Iranistan, where city fought city, and the priests of a myriad rival gods intrigued and plotted, as they had done since the dawn of Time.

The bare outline of the saga of Conan of Cimmeria is weak and paltry; it can not catch the echoes of the thundering pageantry that rioted through that saga: the feasts, revels, wars, the crash and splintering of ships and the onset of chariots. Let it suffice to say that the honor of kings was given to the barbarian, and that in all Hyboria here was no man so feared as this dark-haired barbarian whose war-skill and fury broke the hosts of Aquilonia on the field at Venarium, and the yoke of the Aquilonians from his people.

From a mountain but to a palace of jade and ivory Conan’ saga had led him. Yet the dim half-animal dreams that had filled his slumber when he lay as a youth on a heap of wolfskins in his shaggy-headed father’s hut were nothing so strange and monstrous as the dreams that haunted him on the silken couch in the palace of turquoise-towered Iranistan.

It was from these dreams that Conan woke suddenly. No lamp burned in his chamber and the moon was not yet up, but the starlight filtered dimly through the casement. And in this radiance something moved and took form. There was the vague outline of a lithe form, the gleam of an eye. Suddenly the night beat down oppressively hot and still. Conan heard the pound of his own blood through his veins. Why fear a woman lurking in his chamber? But no woman’s form was ever so pantherishly supple; no woman’s eyes ever burned so in the darkness. With a gasping snarl he leaped from his couch and his sword hissed as it cut the air—but only the air. Something like a mocking laugh reached his ears, but the figure was gone.

A girl entered hastily with a lamp.

“Amytis! I saw her! It was no dream, this time! She laughed at me from the window!”

Amytis trembled as she set the lamp on an ebony table. She was a sleek sensuous creature, with long-lashed, heavy-lidded eyes, passionate lips, and a wealth of lustrous black curly locks. As she stood there naked the voluptuousness of her figure would have stirred the most jaded debauchee. A gift from Eannatum, she hated Conan, and he knew it, but found an angry gratification in possessing her. But now, her hatred was drowned in her terror.

“It was Lilitu!” she stammered. “She has marked you for her own! She is the night-spirit, the mate of Ardat Lili. They dwell in the House of Arabu. You are accursed!”

His hands were bathed with sweat; molten ice seemed to be flowing sluggishly through his veins instead of blood.

“Where shall I turn? The priests hate and fear me since I burned Anu’s temple.”

“There is a man who is not bound by the priest-craft, and could aid you.” She blurted out.

“Then tell me!” He was galvanized, trembling with eager impatience. “His name, girl! His name!”

But at this sign of weakness, her malice returned; she had blurted out what was in her mind, in her fear of the supernatural. Now all the vindictiveness in her was awake again.

“I have forgotten,” she answered insolently, her eyes glowing with spite.

“Slut!” Gasping with the violence of his rage, he dragged her across a couch by her thick locks. Seizing his sword belt he wielded it with savage force, holding down the writhing naked body with his free hand. Each stroke was like the impact of a drover’s whip. So mazed with fury was he, and she so incoherent with pain, that he did not at first realize that she was shrieking a name at the top of her voice. Recognizing this at last, he cast her from him, to fall in a whimpering heap on the mat-covered floor. Trembling and panting from the excess of his passion, he threw aside the belt and glared down at her.

“Gimil-ishbi, eh?”

“Yes!” she sobbed, grovelling on the floor in her excruciating anguish. “He was a priest of Enlil, until he turned diabolist and was banished. Ahhh, I faint! I swoon! Mercy! Mercy!”

“And where shall I find him?” he demanded.

“In the mound of Enzu, to the west of the city. Oh, Enlil, I am flayed alive! I perish!”

Turning from her, Conan hastily donned his garments and armor, without calling for a slave to aid him. He went forth, passed among his sleeping servitors without waking them, and secured the best of his horses. There were perhaps a score in all in Iranistan, the property of the king and his wealthier nobles; they had been bought from the wild tribes far to the north, beyond the Caspian, whom in a later age men called Scythians. Each steed represented an actual fortune. Conan bridled the great beast and strapped on the saddle—merely a cloth pad, ornamented and richly worked.

The soldiers at the gate gaped at him as he drew rein and ordered them to open the great bronze portals, but they bowed and obeyed without question. His crimson cloak flowed behind him as he galloped through the gate.

“Asura!” swore a soldier. “The barbarian has drunk overmuch of Naram-ninub’s Stygian wine.”

“Nay,” responded another; “did you see his face that it was pale, and his hand that it shook on the rein? The gods have touched him, and perchance he rides to the House of Arabu.”

Shaking their helmeted heads dubiously, they listened to the hoof-beats dwindling away in the west.

North, south and east from Iranistan, farm-houses, villages and palm groves clustered the plain, threaded by the networks of canals that connected the rivers. But westward the land lay bare and silent, only charred expanses telling of former villages. A few moons ago raiders had swept out of the desert in a wave that engulfed the vineyards and huts and burst against the staggering walls of Iranistan. Conan remembered the fighting along the walls, and the fighting on the plain, when his sally at the head of his phalanxes had broken the besiegers and driven them in headlong flight back across the Great River. Then the plain had been red with blood and black with smoke. Now it was already veiled in green again as the grain put forth its shoots, uncared for by man. But the toilers who had planted that grain had gone into the land of dusk and darkness.

Already the overflow from more populous districts was seeping; back into the man-made waste. A few months, a year at most, and the land would again present the typical aspect of the Mesopotamian plain, swarming with villages, checked with tiny fields that were more like gardens than farms. Man would cover the scars man had made, and there would be forgetfulness, till the raiders swept again out of the desert. But now the plain lay bare and silent, the canals choked, broken and empty.

Here and there rose the remnants of palm groves, the crumbling ruins of villas and country palaces. Further out, barely visible under the stars, rose the mysterious hillock known as the mound of Enzu—the moon. It was not a natural hill, but whose hands had reared it and for what reason none knew. Before Iranistan was built it had risen above the plain, and the nameless fingers that shaped it had vanished in the dust of time. To it Conan turned his horse’s head.

And in the city he had left, Amytis furtively left his palace and took a devious course to a certain secret destination. She walked rather stiffly, limped, and frequently paused to tenderly caress her person and lament over her injuries. But limping, cursing, and weeping, she eventually reached her destination, and stood before a man whose wealth and power was great in Iranistan. His glance was an interrogation.

“He has gone to the Mound of the Moon, to speak with Gimil-ishbi,” she said.

“Lilitu came to him again tonight,” she shuddered, momentarily forgetting her pain and anger. “Truly he is accursed.”

“By the priests of Anu?” His eyes narrowed to slits.

“So he suspects.”

“And you?”

“What of me? I neither know nor care.”

“Have you ever wondered why I pay you to spy upon him?” he demanded.

She shrugged her shoulders. “You pay me well; that is enough for me.”

“Why does he go to Gimil-ishbi?”

“I told him the renegade might aid him against Lilitu.”

Sudden anger made the man’s face darkly sinister.

“I thought you hated him.”

She shrank from the menace in the voice. “I spoke of the diabolist before I thought, and then he forced me to speak his name, curse him, I will not sit with ease for weeks!” Her resentment rendered her momentarily speechless.

The man ignored her, intent on his own somber meditations. At last he rose with sudden determination.

“I have waited too long,” he muttered, like one speaking his thoughts aloud. “The fiends play with him while I bite my nails, and those who conspire with me grow restless and suspicious. Enlil alone knows what counsel Gimil-ishbi will give. When the moon rises I will ride forth and seek the barbarian on the plain. A stab unaware—he will not suspect until my sword is through him. A bronze blade is surer than the powers of Darkness. I was a fool to trust even a devil.”

Amytis gasped with horror and caught at the velvet hangings for support.

“You? You?” Her lips framed a question too terrible to voice.

“Aye!” He accorded her a glance of grim amusement. With a gasp of terror she darted through the curtained door, her smarts forgotten in her fright.

Whether the cavern was hollowed by man or by Nature, none ever knew. At least its walls, floor, and ceiling were symmetrical and composed of blocks of greenish stone, found nowhere else in that level land. Whatever its cause and origin, man occupied it now. A lamp hung from the rock roof, casting a weird light over the chamber and the bald pate of the man who sat crouching over a parchment scroll on a stone table before him. He looked up as a quick sure footfall sounded on the stone steps that led down into his abode. The next instant a tall figure stood framed in the doorway.

The man at the stone table scanned this figure with avid interest. Conan wore a hauberk of black leather and copper scales; his brazen greaves glinted in the lamplight. The wide crimson cloak, flung loosely about him, did not enmesh the long hilt that jutted from its folds. Shadowed by his horned bronze helmet, the barbarian’s eyes gleamed icily. So the warrior faced the sage.

Gimil-ishbi was very old. There was no leaven of Shemitic blood in his withered veins. His bald head was round as a vulture’s skull, and from it his great nose jutted like the beak of a vulture. His eyes were oblique, a rarity even in a pure-blooded Shemite, and they were bright and black as beads. Whereas Conan’ eyes were all depth, blue deeps and changing clouds and shadows, Gimil-ishbi’s eyes were opaque as jet, and they never changed. His mouth was a gash whose smile was more terrible than its snarl.

He was clad in a simple black tunic, and his feet, in their cloth sandals, seemed strangely deformed. Conan felt a curious twitching between his shoulder-blades as he glanced at those feet, and he drew his eyes away, and back to the sinister face.

“Deign to enter my humble abode, warrior,” the voice was soft and silky, sounding strange from those harsh thin lips. “I would I could offer you food and drink, but I fear the food I eat and the wine I drink would find little favor in your sight.” He laughed softly as at an obscure jest.

“I come not to eat or to drink,” answered Conan abruptly, striding up to the table. “I come to buy a charm against devils.”

“To buy?”

The barbarian emptied a pouch of gold coins on the stone surface; they glistened dully in the lamplight. Gimil-ishbi’s laugh was like the rustle of a serpent through dead grass.

“What is this yellow dirt to me? You speak of devils, and you bring me dust the wind blows away.”

“Dust?” Conan scowled. Gimil-ishbi laid his hand on the shining heap and laughed; somewhere in the night an owl moaned. The priest lifted his hand. Beneath it lay a pile of yellow dust that gleamed dully in the lamplight. A sudden wind rushed down the steps, making the lamp flicker, whirling up the golden heap; for an instant the air was dazzled and spangled with the shining particles. Conan swore; his armor was sprinkled with yellow dust; it sparkled among the scales of his hauberk.

“Dust that the wind blows away,” mumbled the priest. “Sit down, Conan of Iranistan, and let us converse with each other.”

Conan glanced about the narrow chamber; at the even stacks of clay tablets along the walls, and the rolls of papyrus above them. Then he seated himself on the stone bench opposite the priest, hitching his sword belt so that his hilt was well to the front.

“You are far from the cradle of your race,” said Gimil-ishbi. “You are the first dark-haired barbarian rover to tread the plains of Ansham.”

“I have wandered in many lands,” muttered the barbarian, “but may the vultures pluck my bones if I ever saw a race so devil-ridden as this, or a land ruled and harried by so many gods and demons.”

His gaze was fixed in fascination on Gimil-ishbi’s hands; they were long, narrow, white and strong, the hands of youth. Their contrast to the priest’s appearance of great age otherwise, was vaguely disquieting.

“To each city its gods and their priests,” answered Gimil-ishbi; “and all fools. Of what account are gods whom the fortunes of men lift or lower? Behind all gods of men, behind the primal trinity of Ea, Anu and Enlil, lurk the elder gods, unchanged by the wars or ambitions of men. Men deny what they do not see. The priests of Eridu, which is sacred to Ea and light, are no blinder than them of Iranistan, which is consecrated to Enlil, whom they deem the lord of Darkness. But he is only the god of the darkness of which men dream, not the real Darkness that lurks behind all dreams, and veils the real and awful deities. I glimpsed this truth when I was a priest of Enlil, wherefore they cast me forth. Ha! They would stare if they knew how many of their worshippers creep forth to me by night, as you have crept.”

“I creep to no man!” the barbarian bristled instantly. “I came to buy a charm. Name your price, and be damned to you.”

“Be not wroth,” smiled the priest. “Tell me why you have come.”

“If you are so cursed wise you should know already,” growled the barbarian, unmollified. Then his gaze clouded as he cast back over his tangled trail. “Some magician has cursed me.” he muttered. “As I rode back from my triumph over Erech, my war-horse screamed and shied at Something none saw but he. Then my dreams grew strange and monstrous. In the darkness of my chamber, wings rustled and feet padded stealthily. Yesterday a woman at a feast went mad and tried to knife me. Later an adder sprang out of empty air and struck at me. Then, this night, she whom men call Lilitu came to my chamber and mocked me with awful laughter—”

“Lilitu?” the priest’s eyes lit with a brooding fire; his skull-face worked in a ghastly smile. “Verily, warrior, they plot thy ruin in the House of Arabu. Your sword can not prevail against her, or against her mate Ardat Lili. In the gloom of midnight her teeth will find your throat. Her laugh will blast your ears, and her burning kisses will wither you like a dead leaf blowing in the hot winds of the desert. Madness and dissolution will be your lot, and you will descend to the House of Arabu whence none returns.”

Conan moved restlessly, cursing incoherently beneath his breath.

“What can I offer you besides gold?” he growled.

“Much!” the black eyes shone; the mouth-gash twisted in inexplicable glee. “But I must name my own price, after I have given you aid.”

Conan acquiesced with an impatient gesture.

“Who are the wisest men in the world?” asked the sage abruptly.

“The priests of Stygia, who scrawled on yonder parchments,” answered the barbarian.

Gimil-ishbi shook his head; his shadow fell on the wall like that of a great vulture, crouching over a dying victim.

“None so wise as the priests of Tiamat, who—fools believe—died long ago under the sword of Ea. Tiamat is deathless; she reigns in the shadows; she spreads her dark wings over her worshippers.”

“I know them not,” muttered Conan uneasily.

“The cities of men know them not; but the waste-places know them, the reedy marshes, the stony deserts, the hills, and the caverns. To them steal the winged ones from the House of Arabu.”

“I thought none came from that House,” said the barbarian.

“No human returns thence. But the servants of Tiamat come and go at their pleasure.”

Conan was silent, reflecting on the place of the dead, as believed in by the Anshamians; a vast cavern, dusty, dark and silent, through which wandered the souls of the dead forever, shorn of all human attributes, cheerless and loveless, remembering their former lives only to hate all living men, their deeds and dreams.

“I will aid you,” murmured the priest. Conan lifted his helmeted head and stared at him. Gimil-ishbi’s eyes were no more human than the reflection of firelight on subterranean pools of inky blackness. His lips sucked in as if he gloated over all woes and miseries of mankind: Conan hated him as a man hates the unseen serpent in the darkness.

“Aid me and name your price,” said the barbarian.

Gimil-ishbi closed his hands and opened them, and in the palms lay a gold cask, the lid of which fastened with a jeweled catch. He sprung the lid, and Conan saw the cask was filled with grey dust. He shuddered without knowing why.

“This ground dust was once the skull of the first king of Ur,” said Gimil-ishbi. “When he died, as even a necromancer must, he concealed his body with all his art!! But I found his crumbling bones, and in the darkness above them, I fought with his soul as a man fights with a python in the night. My spoil was his skull, that held darker secrets than those that lie in the pits of Stygia.”

“With this dead dust shall you trap Lilitu. Go quickly to an enclosed place—a cavern or a chamber—nay, that ruined villa which lies between this spot and the city will serve. Strew the dust in thin lines across threshold and window; leave not a spot as large as a man’s hand unguarded. Then lie down as if in slumber. When Lilitu enters, as she will, speak the words I shall teach you. Then you are her master, until you free her again by repeating the conjure backwards. You can not slay her, but you can make her swear to leave you in peace. Make her swear by the dugs of Tiamat. Now lean close and I will whisper the words of the spell.”

Somewhere in the night a nameless bird cried out harshly; the sound was more human than the whispering of the priest, which was no louder than the gliding of an adder through slimy ooze. He drew back, his gash-mouth twisted in a grisly smile. The barbarian sat for an instant like a statue of bronze. Their shadows fell together on the wall with the appearance of a crouching vulture facing a strange horned monster.

Conan took the cask and rose, wrapping his crimson cloak about his somber figure, his horned helmet lending an illusion of abnormal height.

“And the price?”

Gimil-ishbi’s hands became claws, quivering with lust.

“Blood! A life!”

“Whose life?”

“Any life! So blood flows, and there is fear and agony, a spirit ruptured from its quivering flesh! I have one price for all—a human life! Death is my rapture; I would glut my soul on death! Man, maid, or infant. You have sworn. Make good your oath! A life! A human life!”

“Aye, a life!” Conan’ sword cut the air in a flaming arc and Gimil-ishbi’s vulture head fell on the stone table. The body reared upright, spouting black blood, then slumped across the stone. The head rolled across the surface and thudded dully on the floor. The features stared up, frozen in a mask of awful surprise.

Outside there sounded a frightful scream as Conan’ stallion broke its halter and raced madly away across the plain.

From the dim chamber with its tablets of cryptic cuneiforms and papyri of dark hieroglyphics, and from the remnants of the mysterious priest, Conan fled. As he climbed the carven stair and emerged into the starlight he doubted his own reason.

Far across the level plain the moon was rising, dull red; darkly lurid. Tense heat and silence held the land. Conan felt cold sweat thickly beading his flesh; his blood was a sluggish current of ice in his veins; his tongue clove to his palate. His armor weighted him and his cloak was like a clinging snare. Cursing incoherently he tore it from him; sweating and shaking he ripped off his armor, piece by piece, and cast it away. In the grip of his abysmal fears he had reverted to the primitive. The veneer of civilization vanished. Naked but for loin-cloth and girded sword he strode across the plain, carrying the golden cask under his arm.

No sound disturbed the waiting silence as he came to the ruined villa whose walls reared drunkenly among heaps of rubble. One chamber stood above the general ruin, left practically untouched by some whim of chance. Only the door had been wrenched from its bronze hinges. Conan entered. Moonlight followed him in and made a dim radiance inside the portal. There were three windows, gold-barred. Sparingly he crossed the threshold with a thin grey line. Each casement he served in like manner. Then tossing aside the empty cask, he stretched himself on a bare dais that stood in deep shadow. His unreasoning horror was under control. He who had been the hunted was now the hunter. The trap was set, and he waited for his prey with the patience of the primitive.

He had not long to wait. Something threshed the air outside and the shadow of great wings crossed the moonlit portal. There was an instant of tense silence in which Conan heard the thunderous impact of his own heart against his ribs. Then a shadowy form framed itself in the open door. A fleeting instant it was visible, then it vanished from view. The thing had entered; the night-fiend was in the chamber.

Conan’ hand clenched on his sword as he heaved up suddenly from the dais. His voice crashed in the stillness as he thundered the dark enigmatic conjurement whispered to him by the dead priest. He was answered by a frightful scream; there was a quick stamp of bare feet, then a heavy fail, and something was threshing and writhing in the shadows on the floor. As Conan cursed the masking darkness, the moon thrust a crimson rim above a casement, like a goblin peering into a window, and a molten flood of light crossed the floor. In the pale glow the barbarian saw his victim.

But it was no were-woman that writhed there. It was a thing like a man, lithe, naked, dusky-skinned. It differed not in the attributes of humanity except for the disquieting suppleness of its limbs, the changeless glitter of its eyes. It grovelled as in mortal agony, foaming at the mouth and contorting its body into impossible positions.

With a blood-mad yell Conan ran at the figure and plunged his sword through the squirming body. The point rang on the tiled floor beneath it, and an awful howl burst from the frothing lips, but that was the only apparent effect of the thrust. The barbarian wrenched forth his sword and glared astoundedly to see no stain on the steel, no wound on the dusky body. He wheeled as the cry of the captive was re-echoed from without.

Just outside the enchanted threshold stood a woman, naked, supple, dusky, with wide eyes blazing in a soulless face. The being on the floor ceased to writhe, and Conan’ blood turned to ice.

“Lilitu!”

She quivered at the threshold, as if held by an invisible boundary. Her eyes were eloquent with hate; they yearned awfully for his blood and his life. She spoke, and the effect of a human voice issuing from that beautiful unhuman mouth was more terrifying than if a wild beast had spoken in human tongue.

“You have trapped my mate! You dare to torture Ardat Lili, before whom the gods tremble! Oh, you shall howl for this! You shall be torn bone from bone, and muscle from muscle, and vein from vein! Loose him! Speak the words and set him free, lest even this doom be denied you!”

“Words!” he answered with bitter savagery. “You have hunted me like a hound. Now you can not cross that line without falling into my hands as your mate has fallen. Come into the chamber, bitch of darkness, and let me caress you as I caress your lover—thus! and thus! and thus!”

Ardat Lili foamed and howled at the bite of the keen steel, and Lilitu screamed madly in protest, beating with her hands as at an invisible barrier.

“Cease! Cease! Oh, could I but come at you! How I would leave you a blind, mangled cripple! Have done! Ask what you will, and I will perform it!”

“That is well,” grunted the barbarian grimly. “I can not take this creature’s life, but it seems I can hurt him, and unless you give me satisfaction, I will give him more pain than ever he guesses exists in the world.”

“Ask! Ask!” urged the were-woman, twisting with impatience.

“Why have you haunted me? What have I done to earn your hate?”

“Hate?” she tossed her head. “What are the sons of men that we of Shuala should hate or love? When the doom is loosed, it strikes blindly.”

“Then who, or what, loosed the doom of Lilitu upon me?”

“One who dwells in the House of Arabu.”

“Why, in Crom’s name?” swore Conan. “Why should the dead hate me?” He halted, remembering a priest who died gurgling curses.

“The dead strike at the bidding of the living. Someone who moves in the sunlight spoke in the night to one who dwells in Shuala.”

“Who?”

“I do not know.”

“You lie, you slut! It is the priests of Anu, and you would shield them. For that lie your lover shall howl to the kiss of the steel—”

“Butcher!” shrieked Lilitu. “Hold your hand! I swear by the dugs of Tiamat my mistress, I do not know what you ask. What are the priests of Anu that I should shield them? I would rip up all their bellies—as I would yours, could I come at you! Free my mate, and I will lead you to the House of Darkness itself, and you may wrest the truth from the awful mouth of the dweller himself, if you dare!”

“I will go,” said Conan, “but I leave Ardat Lili here as hostage. If you deal falsely with me, he will writhe on this enchanted floor throughout all eternity.”

Lilitu wept with fury, crying: “No devil in Shuala is crueller than you. Haste, in the name of Apsu!”

Sheathing his sword, Conan stepped across the threshold. She caught his wrist with fingers like velvet-padded steel, crying something in a strange inhuman tongue. Instantly the moonlit sky and plain were blotted out in a rush of icy blackness. There was a sensation of hurtling through a void of intolerable coldness, a roaring in the barbarian’s ears as of titan winds. Then his feet struck solid ground; stability followed that chaotic instant, that had been like the instant of dissolution that joins or separates two states of being, alike in stability, but in kind more alien than day and night. Conan knew that in that instant he had crossed an unimaginable gulf, and that he stood on shores never before touched by living human feet.

Lilitu’s fingers grasped his wrist, but he could not see her. He stood in darkness of a quality which he had never encountered. It was almost tangibly soft, all-pervading and all-engulfing. Standing amidst it, it was not easy even to imagine sunlight and bright rivers and grass singing in the wind. They belonged to that other world—a world lost and forgotten in the dust of a million centuries. The world of life and light was a whim of chance—a bright spark glowing momentarily in a universe of dust and shadows. Darkness and silence were the natural state of the cosmos, not light and the noises of Life. No wonder the dead hated the living, who disturbed the grey stillness of Infinity with their tinkling laughter.

Lilitu’s fingers drew him through abysmal blackness. He had a vague sensation as of being in a titanic cavern, too huge for conception. He sensed walls and roof, though he did not see them and never reached them; they seemed to recede as he advanced, yet there was always the sensation of their presence. Sometimes his feet stirred what he hoped was only dust. There was a dusty scent throughout the darkness; he smelled the odors of decay and mould.

He saw lights moving like glow-worms through the dark. Yet they were not lights, as he knew radiance. They were most like spots of lesser gloom, that seemed to glow only by contrast with the engulfing blackness which they emphasized without illuminating. Slowly, laboriously they crawled through the eternal night. One approached the companions closely and Conan’ hair stood up and he grasped his sword. But Lilitu took no heed as she hurried him on. The dim spot glowed close to him for an instant; it vaguely illumined a shadowy countenance, faintly human, yet strangely birdlike.

Existence became a dim and tangled thing to Conan, wherein he seemed to journey for a thousand years through the blackness of dust and decay, drawn and guided by the hand of the were-woman. Then he heard her breath hiss through her teeth, and she came to a halt.

Before them shimmered another of those strange globes of light. Conan could not tell whether it illumined a man or a bird. The creature stood upright like a man, but it was clad in grey feathers—at least they were more like feathers than anything else. The features were no more human than they were birdlike.

“This is the dweller in Shuala which put upon you the curse of the dead,” whispered Lilitu. “Ask him the name of him who hates you on earth.”

“Tell me the name of mine enemy!” demanded Conan, shuddering at the sound of his own voice, which whispered drearily and uncannily through the unechoing darkness.

The eyes of the dead burned redly and it came at him with a rustle of pinions, a long gleam of light springing into its lifted hand. Conan recoiled, clutching at his word, but Lilitu hissed: “Nay, use this!” and he felt a hilt thrust into his fingers. He was grasping a scimitar with a blade curved in the shape of the crescent moon, that shone like an arc of white fire.

He parried the bird-thing’s stroke, and sparks showered in the gloom, burning him like bits of flame. The darkness clung to him like a black cloak; the glow of the feathered monster bewildered and baffled him. It was like fighting a shadow in the maze of a nightmare. Only by the fiery gleam of his enemy’s blade did he keep the touch of it. Thrice it sang death in his ears as he deflected it by the merest fraction, then his own crescent-edge cut the darkness and grated on the other’s shoulder-joint. With a strident screech the thing dropped its weapon and slumped down, a milky liquid spurting from the gaping wound. Conan lifted his scimitar again, when the creature gasped in a voice that was no more human than the grating of wind-blown boughs against one another: “Naram-ninub, the great-grandson of my great-grandson! By black arts he spoke and commanded me across the gulfs!”

“Naram-ninub!” Conan stood frozen in amazement; the scimitar was torn from his hand. Again Lilitu’s fingers locked on his wrist. Again the dark was drowned in deep blackness and howling winds blowing between the spheres.

He staggered in the moonlight without the ruined villa, reeling with the dizziness of his transmutation. Beside him Lilitu’s teeth shone between her curling red lips. Catching the thick locks clustered on her neck, he shook her savagely, as he would have shaken a mortal woman.

“Harlot of Hell! What madness has your sorcery instilled in my brain?”

“No madness!” she laughed, striking his hand aside. “You have journeyed to the House of Arabu, and you have returned. You have spoken with and overcome with the sword of Apsu, the shade of a man dead for long centuries.”

“Then it was no dream of madness! But Naram-ninub—” he halted in confused thought. “Why, of all the men of Iranistan, he has been my staunchest friend!”

“Friend?” she mocked. “What is friendship but a pleasant pretense to while away an idle hour?”

“But why in Crom’s name?”

“What are the petty intrigues of men to me?” she exclaimed angrily. “Yet now I remember that men from Erech, wrapped in cloaks, steal by night to Naram-ninub’s palace.”

“Ymir!” like a sudden blaze of light Conan saw reason in merciless clarity. “He would sell Iranistan to Erech, and first he must put me out of the way, because the hosts of Iranistan can not stand before me! Oh, dog, let my knife find your heart!”

“Keep faith with me!” Lilitu’s importunities drowned his fury. “I have kept faith with you. I have led you where never living man has trod, and brought you forth unharmed. I have betrayed the dwellers in Darkness and done that for which Tiamat will bind me naked on a white-hot grid for seven times seven days. Speak the words and free Ardat Lili!”

Still engrossed in Naram-ninub’s treachery, Conan spoke the incantation. With a loud sigh of relief, the were-man rose from the tiled floor and came into the moonlight. The barbarian stood with his hand on his sword and his head bent, lost in moody thought. Lilitu’s eyes flashed a quick meaning to her mate. Lithely they began to steal toward the abstracted man. Some primitive instinct brought his head up with a jerk. They were closing in on him, their eyes burning in the moonlight, their fingers reaching for him. Instantly he realized his mistake; he had forgotten to make them swear truce with him; no oath bound them from his flesh.

With feline screeches they struck, but quicker yet he bounded aside and raced toward the distant city. Too hotly eager for his blood to resort to sorcery, they gave chase. Fear winged his feet, but close behind him he heard the swift patter of their feet, their eager panting. A sudden drum of hoofs sounded in front of him, and bursting through a tattered grove of skeleton palms, he almost caromed against a rider, who rode like the wind, a long silvery glitter in his hand. With a startled oath the horseman wrenched his steed back on its haunches. Conan saw looming over him a powerful body in scale mail, a pair of blazing eyes that glared at him from under a domed helmet, a short black beard.

“You dog!” he yelled furiously. “Damn you, have you come to complete with your sword what your black magic began?”

The steed reared wildly as he leaped at its head and caught its bridle. Cursing madly and fighting for balance, Naram-ninub slashed at his attacker’s head, but Conan parried the stroke and thrust upward murderously. The sword-point glanced from the corselet and plowed along the Semite’s jaw-bone. Naram-ninub screamed and fell from the plunging steed, spouting blood. His leg-bone snapped as he pitched heavily to earth, and his cry was echoed by a gloating howl from the shadowed grove.

Without dragging the rearing horse to earth, Conan sprang to its back and wrenched it about. Naram-ninub was groaning and writhing on the ground, and as Conan looked, two shadows darted from the darkened grove and fastened themselves on his prostrate form. A terrible scream burst from his lips, echoed by more awful laugher. Blood on the night air; on it the night-things would feed, wild as mad dogs, making no difference between men.

The barbarian wheeled away, toward the city, then hesitated, shaken by a fierce revulsion. The level land lay quiescent beneath the moon, and the brutish pyramid of Enlil stood up in the stars. Behind him lay his enemy, glutting the fangs of the horrors he himself had called up from the Pits. The road was open to Iranistan, for his return.

His return —to a devil-ridden people crawling beneath the heels of priest and king; to a city rotten with intrigue and obscene mysteries; to an alien race that mistrusted him, and a mistress that hated him.

Wheeling his horse again, he rode westward toward the open lands, flinging his arms wide in a gesture of renunciation and the exultation of freedom. The weariness of life dropped from him like a cloak. His mane floated in the wind, and over the plains of Ansham shouted a sound they had never heard before—the gusty, elemental, reasonless laughter of a free barbarian.

Mistress of Death

- Robert E. Howard, Gerald W. Page & J.R. Karlsson

Ahead of her in the dark alley steel clashed and a man cried out as men cry only when death-stricken. Around a corner of the winding way three mantled shapes came running, blindly, as men ran in panic and terror. She drew back against the wall to let them go past, and two crowded by her without even seeing her, breathing in hysterical gasps; but the third, running with his chin on his shoulder, blundered full against her.

He shrieked like a damned soul, and evidently deeming himself attacked, grappled her wildly, tearing at her with his teeth like a mad dog. With a curse she broke his grasp and flung him from her against the wall, but the violence of her exertion caused her foot to slip in a puddle on the stones, and she stumbled and went to her knee.

He fled screaming on up the alley, but as she rose, a tall figure loomed above her, like a phantom out of the deeper darkness. The light of a distant cresset gleamed dully on his helm and the sword lifted above her head. She barely had time to parry the stroke; sparks flew as our steel met, and she returned the stroke with a thrust of such violence that her point drove through teeth and neck and rang against the lining of his steel head-piece.

Who her attackers were she knew not, but there was no time for parley or explanation. Dim figures were upon her in the semi-darkness and blades whickered about her head. A stroke that clanged full on her helm filled her eyes with sparks of fire, and abandoning the point in her extremity she hewed right and left and heard men grunt and curse as her edge gashed them. Then, as she stepped back to avoid a swiping cut, her foot caught in the cloak of the man she had killed, and she fell sprawling over the corpse.

There was a fierce cry of triumph, and one sprang forward, sword lifted – but ere he could strike or she could lift her blade above her head, a quick step sounded behind her, a dim figure loomed in the uncertain light, and the downward sweeping blade rang on a sword in mid-air.

“Dog!” quoth the stranger with a curious accent. “Will you strike a fallen man?”

The other roared and cut at him madly, but by that time she was on her feet again, and as the others pressed in, she met them with point and edge, thrusting and slashing like a demon, for she was wild with fury at having been in such a plight as the stranger rescued her from. A side-long glance showed her the latter driving his sword through the body of the man who opposed him, and at this, and as she pressed them, drawing blood at each stroke, the rogues gave way and fled fleetly down the alley.

She turned then to her unknown friend, and saw a huge muscular man much taller than herself. The glare of the distant cresset fell dimly upon him, and she saw that he was clad in fine Kordovan boots and velvet doublet, beneath which she glimpsed a glint of fine mesh-mail. A fine crimson cloak was flung over his shoulder and his eyes, cold and blue, danced restlessly. His face was clean-shaven and bronzed by the sun, and there were scars that hinted of an adventurous career. He bore himself with something of a swagger, and his every action betokened steel-spring muscles and the co-ordination of a swordsman.

“I thank you, my friend,” she said. “Well for me that you came at the moment which you did.”

“Crom!” he cried. “You're a woman!”

There being no reply to that, she cleaned her blade and sheathed it, while he gaped at her open-mouthed.

“Red Sonja!” he said slowly, at length. “It can be no other. It has been some time since Makkalet. Do you remember? I am Conan.”

She grasped his hand, pretending to feign ignorance of their history whilst feeling steely thews in his fingers that spoke of his prowess in combat.

“Who were these rogues who sought your life?” he asked.

“I have many enemies,” she answered, “but I think these were mere skulking rogues, robbers and murderers. They were pursuing three men, and I think tried to cut my throat to hush my tongue.”

“Likely enough,” he said. “I saw three men in black mantles flee out of the alley mouth as though demons were at their heels, which aroused my curiosity, so I came to see what was forward, especially as I heard the rattle of steel. Crom! Men said your sword-play was like summer lightning, and it is even as they said! But let us see if the rogues have indeed fled, or are merely lurking beyond that crook to stab us in the back as they depart.”

He stepped cautiously around the crook, and swore under his breath.

“They are gone, in sooth, but I see something lying in the alley. I think it is a dead man.”

Then she remembered the cry she had heard, and she joined him. A few moments later they were bending over two forms that lay sprawled in the mud of the alley. One was a small man, mantled like the three who had fled, with a deep gash in his breast that had let out his life. But as she spoke to Conan on the matter, he swore suddenly. He had turned the other man on his back, and was staring at him in surprise.

“This man has been dead for hours,” quoth he. “Moreover he died not by sword or pistol. Look! See his features how they are swollen and purple? It is the mark of the gallows! And he is clad still in the gibbet-shirt. By Crom, Sonja, do you know who this is?” And when she shook her head, “It is Costranno, the Argossean sorcerer, who was hanged at dawn this morning on the gibbet outside the walls, for practising the black arts. He it was who poisoned the son of the Duke and caused the blame to be laid upon an innocent man, but Berthilda, suspecting the truth, trapped him into a confession to her, and laid the facts before the authorities.”

“I had heard something of this matter,” she said. “But I have been in Zamora only a matter of a week.”

“It is Costranno, well enough,” said Conan, shaking his head. “His features are so distorted I would not have known him, save that the middle finger of his left hand is missing. And this other is his pupil in the black arts; sentence of death was passed on him, likewise, but he had fled and could not be found. Well, his art did not save him from a footpad’s sword. Costranno’s followers have cut him down from the gibbet – but why should they have brought the body back into the city?”

“There is something in Pelligny’s hand,” she said, prying the dead fingers apart. It was as if, even in death, they gripped what they held. It was a fragment of gold chain, and fastened to it a most curious red jewel that gleamed in the darkness like an angry eye.

“Crom!” muttered Conan. “A rare stone, – hark!” he started to his feet. “The watch! We must not be found by these corpses!”

Far down the alley she saw the glow of moving soldiers and heard the tramp of mailed feet. As she scrambled up, the jewel and chain slipped from her fingers – it was almost as if they were snatched from her hand – and fell full on the breast of the dead sorcerer. She did not wish to take the time to retrieve it, so she hurried up the alley after Conan, and glancing back, she saw the jewel glittering like a crimson star on the dead man’s bosom.

Emerging from the alley into a narrow winding street, scarcely better lighted, they hurried along it until they came to an inn, and entered it. Then, seating ourselves at a table somewhat apart from the others who wrangled and cast dice on the wine-stained boards, they called for wine and the host brought us two great jacks.

“To our better acquaintance,” quoth Conan, lifting his tankard. “By Crom, now that I see you in the light again, I admire you the more. You are a fine, tall woman, but even in helm, doublet, trunk-hose and boots none could mistake you for a man. Well are you called Red Sonja. For all your red hair and fair skin there is something strange and dark about you. Men say you move through life like one of the Fates, unmoved, unchangeable, potent with tragedy and doom, and that the men who ride with you do not live long. Tell me, girl, why did you don breeks and take the road of men?”

She shook her head, unable to say herself, but as he urged her to tell him something of herself, she said: “I once fell in with a leader of the Free Companies, who taught me the proper use of the sword before he was slain in an ambush. I took naturally to the life of a man, and can drink, swear, march fight and boast with the best of them. I have yet to meet my equal at sword play.”

Conan scowled slightly as if her word did not please him overmuch, and he lifted his tankard, quaffed deeply, and said: “I choose not to put this to the test this day. But who is this?”

The door had opened and a gust of cold wind made the candles flicker, and sent a shiver over the men on the settles. A tall man entered, closing the door behind him. He was wrapped in a wide black mantle, and when he raised his head and his glance over the tavern, a silence fell suddenly. That face was strange and unnatural in appearance, being so dark in hue it was almost black. His eyes were strange, murky and staring. She saw several topers cross themselves as they met his gaze, and then he seated himself at a table in a corner furthest from the candles, and drew his mantle closer about him, though the night was warm. He took the tankard proffered him by an apprehensive slattern and bent his head over it, so his face was no longer visible under his slouch hat, and the hum of the tavern began again, though somewhat subdued.

“Blood on that mantle,” said Conan. “If that man be not a cutthroat then I am much befooled. Host, another bottle!”

“You are the first Cimmerian I have ever met,” said she, “though I have had dealings with the Hyperboreans.”

“A curse on the breed!” he cried. “Crom take them all into his keeping. And a curse on all enemies who exiled me from Cimmeria.”

“You are an exile?” she asked.

“Aye! With scant gold to make do. But fortune ever favors the brave.” And he laid hand on the hilt at his hip.

But she was watching the stranger in the corner, and Conan turned to stare at him. The man had lifted his hand and crooked a finger at the fat host, and that rogue drew nigh, wiping his hands on his leathern apron and uneasy in his expression. There was something about the black-mantled stranger that repelled men.

The stranger spoke, but his words were a mumble, and her friend shook his head in bewilderment.

“An Argossean,” muttered Conan. “I know that jabber anywhere.”

But the stranger shifted into the common tongue, and as he spoke, haltingly at first, his words grew plainer, his voice fuller.

“Berthilda,” quoth he, and repeated the name several times. “Where is the house of Berthilda?”

The inn-keeper began giving him directions, and Conan muttered: “Why should that ill-visaged Argossean rogue desire to go to Berthilda?”

“From what she hear,” she answered cynically, “it is no great surprise to hear any man asking for her house.”

“Lies are always told about beautiful women,” answered Conan, lifting his tankard. “Because she is said to be the mistress of the Duke does not mean that she – ”

He froze suddenly, tankard to lip, staring, and she saw an expression of surprise pass over his scarred face. At that moment the Argossean had risen, and drawing his wide mantle about him, made for the door.

“Stop him!” roared Conan, leaping to his feet, and dragging out his sword. “Stop that rogue!”

But at that instant a band of soldiers in morions and breastplates came shouldering in, and the Argossean glided out past them and shut the door behind him. Conan started forward with a curse, to halt as the soldiers barred the way. Striding into the center of the tavern, and roving a stern glance over all the cringing occupants, the captain, a tall man in a gleaming breastplate, said loudly: “Red Sonja, she arrest you for the murder of Jacques Pelligny!”

“What do you mean, Tristan?” she exclaimed angrily, springing up. “I did not kill Pelligny!”

“This woman saw you leave the alley where the man was slain,” answered he, indicating a tall, fair wench in feathers and gauds who cowered in the grasp of a burly man-at-arms and would not meet her gaze. She knew her well, a courtesan whom she had befriended, and whom she would not have expected to give false testimony against her.

“Then I must have seen her too,” growled Conan, “for I was with Sonja. If you arrest her you must arrest me too, and by Crom, my sword will have something to say about that.”

“I have naught to do with you,” answered Tristan. “My business is with this woman.”

“Man, you are a fool!” cried Conan gustily. “She did not kill Pelligny. And what if she did. Was not the rogue under sentence of death?”

“He was meat for the hangman, not the private citizen,” answered Tristan.

“Listen,” said Conan. “He was slain by footpads, who then attacked Sonja who chanced to be traversing the alley at the time. I came to her aid, and we slew two of the rogues. Did you not find their bodies, with masks to their heads to prove their trades?”

“We saw no such thing,” answered Tristan. “Nor were you seen thereabouts, so your testimony is without value. This woman here saw Red Sonja pursue Pelligny into the alley and there stab him. So I am forced to take her to the prison.”

“I know well why you wish to arrest me, Tristan,” she said coolly, approaching him with an easy tread. “I had not been in Zamora a day before you sought to make me your mistress. Now you take this revenge upon her. Fool! I am mistress only to Death!”

“Enough of this idle talk,” ordered Tristan curtly. “Seize her, men!” It was his last command on earth, for her sword was through him before he could lift his hand. The guard closed in on her with a yell, and as she thrust and parried, Conan sprang to her side and in an instant the inn was a madhouse, with stamping boots, clanging blades and the curses and yells of slaughter. Then they broke through, leaving the floor strewn with corpses, and gained the street. As they broke through the door she saw the wench they had brought to testify against her cowering behind an overturned settle and she grasped her thick yellow locks and dragged her with her into the street.

“Down that alley,” gasped Conan. “Other guardsmen will be here anon. “Crom, Sonja, will you burden yourself with that big hussy? We must take to our heels!”

“I have a score to settle with her,” she gritted, for all her hot blood was roused. She hauled her along with them until they made a turn in the alley and halted for breath.

“Watch the street,” she bade him, and then turning to the cowering wench, she said in calm fury: “Margot, if an open enemy deserves a thrust of steel, what fate doth a traitress deserve? Not four days agone she saved you from a beating at the hands of a drunken soldier, and gave you money because your tears touched her foolish compassion. Now I have a mind to cut the head from your fair shoulders!’

“Oh, Sonja,” she sobbed, falling on her knees, and clasping her legs. “Have Mercy! she – ”

“I’ll spare your worthless life,” she said angrily, beginning to unsling her sword belt. “But I mean to turn up your petticoats and whip you as no beadle ever did.”

“Nay, Sonja!” she wailed. “First hear me! I did not lie! It is true that I saw you and the Cimmerian coming from the alley with naked swords in your hands. But the watch said merely that three bodies were lying in the alley, and two were masked, showing they were thieves. Tristan said whoever slew them did a good night’s work, and asked me if I had seen any coming from the alley. So I thought no harm, and replied that I had seen you and the Cimmerian Conan. But when I spoke your name, he smiled and told his men that he had his reasons for desiring to get Red Sonja in a dungeon, helpless and unarmed; and bade them do as he told them. So he told me that my testimony about you would be accepted, but the rest, about Conan, and the two thieves he would not accept. And he threatened me so terribly that I dared not defy him.”

“The foul dog,” she muttered. “Well, there is a new captain of the watch in hell tonight.”

“But you said three bodies,” broke in Conan. “Were there not four? Pelligny, two thieves, and the body of Costranno?”

She shook her head.

“I saw the bodies. There were but three. Pelligny lay deep in the alley, fully clad, the other two around the crook, and the larger was naked.”

“Eh?” ejaculated Conan. “By Ymir, that Argossean! I have but now remembered! On, to the house of Berthilda!”

“Why there?” she demanded.

“When the Argossean in the inn drew his cloak about him to depart,” answered Conan, “I glimpsed on his breast a fragment of golden chain and a great red jewel – I believe the very jewel Pelligny grasped in his hand when they found him. I believe that man is a friend of Costranno’s, a magician come to take vengeance on Berthilda! Come!”

He set impetuously off up the alley, and she followed him, while the girl Margot scurried away in another direction, evidently glad to get off with a whole skin.

“As that Argossean drew his cloak about him, I glimpsed his left hand – it lacked the middle finger!”

“What madness is this?” she muttered.

“Aye, and I glimpsed that cursed red jewel glinting on his bosom. Hark, Sonja, suppose that Costranno knew the secret of bringing corpses back to life. Suppose that the jewel held the secret; that after Pelligny and the others cut him down from the gibbet, they were bringing him to his house to restore life to him, when they were apprehended by those rogues. You dropped the jewel on his bosom. Doubtless the incantations had already been made. Moreover that alley, men tell me is paved with stones from an ancient heathen temple that once stood in a grove outside the city, in the days before Rome.

“If such a man were brought back to life, he would remember slowly. But he would seek vengeance. And it was the testimony of Berthilda which hanged Costranno!”

To her house they went swiftly, and found a servant lying in the court strangled, with the marks on his throat of a hand lacking the middle finger. They soon found another servant who had gone mad from seeing the dead man approach Berthilda’s chamber and bear her away in her night shift. They had followed then down a long flight of stairs the existence of which the girl had known nothing, and came into a mysterious crypt. On a stone dais lay Berthilda, naked, and Costranno was raising a seven sided slab of stone in the floor, revealing a black gaping hole in the light of a torch which burned in a niche.

Costranno’s cloak was thrown off now, and his features, hidden in the tavern, were now revealed in the torch light. The gibbet had done its work well. Bloated was the face of Costranno, his lips blacked with death and the marks and bite of the rope heavy upon his neck. He gave a great, incoherent cry as Conan moved toward him. Then the sorcerer fell back to the wall behind him and snatched a torch from its bracket. His unearthly, garbled voice rose in a shout that might have been rage or a call to the blasphemous gods he worshipped, and he threw the torch at Conan.

The touch struck the brown stone flooring before Conan’s feet, with a shower of sparks and flames and a sudden billowing of black smoke. Instantly Conan’s figure was hidden from her view, but she could hear his voice, giving vent to his cage in a string of curses. The smoke was gone almost as suddenly as it came and Conan still stood, apparently unhurt. But when he moved to leap at Costranno, something seemed to hold him back, as if an invisible wall had formed.

She spent no time in trying to fathom Costranno’s magic. Before the sorcerer could reach another torch, she was upon him. And as Conan cursed and raved because he could not move to hurl himself and his sword point upon his foe, she passed her sword twice through the undead man’s body without harming him.

A horrible, angry cry came forth from Costranno’a mangled throat. He drew his sword, and only her mail shirt beneath her doublet saved her from his terrible thrusts. But even so she was forced back, and the growling, snarling Costranno bore toward her, his sword slashing and beating at her with such terrific blows that she was hard put to parry.

She knew fear at that moment-icy, nerve-shattering fear that seemed to grip her very soul, and rendered her so senseless that she fought by instinct and raw strength and without science or technique, save that of the moment. Costranno was in a rage and wanted her life and the life of Conan and of the naked, helpless girl who lay as intended sacrifice upon the black altar.

She did not realise his strategy until the heel of her left foot reached the edge of the opening in the floor behind her. Costranno had forced her back, hoping not to best her with the sword, but to hurtle her into the abyss. She knew nothing of what might be at the bottom of that pit, but somehow she knew that the kindest death that would befall one who toppled into it would be to have his body dashed to pieces at its bottom.

She hacked fiercely at Costranno, relying more on strength than skill and in that moment drove him back far enough to give her the room she needed. She dove to one side, rolled and came to her feet behind him. She struck with all her strength, and the edge of her blade sank deep into the flesh of Costranno’s mangled neck, severing through hone and gristle as well as flesh, and then pulling free as the severed head flopped from the shoulder of the corpse and into the gaping blackness of the hole into which he had tried to push her.

There was an unearthly cry of terror from the blackness beneath the feet as they moved from the edge of the pit and then moved back, away from it.

Her fear had become so agonising that she was almost mindless, but somehow she saw what must he done and somehow brought herself to do it, despite the revulsion the thought of touching Costranno brought to her, she have fought many times and killed many men and seen many comrades die in battle. She have carried men's corpses to a shallow grave without so much as a second thought about touching cold flesh. But the thought of touching a walking dead was so abhorrent that it sent a chill up her spine. She stirred herself to do what was necessary, that she touch it so that it could not touch her. She forced herself to run up behind the shambling corpse and shove her hands hard against its shoulders. Something like a blast of lightning coursed through her body and threw her back, numbly, to the floor. But even as she fell to the floor, she saw the headless corpse topple into the pit.

For a moment there was a silence in the chamber and neither Conan nor she moved. Then, on the altar, Berthilda stirred and made a whimpering sound as consciousness returned to her. Conan, now out of the spell which had imprisoned him, rushed to her side and reached down to aid her in coming to her feet.

Sudden shame and the womanly fear she had felt while fighting Custranno flooded her. Flustered, she shook off his hand and rose to her feet, unsteadily but without help. “I’m all right,” she said. “I can take care of herself.”

Conan laughed, but there was oddly, nothing of contempt or malice in his laugh, “You are more a woman than you'll admit,” he said. “And to your credit, Red Sonja.”

“If you would aid a helpless woman,” she said, with discomfort, “then see to Berthilda. her guess is they will need such influence as she can give us to gain protection from the watch before they escape this city.”

“Aye,” Conan said. “There is truth in what you say.” He went to see to Berthilda, and she stood, trying to conceal her nervousness, staring at the open pit in the floor.

Sonja went to the wall and took a torch from a bracket and went to the edge of the opening and knelt down. She held the torch out over the opening and peered down into the blackness.

Before she knew what was happening, a snaky, black fur-covered arm reached out and grasped her doublet. She screamed as the arm strove to drag her into the hole and she beat down with the torch. There was a bestial cry and the thing let go. She had only a glimpse, of a distorted, apish thing falling and the torch fell after, dwindling to a speck of light far below, like a meteor. She whimpered like a child and turned away from the pit into the welcome arms of Conan that closed about her like the protecting arms of some saint. And without shame she shivered for a time in those arms as my fear took hold of her and

“It’s over now, Red Sonja,” she heard the soothing deep voice of Conan. “And now you have naught to fear and naught to be ashamed of. You have done as well against this horror as any woman or any man could do. And if, in the end, it comes to this, there is no shame for you to act as a woman Red Sonja, for you are quite a woman, indeed.”

She did not object as he lifted her to her feet. “And it may chance,” he went on, his voice now lighter and with that familiar hint of laughter to it, “that when you ride froth from this city, you will find me riding at your side.”

“Do not forget the curse that hangs over me, Conan. Does it not bother you that the men who ride with Red Sonja ride to an early grave?”

“Not a bit,” Conan said, with booming laughter. “For what is another curse more or less upon the head of one that has been as cursed as Conan of Cimmeria?”

And together they replaced the stone slab in the opening in the floor and then helped Berthilda from the crypt and up the stairs back to her own bedchamber, leaving behind the horror that pursued her.

Tower of Blood

- David A. English & J.R. Karlsson

The cries of his pursuers, deprived by distance of all humanity, drifted up the mountainside. Like the baying of hounds. Oh, very like. For the time being he crouched in the sparse concealment of a narrow copse and watched. Laxil’s mamelukes wandered aimlessly over the lower slope.

Conan was not encouraged. They would pick up his trail before long. And soon it would be their strength against his—, and they were many…

Maybe this would teach him better to avoid the snare of women, he reflected bitterly. Although it was a little late to be making maxims for future guidance. The mystery-priests, most likely, had all the maxims he was going to need.

He only hoped Laxil would deal as sternly with his deceitful concubine. Small chance of that, though. She was wonderfully sly and had probably already persuaded the old fool that Conan had led her astray. Conan laughed, not pleasantly.

As he watched, the horsemen gathered into a tight squadron once more, Having picked up his trail, they rode into the pass.

Conan abruptly brought his thoughts back to the present. He quickly determined on a final sleight to gain time.

Slapping the flank of his weary steed, he sent the animal galloping down the main trail. When Laxil’s men emerged from the pass, the horse would be out of sight. Perhaps they would follow the false trace for a while. He doubted it.

With hope or without it, Conan ran to the mouth of a raw-edged cleft that split the side of the looming cliff. Even if it led nowhere, at least it was narrow and would be an advantageous place to stand and sell his life dearly.

He proceeded cautiously up the slide of scree that formed a kind of floor to the cleft. Tile debris was treacherously loose, and he did not want to start a rock-slide that would persist after his passing and betray him.

A change in the quality of his pursuer’s voices warned him that they had emerged from the pass. He cursed. He could not reach the upper end of the cleft before they came abreast of its lower opening and were in a position to observe him.

In the seconds that remained, he wedged himself into a narrow Assure. It did not completely conceal his big body, but he hoped the broken shadows would distort his outline enough so he would not be noticed.

Conan looked around, surveying the possibilities, which were few enough. At the upper opening of the cleft, half embedded in Broken rocks and gravel, stood a great boulder. He decided that he wanted that boulder at his back if he must stand and fight. If they succumbed to his trick, however, he would try lo lost himself in the mountains. That was all he had in the way of plans.

Damn Laxil’s woman.

Down below, Conan’s pursuers wheeled and milled. Anxiously, their quarry peered and cocked his ear, trying to discern their intentions. Their voices reached him loud but incomprehensible, confused by echoes and the singing of the blood in his ears.

He could not tell what decided them. Perhaps his horse, with misguided loyalty, had returned along the trail. Or some sleuth, too wily by half, had noticed that the hoofprints were not those of an animal bearing a man's weight.

Conan broke from his covert and scrambled toward the boulder, the goal he had set himself. Facing Laxil’s dozen was no pleasant prospect under any circumstances, but braced against that stout backstop he would make a moiety of them bleed before they reaped his head to gratify Laxil’s stupid jealousy.

When he attained the boulder, he turned to look back. They had come •bout half-way. But now their steps were slowing.

They saw the advantage he enjoyed, such as it was. And each one privately was beginning to fear that he might not be among those who went back to receive Laxil’s praise. The pursuit was turning into one of those ludicrous races where the prize goes to the loser.

In his impatience with its slow approach, Conan turned from the creeping doom below him. In the shadowy valley on the other side of the ridge, he saw age-blackened ruins of a wall that poked up through the brown, hummocky grass, and a stark tower, which even to his gaze, looked wicked and menacing.

And even this dismal prospect, gods had decreed, he was not to attain. No need even to think of the broad, blue vistas of plains beyond that, or the snow-covered peaks of the farther reaches of the mountain range. These were lands of escape, lands of freedom and never-dying; lands, if that must be, which he would never enter.

He turned to the swordsmen of Laxil and drew his sword. He shook it at them and whirled it about his head in the high sunlight until it was as a glory around him. He raved at them and cursed them, calling down bloody death for those who fell under its glancing beams.

Slowly and more slowly still they came on. And Conan grew even more furious that he should get his bane from such nidderings. Through mere numbers they would overcome him, and what renown could they expect from that?

In the end it was not cunning or valor or might in battle that saved him. It was sheer rage and despair that finally inspired him, a will to survive that was ravening and mad in its intensity.

No man in his right sense would have attempted what he did. No one lacking a lunatic’s demon-given strength would have succeeded.

In all the region around him there was only one missile sufficient for his blazing wrath. The boulder itself, the landmark on which he had first fixed his eye from far below.

At first he grappled with it face to face, as one who would heave it up above his head and hurl it down. He was as crazy as that with rage! But even Conan’s mighty back was not adequate for that heroic feat.

But he felt it wobble! He felt it move!

It rocked —as a loose tooth might twist in its socket. As by a levin-bolt of revelation, vistas of possibility were illuminated for him. They spread out like those regions of freedom he had a moment before beheld. Men experiencing far less in the way of illumination have claimed unmediated converse with the god.

Conan leaped to the opposite aide of the boulder and set his back against it. He dug in his heels and heaved.

Muscles of back and legs knotted like ship’s cables under his sun-bronzed skin. The veins lay like tangled ropes on hia brow and sweat slicked his straight, black hair to gleaming rat-tails.

The bones of his hack crackled audibly.

One more effort —only one more… and then another.

“By the gods,” he croaked, “it moves, —it gives —way—!”

Nearly blind and numb with the titanic expense of strength, he hardly knew what progress he made, —if any at all. The air seemed suffused with murky redness, or did the very veins of his eye-stones leak under the pressure?

Then there was a sudden great rending like the bursting of his vitals. He thought the effort had been too much, had killed him: for in void and emptiness he floated, permeated with unendurable ecstasy.

The return of his spirit found him stretched on his back under a night sky throbbing with monstrous stars. Thunder and squealing filled his ears, which might have been the tumbling of the boulder and the dying of Laxil’s men … or only ghosts of his disordered senses.

Slowly the blackness leaked out of the sky. The monstrous stars faded.

Conan, staggering a little, descended to the shambles. Broken bodies sprawled about like pieces of a chess game that had ended in a fit of temper. The boulder, horribly smeared, choked the narrow entrance of the cleft.

It was grisly work rummaging among the mashed company. Nevertheless, be would need provisions for his journey. And he thought it fitting that I.axil should render up the parting gift he had so oafishly forgotten. Conan was far too familiar with the red fruit of battle to let superstitious dread stay him.

But something very like terror lunged in his guts when a voice nearby moaned out:

“Conan … strange one … hated of the gods … you will die

In a moment he regained his composure. _

“How is this?” he asked “You still live? But not for long, I think.”

How did the crumpled thing on the ground draw breath for speech? Its skull was soft and pulpy, a single great bruise, and the tormented eyes stared divergently from puffed slits.

“You will not outlive me long,” the thing panted, each word a pink bubble bursting. “You dare not return the way you came, and beyond the ridge lies the valley of the sorcerer Morophla, and the hellcat L’athacht”

“Be quiet, man.” Cronuk growled. ‘ Get your dying done.”

“I will be silent long enough. You will pay for my death. You will suffer worse than I. Evil dwells in that valley, in that tower. Terrible evil. Monstrous forms and hellish tortures long drawn out. Ugly, ugly. Vile transformations of body and spirit. Things hideously awry. You will suffer it all. You… will pay for my death. You will... —will-”

The pain of his injuries overwhelmed him, his voice dissolving into blubbering

“Slay me, Conan! Quickly!”

Conan bit his lip, then picked up the man’s sword and struck off his head.

Little enough had Conan liked the valley on first seeing it from above. He liked it still less as its ugly slopes rose above his head. The threats of a man half a corpse did not make it more attractive.

Almost wilfully, crawling weeds impeded him. The tough, tangled stalks clung to his ankles with a kind of lechery.

Even the rocks and pebbles had a kind of inherent wrongness. They seemed not to have sprung from any normal processes of weathering and flaking. They might have been formed in some long-gone age when even the powers of air and frost were different. They resembled the broken forms of dreams, the haunting shapes of delirium.

Of this sick stone were built the ruined walls that rose like the backs of snake out of the long, yellow grass.

The air grew cold as he went lower. The sun hid behind the mountain range and let the valley sink in gloomy twilight. A clammy mist distilled itself from the heavy air to freight the landscape with dire ambiguity.

He didn’t like it, walking blind into that auspicious terrain. In the sudden fog he could hardly make out the cruel tower that struck like a fist from a grave at the dismal sky,

Conan unsheathed his sword. The weapon gave him no reassurance. It cut easily through the fog-phantoms that crowded close upon him— too easily to have any effect.

He preferred fighting something which, when cat, stayed cut.

Nearby, pebbles rattled on the path. But the mist was too thick, he could not see the spot where his ears placed the disturbance™.

Which way was he going now? Which way out of this valley of nightmare? The filthy chill of the malefic fog penetrated his bones, causing a dolor like the remembrance of mortality What was that? Something panted close by.

“Who is it?” he challenged. ‘“Man or devil, come no nearer—”

Squealing laughter. He heard the slithering movement of many bodies, supple as rats.

Something big and black fluttered past him and its stinking wing brushed his face. On its second pass he was ready for it and struck it out of the air with his sword.

Softly throbbing it lay at his feet. At first Conan thought it was a man with a dark cloak crumpled about him. But the cloak was actually part of the creature, a leathery membrane that made its longer-than-human arms into the wings of a bat. Its face also was a bat’s, a blunt snout; but there was human intelligence dying in its tiny red eyes.

He saw then that the valley was no natural place. It was part of the old domain—, a chaotic region left over from the confused realm of the demons who held sway before the coming of man’s gods.

The mist parted a little to reveal the terrible form that loomed over.

Well, now he knew. He had been driven here by the soft threatening and prodding of shapes in the darkness —herded like a sheep by phantom dogs. The tower hung over him.

The door swung open, A figure stood outlined against the green. decaying glare from within.

Conan saw no advantage in flight. Nor was it to his liking to be hunted down in the crawling fog, hounded by stinking bats.

Sword raised, he charged.

Light exploded in his face, a fierce glare that drove like cold iron through the portals of his eyes, deep into his brain, flooding it; and all sense, all impression rushed away from him … away… away…

For the second time in too brief an interval, Conan had to drig together his scattered senses. At first only cool touches and confused sounds reached him in the humming void.

Then a pale oval framed in darkness moved across the quivering red veil that hung before his eyes.

He moved his hand through the veil. Strangely, it felt like many thickness’s of cobwebs. But that was only the tingling in his finger. The redness cleared.

An avid face moved back from his, hung over him.

“You are awake. You are indeed strong —to recover so quickly.”

Conan, too sick to care, regarded her. He saw no need to act until he had better appraised the situation. He did not doubt it was bad, filthy bad.

“You are very self-possessed, aren’t you?” the woman said. “You stir not, neither do you question me. You would press the burden of speech on me, is that it, dear Conan?”

She laughed, lightly but not sweetly.

“You are surprised? But I know many things about you, not just your name. Am I not usthacht?”

“Are you?” he said, and that made her laugh.

He knew that she was. A man more than half a corpse had promised him this meeting – and worse.

Tall and well-shapen, that was the fashion of her, and smooth of skin, which was like the snow drifted against a gravestone. Her hair was black and fragrant as the smoke of herbs that burn on •a demon’s altar. But her eyes: he was reminded of those nameless gems, dusky and translucent, employed by desert tribesmen in their malignant rites.

For all her comeliness, Conan disliked her. The gaze she bent upon him was avid, too hungry to bode well. And he had heard ill rumours of her.

When he spoke it was more for relief of the discomfort he felt in her gase than for desire of conversation with her.

“You have an ugly way of greeting wayfarers. It was not my intention to intrude, and bad you not stricken me I would have passed quickly.”

Usthacht bared small, white teeth. Perhaps she meant to smile, but there was no kindness in it.

“That would not have pleased me, Conan,” she purred. ‘But if the choice had been mine, a softer way would have been found of gaining your company.”

“Then … there are others here?”

“One other. Now hush, —he comes.”

She pressed him back on the couch and closed his eyes with a pass of her pale, cold fingers.

The door opened with a soft hiss

“Has he awakened?”

“Not yet, Morophla.”

“That is as you say,” he sneered. “I know your ways, lady.”

When the man called Morophla laughed, it was not an expression of mirth. If he had mirth, it was thin and cruel as a blade, and he kept it within for his own pleasure. His laughter served only to indicate contempt for the one he addressed. A sharp expulsion of breath through his nostrils sufficed.

“Let him feign unconsciousness all he likes – though he does it. But let him plainly understand that I can at will make the fiction a fact.”

Usthacht said, “I see that my brother is pleased to have another on whom to hone his sharp tongue. Open your eyes, Conan. Gaze on the author of your discomfort.”

Conan did as he was bidden, not gracefully. His smouldering glance engaged with that of the tall newcomer.

His eyes. Almost, Conan's fell before them. A plenum, paradoxically, of emptiness harboured there. Conan had seen their like only once before, in the eyes of a moon-priest of Ishtar, who claimed to have shared that sphere’s monthlv decline into non-being. Morophla, too, had eyes that had been scoured by the obscene mysteries of the Void.

Warily, Conan rose from his pallet. In n low crouch, like a wrestler stalking his adversary, he eased forward. He advanced dubiously, for he suspected the other’s powers. But at least he would take their measure.

“Stop, Conan” Usthacht said, “you cannot overcome him”

Morophla smiled sourly, “I know you regret that lady. But he will not believe you -”

Conan’s huge hand shot out. He intended to tangle it in the black locks of the wizard’s beard and haul him off balance.

He did not do that. His hand, extended to the length of his arm, closed on air several inches before the wizard’s face. But the man had not moved at all!

Conan jerked back from his unbalanced position. He had seen a comrade, a swordsman who had lost an eve, make similar errors. His own eyes seemed all right, although he was suddenly aware of an obscure malaise somewhere behind them. And yet, when be grabbed he was accustomed to getting— -

Desperately, he lunged straight at his opponent, forgetting all caution, with his arms flung wide.

The lunge prolonged itself as in a nightmare, but he got no closer to the mocking form. Just in time, Conan pulled up, barely avoiding a stunning collision with the wall.

Usthacht caught his hand. “Stop it. Can't you see he enjoyed tormenting you?”

“The room is – twisted, is that it?” he growled.

“You know a great deal,” she marvelled. “But no, this is not one of those illusion chambers in which the mystery priests befool the initiated. Morophla tangles your seeing with his magic.

Morophla laughed, training to expel a bit of lint from his nostrils, and said, “While you are explaining matters to you dear friend, why not tell him what task we have of him?”

He added bitterly, “He must already divine yours.”

Usthacht's eyes glittered with pain and anger. Conan still did not like their crazy intensity, but he sensed that in her lay his only hope. He pressed her hand confidently before he started again toward her brother.

“Again? Amusing as your antics are-”

Conan could not properly here what he then uttered. Guttral and sibilant at once, the strange syllables were instantly swallowed up by thhe rattling and chuckling of their own echo.

Instead of dying away, the echo mounted to an ear-shattering intensity. Conan was enveloped bv a formless, crushing pressure. The syllables themselves seemed to take substance and beat like the sea against him. He was borne back against the wall and held there.

“He is strong, Usthacht,” the wizard commented. “I can feel the force he exerts against the words of power. There must be good blood in him.”

Usthacht began haughtily, “Your thoughts flow always in one channel—” But her voice broke and she grew pale.

“It is well that it does —for both of us. You would not he half so lickerish, lady, did I not strive to keep the pens filled. What would you be? Not white wanton flesh and rounded limbs of lust, no— ‘

“Hold your tongue!”

She turned from him, hands in her ears, eyes wide with fright and pale lips that trembled.

“Bones and dust in some dry tomb!” raged Morophla. “That is all we are, dear sister – save that I sustain us with my science. What good hen your juices and your heated belly?”

Usthacht cringed under his words, then blubbered outright. With a howl, she fled the chamber.

Morophla turned to his captive.. His strange eyes flashed.

“She hankers for you, man. It’s been ages since she’s had a stranger see to her. So it galls her you should know that her plump flesh, which doubt not she has shaken in your face, scarce belongs to her at all.”

Conan gazed at him blankly. The wizard flicked him sharply on

“Don't play at being stupid. You're not intelligent enough for it. You must know that the life in us, unnaturally prolonged, is but the stolen life of others.”

“You are vampires!”

Morophla expelled, perhaps, an inturning beard hair, he said:

“There is an analogy yes. But ours is not such a simple case. I prefer not to acquire in the manner prescribed by legend, the vampire's ability to assimilate straightaway his victim's red life. Not at the price of assuming his limitations.

“No, I choose a more complicated method that science teaches me, althought it needs red lakes of human life and innumerable complex operations. There are incubations and putrefactions and distillations; rare extracts to be divided out during the relevant phases of the moon. Elusive essences must be exposed, prior to recombination, under various conditions to the streamings of certain nameless stars.

“There is prepared an amber elixir which has preserved our lives through interminable ages that men hereabouts believe there has never been a time when we did not inhabit this lonesome tower.”

Conan shuddered. Mere vampirism had been homely by comparison.

“And that is why you must needs waylay travellers...”

“Not exactly my friend. Vast dungeons scooped out of the rock beneath this tower contain a population ample for my needs.”

“Then what use am I to you?”

“Nothing so terrible as you might imagine. Lately – as time is seen by us - I have noticed that my herd grows feeble and anemic, the result of excessive inbreeding. Their blood has become as watered and degenerate as that of the ruling family of ancient Merula.”

Morophla smiled tenderly at Conan. “Well, in such event the effete aristrocrat seeks aliance with a younger, mor vigorous house... and the cattle breeder requires... a stud animal.”

“Yes – yes, I feel you struggling against the spell. What strength! What vigour!”

When the wizard said come, Conan went. Something invisible, inpalpable except when he sought to resist it, move him this way, that way, wherever Morophla wished.

Morophla took him through tapestried corridors and down winding flights of stone stairs. Once he saw Usthact's pale, sick face peering from behind an arras. The Wizard did not notice, or so pretended.

Soon they entered the winding tunnels under the tower, where they frequently encountered the things that had attacked Conan in the fog. With a cringing aspect that was nine parts fear, the creatures made way for the wizard and his captive

“I call them afterlings,” said Morophla, “because they spring from a later creation than the first spawning of men and demons that populate our sphere. Mere trifles that I dashed together to do my bidding, from mine experiments as it were.”

“It makes me wonder why you are at such pains to prologon an existence conducted amon filth and vileness,” said Conan.

“Indeed? You would get along well with my sister. It would be a meeting of minds, such as it were. It is her inceessant complaint that our establishment is gloomy and not conducive to delight. She would have me, by magic, cojure here some eastern court for her to queen it over, replete with her personal harem of Conans, I doubt not. Not from the her joy of knowledge and wisdom that need never perish, the solemn delight of a mind able to grow through endless ages beyond the limits that morality imposes.... well, a thousand years of my lecturing have not sufficed to change her, she remains what she always was”

“You are a great magician,” sneered Conan, “but are a great coward. Your dread of death is measured by the scope of your sorcery, If you delight in your mind so much, why not die and be free of the flesh altogether? Why not be mind only?”

The wizard dismissed that with a sniff. “Surely you are not one of those who imagine that we persist as airy confections in a shadowy realm beyond death? Mind, sir, is but a certain form imposed upon matter. Although this form or pattern can be projected forth from its material basis, as when in certain dreams of which I am capable I wander among the beings of other stars and spheres in search of wisdom, it must always retain Its connection, however tenuous, with the flesh that harbours it. For if the flesh perishes, like a flower torn from the soil, so does the mind. When a man dies, he becomes nothing— forever!”

Conan shivered. He would have stood still and marvelled but for the compulsion that was on him. Death and non-being: it was a gulf that yawned at his feet, drawing him as much as it repelled him.

“Nothing is left when the meat dies and begins to rot?”

Morophla smiled. “No, barbarian, it is not. The motion of mind apart from flesh is but a delusion 1 that our languages impose upon us. As are most of the questions that philosophers debate age after age.

“And yet,” the sorcerer mused, “if my mind be but a certain -form or image wrought in the matter of my flesh, might it not be reproduced in some more durable material? None of the strange beings whom I have visited out among the stars knows this secret, true. But who knows? I have not journeyed far in my search for wisdom —and the universe!”

Morophla fell silent, lost in, musings, and let Conan puzzle over his speech. It all sounded like clown’s patter to the fighting man, like words used to mock the pattern and flow of language but convey no meaning at all.

Abruptly they entered a great, vaulted chamber at the end of the tunnel. Conan found himself on a narrow lip of rock that overlooked the gloomy pit.

In the murky dawn there he saw pale figures moving. White bodies clustered like knots of worms. He shuddered and drew back as far as the crowding power would permit.

Morophla took down a torch from the wall. Vacuous faces, flabby and indefinite of contour, lifted to follow its slow arc.

“Regard the creatures, Conan.”

Their huge eves blinked repeatedly at the unaccustomed light, unable to turn away. But when the sorcerer withdrew the torch, all interest subsided. The listless milling resumed, as if with the fading of the faint memory trace left by the light. A squeaking chattering fight broke out, and a pair of man-bats, swooping low, drove the quarrellers apart. Once separated, they quickly forgot one another and their contention.

“You will grow used to the darlings, Conan.”

Without much confidence, Conan said, “Whatever your wizardry, you will find there are some things in which man’s cooperation cannot be compelled.”

Morophla snickered.

He had reason to laugh his dirty laugh.

The days that followed became a series of nightmares, or one long nightmare interrupted by sleep. And sleep itself was no respite, only the piling of nightmare upon nightmare. The events and images of wakefulness were then reduced to rubbish and built into crazy towers that tottered, crumbled and fell.

For the wizard was entirely adequate to deal with his captive’s reluctance. There was a demon of lust that dwelt in a crusted stone jar, and when Morophla poured it forth, straight it flew to Conan’i flesh. It did him on like a cloak, and Conan, released from his cage Wider the control of some smoky demon, descended into the pit to join the mating-dance of the pale herd. The fife wailed and the drum rattled, and be knew their cold flesh,

Stung out of sleep by some recollected horror, he awoke in his cell. Or had some strange sound penetrated and burst his sleep? Was someone near? “It isn’t time yet,” he protested. But he could not know what time in that place was determined entirely by alternating abominations. He steeled himself, knowing it was useless, against the demons.

It did not come.

Nor did he hear the fife, preparing the herd for the descent of the god of its sahbat.

A husky voice whispered, “Are you sleeping, Conan?

“How came you here?” he snarled. “I did not hear the gate.”

Uathacht laughed. “Then I must not be here at all. For I could not pass through the strong ours that cage you, my magnificent animal.”

He hurled himself off the pallet and drove his fist at her taunting mouth. Then howled with rage and pain. His hand felt broken.

“Nay, be careful!” she cried. “It is only a sending. You cannot touch me, for I am far from here.”

Conan cursed her, a round soldierly oration full of footras and strange gods.

She said softly, “Do not curse me, dearest. I wish that I could bring you… all of me, not just my voice and seeming. For I think I love you, Conan.”

“Yon are strange people, you and your brother. Your hospitality is strange, but your love is most strange indeed.”

“Oh, please; it is not well that you are used thus, wasted I should say, on those who arc incapable of appreciating you. But you know the Strength of my brother’s magic. I have a little sorcery, hut it is a pitiful thing compared with his.”

He studied her image for a moment. It was only her likeness that Stood before him after nil. Her figure, on close examination, seemed flat and followed the contour of the rugged wall, like a painted image that somehow moved and spoke.

When he answered her, he spoke craftily: “Well … if you had no part in my loathesome captivity, I will admit I grew angry all too hastily. You are too fair for me to find it easy to hate you.

Her face went soft and vacuous at this flattery. There might be hope yet…

“But what good is any understanding we might come to?” be asked bitterly. “Your sending is not yourself, and we can have little joy of such assignations as this.”

Suspicion shadowed her eyes, but Conan smiled inwardly. He did not fear that she would divine his true motive; no, not if her magic were thrice as great. As Morophla said, she was lickerish, and her headlong infatuation would sweep aside all misgivings.

“And is it for the great love you bear me that you ask this? Or would you merely use me to gain your freedom, then abandon me to my brother’s wrath?”

“I admit that I like not this subterranean life,” he replied, nor its pale, cold companions.” He cast her as moony a glance as he coold contrive. “But one of the kindest memories I have from the world of sunlight is of the touch of your hand.”

While he hated himself somewhat, she mused: “What you suggest is not impossible… Morophla’s magic is not impregnable… His sorcery could be used as well by another.

“Can I rely upon you in this, my lady? After all, he is your brother and -”

A masterful move, he congratulated himself: to shift the burden of proving good faith to her!

“What good is that to me?” she spat. “I have no love for him, for he is insanely jealous and thwarts me always. Nor is It meet that • man should use his sister in that fashion—”

Conan’s skin crawled at the implication. Too slowly, he recomposed his features, for she read the horror in his look.

“It is not at all as you think!” she stammered. “Let me go now … I must think on this … it will take time to prepare the spell. But do I dare? Do I dare?”

Her image rippled like a reflection on water; then the sending was gone.

In the days that followed he underwent alternations of hope and despair. Had his unwelcome insight into her odd way of life caused her to repent her resolve to aid him? Indeed, had she ever had any such notion? And was there anything she could do? Against the might of Morophla” s sorcery?

Meanwhile the monotonous horror of his existence proceeded in its accustomed channels. At intervals that made no sense to him, the lusty demon entered into him and he went to enact the vile sabbat.

But not really he, for he was only a small screaming thing, an anguished shred of consciousness, thrust far back into some cranny of the brain. He was only that tiny corse of revulsion against the abominations that his flesh worked with the sub-human cavern dwellers.

Afterwards, only images and sensations remained to him. Nor could he bear to dwell on them and order them in recollection. So they grew steadily more confused, becoming like a wrack of sickly dreams such as may vaguely poison the ensuing day.

He sword the wizard would pay for making his own flesh detestable to him. But when? When?

At length, Usthact returned to him.

Cromek regarded her, carefully, very carefully, not to betray his eagerness. He knew that he must remain unreadable to her and give her fancy all possible scope.

“I came back,” she said.

“Yes, and this time you need a key to enter – like a proper person – don't you?”

She hesitated, “I have the key, but now I don't know if I dare use it. And yet, everything is in readiness. Three days at noon I gazed at the sun with tear-streaming eyes and gathered the gleaming strands of the Sun Spider’s web, gathered them in my own smarting eyes so that at the appointed time I might bind down my brother’s soul. Now he is like a fly in that unbreakable web and cannot throw his spells against us.”

“What the bat-things?”

“Oh, them! He rules them™ by spells and forces, which he cannot use in his present state. They would not act on their own to aid him.” But her eyes were wild and confused. With uncertain fingers, she turned and turned the key on its ring. “Nothing to hinder us, then,” he pressed. He did not trust himself to snatch the key.

“I am afraid,” she whimpered.

Conan said nothing. Anything he might say could only arouse her resistance, but her own hot blood would he his most effective advocate.

Let her carry on the debate within herself.

“You... would not betray me?”

He made her answer her own question. “Don’t be angry,” She pleaded. “I didn’t really doubt you.”

With the abruptness of one racing against the onset of misgivings, Usthacht unlocked the cell and ran in to him. Her long white arms snaked round his neck. The suddenness of the onslaught was her undoing.

The dregs of a hundred revulsions past, thwarted in their time, swarmed in his nerves. The shame of a hundred unwilled embraces cried for vengeance – suddenly it seemed – was not there. Involuntary as thought itself, his huge hands twisted about her neck.

Neck broken, she lay at his feet. Her last breath sighed from her lips like a ghost fleeing, and before it was entirely free, she was dead.

Conan shook his head, more amazed than sorry. No, not sorry at all. The only regret he felt was at not having waited until she had led him out of the caverns.

Still, he would manage.

He looked back once before he left her forever, and wished he had not. Dissolution, so long frustrate, hastened obscenely: already her face had darkened, as with a crow's shadow.

In the dismal, cresset-lighted corridors, he encountered one of Morophla's Afterlings. He watched the creature closely as he wrapped his cloak around his left arm. It was small and fragile looking, but he feared its teeth.

Softly, it said: “Do not slay me, Conan. I offer no resistance. Escape if you can.”

“If you do not attempt to stop me, the wizard will be angry with you.”

“No; even as the god who created men know them, our creator knows us. We are but instruments of his so he would not have to bargain for our loyalty.”

“I intend to slay him. Does he not will that you prevent me?”

“He may. But he is bound by his sister’s spell. His will cannot force us to act.” The man-bat hesitated. “Nevertheless, he still has resources. Go cautiously, Conan.”

Conan passed on.

Eventually he found his way into the tower proper. A feeling of surveillance had grown upon, though he could not indicate its source, only guess it uneasily. His skin crawled, as it does before a summer storm. The rising tide of dread almost drove him to flight now that he had the chance; but his fear of the magician’s inevitable pursuit was greater.

While he could, he must seek out the wizard where he lay entranced and slay him. He thought of the horrors the magician had already visited upon him; and that had been only casualty, as a means to an end. Only a demon of perversion could imagine what he might conjure up in a vengeful spirit!

But how long would Uathacht’s spell retain it power? The uncertainty of it was maddening.

The tower was large, the arrangement of its rooms complex. He was soon confused by the innumerable turnings its corridors took., and became increasingly uncertain, because of their bizarre shapes, that he had thoroughly searched every room. His eyes burned and leaden exhaustion weighed his feet. Sometimes he thought that he was dreaming, trapped in delirium; sometimes it seemed that the tower, and he himself, were dreams in a madman’s skull. The feeling of surveillance grew.

He had searched a hundred rooms, corridors, closets. In rooms fitted like laboratories, filled with strange instruments and papered with Incomprehensible diagrams, he hunted frantically. He had found curiously-shaped vessels filled with blood in various stages of decomposition, vats in which Afterlings took form in the midst of unspeakable corruption, and innumerable manuscripts, some of them crumbling with age, in what he took to be Morophla s hand. But nowhere could he find the wizard himself.

He left off tearing the tapestries from the walls of an unused audience chamber. “Enough of this!” he muttered.

He suddenly understood that his increasing confusion, the feeling of surveillance, were the doing of the wizard. Even bound by a prepotent spell, he could still watch and subtly twist Conan’s seeing—

The Afterling had said Morophla had resources.

“And so have I, damn it.”

He went quickly to the storeroom adjoining one of the laboratories, in haste lest the unseen Watcher divine his purpose and prevent him. Prying open the strange-figured urns of chemicals, he soon found what he wanted.

He carried the heavy vessel to the ground floor and began to dash its contents on the wooden flooring and walls. A sharp, resinous odor filled his nostrils.

And suddenly Morophla was there!

The wizard’s rage-distorted countenance glared down upon him. Conan shrank hack. In a moment that terrible will would enter into him like the fingers of those puppeteers you saw in basaars.

But that did not happen, and he understood why. “So you are come to this, Morophla. No longer do you come like a mighty wave, to toss the wills of your victims like shells on a beach. No; the worst you can contrive now is to project your image and trouble me with your ugly face, or twist my seeing a little like a hairless old woman engaged in glamoury.”

The wavering form spoke: “Beware, Conan. Though limited by that slut’s spell, I might yet overcome you.”

Conan laughed and capered.

“But why speak of that?” Morophla said, as one who would dismiss harsh words spoken thoughtlessly between friends. “Surely it was no insult, rather a compliment, that you were chosen. And were the labors enforced upon you so terrible?

From a heart charred black with horror, Conan answered: “Yes— more than filth like you could conceive. I have reason enough to slay you, Morophla.

“Be lenient, man, and see if I do not reward you. I can give much with my magic.”

He promised much, but Conan only continued to pour out the flammable liquid, a little lingeringly now. When the urn was empty, he took a torch from its socket and moved to the door. “I cannot find you, but the fire will. …”

Morophla, beside himself with rage and frustration, seemed almost to lose control of his sending. His grotesque figure, now swelling, now shrinking, writhed and twisted across wall and ceiling. It danced like a flame already.

“How can you?” he raved. “Darken eyes that have looked on the distant marvels of other stars and spheres? Burn the brain that harbors the lost secrets of the gods, the most interior mysteries of matter and energy? No; put up the torch and I will make you co-equal with me, share my power and my immortality with you.”

Conan hurled the torch. Flame leaped up with a snarl like a lunging beast. The wizard shrieked.

The hot glare brought tears to Conan’s eyei. He backed towards the door, watching the flames mutter sod gnaw at the wooden panels. The tapestries turned to falling, flaming iacework.

“You animal, you cretin!” the wizard gibbered. “You’ve destroyed me, but you will die with me!”

Conan reached for the door, but before he touched it, it burst inward. A great, threatening confusion bore down on him—something that thundered like a stampede, or roared and clanked like a host of men-at-arms. He couldn’t put a name to it; he could only give way before it.

He was driven back through the wall of flame and up the smoky stars.

The attack - —but what attacked? - came on and on, continuously squealing and gibbering. Its high-pitched wail paralysed thought; only the instinctive reaction of flight was possible.

And suddenly it became an enormous mouth in which innumerable teeth clashed and ground together. But when it overtook him, it only gnashed impalpably around him for a moment—

Then vanished!

“Yes, Conan; only an illusion,” said Morophla. “But you know that too late. The fire has already cut off your escape and you must perish with me.”

He smiled sourly. “But don’t bother to repent having rejected my offer. I should not have kept that bargain anyway. This is the only fellowship we two can have—in the Are, which has a trick of levelling all flesh. I could not have raised you to my level, although you have reduced me to yours.

Conan, no philosopher, ignored him. Before a wall of hot gases he fled up the tower stairs. He could hardly draw breath to curse the sorcerer, whose sending drifted always before him.

The projected image changed from moment to moment. Not only did it ripple and flicker as it drifted like a shadow or a flame along the walls and stair-treads, but it underwent other transformation, more painful to see as well.

“Yes, murderer, it is your work. The flames have found my body where it lies bound by the Sun Spider. Oh, you cannot imagine how painful it is. But I need not describe it; you will learn soon enough. Of course, you have the option of leaping from the roof. No option really; you will inevitably do so when the fire touches you….”

Conan could scarcely see the stairs and corridors along which he fled. But the image of Morophla’s disintegrating corpse remained with him always, sealed within his closed eyes; its voice droned in his ears.

“I hate you, murderer!” the thing screamed. “Not just for the agony I endure. Even if I had to endure it as long as I lived, I would still choose to survive. For there is much that I would yet learn in the vastness of the cosmos and the vastness of the mind, matters that you and that bitch with your little, animal minds could not conceive of. I hope you don’t die outright when you leap from the tower. Be a long time dying with the ache of mangled nerves, bone splinters piercing your guts—-”

The oozing, blackened horror shimmered and faded.

“No; I can’t follow you any more. Wanted to see you dying, but I can’t, not strong enough— any more…”

Gone: leaving only a dying curse.

Conan crawled onto the roof, gasping. Night. Those stars whose marvels the wizard regretted appraised him and found him of little worth. Already the boards were hot under his feet. From the trapdoor through which he had come, the flames leaped: a pillar of fire which, like Morophla’s spirit, clutched at the stars. While he watched, a cluster of strange instruments, gleaming copper tubes and lenses, sank through the roof, engulfed by a muttering mouth of fire.

The tower was high and its walls of closely fitted stones appeared almost smooth. Staring hopelessly down, Conan felt the clutch of the gulf at his loins. His belly crawled with its cold stroking.

Nevertheless, he had to attempt that impossible descent. Better to have his last moments absorbed in some arduous task than to sit waiting for the fire to eat through the roof.

Lowering himself over the edge, he sank almost to the length of hi arms before his foot found what purported to be a toe-hold. With one hand on the ledge, he supported himself while he fitted blunt finger into a narrow cranny. The effort was tremendous: it seemed that bone must crack, muscle or tendon tear.

He flattened himself against the wall like a vine or lichen. It was insane, he knew that already, sinews stuttered their plea for release from a task beyond their capacity. And still he persisted, relinquishing each impossible toe-hold only to seek another….

He knew that eventually he must fall—drop like a dead fly. But it would not be willingly. Never would his soul cry, enough! and order his cramped fingers to open.

It came as no surprise, however, when his bleeding fingertips slid from their precarious clutch.

He fell.

It was strange when you fell. At such a time, when your weight was most active, you felt no weight at ell. Almost you were bodiless, as in dreams when you drift like smoke across some broken landscape. The wind, like his own cry, sang in his ears.

There came a beating of leathery wings round his head. Clawed fingers sank into the muscles of his arms and bore him up. His fall was not halted, only slowed, and he dropped, struggling in the hand of his rescuers, until the earth smashed his knees up into his chest. When be could breathe a little, Conan gasped out, “I thank you for my life.”

The Afterling said, “We thank you for ours, now truly ours. In slaying our creator, our god, you set us free.”

“God-slayer…” Conan smiled. “Among my people it is the bestow vaunting titles: but never have I heard one so grandiose. You account my deed a boon?”

“Of course. Wouldn’t you?”

Conan glanced skyward and did not answer.

They gave him food and drink, and would have had him remain with them, but this last he refused. “You might come to look on me as your god.”

He departed along the winding road, the road downward out of the mountains. As the stars faded and morning came, his thoughts returned to Morophla. He did not understand why he should be at such effort to prolong a life which, to Conan, seemed only a mounting confusion and horror.

He shook his head and tried to think of other things

The Purple Heart of Erlik

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

“You'll do what I tell you, or else!” Baron Takkim smiled cruelly as he delivered his ultimatum. Across the table from him Arlinna clenched her white hands in helpless rage. Baron Takkim, world adventurer, was tall, slim, darkly mustached, handsome in a ruthless way; and many women looked on him with favor. But Arlinna hated him, with as good reason as she feared him.

But she ventured a flare of rebellion.

“I won’t do it! It’s too risky!”

“Not half as risky as defying me!” he reminded her. “I’ve got you by the seat of your pretty pants, my dear. How would you like to have me tell the city guard why you left in such a hurry? Or tell them my version of that night in the apartment ”

“Hush!” she begged. She was trembling as she glanced fearfully about the little curtained alcove in which they sat. It was well off the main floor of the Cabaret; even the music from the native orchestra came only faintly to their ears. They were alone, but the words he had just spoken were dynamite, not even safe for empty walls to hear.

“You know I didn’t kill him !”

“So you say. But who’d believe you if I swore I saw you do it?”

She bent her head in defeat. This was the price she must pay for an hour of folly. She had been indiscreet enough to visit the apartments of a certain important official. It had been only the harmless escapade of a thrill-hunting girl.

She had found more thrills than she wanted, when the official had been murdered, almost before her eyes, by his servant, who she was sure was a spy. The murderer had fled, and so had she, but not before she had been seen leaving the house by a friend of the slain official. He had kept silent. But the murderer had taken important documents with him in his flight, and there was hell to pay in diplomatic circles.

It had been an international episode, that almost set off war roaring in the East. The murder and theft remained an unsolved mystery to the world at large, a wound that still rankled in the capitals of the East.

Arlinna had fled the city in a panic, realizing she could never prove her innocence, if connected with the affair. Takkim had followed her to Arenjun and laid his cards on the table. If she did not comply with his wishes, he’d go to the guards and swear he saw her murder the man. And she knew his testimony would send her to the gallows, for various governments were eager for a scape-goat.

Terrified, Arlinna submitted to the blackmail. And now Takkim had told her the price of his silence. It was not what she had expected, though, from the look in his eyes as he devoured her trim figure from blonde hair to French heels, she felt it would come to that eventually. But here in the Bordeaux, a shady rendezvous in the shadowy borderland between the European and the native quarters, he had set her a task that made her flesh crawl.

He had commanded her to steal the famous Heart of Erlik, the purple ruby belonging to Lun-Faar, a Khitain merchant of powerful and sinister connections.

“So many men have tried,” she argued. “How can I hope to succeed? I’ll be found floating in the river with my throat cut, just as they were.”

“You’ll succeed,” he retorted. “They tried force or craft; we’ll use a woman’s strategy. I’ve learned where he keeps it had a spy working in his employ and he learned that much. He keeps it in a wall safe that looks like a dragon’s head, in the inner chamber of his antique shop, where he keeps his rarest goods, and where he never admits anybody but wealthy women collectors. He entertains them there alone, which makes it easy.”

“But how am I going to steal it, with him in there with me?”

“Easy!” he snapped. “He always serves his guests tea. You watch your chance and drop this knock-out pill in his tea.”

He pressed a tiny, faintly odorous sphere into her hand.

“He’ll go out like a candle. Then you open the safe, take the ruby and skip. It’s like taking candy from a baby. One reason I picked you for this job, you have a natural gift for unravelling Khitain puzzles. The safe doesn’t have a dial. You press the dragon’s teeth. In what combination, I don’t know. That’s for you to find out.”

“But how am I going to get into the inner chamber?” she demanded.

“That’s the cream of the scheme,” he assured her. “Did you ever hear of Lady Asqueth? Well, every antique dealer in the East knows her by sight or reputation. She’s never been to Arenjun, though, and I don’t believe Lun-Faar ever saw her. That’ll make it easy to fool him. She’s a young woman with exotic ideas and she spends her time wandering around the land collecting rare art treasures. She’s wealthy beyond measure, and she’s a free spender.

“Well, you look enough like her in a general way to fit in with any description Lun-Faar’s likely to have heard. You’re about the same height, same color of hair and eyes, same kind of figure ” his eyes lit with admiration as they dwelt on the trim curves of bosom and hips. “And you can act, too. You can put on an accent that would fool him, and act the high-born lady to a queen’s taste.

“I’ve seen Lady Asqueth’s cards, and before I left for Zamora I had one made, to match. You see I had this in mind, even then.” He passed her a curious slip of paper-thin jade, carved with scrawling Khitain characters.

“Her name, of course, in Khitain. She spends a small fortune on cards like that, alone. Now go back to your apartment and change into the duds I had sent up there scarlet silk dress, jade-green hat, slippers with ivory heels, and a jade brooch. That’s the way Lady Asqueth always dresses. Eccentric? You said it! Go to Lun-Faar’s shop and tell him you want to see the ivory Bon. He keeps it in the inner chamber. When you get in there, do your stuff, but be careful! They say Lun-Faar worships that ruby, and burns incense to it. But you’ll pull the wool over his eyes, all right. Be careful he doesn’t fall for you! Couldn’t blame him if he did.”

He was leaning toward her, and his hand was on her knee. She flinched at the feel of his questing fingers. She loathed his caresses, but she dared not repulse him. He was arrogantly possessive, and she did not doubt that when and if she returned with the coveted gem, he would demand the ultimate surrender. And she knew she would not dare refuse him. Tears of helpless misery welled to her eyes, but he ignored them. Grudgingly he withdrew his hand and rose.

“Go out by the back way. When you get the ruby, meet me at room seven, in the Alley of Rats, you know the place. Arenjun will be too hot for you, and we’ll have to get you out of town in a hurry. And remember, sweetheart,” his voice grew hard as his predatory eyes, and his arm about her waist was more a threat than a caress, “if you double-cross me, or if you flop on this job, I’ll see you stood before the gallows if it’s the last thing I do. I won’t accept any excuses, either. Understood?”

His fingers brushed her chin, trailed over the soft white curve of her throat, to her shoulder; and as he voiced his threat, he dug them in like talons, emphasizing his command with a brutality that made Arlinna bite her lip to keep from crying out with pain.

“Yes, I get you.”

“All right. Get going.” He spanked her lightly and pushed her toward a door opposite the curtained entrance beyond which the music blared.

The door opened into a long narrow alley that eventually reached the street. As Arlinna went down this alley, seething with rebellion and dismay for the task ahead of her, a man stepped from a doorway and stopped her. She eyed him suspiciously, though concealing a secret throb of admiration for a fine masculine figure.

He was big, broad-shouldered, heavy-fisted, with smoldering blue eyes and a mop of unruly black hair. And he was Conan of Cimmeria, a wandering barbarian who had fought in many lands.

“Will you get out of my way?” she demanded.

“Wait a minute, woman!” He barred her way with a heavy arm, and his eyes blazed as they ran over the smooth bland curves of her blond loveliness. “Why do you always give me the shoulder? I’ve made it a point to run into you in a dozen ports, and you always act like I had the plague.”

“You have, as far as I’m concerned,” she retorted.

“You seem to think Baron Takkim’s healthy,” he growled resentfully.

She flinched at the name of her master, but answered spiritedly: “What I see in Baron Takkim’s none of your business. Now let me pass!”

But instead he caught her arm in a grip that hurt.

“Damn your saucy little soul!” he ripped out, anger fighting with fierce desire in his eyes. “If I didn’t want you so bad, I’d smack your ears back! What the hell! I’m as good a man as Baron Takkim. I’m tired of your superior airs. I came to Arenjun just because I heard you were here. Now are you going to be nice, or do I have to get rough?”

“You wouldn’t dare!” she exclaimed. “I’ll scream ”

A big hand clapped over her mouth put a stop to that.

“Nobody interferes with anything that goes on in alleys behind dumps like Arenjun,” he growled, imprisoning her arms and lifting her off her feet, kicking and struggling. “Any woman caught here’s fair prey.”

He kicked open the door through which he had reached the alley, and carried Arlinna into a dim hallway. Traversing this with his writhing captive, he shoved open a door that opened on it. Arlinna, crushed against his broad breast, felt the tumultuous pounding of his heart, and experienced a momentary thrill of vanity that she should rouse such stormy emotion in Conan of Cimmeria, whose exploits with the women of a hundred ports were as widely celebrated as his myriad bloody battles with men.

He entered a bare, cobwebby room, and set her on her feet, placing his back against the door.

“Let me out of here, you beast!” She kicked his shins vigorously.

He ignored her attack.

“Why don’t you be nice?” he begged. “I don’t want to be rough with you. I’d be good to you better than Takkim probably is ”

For answer she bent her blonde head and bit his wrist viciously, even though discretion warned her it was probably the worst thing she could do.

“You little wench!” he swore, grabbing her. “That settles it!”

Scornful of her resistance he crushed her writhing figure against his chest, and kissed her red lips, her furious eyes, her flaming cheeks and white throat, until she lay panting and breathless, unable to repel the possessive arms that drew her closer and closer.

She squirmed and moaned with mingled emotions as he sank his head, eagerly as a thirsty man bending to drink, and pressed his burning lips to the tender hollow of her throat. One hand wandered lower, to her waist, locked her against him despite her struggles.

In a sort of daze she found herself on the dingy cot, with her skirt bunched about her hips. The gleam of her own white flesh, so generously exposed, brought her to her senses, out of the maze of surrender into which his strength was forcing her. Her agile mind worked swiftly. As she sank back, suddenly she shrieked convulsively.

“My back! Something’s stabbed me! A knife in the mattress ”

“What the hell?” He snatched her up instantly and whirled her about, but she had her hands pressed over the small of her back, and was writhing and moaning in well-simulated pain.

“I’m sorry, woman ” he began tearing the mattress to pieces, trying to find what had hurt her, and as he turned his back, she snatched a heavy pitcher from the wash-stand and smashed it over his head.

Not even young Conan of Cimmeria could stand up under a clout like that. He went down like a pole-axed ox or bull, rather and she darted through the door and down the hall. Behind her she heard a furious roar that lent wings to her small high heels. She sprang into the alley and ran up it, not stopping to arrange her garments.

As she emerged into the street, a backward glance showed her Conan reeling out into the alley, streaming blood, a raging and formidable figure. But she was on a semi-respectable street, with people strolling past and guards within call. He wouldn’t dare come out of the alley after her. She walked sedately away, arranging her dress as she went. A few loungers had seen her run from the alley, but they merely smiled in quiet amusement and made no comment. It was no novelty in that quarter to see a girl run from a back alley with her breasts exposed and her skirt pulled awry.

But a few deft touches smoothed out her appearance, and a moment later, looking cool, unruffled and demure as though she had just stepped out of a beauty shop, she was headed for her apartment, where waited the garments she must don for her dangerous masquerade.

An hour later she entered the famous antique shop of Lun-Faar, which rose in the midst of a squalid native quarter like a cluster of jewels in a litter of garbage. Outside it was unpretentious, but inside, even in the main chamber with its display intended to catch the fancy of tourists and casual collectors, the shop was a colorful riot of rich artistry.

A treasure trove in jade, gold, and ivory was openly exhibited, apparently unguarded. But the inhabitants of the quarter were not fooled by appearances. Not one would dare to try to rob Lun-Faar. Arlinna fought down a chill of fear.

A cat-footed Khitain bowed before her, hands concealed in his wide silken sleeves. She eyed him with the languid indifference of an aristocrat, and said, with an accent any Briton would have sworn she was born with: “Tell Lun-Faar that Lady Asqueth wishes to see the ivory Bon.” The slant eyes of the impassive Khitain widened just a trifle at the name. With an even lower bow, he took the fragment of jade with the Khitain characters, and kowtowed her into an ebony chair with dragon-claw feet, before he disappeared through the folds of a great dark velvet tapestry which curtained the back of the shop.

She sat there, glancing indifferently about her, according to her role. Lady Asqueth would not be expected to show any interest in the trifles displayed for the general public. She believed she was being spied on through some peephole. Lun-Faar was a mysterious figure, suspected of strange activities, but so far untouchable, either by his many enemies or by the authorities. When he came, it was so silently that he was standing before her before she was aware of his entrance. She glanced at him, masking her curiosity with the bored air of an English noblewoman.

Lun-Faar was a big man, for a Khitain, squattily built, yet above medium height. His square, lemon-tinted face was adorned with a thin wisp of drooping mustachios, and his bull-like shoulders seemed ready to split the seams of the embroidered black silk robe he wore. He had come to Arenjun from the North, and there was more Mongol than Khitain in him, as emphasized by his massive forearms, impressive even beneath his wide sleeves. He bowed, politely but not obsequiously. He seemed impressed, but not awed by the presence of the noted collector in his shop.

“Lady Asqueth does my humble establishment much honor,” said he, in perfect English, sweeping his eyes over her without any attempt to conceal his avid interest in her ripe curves. There was a natural arrogance about him, an assurance of power. He had dealt with wealthy white women before, and strange tales were whispered of his dealings with some of them. The air of mystery and power about him made him seem a romantic figure to some women. “The Bon is in the inner chamber,” he said. “There, too, are my real treasures. These,” he gestured contemptuously about him, “are only a show for tourists’. If milady would honor me ”

She rose and moved across the room, with the assured bearing of a woman of quality, certain of deference at all time. He drew back a satin curtain on which gilt dragons writhed, and following her through, drew it together behind them. They went along a narrow corridor, where the walls were hung with black velvet and the floor was carpeted with thick Bokhara rugs in which her feet sank deep.

A soft golden glow emanated from bronze lanterns, suspended from the gilt-inlaid ceiling. She felt her pulse quicken. She was on her way to the famous, yet mysterious, inner chamber of Lun-Faar, inaccessible to all but wealthy and beautiful women, and in which, rumor whispered, Lun-Faar had struck strange bargains; He did not always sell his antiques for money, and there were feminine collectors who would barter their virtue for a coveted relic.

Lun-Faar opened a bronze door, worked in gold and ebon inlay, and Arlinna entered a broad chamber, over a silvery plate of glass set in the threshold. She saw Lun-Faar glance down as she walked over it, and knew he was getting an eyeful. That mirror placed where a woman must walk over it to enter the chamber was a typical Khitain trick to allow the master of the establishment to get a more intimate glimpse of the charms of his fair customers, as reflected in the mirror. She didn’t care, but was merely amused at his ingenuity. Even Lun-Faar would hardly dare to make a pass at Lady Asqueth.

He closed the door and bowed her to an ornate mahogany chair.

“Please excuse me for a moment, milady. I will return instantly.”

He went out by another door, and she looked about her at a display whose richness might have shamed a shah’s treasure-house. Here indeed were the real treasures of Lun-Faar what looked like the plunder of a thousand sultans’ palaces and heathen temples. Idols in jade, gold, and ivory grinned at her, and a less sophisticated woman would have blushed at some of the figures, depicting Oriental gods and goddesses in amorous poses of an astonishing variety. She could imagine the effect these things would have on some of his feminine visitors.

Even her eyes dilated a trifle at the sight of the smirking, pot-bellied monstrosity that was the ivory Bon, looted from God only knew what nameless monastery high in the forbidden Himalayas. Then every nerve tingled as she saw a gold-worked dragon head jutting from the wall beyond the figure. Quickly she turned her gaze back to the god, just as her host returned on silent, velvet-shod feet.

He smiled to see her staring at the idol and the female figure in its arms.

“That is only one of the conceptions of a god. It is worth, to any collector but let us delay business talk until after tea. If you will honor me ”

With his guest seated at a small ebon table, the Mongol struck a bronze gong, and tea was served by a slim, silent-footed Khitain girl, clad only in a filmy jacket which came a little below her budding hips, and which concealed none of her smooth-skinned, lemon-tinted charms.

This display, Arlinna knew, was in accord with the peculiar Khitain belief that a woman is put in a properly receptive mood for amorous advances by the sight of another woman’s exposed charms. She wondered, if, after all, Lun-Faar had designs but he showed no signs of it.

The slave girl bowed herself humbly out with a last salaam that displayed her full breasts beneath the low-necked jacket, and Arlinna’s nerves tightened. Now was the time. She interrupted Lun-Faar’s polite trivialities.

“That little jade figure, over there on the ivory shelf,” she said, pointing. “Isn’t that a piece of Jum Shan’s work?”

“I will get it!”

As he rose and stepped to the shelf, she dropped the knock-out pellet into his tea-cup. It dissolved instantly, without discoloring the liquid. She was idly sipping her own tea when the Mongol returned and placed the tiny figure of a jade warrior before her.

“Genuine Jum Shan,” said he. “It dates from the tenth century!” He lifted his cup and emptied it at a draught, while she watched him with a tenseness which she could not wholly conceal. He sat the cup down empty, frowning slightly and twitching his lips at the taste.

“I would like to call your attention, milady ” he leaned forward, reaching toward the jade figure then slumped down across the table, out cold. In an instant she was across the room, and her white, tapering fingers were at work on the teeth of the carved dragon’s head. There was an instinct in those fingers, a super-sensitiveness such as skilled cracksmen sometimes have.

In a few moments the jaws gaped suddenly, revealing a velvet-lined nest in the midst of which, like an egg of some fabled bird of paradise, burned and smoldered a great, smooth, round jewel.

She caught her breath as awedly she cupped it in her hands. It was a ruby, of such deep crimson that it looked darkly purple, the hue of old wine, and the blood that flows near the heart. It looked like the materialization of a purple nightmare. She could believe now the wild tales she had heard that Lun-Faar worshiped it as a god, sucking madness from its sinister depths, that he performed terrible sacrifices to it

“Lovely, is it not?”

The low voice cracked the tense stillness like the heart-stopping blast of an explosion. She whirled, gasping, then stood transfixed. Lun-Faar stood before her, smiling dangerously, his eyes slits of black fire. A frantic glance sped to the tea-table. There still sprawled a limp, bulky figure, idential to Lun-Faar in every detail.

“What ?” she gasped weakly.

“My shadow,” he smiled. “I must be cautious. Long ago I hit upon the expedient of having a servant made up to resemble me, to fool my enemies. When I left the chamber a little while ago, he took my place, and I watched through the peephole. I supposed you were after the Heart.

“How did you guess?” She sensed the uselessness of denial.

“Why not? Has not every thief in Zamora tried to steal it?” He spoke softly, but his eyes shone reddishly, and the veins swelled on his neck. “As soon as I learned you were not what you pretended, I knew you had come to steal something. Why not the ruby? I set my trap and let you walk into it. But I must congratulate you on your cleverness. Not one in a thousand could have discovered the way to open the dragon’s jaws.”

“How did you know I wasn’t Lady Asqueth?” she whispered, dry-lipped; the great ruby seemed to burn her palms.

“I knew it when you walked across the mirror and I saw your lower extremities reflected there, I have never seen Lady Asqueth, but all dealers in jade know her peculiarities by reputation. One of them is such a passion for jade that she always wears jade-green step-ins. Yours are lavender.”

“What are you going to do?” she panted, as he moved toward her.

A light akin to madness burned in his eyes.

“You have defamed the Heart by your touch! It must drink of all who touch it save me, its high priest! If a man, his blood! If a woman ”

No need for him to complete his abominable decree. The ruby fell to the thick carpet, rolled along it like a revolving, demoniac eyeball. She sprang back, shrieking, as Lun-Faar, no longer placid, but with his convulsed face a beast’s mask, caught her by the wrist. Against his thickly muscled arms her struggles were vain. As in a nightmare, she felt herself lifted and carried kicking and scratching, through heavily brocaded drapes into a curtained alcove. Her eyes swept the room helplessly; she saw the ivory Bon leering at her as through a mist. It seemed to mock her.

The alcove was walled with mirrors. Only Khitain cruelty could have devised such an arrangement, where, whichever way she twisted her head she was confronted by the spectacle of her own humiliation, reflected from every angle. She was at once actor and spectator in a beastly drama. She could not escape the shameful sight of her own writhings and the eager brutish hands of Lun-Faar remorselessly subduing her hopeless, desperate struggles.

As she felt the greedy yellow fingers on her cringing flesh, she saw in the mirrors, her quivering white breasts, her dress torn dishevelled, the scarlet skirt in startling contrast to the white thighs, with only a wisp of silk protecting them as they frantically flexed, twisted and writhed then with a sucking gasp of breath between his grinding teeth, Lun-Faar tore the filmy underthings to rags on her body…

At the tea-table the senseless Khitain still sprawled, deaf to the frantic, agonized shrieks that rang again and again through the inner chamber of Lun-Faar.

An hour later a door opened into a narrow alley in the rear of Lun-Faar’s antique shop, and Arlinna was thrust roughly out, her breasts almost bare, her dress ripped to shreds. She fell sprawling from the force of the shove, and the door was slammed, with a brutal laugh. Dazedly she rose, shook down the remains of her skirt, drew her dress together, and tottered down the alley, sobbing hysterically.

Inside the room from which she had just been ejected, Lun-Faar turned to a lean, saturnine individual, whose pigtail was wound tightly about his head, and from whose wide silk girdle jutted the handle of a light hatchet.

“Yao Chin, take Yun Kang and follow her. There is always some man behind the scenes, when a woman steals. I let her go because I wished her to lead us to that man, send Yun Kang back to me. On no account kill him yourself. I, and only I, must feed the Heart with their vile blood hers and his.”

The hatchetman bowed and left the room, his face showing nothing of his secret belief that Lun-Faar was crazy, not because he believed the Heart drank human blood, but because he, a rich merchant, insisted on doing murder which others of his class always left to hired slayers.

In the mouth of a little twisting alley that ran out upon a rotting abandoned wharf, Arlinna paused. Her face was haggard and desperate. She had reached the end of her trail. She had failed, and Takkim would not accept any excuse. Ahead of her she saw only the black muzzles of a firing squad to which he would deliver her but first there would be torture, inhuman torture, to wring from her secrets her captors would think she possessed. The world at large never knows the full story of the treatment of suspected spies.

With a low moan she covered her eyes with her arm and stumbled blindly toward the edge of the wharf then a strong arm caught her waist and she looked up into the startled face of Conan of Cimmeria.

“By Crom! What are you doing here?”

“Let go!” she whimpered. “It’s my life! I can end it if I want to!”

“Not with me around,” he grunted, picking her up and carrying her back away from the wharf-lip. He sat down on a pile and took her on his lap, like a child. “Good thing I found you,” he grunted. “I had a hard time tracing you after you slugged me and ran up that alley, but I finally saw you ducking down this one. You pick the damndest places to stroll in. Now you tell me what the trouble is. A woman like you don’t need to go jumping off of docks.”

He seemed to hold no grudge for that clout with the pitcher. There was possessiveness in the clasp of his arms about her supple body, but she found a comforting solidity in the breast muscles against which her flaxen head rested. There was a promise of security in his masculine strength. Suddenly she no longer resented his persistent pursuit of her. She needed his strength needed a man who would fight for her.

In a few words she told him everything, the hold Takkim had on her, the task he had set for her, and what had happened in Lun-Faar’s inner room.

He swore at the narrative.

“Ill get that yellow-belly for that! But first we’ll go to the Alley of Rats. Try to stall Takkim along to give you another chance. In the meantime I’ll work on a Zamoran wench I know who could tell me plenty about him and she will, too, or I’ll skin her alive. He’s been mixed up in plenty of crooked rackets. If we get something hot on him, we can shut his mouth, all right. And we’ll get something, you can bet.”

When they entered the Alley of Rats, in a half-abandoned warehouse district in the native quarter, they did not see two furtive figures slinking after them, nor hear the taller whisper: “Yun Kang, go back and tell our master she had led us to a man! I will watch the alley till he comes.”

Conan and Arlinna turned into a dingy doorway, and went down a corridor that seemed wholly deserted. Groping along it, in the dusk, she found the room she sought and led Conan into it. She lit a candle stub stuck on a shelf, and turned to Conan: “He’ll be here soon.”

“I’ll wait in the next room,” he said, reluctantly taking his arm from about her waist. “If he gets rough, I’ll come in.”

Alone in the candle-lighted room she tried to compose herself; her heart was beating a wild tattoo, loud in the stillness. Somewhere rats scampered noisily. Time dragged insufferably. Then quick, light steps sounded in the hall, and Baron Takkim burst through the door, his eyes blazing with greed. They turned red as he read defeat in her eyes; his face contorted.

“Damn you!” His fingers were like talons as he gripped her shoulders. “You failed!”

“I couldn’t help it!” she pleaded. “He knew I was a fake. Please don’t hurt me, Duke. I’ll try again ”

“Try again? You little fool! Do you think that Khitain devil will give you another chance?” Takkim’s suavity was gone; he was like a madman. “You failed, after all my planning! All right! I’ll have a little profit out of you! Take off that dress ” Already in shreds, the garment ripped easily in his grasp, baring a white breast which quivered under his gaze.

The inner door swung open. Takkim wheeled, drawing a crossbow, but before he could let loose the bolt, Conan’s fist crashed against his jaw and stretched him senseless. Conan bent and picked up the weapon, then whirled as the hall door opened behind him. He stiffened as a tranquil voice spoke: “Do not move, my friend!”

He looked into the tip of the crossbow resting in Lun-Faar’s hand.

“So you are the man?” muttered the Khitain. “Good! The Heart drinks ”

He could fire before Conan could lift the crossbow he held. But behind the Cimmerian Arlinna laughed suddenly, unexpectedly.

“It worked, Conan!” she exclaimed. “Our man will get the ruby while we hold Lun-Faar here! The fool! He hasn’t yet guessed that we tricked him to draw him away from his shop after I’d found where he hid the gem.”

Lun-Faar’s face went ashen. With a choking cry he fired, not at Conan but at the girl. But his hand was shaking like a leaf. He missed, and like an echo of his shot came the retort of Conan’s own. Lun-Faar dropped, drilled through the head.

“Good work, woman!” Conan cried exultantly. “He fell for it hard!”

“But they’ll hang us for this!” whimpered the girl. “Listen! Someone’s running up the hall! They’ve heard the shots!”

Stooping swiftly Conan folded Baron Takkim’s fingers about the stock of the crossbow, and then kicked the man heavily in the shins. Takkim grunted and showed signs of returning consciousness. Conan drew Arlinna into the other room and they watched through the crack of the door.

The hall door opened and Yao Chin came in like a panther, hatchet in hand. His eyes blazed at the sight of Lun-Faar on the floor, Takkim staggering to his feet, a crossbow in his hand. With one stride the hatchetman reached the reeling blackmailer. There was a flash of steel, an ugly butcher-shop crunch, and Takkim slumped, his skull split. Yao Chin tossed the reeking hatchet to the floor beside his victim and turned away.

“Out of here, quick!” muttered Conan, shaking Arlinna who seemed threatened with hysteria. “Up the alley in the other direction.”

She regained her poise in their groping flight up the darkened alley, as Conan muttered: “We’re in the clear now. Takkim can’t talk, with his head split, and that hatchetman’ll tell his pals Takkim shot their boss.”

“We’d better get out of town!” They had emerged into a narrow, lamp-lit street.

“Why? We’re safe from suspicion now.” A little tingle of pleasure ran through her as Conan turned into a doorway and spoke to a grinning old Chinaman who bowed them into a small neat room, with curtained windows and a couch.

As the door closed behind the old Khitain, Conan caught her hungrily to him, finding her red lips, now unresisting. Her arms went about his thick neck as he lifted her bodily from the floor. Willingly she yielded, responded to his eager caresses.

She had only exchanged masters, it was true, but this was different. There was a delicious sense of comfort and security in a strong man who could fight for her and protect her. There was pleasure in the dominance of his strong hands. With a blissful sigh she settled herself luxuriously in his powerful arms.

The Lost Valley of Iskander

(Originally Swords of the Hills)

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

It was the stealthy clink of steel on stone that wakened Conan. In the dim starlight a shadowy bulk loomed over him and something glinted in the lifted hand. Conan went into action like a steel spring uncoiling. His left hand checked the descending wrist with its curved knife, and simultaneously he heaved upward and locked his right hand savagely on a hairy throat.

A gurgling gasp was strangled in that throat and Conan, resisting the other’s terrific plunges, hooked a leg about his knee and heaved him over and underneath. There was no sound except the rasp and thud of straining bodies. Conan fought, as always, in grim silence, and no sound came from the straining lips of the man beneath. His right hand writhed in Conan’s grip; his left tore futilely at the wrist whose iron fingers drove deeper and deeper into the throat they grasped. That wrist felt like a mass of woven steel wires to the weakening fingers that clawed at it. Grimly Conan maintained his position, driving all the power of his compact shoulders and corded arms into his throttling fingers. He knew it was his life or that of the man who had crept up to stab him in the dark. In that unmapped corner of the Afhugli mountains all fights were to the death. The tearing fingers relaxed. A convulsive shudder ran through the great body straining beneath the Cimmerian; then it went limp.

Conan slid off the corpse, in the deeper shadow of the great rocks among which he had been sleeping. Instinctively he felt under his arm to see if the precious package for which he had staked his life was still safe. Yes, it was there, that flat bundle of velum wrapped in oiled silk, that meant life or death to thousands. He listened. No sound broke the stillness. About him the slopes with their ledges and boulders rose gaunt and black in the starlight. It was the darkness before the dawn.

But he knew that men moved about him, out there among the rocks. His ears, whetted by years in wild places, caught stealthy sounds — the soft rasp of cloth over stones, the faint shuffle of sandalled feet. He could not see them, and he knew they could not see him, among the clustered boulders he had chosen for his sleeping site.

His left hand groped for his sword, and he drew his dagger with his right. That short, deadly fight had made no more noise than the silent knifing of a sleeping man might have made. Doubtless his stalkers out yonder were awaiting some signal from the man they had sent in to murder their victim.

Conan knew who these men were. He knew their leader was the man who had dogged him for hundreds of miles, determined he should not reach Vendhya with that silk-wrapped packet. Conan was known by repute from Turan to the Khitai; elsewhere he was called Amra, the Lion, and they feared and respected him. But in Hunyadi, renegade and international adventurer, Conan had met his match. And he knew that now Hunyadi, out there in the night, was lurking with his Turanian killers. They had ferreted him out, at last.

Conan glided out from among the boulders as silently as a great cat. No hillman, born and bred among those crags, could have avoided loose stones more skillfully or picked his way more carefully. He headed southward, because that was the direction in which lay his ultimate goal. Doubtless he was completely surrounded.

His soft native sandals made no noise, and in his dark hillman’s garb he was all but invisible. In the pitch-black shadow of an overhanging cliff, he suddenly sensed a human presence ahead of him. A voice hissed, a northern tongue framing the Turanian words: “Ali! Is that you? Is the dog dead? Why did you not call me?”

Conan struck savagely in the direction of the voice. His scimitar crunched glancingly against a human skull, and a man groaned and crumpled. All about rose a sudden clamor of voices, the rasp of leather on rock. A stentorian voice began shouting, with a note of panic.

Conan cast stealth to the winds. With a bound he cleared the writhing body before him, and sped off down the slope. Behind him rose a chorus of yells as the men in hiding glimpsed his shadowy figure racing through the starlight. Jets of orange cut the darkness, but the arrows whined high and wide. Conan’s flying shape was sighted but an instant, then the shadowy gulfs of the night swallowed it up. His enemies raved like foiled wolves in their bewildered rage. Once again their prey had slipped like an eel through their fingers and was gone.

So thought Conan as he raced across the plateau beyond the clustering cliffs. They would be hot after him, with hillmen who could trail a wolf across naked rocks, but with the start he had — even with the thought the earth gaped blackly before him. Even his steel-trap quickness could not save him. His grasping hands caught only thin air as he plunged downward, to strike his head with stunning force at the bottom.

When he regained his senses a chill dawn was whitening the sky. He sat up groggily and felt his head, where a large lump was clotted with dried blood. It was only by chance that his neck was not broken. He had fallen into a ravine, and during the precious time he should have employed in flight, he was lying senseless among the rocks at the bottom.

Again he felt for the packet under his native shirt, though he knew it was fastened there securely. Those papers were his death-warrant, which only his skill and wit could prevent being executed. Men had laughed when Conan of Cimmeria had warned them that the devil’s own stew was bubbling in the East, where an adventurer was dreaming of an outlaw empire.

To prove his assertion, Conan had gone into Turan, in the guise of a wandering Afghul. Years spent in the East had given him the ability to pass himself for a native anywhere. He had secured proof no one could ignore or deny, but he had been recognized at last. He had fled for his life, and for more than his life, then, and Hunyadi, the renegade who plotted the destruction of nations, was hot on his heels, clear across the steppes, through the foothills, and up into the mountains where Conan had thought at last to throw him off. But he had failed. His foe was a human bloodhound. Wary, too, as shown by his sending his craftiest slayer in to strike a blow in the dark.

Conan found his weapon and began the climb out of the ravine. Under his left arm was proof that would make certain officials wake up and take steps to prevent the atrocious thing that Hunyadi planned. It was letters to various chiefs, signed and sealed with his foe's own hand, and it revealed his whole plot to embroil Easten Hyboria in a religious war and send howling hordes of fanatics against the Vendhyan border. It was a plan for plundering on a staggering scale. That package must reach Fort Ali Masjid! With all his iron will Conan of Cimmeria was determined it should; with equal resolution Hunyadi was determined it should not. In the clash of two such steely temperaments, kingdoms shake and Death reaps a red harvest.

Dirt crumbled and pebbles rattled down as Conan worked his way up the sloping side of the ravine, but presently he clambered over the edge and cast a quick look about him. He was on a narrow plateau, pitched among giant slopes which rose somberly above it. To the south showed the mouth of a narrow gorge, walled by rocky cliffs. In that direction he hurried.

He had not gone a dozen steps when the twang of a bow came from behind him. Even as the wind of the arrow fanned his cheek, Conan dropped flat behind a boulder, a sense of futility tugging at his heart. He could never escape Hunyadi. This chase would end only when one of them was dead. In the increasing light he saw figures moving among the boulders along the slopes to the northwest of the plateau. He had lost his chance of escaping under cover of darkness, and now it looked like a finish fight.

He thrust forward his own bow and loosed an arrow. Too much to hope that that blind blow in the dark had killed Hunyadi; the man had as many lives as a cat. An arrow clattered on the boulder close to his elbow. He had heard the twang of the weapon it had come from, marking the spot where the assailant lurked. He watched those rocks, and when a head and part of an arm and shoulder came up with a bow, Conan fired. It was a long shot, but the man reared upright and pitched forward across the rock that had sheltered him.

More arrows came, spattering Conan’s refuge. Up on the slopes, where the big boulders poised breathtakingly, he saw his enemies moving like ants, wriggling from ledge to ledge. They were spread out in a wide ragged semicircle, trying to surround him again, and he did not have enough ammunition to stop them. He dared shoot only when fairly certain of scoring a hit. He dared not make a break for the gorge behind him. He would be riddled before he could reach it. It looked like trail’s end for him, and while Conan had faced death too often to fear it greatly, the thought that those papers would never reach their destination filled him with black despair.

An arrow whining off his boulder from a new angle made him crouch lower, seeking the marksman. He glimpsed a white turban, high up on the slope, above the others. From that position the Turanian could shoot arrows directly into Conan’s covert.

The Cimmerian could not shift his position, because a dozen other bows nearer at hand were covering it; and he could not stay where he was. One of those dropping slugs would find him sooner or later. But the Ottoman decided that he saw a still better position, and risked a shift, trusting to the long uphill range. He did not know Conan as Hunyadi knew him.

The Nemedian, further down the slope, yelled a fierce command, but the Turanian was already in motion, headed for another ledge, his garments flapping about him. Conan’s arrow caught him in mid-stride. With a wild cry he staggered, fell headlong and crashed against a poised boulder. He was a heavy man, and the impact of his hurtling body toppled the rock from its unstable base. It rolled down the slope, dislodging others as it came. Dirt rattled in widening streams about it.

Men began recklessly to break cover. Conan saw Hunyadi spring up and run obliquely across the slope, out of the path of the sliding rocks. The tall supple figure was unmistakable, even in Turanian garb. Conan fired and missed, as he always seemed to miss the man, and then there was no time to fire again. The whole slope was in motion now, thundering down in a bellowing, grinding torrent of stones and dirt and boulders. The Turanians were fleeing after Hunyadi, screaming.

Conan sprang up and raced for the mouth of the gorge. He did not look back. He heard above the roaring the awful screams that marked the end of men caught and crushed and ground to bloody shreds under the rushing tons of shale and stone. He dropped his bow; every ounce of extra burden counted now. A deafening roar was in his ears as he gained the mouth of the gorge and flung himself about the beetling jut of the cliff. He crouched there, flattened against the wall, and through the gorge mouth roared a welter of dirt and rocks, boulders bouncing and tumbling, rebounding thunderously from the sides and hurtling on down the sloping gut. Yet, it was only a trickle of the avalanche which was diverted into the gorge. The main bulk of it thundered on down the mountain.

II

Conan pulled away from the cliff that had sheltered him. He stood knee deep in loose dirt and broken stones. A flying splinter of stone had cut his face. The roar of the landslide was followed by an unearthly silence. Looking back on to the plateau, he saw a vast litter of broken earth, shale and rocks. Here and there an arm or a leg protruded, bloody and twisted, to mark where a human victim had been caught by the torrent. Of Hunyadi and the survivors there was no sign.

But Conan was a fatalist where the satanic Nemedian was concerned. He felt quite sure that Hunyadi had survived, and would be upon his trail again as soon as he could collect his demoralized followers. It was likely that he would recruit the natives of these hills to his service. The man’s power was little short of marvelous.

So Conan turned hurriedly down the gorge. Bow, pack of supplies, all were lost. He had only the garments on his body and the sword at his hip. Starvation in these barren mountains was a haunting threat, if he escaped being butchered by the wild tribes which inhabited them. There was about one chance in ten thousand of his ever getting out alive. But he had known it was a desperate quest when he started, and long odds had never balked Conan of Cimmeria, for years soldier of fortune in the outlands of the world.

The gorge twisted and bent between tortuous walls. The split-off arm of the avalanche had quickly spent its force there, but Conan still saw the slanting floor littered with boulders which had tumbled down from the higher levels. And suddenly he stopped short, his weapon drawn.

On the ground before him lay a man such as he had never seen in the Afghuli mountains or elsewhere. He was young, but tall and strong, clad in short silk breeches, tunic and sandals, and girdled with a broad belt which supported a curved sword.

His hair caught Conan’s attention. Blue eyes, such as the youth had, were not uncommon in the hills; but his hair was yellow, bound about his temples with a band of red cloth, and falling in a square-cut mane nearly to his shoulders. He was clearly no Afghuli. Conan remembered tales he had heard of a tribe living in these mountains somewhere who were not Afhuglis. Had he stumbled upon a member of that legendary race?

The youth was vainly trying to draw his sword. He was pinned down by a boulder which had evidently caught him as he raced for the shelter of the cliff.

“Slay me and be done with it, you dog!” he gritted.

“I won’t harm you,” answered Conan. “I’m no Afghuli. Lie still. I’ll help you if I can. I have no quarrel with you.”

The heavy stone lay across the youth’s leg in such a way that he could not extricate the member.

“Is your leg broken?” Conan asked.

“I think not. But if you move the stone it will grind it to shreds.”

Conan saw that he spoke the truth. A depression on the under side of the stone had saved the youth’s limb, while imprisoning it. If he rolled the boulder either way, it would crush the member.

“I’ll have to lift it straight up,” he grunted.

“You can never do it,” said the youth despairingly. “Ptolemy himself could scarcely lift it, and you are not nearly so big as he.”

Conan did not pause to inquire who Ptolemy might be, nor to explain that strength is not altogether a matter of size alone. His own thews were like masses of knit steel wires.

Yet he was not at all sure that he could lift that boulder, which, while not so large as many which had rolled down the gorge, was yet bulky enough to make the task look dubious. Straddling the prisoner’s body, he braced his legs wide, spread his arms and gripped the big stone. Putting all his corded sinews and his scientific knowledge of weight-lifting into his effort, he uncoiled his strength in a smooth, mighty expansion of power.

His heels dug into the dirt, the veins in his temples swelled, and unexpected knots of muscles sprang out on his straining arms. But the great stone came up steadily without a jerk or waver, and the man on the ground drew his leg clear and rolled away.

Conan let the stone fall and stepped back, shaking the perspiration from his face. The other worked his skinned, bruised leg gingerly, then looked up and extended his hand in a curiously un-Oriental gesture.

“I am Bardylis of Attalus,” he said. “My life is yours!”

“Men call me Conan,” answered Conan, taking his hand. They made a strong contrast: the tall, rangy youth in his strange garb, with his white skin and yellow hair, and the Cimmerian, taller still, and broader, in his tattered Afghuli garments, and his sun-darkened skin. Conan’s hair was straight and black, and his eyes smouldered with blue fire.

“I was hunting on the cliffs,” said Bardylis. “I heard shots and was going to investigate them, when I heard the roar of the avalanche and the gorge was filled with flying rocks. You are no Afghuli, despite your name. Come to my village. You look like a man who is weary and has lost his way.”

“Where is your village?”

“Yonder, down the gorge and beyond the cliffs.” Bardylis pointed southward. Then, looking over Conan’s shoulder, he cried out. Conan wheeled. High up on the beetling gorge wall, a turbaned head was poked from behind a ledge. A dark face stared down wildly. Conan turned with a snarl, but the face vanished and he heard a frantic voice yelling in guttural Turanian. Other voices answered, among which the Cimmerian recognized the strident accents of Hunyadi. The pack was at his heels again. Undoubtedly they had seen Conan take refuge in the gorge, and as soon as the boulders ceased tumbling, had traversed the torn slope and followed the cliffs where they would have the advantage of the man below.

But Conan did not pause to ruminate. Even as the turbaned head vanished, he wheeled with a word to his companion, and darted around the next bend in the canyon. Bardylis followed without question, limping on his bruised leg, but moving with sufficient alacrity. Conan heard his pursuers shouting on the cliff above and behind him, heard them crashing recklessly through stunted bushes, dislodging pebbles as they ran, heedless of everything except their desire to sight their quarry.

But the pursuers had one advantage, the fugitives had another. They could follow the slightly slanting floor of the gorge more swiftly than the others could run along the uneven cliffs, with their broken edges and jutting ledges. They had to climb and scramble, and Conan heard their maledictions growing fainter in the distance behind him. When they emerged from the further mouth of the gorge, they were far in advance of Hunyadi’s killers.

But Conan knew that the respite was brief. He looked about him. The narrow gorge had opened out onto a trail which ran straight along the crest of a cliff that fell away sheer three hundred feet into a deep valley, hemmed in on all sides by gigantic precipices. Conan looked down and saw a stream winding among dense trees far below, and further on, what seemed to be stone buildings among the groves.

Bardylis pointed to the latter.

“There is my village!” he said excitedly. “If we could get into the valley we would be safe! This trail leads to the pass at the southern end, but it is five miles distant!”

Conan shook his head. The trail ran straight along the top of the cliff and afforded no cover. “They’ll run us down and shoot us like rats at long range, if we keep to this path.”

“There is one other way!” cried Bardylis. “Down the cliff, at this very point! It is a secret way, and none but a man of my people has ever followed it, and then only when hard pressed. There are handholds cut into the rock. Can you climb down?”

“I’ll try,” answered Conan, sheathing his weapon. To try to go down those towering cliffs looked like suicide, but it was sure death to try to outrun Hunyadi’s bows along the trail. At any minute he expected the Magyar and his men to break cover.

“I will go first and guide you,” said Bardylis rapidly, kicking off his sandals and letting himself over the cliff edge. Conan did likewise and followed him. Clinging to the sharp lip of the precipice, Conan saw a series of small holes pitting the rock. He began the descent slowly, clinging like a fly to a wall. It was hair-raising work, and the only thing that made it possible at all was the slight convex slant of the cliff at that point. Conan had made many a desperate climb during his career, but never one which put such strain on nerve and thew. Again and again only the grip of a finger stood between him and death. Below him Bardylis toiled downward, guiding and encouraging him, until the youth finally dropped to the earth and stood looking tensely up at the man above him.

Then he shouted, with a note of strident fear in his voice. Conan, still twenty feet from the bottom, craned his neck upward. High above him he saw a bearded face peering down at him, convulsed with triumph. Deliberately the Turanian sighted downward with a weapon, then laid it aside and caught up a heavy stone, leaning far over the edge to aim its downward course. Clinging with toes and nails, Conan drew and fired upward with the same motion. Then he flattened himself desperately against the cliff and clung on.

The man above screamed and pitched headfirst over the brink. The rock rushed down, striking Conan a glancing blow on the shoulder, then the writhing body hurtled past and struck with a sickening concussion on the earth below. A voice shouting furiously high above announced the presence of Hunyadi at last, and Conan slid and tumbled recklessly the remaining distance, and, with Bardylis, ran for the shelter of the trees.

A glance backward and upward showed him Hunyadi crouching on the cliff, leveling a bow, but the next instant Conan and Bardylis were out of sight, and Hunyadi, apparently dreading an answering shot from the trees, made a hasty retreat with the four Turanians who were the survivors of his party.

III

“You saved my life when you showed me that path,” said Conan.

Bardylis smiled. “Any man of Attalus could have shown you the path, which we call the Road of the Eagles; but only a hero could have followed it. From what land comes my brother?”

“From the west,” answered Conan; “from the land of Cimmeria, and far to the north.”

Bardylis shook his head. “I have never heard of it. But come with me. My people are yours henceforth.”

As they moved through the trees, Conan scanned the cliffs in vain for some sign of his enemies. He felt certain that neither Hunyadi, bold as he was, nor any of his companions would try to follow them down “the Road of the Eagles.” They were not mountaineers; including Hunyadi, they were more at home in the saddle than on a hill path. They would seek some other way into the valley. He spoke his thoughts to Bardylis.

“They will find death,” answered the youth grimly. “The Pass of the King, at the southern end of the valley, is the only entrance. Men guard it night and day. The only strangers who enter the Valley of Iskander are traders, merchants with pack-mules.”

Conan inspected his companion curiously, aware of a certain tantalizing sensation of familiarity he could not place.

“Who are your people?” he asked. “You are not an Afghuli. You do not look like an Oriental at all.”

“We are the Sons of Iskander,” answered Bardylis. “When the great conqueror came through these mountains, long ago, he built the city we call Attalus, and left hundreds of his soldiers and their women in it. Iskander marched westward again, and after a long while word came that he was dead and his empire divided. But the people of Iskander abode here, unconquered. Many times we have slaughtered the Afghuli dogs who came against us.”

Light came to Conan, illuminating that misplaced familiarity. Iskander — This boy’s profile was classic Corinthian, such as Conan had seen in sculptured marble, and the names he spoke were Corinthian. Undoubtedly he was the descendant of some soldier who had been part of some ancient invasion of the East.

To test the matter, he spoke to Bardylis in Corinthian, one of the many languages, modern and obsolete, he had picked up in his varied career. The youth cried out with pleasure.

“You speak our tongue!” he exclaimed, in the same language. “Not in a thousand years has a stranger come to us with our own speech on his lips. We converse with the outsiders in their own tongue, and they know nothing of ours. Surely you, too, are a Son of Iskander?”

Conan shook his head, wondering how he could explain his knowledge of the tongue to this youth who knew nothing of the world outside the hills. “My ancestors may have met your own,” he said at last. “It is not uncommon for those that travel to speak your language.”

They were approaching the stone roofs which shone through the trees, and Conan saw that Bardylis’ “village” was a substantial town, surrounded by a wall, and so plainly the work of long dead Corinthian architects that he felt like a man who had wandered into a past and forgotten age.

Outside the walls, men tilled the thin soil with primitive implements, and herded sheep and cattle. A few horses grazed along the bank of the stream which meandered through the valley. All the men, like Bardylis, were tall and fair-haired. They dropped their work and came running up, staring at the black-haired stranger in hostile surprize, until Bardylis reassured them.

“It is the first time any but a captive or a trader has entered the valley in centuries,” said Bardylis to Conan. “Say nothing till I bid you. I wish to surprize my people with your knowledge. Mitra, they will gape when they hear a stranger speak to them in their own tongue!”

The gate in the wall hung open and unguarded, and Conan noticed that the wall itself was in a poor state of repair. Bardylis remarked that the guard in the narrow pass at the end of the valley was sufficient protection, and that no hostile force had ever reached the city itself. They passed through and walked along a broad paved street, in which yellow-haired people in tunics, men, women and children, went about their tasks much like the Greeks of two thousand years ago, among buildings which were duplicates of the structures of ancient Athens.

A crowd quickly formed about them, but Bardylis, bursting with glee and importance, gave them no satisfaction. He went straight toward a large edifice near the center of the town and, mounting the broad steps, came into a large chamber where several men, more richly dressed than the common people, sat casting dice on a small table before them. The crowd swarmed in after them, and thronged the doorway eagerly. The chiefs ceased their dice game, and one, a giant with a commanding air, demanded: “What do you wish, Bardylis? Who is this stranger?”

“A friend of Attalus, oh Ptolemy, king of the valley of Iskander,” answered Bardylis. “He speaks the tongue of Iskander!”

“What tale is this?” harshly demanded the giant.

“Let them hear, brother!” Bardylis directed triumphantly.

“I come in peace,” said Conan briefly, in Corinthian. “I am called Conan, but I am no Afghuli.”

A murmur of surprise went up from the throng, and Ptolemy fingered his chin and scowled suspiciously. He was a magnificently built man, clean shaven like all his tribesmen, and handsome, but his visage was moody.

He listened impatiently while Bardylis related the circumstances of his meeting with Conan, and when he told of the Cimmerian lifting the stone that pinned him down, Ptolemy frowned and involuntarily flexed his own massive thews. He seemed ill-pleased at the approval with which the people openly greeted the tale. Evidently these descendants of Corinthian athletes had as much admiration for physical perfection as had their ancient ancestors, and Ptolemy was vain of his prowess.

“How could he lift such a stone?” the king broke in. “It is impossible for such a man.”

“He is mighty even beyond his stature, oh king,” retorted Bardylis. “Here is the bruise on my leg to prove I tell the truth. He lifted the stone I could not move, and he came down the Road of the Eagles, which few even among the Attalans have dared. He has traveled far and fought men, and now he would feast and rest.”

“See to it then,” grunted Ptolemy contemptuously, turning back to his dice game. “If he is a spy, your head shall answer for it.”

“I stake my head gladly on his honesty, oh king!” answered Bardylis proudly; then taking Conan’s arm, he said softly, “Come my friend. Ptolemy is short of patience and scant of courtesy. Pay no heed to him. I will take you to the house of my father.”

As they pushed their way through the crowd, Conan’s gaze picked out an alien countenance among the frank, blond faces — a thin, swarthy visage, whose black eyes gleamed avidly on the Cimmerian. The man was an outsider, with a bundle on his back. When he saw he was being scrutinized he smirked and bobbed his head servilely. There was something familiar about the gesture.

“Who is that man?” Conan asked.

“Abdullah, a dog whom we allow to enter the valley with beads and mirrors and such trinkets as our women love; we trade ore and wine and skins for them.”

Conan remembered the fellow now — a shifty character who used to hang around Peshawur, and was suspected of smuggling bows up the Zhaibar Pass. But when he turned and looked back, the dark face had vanished in the crowd. However, there was no reason to fear Abdullah, even if the man recognized him. The man could not know of the papers he carried. Conan felt that the people of Attalus were friendly to the friend of Bardylis, though the youth had plainly roused Ptolemy’s jealous vanity by his praise of Conan’s strength.

Bardylis conducted Conan down the street to a large stone house with a pillared portico, where he proudly displayed his friend to his father, a venerable patriarch called Perdiccas, and his mother, a tall, stately woman, well along in years. The Attalans certainly did not keep their women in seclusion like the Afghulis. Conan saw Bardylis’ sisters, robust blond beauties, and his young brother. The Cimmerian could scarcely suppress a smile at the strangeness of it all, being ushered into the every-day family life of two thousand years ago. These people were definitely not barbarians; lower, undoubtedly, in the cultural scale than their Corinthian ancestors, they were still more highly civilized by far than their fierce Afghuli neighbors.

Their interest in their guest was genuine, but none save Bardylis showed much interest in the world outside their valley. Presently the youth led Conan into an inner chamber and set food and wine before him. The Cimmerian ate and drank ravenously, suddenly aware of the lean days that had preceded this feast. While he ate, Bardylis talked, but he did not speak of the men who had been pursuing Conan. Evidently he supposed them to have been Afghulis of the surrounding hills, whose hostility was proverbial. Conan learned that no man of Attalus had ever been more than a day’s journey away from the valley. The ferocity of the hill tribes all about them had isolated them from the world completely.

When Conan at last expressed a desire for sleep, Bardylis left him alone, assuring him that he would not be disturbed. The Cimmerian was somewhat disturbed to find that there was no door to his chamber, merely a curtain drawn across an archway. Bardylis had said there were no thieves in Attalus, but caution was so much a natural part of Conan that he found himself a prey to uneasiness. The room opened onto a corridor, and the corridor, he believed, gave onto an outer door. The people of Attalus apparently did not find it necessary to safeguard their dwellings; but though a native might sleep in safety, that might not apply to a stranger.

Finally Conan drew aside the couch which formed the main piece of furniture for the chamber, and making sure no spying eyes were on him, he worked loose one of the small stone blocks which composed the wall. Taking the silk-bound packet from his shirt, he thrust it into the aperture, pushed back the stone as far as it would go, and replaced the couch.

Stretching himself, then, upon the couch, he fell to evolving plans for escape with his life and those papers which meant so much to the peace of Asia. He was safe enough in the valley, but he knew Hunyadi would wait for him outside with the patience of a cobra. He could not stay here forever. He would scale the cliffs some dark night and bolt for it. Hunyadi would undoubtedly have all the tribes in the hills after him, but he would trust to luck and his good right arm, as he had so often before. The wine he had drunk was potent; weariness after the long flight weighted his limbs. Conan’s meditations merged into dream. He slept deeply and long.

IV

When Conan awoke it was in utter darkness. He knew that he had slept for many hours, and night had fallen. Silence reigned over the house, but he had been awakened by the soft swish of the curtains over the doorway.

He sat up on his couch and asked: “Is that you, Bardylis?”

A voice grunted, “Yes.” Even as he was electrified by the realization that the voice was not that of Bardylis, something crashed down on his head, and a deeper blackness, shot with fire-sparks, engulfed him.

When he regained consciousness, a torch dazzled his eyes, and in its glow he saw three men — burly, yellow-haired men of Attalus with faces more stupid and brutish than any he had yet seen. He was lying on a stone slab in a bare chamber, whose crumbling, cobwebbed walls were vaguely illumined by the gutturing torch. His arms were bound, but not his legs. The sound of a door opening made him crane his neck, and he saw a stooped, vulture-like figure enter the room. It was Abdullah, the outsider.

He looked down on the Cimmerian with his rat-like features twisted in a venomous grin.

“Low lies the terrible Conan!” he taunted. “Fool! I knew you the instant I saw you in the palace of Ptolemy.”

“You have no feud with me,” growled Conan.

“A friend of mine has,” answered the outsider. “That is nothing to me, but it shall gain me profit. It is true you have never harmed me, but I have always feared you. So when I saw you in the city, I gathered my goods and hastened to depart, not knowing what you did here. But beyond the pass I met Hunyadi, and he asked me if I had seen you in the valley of Iskander, whither you had fled to escape him. I answered that I had, and he urged me to help him steal into the valley and take from you certain documents he said you stole from him.

“But I refused, knowing that these Attalan devils would kill me if I tried to smuggle a stranger into Iskander, and Hunyadi went back into the hills with his four Turanians, and the horde of ragged Afghulis he has made his friends and allies. When he had gone I returned to the valley, telling the guardsmen at the pass that I feared the Pathans.

“I persuaded these three men to aid me in capturing you. None will know what became of you, and Ptolemy will not trouble himself about you, because he is jealous of your strength. It is an old tradition that the king of Attalus must be the strongest man in the city. Ptolemy would have killed you himself, in time. But I will attend to that. I do not wish to have you on my trail, after I have taken from you the papers Hunyadi wishes. He shall have them ultimately — if he is willing to pay enough!” He laughed, a high, cackling laugh, and turned to the stolid Attalans. “Did you search him?”

“We found nothing,” a giant rumbled.

Abdullah tck-tck’ed his teeth in annoyance.

“You do not know how to search a Cimmerian. Here, I will do it myself.”

He ran a practiced hand over his captive, scowling as his search was unrewarded. He tried to feel under the Cimmerian’s arm-pits, but Conan’s arms were bound so closely to his sides that this was impossible.

Abdullah frowned worriedly, and drew a curved dagger.

“Cut loose his arms,” he directed, “then all three of you lay hold on him; it is like letting a leopard out of his cage.”

Conan made no resistance and was quickly spread-eagled on the slab, with a big Attalan at each arm and one at his legs. They held him closely, but seemed skeptical of Abdullah’s repeated warnings concerning the stranger’s strength.

The outsider again approached his prisoner, lowering his knife as he reached out. With a dynamic release of coiled steel muscles Conan wrenched his legs free from the grasp of the careless Attalan and drove his heels terrifically into Abdullah’s breast. Had his feet been booted they would have caved in the outsider’s breast bone. As it was, the merchant shot backward with an agonized grunt, and struck the floor flat on his shoulders.

Conan had not paused. That same terrific lunge had torn his left arm free, and heaving up on the slab, he smashed his left fist against the jaw of the man who gripped his right arm. The impact was like that of a caulking hammer, and the Attalan went down like a butchered ox. The other two lunged in, hands grasping. Conan threw himself over the slab to the floor on the other side, and as one of the warriors lunged around it, he caught the Attalan’s wrist, wheeled, jerking the arm over his shoulder, and hurled the man bodily over his head. The Attalan struck the floor headfirst with an impact that knocked wind and consciousness out of him together.

The remaining kidnaper was more wary. Seeing the terrible strength and blinding speed of his smaller foe, he drew a long knife and came in cautiously, seeking an opportunity for a mortal thrust. Conan fell back, putting the slab between himself and that glimmering blade, while the other circled warily after him. Suddenly the Cimmerian stooped and ripped a similar knife from the belt of the man he had first felled. As he did so, the Attalan gave a roar, cleared the slab with a lion-like bound, and slashed in mid-air at the stooping Cimmerian.

Conan crouched still lower and the gleaming blade whistled over his head. The man hit the floor feet-first, off balance, and tumbled forward, full into the knife that swept up in Conan’s hand. A strangled cry was wrung from the Attalan’s lips as he felt himself impaled on the long blade, and he dragged Conan down with him in his death struggles.

Tearing free from his weakening embrace, Conan rose, his garments smeared with his victim’s blood, the red knife in his hand. Abdullah staggered up with a croaking cry, his face green with pain. Conan snarled like a wolf and sprang toward him, all his murderous passion fully roused. But the sight of that dripping knife and the savage mask of Conan’s face galvanized the outsider. With a scream he sprang for the door, knocking the torch from its socket as he passed. It hit the floor, scattering sparks and plunging the room into darkness, and Conan caromed blindly into the wall.

When he righted himself and found the door, the room was empty except for himself and the Attalans, dead or senseless.

Emerging from the chamber, he found himself in a narrow street, with the stars just fading for dawn. The building he had just quitted was dilapidated and obviously deserted. Down the narrow way he saw the house of Perdiccas. So he had not been carried far. Evidently his abductors had anticipated no interference. He wondered how much of a hand Bardylis had had in the plot. He did not like to think that the youth had betrayed him. But in any event, he would have to return to the house of Perdiccas, to obtain the packet he had concealed in the wall. He went down the street, still feeling a bit sick and giddy from that blow that had knocked him senseless, now that the fire of battle had cooled in his veins. The street was deserted. It seemed, indeed, more like an alley than a street, running between the backs of the houses.

As he approached the house, he saw someone running toward him. It was Bardylis, and he threw himself on Conan with a cry of relief that was not feigned.

“Oh, my brother!” he exclaimed. “What has happened? I found your chamber empty a short time ago, and blood on your couch. Are you unhurt? Nay, there is a cut upon your scalp!”

Conan explained in a few words, saying nothing of the letters. He allowed Bardylis to suppose that Abdullah had been a personal enemy, bent on revenge. He trusted the youth now, but there was no need to disclose the truth of the packet.

Bardylis whitened with fury. “What a shame upon my house!” he cried. “Last night that dog Abdullah made my father a present of a great jug of wine, and we all drank except yourself, who were slumbering. I know now the wine was drugged. We slept like dogs.

“Because you were our guest, I posted a man at each outer door last night, but they fell asleep because of the wine they had drunk. A few minutes ago, searching for you, I found the servant who was posted at the door which opens into this alley from the corridor that runs past your chamber. His throat had been cut. It was easy for them to creep along that corridor and into your chamber while we slept.”

Back in the chamber, while Bardylis went to fetch fresh garments, Conan retrieved the packet from the wall and stowed it under his belt. In his waking hours he preferred to keep it on his person.

Bardylis returned then with the breeches, sandals and tunic of the Attalans, and while Conan donned them, gazed in admiration at the Cimmerian’s bronzed and sinewy torso, devoid as it was of the slightest trace of surplus flesh.

Conan had scarcely completed his dressing when voices were heard without, the tramp of men resounded through the hall, and a group of yellow-haired warriors appeared at the doorway, with swords at their sides. Their leader pointed to Conan, and said: “Ptolemy commands that this man appear at once before him, in the hall of justice.”

“What is this?” exclaimed Bardylis. “Conan is my guest!”

“It is not my part to say,” answered the chief. “I but carry out the commands of our king.”

Conan laid a restraining hand on Bardylis’s arm. “I will go. I want to see what business Ptolemy has with me.”

“I, too, will go,” said Bardylis, with a snap of his jaws. “What this portends I do not know. I do know that Conan is my friend.”

The sun was not yet rising as they strode down the white street toward the palace, but people were already moving about, and many of them followed the procession.

Mounting the broad steps of the palace, they entered a wide hall, flanked with lofty columns. At the other end there were more steps, wide and curving, leading up to a dais on which, in a throne-like marble chair, sat the king of Attalus, sullen as ever. A number of his chiefs sat on stone benches on either side of the dais, and the common people ranged themselves along the wall, leaving a wide space clear before the throne.

In this open space crouched a vulture-like figure. It was Abdullah, his eyes shining with hate and fear, and before him lay the corpse of the man Conan had killed in the deserted house. The other two kidnappers stood near by, their bruised features sullen and ill at ease.

Conan was conducted into the open space before the dais, and the guards fell back on either side of him. There was little formality. Ptolemy motioned to Abdullah and said: “Make your charge.”

Abdullah sprang up and pointed a skinny finger in Conan’s face.

“I accuse this man of murder!” he screeched. “This morning before dawn he attacked me and my friends while we slept, and slew him who lies there. The rest of us barely escaped with our lives!”

A mutter of surprize and anger rose from the throng. Ptolemy turned his somber stare on Conan.

“What have you to say?”

“He lies,” answered the Cimmerian impatiently. “I killed that man, yes —”

He was interrupted by a fierce cry from the people, who began to surge menacingly forward, to be thrust back by the guards.

“I only defended my life,” said Conan angrily, not relishing his position of defendant. “That outsider dog and three others, that dead man and those two standing there, slipped in my chamber last night as I slept in the house of Perdiccas, knocked me senseless and carried me away to rob and kill me.”

“Aye!” cried Bardylis wrathfully. “And they slew one of my father’s servants while he slept.”

At that the murmur of the mob changed, and they halted in uncertainty.

“A lie!” screamed Abdullah, fired to recklessness by avarice and hate. “Bardylis is bewitched! Conan is a wizard! How else could he speak your tongue?”

The crowd recoiled abruptly, and some made furtive signs to avert conjury. The Attalans were as superstitious as their ancestors. Bardylis had drawn his sword, and his friends rallied about him, clean-cut, rangy youngsters, quivering like hunting dogs in their eagerness.

“Wizard or man!” roared Bardylis, “he is my brother, and no man touches him save at peril of his head!”

“He is a wizard!” screamed Abdullah, foam dabbling his beard. “I know him of old! Beware of him! He will bring madness and ruin upon Attalus! On his body he bears a scroll with magic inscriptions, wherein lies his necromantic power! Give that scroll to me, and I will take it afar from Attalus and destroy it where it can do no harm. Let me prove I do not lie! Hold him while I search him, and I will show you.”

“Let no man dare touch Conan!” challenged Bardylis. Then from his throne rose Ptolemy, a great menacing image of bronze, somber and awe-inspiring. He strode down the steps, and men shrank back from his bleak eyes. Bardylis stood his ground, as if ready to defy even his terrible king, but Conan drew the lad aside. Conan was not one to stand quietly by while someone else defended him.

“It is true,” he said without heat, “that I have a packet of papers in my garments. But it is also true that it has nothing to do with witchcraft, and that I will kill the man who tries to take it from me.”

At that Ptolemy’s brooding impassiveness vanished in a flame of passion.

“Will you defy even me?” he roared, his eyes blazing, his great hands working convulsively. “Do you deem yourself already king of Attalus? You black-haired dog, I will kill you with my naked hands! Back, and give us space!”

His sweeping arms hurled men right and left, and roaring like a bull, he hurled himself on Conan. So swift and violent was his attack that Conan was unable to avoid it. They met breast to breast, and he was hurled backward, and to his knee. Ptolemy plunged over him, unable to check his velocity, and then, locked in a death-grapple they ripped and tore, while the people surged yelling about them.

Not often did Conan find himself opposed by a man as strong as himself. But the king of Attalus was a mass of whale-bone and iron, and nerved to blinding quickness. Neither had a weapon. It was man to man, fighting as the primitive progenitors of the race fought. There was no science about Ptolemy’s onslaught; he fought like a tiger or a lion, with all the appalling frenzy of the primordial. Again and again Conan battered his way out of a grapple that threatened to snap his spine like a rotten branch. His blinding blows ripped and smashed in a riot of destruction. The tall king of Attalus swayed and trembled before them like a tree in a storm, but always came surging back like a typhoon, lashing out with great strokes that drove Conan staggering before him, rending and tearing with mighty fingers.

Only his desperate speed and the savage skill of wrestling that was his had saved Conan so long. Naked to the waist, battered and bruised, his tortured body quivered with the punishment he was enduring. But Ptolemy’s great chest was heaving; his face was a mask of raw beef, and his torso showed the effects of a beating that would have killed a lesser man.

Gasping a cry that was half curse, half sob, he threw himself bodily on the Cimmerian, bearing him down by sheer weight. As they fell he drove a knee savagely at Conan’s groin, and tried to fall with his full weight on his foe’s breast. A twist of his body sent the knee sliding harmlessly along his thigh, and Conan writhed from under the heavier body as they fell.

The impact broke their holds, and they staggered up simultaneously. Through the blood and sweat that streamed into his eyes, Conan saw the king towering above him, reeling, arms spread, blood pouring down his mighty breast. His belly went in as he drew a great laboring breath. And into the relaxed pit of his stomach Conan, crouching, drove his left with all the strength of ridged arm, iron shoulders and knotted calves behind it. His clenched fist sank to the wrist in Ptolemy’s solar plexus. The king’s breath went out of him in an explosive grunt; his hands dropped, he swayed like a tall tree under the axe. Conan’s right, hooking up in a terrible arc, met his jaw with a sound like a cooper’s mallet, and Ptolemy pitched headlong and lay still.

V

In the stupified silence that followed the fall of the king, while all eyes, dilated with surprize, were fixed on the prostrate giant and the groggy figure that weaved above him, a gasping voice shouted from outside the palace. It grew louder, mingled with a clatter of hoofs which stopped at the outer steps. All wheeled toward the door as a wild figure staggered in, spattering blood.

“A guard from the pass!” cried Bardylis.

“The Afghulis!” cried the man, blood spurting through his fingers which he pressed to his shoulder. “Three hundred Afghuls! They have stormed the pass! They are led by a white man and four Turanians with bows. These men shot us down from afar off as we strove to defend the pass. The Afghulis have entered the valley —” He swayed and fell, blood trickling from his lips. A wound from an arrow showed in his shoulder, near the base of his neck.

No clamor of terror greeted this appalling news. In the utter silence that followed, all eyes turned toward Conan, leaning dizzily against the wall, gasping for breath.

“You have conquered Ptolemy,” said Bardylis. “He is dead or senseless. While he is helpless, you are king. That is the law. Tell us what to do.”

Conan gathered his dazed wits and accepted the situation without demur or question. If the Afghulis were in the valley, there was no time to waste. He thought he could hear the distant popping of firearms already.

“How many men are able to bear arms?” he panted.

“Three hundred and fifty,” answered one of the chiefs.

“Then let them take their weapons and follow me,” he said. “The walls of the city are rotten. If we try to defend them, with Hunyadi directing the siege, we will be trapped like rats. We must win with one stroke, if at all.”

Someone brought him a sheathed and belted scimitar and he buckled it about his waist. His head was still swimming and his body numb, but from some obscure reservoir he drew a fund of reserve power, and the prospect of a final showdown with Hunyadi fired his blood. At his directions men lifted Ptolemy and placed him on a couch. The king had not moved since he dropped, and Conan thought it probable that he had a concussion of the brain. That pole-ax smash that had felled him would have split the skull of a lesser man.

Then Conan remembered Abdullah, and looked about for him, but the outsider had vanished.

At the head of the warriors of Attalus, Conan strode down the street and through the ponderous gate. All were armed with long curved swords; some had unwieldy hammers, ancient weapons captured from the hill tribes. He knew the Afghulis would be no better armed, but the bows of Hunyadi and his Turanians would count heavily.

He could see the horde swarming up the valley, still some distance away. They were on foot. Lucky for the Attalans that one of the pass-guards had kept a horse near him. Otherwise the Afghulis would have been at the very walls of the town before the word came of their invasion.

The invaders were drunk with exultation, halting to fire outlying huts and growing stuff, and to shoot cattle, in sheer wanton destructiveness. Behind Conan rose a deep rumble of rage, and looking back at the blazing blue eyes, and tall, tense figures, the Cimmerian knew he was leading no weaklings to battle.

He led them to a long straggling heap of stones which ran waveringly clear across the valley, marking an ancient fortification, long abandoned and crumbling down. It would afford some cover. When they reached it the invaders were still out of bow fire. The Afghulis had ceased their plundering and came on at an increased gait, howling like wolves.

Conan ordered his men to lie down behind the stones, and called to him the warriors with the matchlocks — some thirty in all.

“Pay no heed to the Afghulis,” he instructed them. “Shoot at the men with the bows. Do not shoot at random, but wait until I give the word, then all fire together.”

The ragged horde were spreading out somewhat as they approached, loosing their arrows before they were in range of the grim band waiting silently along the crumbled wall. The Attalans quivered with eagerness, but Conan gave no sign. He saw the tall, supple figure of Hunyadi, and the bulkier shapes of his turbaned Turanians, in the center of the ragged crescent. The men came straight on, apparently secure in the knowledge that the Attalans had no modern weapons, and that Conan had lost his bow. They had seen him climbing down the cliff without it. Conan cursed Abdullah, whose treachery had lost him his weapon.

Before they were in range of retaliation, Hunyadi fired, and the warrior at Conan’s side slumped over, drilled through the head. A mutter of rage and impatience ran along the line, but Conan quieted the warriors, ordering them to lie closer behind the rocks. Hunyadi tried again, and the Turanians fired, but the arrows whined off the stones. The men moved nearer and behind them the Afghulis howled with blood-thirsty impatience, rapidly getting out of hand.

Conan had hoped to lure Hunyadi into reach of their projectiles. But suddenly, with an earth-shaking yell, the Afghulis stormed past the Nemedian in a wave, knives flaming like the sun on water. Hunyadi yelped explosively, unable to see or shoot at his enemies, for the backs of his reckless allies. Despite his curses, they came on with a roar.

Conan, crouching among the stones, glared at the gaunt giants rushing toward him until he could make out the fanatical blaze of their eyes, then he roared: “Fire!”

A thunderous volley ripped out along the wall, ragged, but terrible at that range. A storm of lead blasted the oncoming line, and men went down in windrows. And lost to all caution, the Attalans leaped the wall and hewed into the staggering Afghulis with naked steel. Cursing as Hunyadi had cursed, Conan drew his scimitar and followed them.

No time for orders now; no formation, no strategy; Attalan and Afghuli, they fought as men fought a thousand years ago, without order or plan, massed in a straining, grunting, hacking mob, where naked blades flickered like lightning. Yard-long Zhaibar knives clanged and ground against the curved swords of the Attalans. The rending of flesh and bone beneath the chopping blades was like the sound of butchers’ cleavers. The dying dragged down the living and the warriors stumbled among the mangled corpses. It was a shambles where no quarter was asked and none given, and the feuds and hates of a thousand years glutted in slaughter.

No shots were fired in that deadly crush, but about the edges of the battle circled Hunyadi and the Turanians, shooting with deadly accuracy. Man to man, the stalwart Attalans were a match for the hairy hillmen, and they slightly outnumbered the invaders. But they had thrown away the advantage of their position, and the bows of the Nemedian’s party were dealing havoc in their disordered ranks, though two of them were down, one hit by an arrow in that first and only volley, and another disembowelled by a dying Attalan.

As Conan hewed his way through the straining knots and flailing blades, he met one of the remaining Turanians face to face. The man thrust a bow muzzle in his face, but the hammer fell with a click on an empty shell, and the next instant Conan’s scimitar ripped through his belly and stood out a foot behind his back. As the Cimmerian twisted his blade free, the other shot a weapon, missed, and hurled the empty quiver fruitlessly, and rushed in slashing with a saber at Conan’s head. Conan parried the singing blade, and his scimitar cut the air like a blue beam, splitting the Turanian’s skull to the chin.

Then he saw Hunyadi. The Nemedian was groping in his quiver, and Conan knew he was out of arrows.

“We’ve tried shooting each other from afar, Hunyadi,” challenged Conan, “and we both still live. Come and try cold steel!”

With a wild laugh the Nemedian ripped out his blade in a bright shimmer of steel that caught the morning sun. He was a tall man, Hunyadi, black sheep son of a noble Nemedian house, supple and lithe as a catamount, with dancing, reckless eyes and lips that curved in a smile as cruel as a striking sword.

“I match my life against a little package of papers, Conan!” the Nemedian laughed as the blades met.

On each side the fighting lulled and ceased, as the warriors drew back with heaving chests and dripping swords, to watch their leaders settle the score.

The curved blades sparkled in the sunlight, ground together, leaped apart, licked in and out like living things.

Well for Conan then that his wrist was a solid mass of steel cords, that his eye was quicker and surer than a falcon’s, and his brain and thews bound together with a coordination keen as razor-edged steel. For into his play Hunyadi brought all the skill of a race of swordsmen, all the craft taught by masters of the blade of East and West, and all the savage cunning he had learned in wild battles on the edges of the world.

He was shorter, and had the lesser reach. Yet again and again his blade whispered at Conan’s throat. Once it touched his arm, and a trickle of crimson began. There was no sound except the rasp of feet on the sward, the rapid whisper of the blades, the deep panting of the men. Conan was the harder pressed. That terrible fight with Ptolemy was taking its toll. His legs trembled, his sight kept blurring. As if through a mist he saw the triumphant smile growing on the thin lips of his foe.

And a wild surge of desperation rose in Conan’s soul, nerving him for a last rush. It came with the unexpected fury of a dying wolf, with a flaming fan of steel, a whirlwind of blades — and then Hunyadi was down, clutching at the earth with twitching hands, Conan’s narrow curved blade through him.

The Nemedian rolled his glazing eyes up at his conqueror, and his lips distorted in a ghastly smile. “To the mistress of all true adventurers!” he whispered, choking on his own blood. “To Lady Death!”

He sank back and lay still, his pallid face turned to the sky, blood oozing from his lips.

The Afghulis began slinking furtively away, their morale broken, like a pack of wolves whose leader is down. Suddenly, as if waking from a dream, the Attalans gave tongue and pelted after them. The invaders broke and fled, while the infuriated Attalans followed, stabbing and hacking at their backs, down the valley and out through the pass.

Conan was aware that Bardylis, blood-stained but exultant, was beside him, supporting his trembling frame that seemed on the point of collapse. The Cimmerian wiped the bloody sweat from his eyes, and touched the packet under his girdle. Many men had died for that; but many more would have died had it not been saved, and helpless women and children.

Bardylis muttered apprehensively, and Conan looked up to see a gigantic figure approaching leisurely from the direction of the city, through whose gate the rejoicing women were already streaming. It was Ptolemy, his features grotesquely swollen and blackened from Conan’s iron fists. He strode serenely through the heaps of corpses, and reached the spot where the companions stood.

Bardylis gripped his notched sword, and Ptolemy, seeing the gesture, grinned with his pulped lips. He was holding something behind him.

“I do not come in anger, Conan,” he said calmly. “A man who can fight as you have fought is neither wizard, thief nor murderer. I am no child to hate a man who has bested me in fair fight — and then saved my kingdom while I lay senseless. Will you take my hand?”

Conan grasped it with an honest surge of friendship toward this giant, whose only fault, after all, was his vanity.

“I did not recover my senses in time for the battle,” said Ptolemy. “I only saw the last of it. But if I did not reach the field in time to smite the dogs, I have at least rid the valley of one rat I found hiding in the palace.” He casually tossed something at Conan’s feet. The severed head of Abdullah, the features frozen in a grin of horror, stared up at the Cimmerian.

“Will you live in Attalus and be my brother, as well as the brother of Bardylis?” asked Ptolemy, with a glance down the valley, toward the pass through which the warriors were harrying the howling Afghulis.

“I thank you, king,” said Conan, “but I must go, there is still a long road for me to travel. When I have rested for a few days, I will be gone. A little food to carry with me on my journey is all I ask from the people of Attalus, who are men as brave and valiant as their royal ancestors.”

The Shadow of the Beast

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

The horror had its beginning in the twang of a crossbow in a black hand. A white man dropped with a bolt in his chest and the dark man who had fired the shot turned and fled, after a single hideous threat hurled at the pale-faced girl who stood horror-struck close by.

Within an hour grim-faced men were combing the pine woods with swords in their hands, and on through the night the grisly hunt went on, while the victim of the hunted lay fighting for his life.

"He's quiet now; they say he'll live," his sister said, as she came out of the room where the boy lay. Then she sank down into a chair and gave way to a burst of tears.

Conan sat down beside her and soothed her much as one would a child. He liked her and she had shown that she returned his affection. It was his attraction to her that had drawn him out here to the lumber camps in the shadow of the pine woods, where her brother looked after the interests of a small logging company.

"Give him the details of all this," Conan said. "I haven't been able to get a coherent account of it. You know I arrived after he had been shot."

"There isn't much to tell," she answered listlessly. "This dark man's name is Cagle and he's bad – in every sense of the word. Twice I've seen him peering in his window, and this morning he sprang out from behind a pile of lumber and caught him by the arm. I screamed and Harry rushed up and struck him with a club. Then Cagle shot my brother, and snarling like a wild beast, promised to revenge himself on him, also. Then he dashed away among the trees on the edge of the camp, looking like a great black ape with his broad back and stooping gait."

"What threats did he make against you?" Conan asked, his hands involuntarily clenching.

"He said he'd come back and get him some night when the woods were dark," she answered wearily, and with a fatalism that surprized and dismayed him she added, "He will, too. When a dark man like him sets his mind on a white girl, nothing but death can stop him."

"Then death will stop him," Conan said harshly, rising. "Do you think I'm going to sit here and let that black beast menace you? I'm going to join the posse. Don't you leave this house tonight. By morning Cagle will be past harming any girl, white or black."

As Conan went out of the house he met one of the men who had been searching for the dark man. He had sprained his ankle on a hidden root in the darkness and had returned to the camp on a borrowed horse.

"No, we've found no trace yet," he replied to his question. "We've combed the country right around the camp, and the boys are spreading out towards the swamp. Doesn't look reasonable that he could have got so far away with the short start he had, and us right after him on horse back, but Cagle's more of a besat than he is a man. Looks like one of these gorillas. I imagine he's hidin' in the swamp and if he is, it may take weeks to rout him out. Like Conan said, we've done searched the woods close by – all except the Deserted House, uh course."

"Why not there? And where is this house?"

"Down the old road that isn't used any more, about four miles. There isn't a black man in the country that'd go near that place, to save his life, even. That dark man that killed the foreman a few years ago, they chased him down the old road and when he saw he was going to have to go right past the Deserted House, he turned back and give up to the mob. No, Cagle isn't anywhere near that house, you can bet."

"Why has it such a bad name?" Conan asked curiously.

"Nobody has lived in it for twenty years. Last man that owned it leaped, fell or was thrown out of an upstairs window one night and was killed by the fall. Later a young travelling man stayed there all night on a bet and they found him outside the house next morning, all smashed up like he'd fell a long ways. A backwoodsman who'd passed that way late in the night swore he'd heard a terrible scream, and then seen the travelling man come flying out of a second story window. He didn't wait to see no more. What gave the Deserted House the bad name in the first place was..."

But Conan was in no mood to listen to a long drawn-out ghost story, or whatever the man was about to tell him. Almost every locality in the South has its "haunted" house and the tales attached to each are numberless.

Conan interrupted him to ask where he would be likely to find the part of the posse which had penetrated most deeply into the pine woods, and having gotten instructions, he mounted the horse he had ridden back and rode away, first getting his promise that he would keep watch over the girl, Zebel, until Conan had returned.

"Don't get lost," he shouted after him. "Those woods are a risky business for a stranger. Watch for the light of the posse's torches through the trees."

A brisk canter brought him to the verge of a road which led into the woods in the direction Conan wished to go, and there he halted. Another road, one which was little more than a dimly defined path, led away at right angles. This was the old road which went past the Deserted House. Conan hesitated. He had none of the confidence that the others had shown, that Cagle would shun the place. The more he thought of it, the more he felt it likely that the dark man would take refuge there. From all accounts, he was an unusual man, a complete savage, so bestial, so low in the scale of intelligence that even the superstitions of his race left him untouched. Why then should not his animal craft bid him hide in the last place his pursuers would think of looking, while that same animal-like nature caused him to scorn the fears possessed by the more imaginative of his race?

His decision reached, Conan reined his steed about and started down the old road.

There is no darkness in the world so utterly devoid of light as the blackness of the pine woods. The silent trees rose like basaltic walls about him, shutting out the stars. Except for the occasional eery sigh of the wind through the branches, or the far away, haunting cry of an owl, the silence was as absolute as the darkness. The stillness bore heavily upon him. Conan seemed to sense, in the blackness about him, the spirit of the unconquerable swamplands, the primitive foe of man whose abysmal savagery still defies his vaunted civilization. In such surroundings anything seems possible. Conan did not then wonder at the dark tales of black magic and voo-doo rites attributed to these horrid depths, nor would Conan have been surprized to hear the throb of the tomtom, or to see a fire leap up in the dark, where naked figures danced about a cannibalistic feast.

Conan shrugged his shoulders to rid myself of such thoughts. If voo-doo worshippers secretly held their fearsome rites in these woods, there were none tonight with the vengeful white men combing the country.

As his mount, bred in the pine country and sure-footed as a cat in the darkness, picked his way without his aid, Conan strained his senses to catch any sound such as a man might make. But not one stealthy footfall reached him, not a single rustle of the scanty underbrush. Cagle was armed and desperate. He might be waiting in ambush; might spring on him at any moment, but Conan felt no especial fear. In that veiling darkness, he could see no better than Conan, and Conan would have as good a chance as he in a blind exchange of shots. And if it came to a hand-to-hand conflict, Conan felt that he, with his corded frame of bone and sinew, was a match for even the ape-like dark man.

Surely Conan must be close to the Deserted House by now. Conan had no idea of knowing the exact time, but far away in the east a faint glow began to be apparent through the masking blackness of the pines. The moon was rising. And on that instant, from somewhere in front of him, rattled a sudden volley of shots, then silence fell again like a heavy fog. Conan had halted short and now Conan hesitated. To him it had sounded as if all the reports had come from the same weapon, and there had been no answering shots. What had happened out there in the grim darkness? Did those shots spell Cagle's doom, or did they mean that the dark man had struck again? Or did the sounds have any connection with the man he was hunting? There was but one way to find out and nudging his mount's ribs, Conan started on again at a swifter gait.

A few moments later a large clearing opened and a gaunt dark building bulked against the stars. The Deserted House at last! The moon glimmered evilly through the trees, etching out black shadows and throwing an illusive witch-light over the country. Conan saw, in this vague light, that the house had once been a mansion of the old colonial type. Sitting in his saddle for an instant before he dismounted, a vision of lost glory passed before his mind.

All gone now. Blotted out by the war. The pine trees grew where the fields had flourished, the gallants and the ladies were long dead and forgotten, the mansion crumbled into decay and ruin – and now what grim threat lurked in those dark and dusty rooms where the mice warred with the owls?

Conan swung from his saddle, and as he did, his horse snorted suddenly and reared back violently upon his haunches, tearing the reins from his hand. Conan snatched for them again, but he wheeled and galloped away, vanishing like a goblin's shadow in the gloom. Conan stood struck speechless, listening to the receding thunder of the hoofs, and he will admit that a cold finger traced its way down his spine. It is rather a grisly experience to have your retreat suddenly cut off, in such surroundings as Conan was in.

However, he had not come to run away from danger, so he strode boldly up to the broad veranda, a knife in one hand, a flickering torch in the other. The massive pillars towered above him; the door sagged open upon broken hinges. He swept the broad hallway with a gleam of light but only dust and decay met his eyes. Conan entered warily, extinguishing the flame.

As he stood there, trying to accustom his eyes to the gloom, he realized that he was doing as reckless a thing as a man could do. If Cagle were hiding somewhere in the house, all he had to do would be to wait until Conan reignited the torch and then shoot him full of arrows. But Conan thought again of his threats against the weak and helpless girl he liked, and his determination was steeled. If Cagle was in that house, he was going to die.

Conan strode toward the stairs, instinctively feeling that if there, the fugitive would be somewhere in the second story. He groped his way up and came out on a landing, lit by the moonlight which streamed in at a window. The dust lay thick on the floor as if undisturbed for two decades and he heard the whisper of bats' wings and the scampering of mice. No foot prints in the dust betrayed a man's presence but Conan felt sure that there were other stairways. Cagle might have come into the house through a window.

He went down the hallway, which was a horrible system of black lurking shadows and squares of moonlight--for now the moon had risen high enough to flood in at the windows. There was no sound save the cushioned tread of his own feet in the deep dust on the floor. Room after room Conan passed, but his torch showed only moldered walls, sagging ceilings and broken furniture. At last, close to the end of the corridor, he came to a room whose door was shut. He halted, an intangible feeling working upon him to steel his nerves and send the blood racing through his veins. Somehow, he knew that on the other side of that door lay something mysterious and menacing.

Cautiously Conan reignited the flame. The dust in front of the door was disturbed. An arc of the floor was brushed bare, just in front. The door had been open; had been closed only a short time before. Conan tried the knob warily, wincing at the rattle it made and expecting an arrow to come arching through the door. Silence reigned.

Conan tore the door open and leaped quickly aside.

There was no shot, no sound. Crouching, weapon at the ready, Conan peered about the jamb and strained his eyes into the room. A faint acrid scent met his nostrils – was it in this room that had been fired those shots Conan had heard?

Moonlight streamed over a broken window sill, lending a vague radiance. Conan saw a dark bulky form, that had the semblance of a man, lying close to the center of the floor. Conan crossed the threshold, bent over the figure and turned his light full into the upturned face.

Zebel need never fear Cagle's threats again, for the shape on the floor was Cagle and he was dead.

Close to his outstretched hand lay a crossbow, and on the floor beside it lay a series of bolts that had remained unused. Yet there was no wound upon the dark man – at whom had he fired and what had killed him? A second glance at his distorted features told him – Conan saw that look once before in the eyes of a man struck by a rattlesnake, who died with fear before the reptile's venom could kill him. Cagle's mouth gaped, his dead eyes stared hideously; he had died of fright, but what grisly thing had caused that fright? At the thought cold sweat started out on his brow and the short hairs prickled at the base of his skull. He was suddenly aware of the silence and solitude of the place and the hour. Somewhere in the house a rat squeaked and he started violently.

Conan glanced up, then halted, frozen. Moonlight fell on the opposite wall and suddenly a shadow fell silently across it – he bounded to his feet, whirling toward the outer door as he did so. The doorway stood empty. Conan sprang across the room and went through another door, closing it behind him. Then he halted, shaken. Not a sound broke the stillness. What was it that had stood for an instant in the doorway opening into the hall, throwing its shadow into the room where he had stood? He was still gripped with the nameless fear of superstition. The thought of some desperate man was bad enough, but the glance Conan had had of that shadow had left upon his soul an impression of something strange and unholy – inhuman!

The room in which Conan now was also opened in the hallway. He started to cross to the hall door and then hesitated at the thought of pitting his powers against whatever lurked in the outer darkness. The door sagged open – Conan saw nothing, but to his soul-freezing horror, a hideous shadow fell across the floor and moved toward him!

Etched blackly in the moonlight on the floor, it was as if some frightful shape stood in the doorway, throwing its lengthened and distorted shade across the boards to his feet. Yet he swore that the doorway was empty!

Conan rushed across the room and entered the door that opened into the next room. Still he was adjacent to the hallway. All these upstairs rooms seemed to open into the hall. He stood, shivering, his knife gripped so tightly in his hand that the it shook like a leaf. The pounding of his heart sounded thunderously in the silence. What in Mitra's name was this horror which was hunting him through these dark rooms? What was it that threw a shadow, when its own substance was unseen? Silence lay like a dark mist; the ghostly radiance of the moon patterned the floor. Two rooms away lay the corpse of a man who had seen a thing so unnamably terrible that it had shattered his brain and taken away his life.

And here stood Conan, alone with the unknown monster.

What was that? The creak of ancient hinges! He shrank back against the wall, his blood freezing. The door through which he had just come was slowly opening! A sudden gust of wind shuddered through. The door swung wide, but Conan, nerving myself to meet the sight of some horror framed in the opening, saw nothing!

Moonlight, as in all of the rooms on this side of the hall, streamed through the hall door and lay on the opposite wall. If any invisible thing was coming from that adjoining room, the moonlight was not at its back. Yet a distorted shadow fell across the wall which shone in the moonlight and moved forward.

Now Conan saw it clearly, though the angle at which it was thrown deformed it. A broad, shambling figure, stooped, head thrust forward, long man-like arms dangling – the whole thing was hideously suggestive of the human, yet fearsomely unlike. This he read in the approaching shadow, yet saw no solid form that might throw this shadow.

Then panic seized him and Conan stabbed forth with his blade again and again. Just so Cagle must have done in the last terrible moment which preceded his death. Conan hurled the weapon wildly. Not an instant had halted the unseen thing – now the shadow was close upon him.

His back-flung hands encountered the door – tore at the knob. It held! The door was locked! Now on the wall beside him, the shadow loomed up black and horrific. Two great treelike arms were raised – with a roar Conan hurled his full weight against the door. It gave way with a splintering crash and he fell through into the room beyond.

The rest was nightmare. He scrambled up without a glance behind him and rushed into the hall. At the far end Conan saw, as through a fog, the stair landing and toward it he rushed. The hall was long – it seemed endless. It seemed as though it stretched into Eternity and that he fled for hours down that grisly corridor. And a black shadow kept pace with him, flying along the moonlit wall, vanishing for an instant in black darkness, reappearing an instant later in a square of moonlight, let in by some outer window.

Down the hall it kept by his side, falling upon the wall at his left, telling him that whatever thing threw that shadow, was close at his back. It has long been said that a ghost will fling a shadow in the moonlight, even when it itself is invisible to the human sight. But no man ever lived whose ghost could throw such a silhouette. Such thoughts as these did not enter his mind tangibly as Conan fled; he was in the grip of unreasoning barbaric fear, but piercing through the fogs of his horror, was the knowledge that he was faced by some supernatural thing, which was at once unearthly and bestial.

Now he was almost at the stair; but now the shadow fell in front of him! The thing was at his very back--was reaching hideous unseen arms to clutch him! One swift glance over his shoulder showed him something else: on the dust of the corridor, close upon the footprints he left, other footprints were forming! Huge misshapen footprints, that left the marks of talons! With a terrible roar he swerved to the right, leaping for an open outer window as a drowning man seizes a rope – without conscious thought.

His shoulder struck the side of the window; he felt empty air under his feet – caught one whirling, chaotic glimpse of the moon, sky and the dark pine trees, as the earth rushed up to meet him, then black oblivion crashed about him.

His first sensation of returning consciousness was of soft hands lifting his head and caressing his face. Conan lay still, his eyes closed, trying to orient myself – he could not remember where he was, or what had happened. Then with a rush it all came back to him. His eyes flared open and he struggled wildly to rise.

"Conan, oh Conan, are you hurt?"

Surely he was insane, for it was the voice of Zebel! No! His head was cradled in her lap, her large dark eyes, bright with tears, gazed down into mine.

"Zebel! In Bel's name, what are you doing here?" Conan sat up, drawing her into his arms. His head throbbed nauseatingly; he was sore and bruised. Above us rose the stark grim wall of the Deserted House, and he could see the window from which he had fallen. He must have lain senseless for a long time, for now the moon lay red as blood close to the western horizon, glimmering in a scarlet wallow through the tops of the pines.

"The horse you rode away came back riderless. I couldn't stand to sit and wait – so I slipped out of the house and came here. They told me you'd gone to find the posse, but the horse came back to the old road. There wasn't anyone to send so I slipped away and came myself."

"Zebel!" the sight of her forlorn figure and the thought of her courage took hold of his heart and he kissed her without speaking.

"Conan," her voice came low and frightened, "what happened to you? When I rode up, you lay here unconscious, just like those other two men who fell from those windows – only they were killed."

"And only pure chance saved me, despite my powerful frame and heavy bones," Conan answered. "Once out of a hundred times a fall like that fails to injure a man – Zebel, what happened in that house twenty years ago to throw a curse upon it?"

She shivered. "I don't know. The people who owned it before the war had to sell it afterwards. The tenants let it fall into disrepair, of course. A strange thing happened there just before the death of the last tenant. A huge gorilla escaped from a circus which was passing through the country and took refuge in the house. He fought so terribly when they tried to recapture him that they had to kill him. That was over twenty years ago. Shortly after that, the owner of the house fell from an upstairs window and was killed.

Everyone supposed he committed suicide or was walking in his sleep, but - "

"No!" Conan broke in with a shudder. "He was being hunted through those horrible rooms by a thing so terrible that death itself was an escape. And that travelling man – I know what killed him—and Cagle..."

"Cagle!" she started violently. "Where..."

"Don't worry, child," Conan soothed. "He's past harming you. Don't ask him any more. No, I didn't kill him; his death was more horrible than any I could have dealt. There are worlds and shadows of worlds beyond our ken, and bestial earth-bound spirits lurk in the dark shadows of our world, it may be. Come, let us go."

She had brought two horses with her, and had tethered them a short distance from the house. Conan made her mount and then, despite her protests and pleas, he returned to the house. He went only as far as a first story window and stayed only a few moments. Then Conan also mounted, and together we rode slowly down the old road. The stars were paling and the east was beginning to whiten with the coming morn.

"You have not told me what haunts that house," said Zebel in an awed voice, "but I know it's something frightful; what are we to do?"

For answer Conan turned in his saddle and pointed. We had rounded a bend in the old road and could just glimpse the old house through the trees. As we looked, a red lance of flame leaped up, smoke billowed to the morning sky, and a few minutes later a deep roar came to them, as the whole building began to fall into the insatiate flames Conan had started before they left. The ancients have always maintained that fire is the final destroyer, and Conan knew as he watched, that the ghost of the dead gorilla was lain, and the shadow of the beast forever lifted from the pine lands.

Hawks of Khoraja

(Originally titled Hawks of Outremer)

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

A Man Returns

“Halt!” The bearded man-at-arms swung his pike about, growling like a surly mastiff. It paid to be wary on the road to Khoraja. The stars blinked redly through the thick night and their light was not sufficient for the fellow to make out what sort of man it was who loomed so gigantically before him.

An iron-clad hand shot out suddenly and closed on the soldier’s mailed shoulder in a grasp that numbed his whole arm. From beneath the helmet the guardsman saw the blaze of ferocious blue eyes that seemed lambent, even in the dark.

“Ishtar preserve us!” gasped the frightened man-at-arms, “Conan of Cimmeria! Avaunt! Back to Hell with you, like a good soldier! I swear to you, sir—”

“Swear me no oaths,” growled the Cimmerian. “What is this talk?”

“Are you not an incorporeal spirit?” mouthed the soldier. “Were you not slain by the Moorish corsairs on your homeward voyage?”

“By the accursed gods!” snarled Conan. “Does this hand feel like smoke?”

He sank his mailed fingers into the soldier’s arm and grinned bleakly at the resultant howl.

“Enough of such mummery; tell me who is within that tavern.”

“Only my master, De Vaile, of Poitain.”

“Good enough,” grunted the other. “He is one of the few men I count friends, in the East or elsewhere.”

The big warrior strode to the tavern door and entered, treading lightly as a cat despite his heavy armor. The man-at-arms rubbed his arm and stared after him curiously, noting, in the dim light, that Conan bore a shield with a horrific emblem—a white grinning skull. The guardsman knew him of old—a turbulent character, a savage fighter and the only man among the soldiers who had been esteemed stronger than the king himself. But Conan had taken ship even before the king had departed from the Holy Land. The battle had ended in failure and disgrace; most of the soldiers had followed their kings homeward. What was this grim Cimmerian killer doing on the road to Khoraja?

De Vaile, once of Poitain, now a lord of the fast-fading Khoraja, turned as the great form bulked in the doorway. Conan of Cimmeria was well above six feet, with mighty shoulders and iron muscle. The Poitainian stared in surprised recognition, and sprang to his feet. His fine face shone with sincere pleasure.

“Conan, by Ishtar! Why, man, we heard that you were dead!”

Conan returned the hearty grip, while his thin lips curved slightly in what would have been, in another man, a broad grin of greeting. De Vaile was a tall man, and well knit, but he seemed almost slight beside the huge Cimmerian warrior who combined bulk with a sort of dynamic aggressiveness that was apparent in his every movement.

Conan was clean-shaven and the various scars that showed on his dark, grim face lent his already formidable features a truly sinister aspect. When he took off his plain visorless helmet and thrust back his mail coif, his square-cut, black hair that topped his low broad forehead contrasted strongly with his cold blue eyes. A true son of the most indomitable and savage race that ever trod the bloodstained fields of battle, Conan of Cimmeria looked to be what he was—a ruthless fighter, born to the game of war, to whom the ways of violence and bloodshed were as natural as the ways of peace are to the average man.

Son of a woman who died upon the battlefield and a smith who he had seen cut down, in whose veins, it is said, coursed the blood of Kull the Conqueror, Conan had seldom known an hour of peace or ease in all his thirty years of violent life. He was born in a feud-torn and blood-drenched land, and raised in a heritage of hate and savagery. The ancient culture of Cimmeria had long suffered the repeated onslaughts of the Picts and Hyperboreans. Harried on all sides by cruel foes, the rising civilization of the Cimmerians had been tempered by the fierce necessity of incessant conflict, and the merciless struggle for survival had made them as savage as the heathens who assailed them.

Now, in Conan’s time, war upon red war swept the crimson land, where clan fought clan, and adventurers tore at one another’s throats, or resisted the attacks of the Cimmerians, playing tribe against tribe, while from the east, the still half-pagan Vanir ravaged all impartially.

A vague realization of all this flashed through De Vaile’s mind as he stood staring at his friend.

“We heard you were slain in a sea-fight,” he repeated.

Conan shrugged his shoulders. “Many died then, it is true, and I was struck senseless by a stone from a ballista. Doubtless that is how the rumor started. But you see me, as much alive as ever.”

“Sit down, old friend.” De Vaile thrust forward one of the rude benches which formed part of the tavern’s furniture. “What is forward in the West?”

Conan took the wine goblet proffered him by a dark-skinned servitor, and drank deeply.

“Little of note,” said he. “In your own Poitain the king counts his gold and squabbles with his nobles. My former employer—if he lives—languishes somewhere in Nemedia, it is thought. In Brythunia the new king oppresses the people and betrays the barons. And in Cimmeria—Crom!” He laughed shortly and without mirth. “What shall I say of Cimmeria but the same old tale? Local and foreigner cut each other’s throat and plot together against the chiefs. One of them has raged like a madman, burning and pillaging, while others lurk in the west to destroy what remains. Yet, I think this land is but little better.”

“Yet there is peace of a sort now,” murmured De Vaile.

“Aye—peace while the Aquilonians gather their powers,” grunted Conan. “Think you he will rest idle while they squabble amongst themselves? The north is of little consequence to Numedides in truth. He but waits an excuse to seize the remnants of Khoraja.”

De Vaile shook his head, his eyes shadowed.

“This is a naked land and a bloody one. Were it not akin to blasphemy I could curse the day I followed my King eastward. Betimes I dream of the orchards of Poitain, the deep cool forests and the dreaming vineyards. Methinks my happiest hours were when a page of twelve years—”

“At twelve,” grunted Conan, “I was running wild with shock-head barbarians on the naked fens—I wore wolf skins, weighed near to fourteen stone, and had killed three men.”

De Vaile looked curiously at his friend. Separated from Conan’s native land by a great stretch of land and mountain, the Poitanian knew but little of the affairs in that far isle. But he knew vaguely that Conan’s life had not been an easy one. Hated by his fellow Cimmerians and despised by the rest of the Nordheimers, he had paid back contempt and ill-treatment with savage hate and ruthless vengeance. It was known that he owned no shadow of allegiance to any, a wandering mercenary for hire who lived by his own barbarous code.

“You wear another sword than that you wore when I saw you last.”

“They break in my hands,” said Conan. “Three Turanian sabers went into the forging of the sword I wielded at Joppa—yet it shattered like glass in that sea-fight. I took this from the body of a Nordheim sea-king who led a raid into Munster. It was forged in Asgard—see the pagan runes on the steel?”

He drew the sword and the great blade shimmered bluely, like a thing alive in the candle light. The servants crossed themselves and De Vaile shook his head.

“You should not have drawn it here—they say blood follows such a sword.”

“Bloodshed follows my trail anyway,” growled Conan. “This blade has already drunk its fair share. Many of my comrades has it slain”

“And you wear such a sword?” exclaimed De Vaile in horror. “No good will come of that evil blade, Conan!”

“Why not?” asked the big warrior impatiently. “It’s a good blade—I wiped out the stain of my comrade’s blood when I slew their slayer. By Crom, but that sea-king was a grand sight in his coat of mail with silvered scales. His silvered helmet was strong too—ax, helmet and skull shattered together.”

“How came you here in the first place?” asked De Vaile curiously. “Were you stirred with a desire to cleanse your soul by smiting our foes?”

“Cimmeria was too dull for me,” answered the Cimmerian candidly. “One of the clan chiefs wished to make peace with another and I feared he would buy favor by delivering me into the hands of the man's warriors. As there was feud between myself and most of the Cimmerian clans, there was nowhere for me to go. I was about to seek my fortune in Vanaheim when I ran into some Vanir heading south and I chose to accompany them.”

“But you gained favor with the king—tell me the tale.”

“Soon told. It was on the plains of Azotus when we came to grips with the Turanians. Aye, you were there! I was fighting alone in the thick of the fray and helmets and turbans were cracking like eggs all around when I noted a strong soldier in the forefront of our battle. He cut deeper and deeper into the close-ranked lines of the heathen and his heavy mace scattered brains like water. But so dented was his shield and so stained with blood his armor, I could not tell who he might be.

“But suddenly his horse went down and in an instant he was hemmed in on all sides by the howling fiends who bore him down by sheer weight of numbers. So hacking a way to his side I dismounted—”

“Dismounted?” exclaimed De Vaile in amazement.

Conan’s head jerked up in irritation at the interruption. “Why not?” he snapped. “I am no Poitainian woman to fear wading in the muck—anyway, I fight better on foot. Well, I cleared a space with a sweep or so of my sword, and the fallen soldier, the press being lightened, came up roaring like a bull and swinging his blood-clotted mace with such fury he nearly brained me as well as the Turanians. A charge of Brythunian soldiers swept the heathen away and when he lifted his visor I saw I had succoured the king of Brythunia.

“‘Who are you and who is your master?’ said he.

“‘I am Conan of Cimmeria and I have no master,’ said I. ‘I followed a group of vanir into the south and since they fell, I seek my fortune alone.’

“‘What think ye of me as a master?’ asked he, while the battle raged half a bow-shot about us.

“‘You fight reasonably well for a man with Brythunian blood in his veins,’ I answered, ‘but I own allegiance to no Brythunian king.’

“He swore like a trooper. ‘By the bones of the saints,’ said he, ‘that had cost another man his head. You saved my life, but for this insolence, no prince shall soldier you!’

“‘Keep your knighthoods and be damned,’ said I. ‘I am a chief in Cimmeria—but we waste words; yonder are heads to be smashed.’

“Later he bade me to his royal presence and waxed merry with me; a rare drinker he is, though a fool withal. But I distrust kings—I attached myself to the train of a brave and gallant young soldier of Poitain—De Gissclin, full of insane ideals of chivalry, but a noble youth.

“When peace was made between the hosts, I heard hints of a renewal of strife between the clans of the north, and the chieftan who thought ill of me having been slain, and I being in favor with the king anyway, I took leave and betook myself back to Cimmeria. Well—we swept the land with torch and sword and hanged a chief to his own barbican. Then, the clans having no particular need of my sword at the moment, I bethought myself once more of De Gissclin, to whom I owed my life and which debt I have not yet had opportunity to pay. How, De Vaile, dwells he still in his castle of Ali-El-Yar?”

De Vaile’s face went suddenly white, and he leaned back as if shrinking from something. Conan’s head jerked up and his dark face grew more forbidding and fraught with somber potentialities. He seized the Poitanian’s arm in an unconsciously savage grip.

“Speak, man,” he rasped. “What ails you?”

“De Gissclin,” half-whispered De Vaile. “Had you not heard? Ali-El-Yar lies in smoldering ruins and De Gissclin is dead.”

Conan snarled like a mad dog, his terrible eyes blazing with a fearful light. He shook De Vaile in the intensity of his passion.

“Who did the deed? He shall die, were he Emperor of Nemedia!”

“I know not!” De Vaile gasped, his mind half-stunned by the blast of the Cimmerian's primitive fury. “There be foul rumors—De Gissclin loved a girl in a sheik’s harem, it is said. A horde of wild riders from the desert assailed his castle and a rider broke through to ask aid of the baron Von Gonler. But Von Gonler refused—”

“Aye!” snarled Conan, with a savage gesture. “He hated De Gissclin because long ago the youngster had the best of him at sword-play on shipboard before old Frederick’s eyes. And what then?”

“Ali-El-Yar fell with all its people. Their stripped and mutilated bodies lay among the coals, but no sign was found of De Gissclin. Whether he died before or after the attack on the castle is not known, but dead he must be, since no demand for ransom has been made.”

“Thus Yildiz keeps the peace!”

De Vaile, who knew Conan’s unreasoning hatred for the great Turanian king, shook his head. “This was no work of his—there is incessant bickering along the border. It could not be otherwise with foreign barons holding forts in the very heart of Turanian country. There are many private feuds and there are wild desert and mountain tribes who owe no lordship even to Yildiz, and wage their own wars. Many suppose that the sheik Nureddin El Ghor destroyed Ali-El-Yar and put De Gissclin to death.”

Conan caught up his helmet.

“Wait!” exclaimed De Vaile, rising. “What would you do?”

Conan laughed savagely. “What would I do? I have eaten the bread of the De Gissclins. Am I a jackal to sneak home and leave my patron to the kites? Out on it!”

“But wait,” De Vaile urged. “What will your life be worth if you ride on Nureddin’s trail alone? I will return to Khoraja and gather my retainers; we will avenge your friend together.”

“Nureddin is a half-independent chief and I am a masterless wanderer,” rumbled the Cimmerian, “but you are Seneschal of Khoraja. If you ride over the border with your men-at-arms, the swine Yildiz will take advantage to break the truce and sweep the remnants of the kingdoms into the sea. They are but weak shells, as it is, shadows of the glories of before. No—I will wreak my own vengeance. I ride alone.”

He jammed his helmet into place and with a gruff “Farewell!” he turned and strode into the night, roaring for his horse. A trembling servant brought the great black stallion, which reared and snorted with a flash of wicked teeth. Conan seized the reins and savagely jerked down the rearing steed, swinging into the saddle before the pawing front hoofs touched earth.

“Hate and the glutting of vengeance!” he yelled savagely, as the great stallion whirled away, and De Vaile, staring bewilderedly after him, heard the swiftly receding clash of the brazen-shod hoofs. Conan of Cimmeria was riding east.

II

The Cast of An Ax

White dawn surged out of the East to break in rose-red billows on the hills of Khoraja. The rich tints softened the rugged outlines, deepened the blue wastes of the sleeping desert.

The castle of the baron Von Gonler frowned out over a wild and savage waste. Once a stronghold of the Turanians, its metamorphosis into the manor of a Nemedian lord had abated none of the Eastern menace of its appearance. The walls had been strengthened and a barbican built in place of the usual wide gates. Otherwise the keep had not been altered.

Now in the dawn a grim, dark figure rode up to the deep, waterless moat which encircled the stronghold, and smote with iron-clad fist on hollow-ringing shield until the echoes reverberated among the hills. A sleepy man-at-arms thrust his head and his pike over the wall above the barbican and bellowed a challenge.

The lone rider threw back his helmeted head, disclosing a face dark with a passion that an all-night’s ride had not cooled in the least.

“You keep rare watch here,” roared Conan of Cimmeria. “Is it because you’re so hand-in-glove with the easterners that you fear no attack? Where is that ale-guzzling swine you call your liege?”

“The baron is at wine,” the fellow answered sullenly, in broken Brythunian.

“So early?” marveled Conan.

“Nay,” the other gave a surly grin, “he has feasted all night.”

“Wine-bibber! Glutton!” raged Conan. “Tell him I have business with him.”

“And what shall I say your business is, Lord Conan?” asked the carl, impressed.

“Tell him I bring a passport to Hell!” yelled Conan, gnashing his teeth, and the scared soldier vanished like a puppet on a string.

The Cimmerian sat his horse impatiently, shield slung on his shoulders, spear in his stirrup socket, and to his surprise, suddenly the barbican door swung wide and out of it strutted a fantastic figure. Baron Von Gonler was short and fat; broad of shoulder and portly of belly, though still a young man. His long arms and wide shoulders had gained him a reputation as a deadly broadsword man, but just now he looked little of the fighter. Nemedia sent many noble soldiers to the east. Baron Von Gonler was not one of them.

His only arm was a gold-chased dagger in a richly brocaded sheath. He wore no armor, and his costume, flaming with gay silk and heavy with gold, was a bizarre mingling of northern gauds and eastern finery. In one hand, on each finger of which sparkled a great jewel, he held a golden wine goblet. A band of drunken revelers reeled out behind him—minnesingers, dwarfs, dancing girls, wine-companions, vacuous-faced, blinking like owls in the daylight. All the boot-kissers and hangers-on that swarm after a rich and degenerate lord trooped with their master—scum of both races. The luxury of the East had worked quick ruin on Baron Von Gonler.

“Well,” shouted the baron, “who is it wishes to interrupt my drinking?”

“Any but a drunkard would know Conan of Cimmeria,” snarled the horseman, his lip writhing back from his strong teeth in contempt. “We have an account to settle.”

That name and Conan’s tone had been enough to sober any drunken soldier of Khoraja. But Von Gonler was not only drunk; he was a degenerate fool. The baron took a long drink while his drunken crew stared curiously at the savage figure on the other side of the dry moat, whispering to one another.

“Once you were a man, Von Gonler,” said Conan in a tone of concentrated venom; “now you have become a groveling debauchee. Well, that’s your own affair. The matter I have in mind is another—why did you refuse aid to the De Gissclin?”

The Nemedian's puffy, arrogant face took on new hauteur. He pursed his thick lips haughtily, while his bleared eyes blinked over his bulbous nose like an owl. He was an image of pompous stupidity that made Conan grind his teeth.

“What was the Poitanian to me?” the baron retorted brutally. “It was his own fault—out of a thousand girls he might have taken, the young fool tried to steal one a sheik wanted himself. He, the purity of honor! Bah!”

He added a coarse jest and the creatures with him screamed with mirth, leaping and flinging themselves into obscene postures. Conan’s sudden and lion-like roar of fury gave them pause.

“Von Gonler!” thundered the maddened Cimmerian, “I name you liar, traitor and coward—dastard, poltroon and villain! Arm yourself and ride out here on the plain. And haste—I can not waste much time on you—I must kill you quick and ride on lest another vermin escape me.”

The baron laughed cynically, “Why should I fight you? You are not even a soldier. You wear no knightly emblem on your shield.”

“Evasions of a coward,” raged Conan. “I am a chief in Cimmeria and I have cleft the skulls of men whose boots you are not worthy to touch. Will you arm yourself and ride out, or are you become the swinish coward I deem you?”

Von Gonler laughed in scornful anger.

“I need not risk my hide fighting you. I will not fight you, but I will have my men-at-arms fill your hide with crossbow bolts if you tarry longer.”

“Von Gonler,” Conan’s voice was deep and terrible in its brooding menace, “will you fight, or die in cold blood?”

The German burst into a sudden brainless shout of laughter.

“Listen to him!” he roared. “He threatens me—he on the other side of the moat, with the drawbridge lifted—I here in the midst of my henchmen!”

He smote his fat thigh and roared with his fool’s laughter, while the debased men and women who served his pleasures laughed with him and insulted the grim Cimmerian warrior with shrill anathema and indecent gestures. And suddenly Conan, with a bitter curse, rose in his stirrups, snatched his battle-ax from his saddle-bow and hurled it with all his mighty strength.

The men-at-arms on the towers cried out and the dancing girls screamed. Von Gonler had thought himself to be out of reach—but there is no such thing as being out of reach of Cimmerian vengeance. The heavy ax hissed as it clove the air and dashed out Baron Von Gonler’s brains.

The fat, gross body buckled to the earth like a mass of melted tallow, one fat, white hand still gripping the empty wine goblet. The gay silks and cloth-of-gold were dabbled in a deeper red than ever was sold in the bazaar, and the jesters and dancers scattered like birds, screaming at the sight of that blasted head and the crimson ruin that had been a human face.

Conan of Cimmeria made a fierce, triumphant gesture and voiced a deep-chested yell of such ferocious exultation that men blenched to hear. Then wheeling his black steed suddenly, he raced away before the dazed soldiers could get their wits together to send a shower of arrows after him.

He did not gallop far. The great steed was weary from a hard night’s travel. Conan soon swung in behind a jutting crag, and reining his horse up a steep incline, halted and looked back the way he had come. He was out of sight of the keep, but he heard no sounds of pursuit. A wait of some half-hour convinced him that no attempt had been made to follow him. It was dangerous and foolhardy to ride out of a safe castle into these hills. Conan might well have been one of an ambushing force.

At any rate, whatever his enemies’ thoughts were on the subject, it was evident that he need expect no present attempt at retaliation, and he grunted with angry satisfaction. He never shunned a fight, but just now he had other business on hand.

Conan rode eastward.

III

The Road to El Ghor

The way to El Ghor was rough indeed. Conan wound his way between huge jagged boulders, across deep ravines and up treacherous steeps. The sun slowly climbed toward the zenith and the heat waves began to dance and shimmer. The sun beat fiercely on Conan’s helmeted head, and glancing back from the bare rocks, dazzled his narrowed eyes. But the big warrior gave no heed; in his own land he learned to defy sleet and snow and bitter cold, and before Joppa, he had become inured to the blaze of the eastern sun, to the glare of naked sands, to the slashing dust winds.

At noon he halted long enough to allow the black stallion an hour’s rest in the shade of a giant boulder. A tiny spring bubbled there, known to him of old, and it slaked the thirst of the man and the horse. The stallion cropped eagerly at the scrawny fringe of grass about the spring and Conan ate of the dried meats he carried in a small pouch. Here he had watered his steed in the old days, when he rode with De Gissclin. Ali-El-Yar lay to the west; in the night he had swung around it in a wide circle as he rode to the castle of Von Gonler. He had had no wish to gaze on the moldering ruins. The nearest chief of any importance was Nureddin El Ghor, who with his brother-at-arms, Kosru Malik, the Seljuk, held the castle of El Ghor, in the hills to the east.

Conan rode on stolidly through the savage heat. As mid-afternoon neared he rode up out of a deep, wide defile and came onto the higher levels of the hills. Up this defile he had ridden aforetime to raid the wild tribes to the east, and on the small plateaus at the head of the defile stood a gibbet where De Gissclin had once hanged a red-handed Turanian chief as a warning to the surrounding desert tribes.

Now, as Conan rode up on the plateau, he saw the old tree again bore fruit. His keen eyes made out a human form suspended in midair, apparently by the wrists. A tall warrior in the peaked helmet and light mail shirt of a Shemite stood beneath, tentatively prodding at the victim with a spear, making the body sway and spin on the rope. A bay Turanian horse stood near. Conan’s cold eyes narrowed. The man on the rope—his naked body glistened too white in the sun for a man. The Cimmerian touched spurs to the black stallion and swept across the plateau at a headlong run.

At the sudden thunder of hoofs the Shemite started and whirled. Dropping the spear with which he had been tormenting the captive, he mounted swiftly, stringing a short heavy bow as he did so. This done, and his left forearm thrust through the straps of a small round buckler, he trotted out to meet the onset of the Cimmerian.

Conan was approaching at a thundering charge, eyes glaring over the edge of his grim shield. He knew that this man would never meet him as a Nemedian soldier would have met him—breast to breast. The Shemite would avoid his ponderous rushes, and circling him on his nimbler steed, drive in shaft after shaft until one found its mark. But he rushed on as recklessly as if he had never before encountered these tactics.

Now the man bent his bow and the arrow glanced from Conan’s shield. They were barely within javelin cast of each other, but even as the Shemite laid another shaft to string, doom smote him. Conan, without checking his headlong gait, suddenly rose in his stirrups and gripping his long lance in the middle, cast it like a javelin. The unexpectedness of the move caught his foe off guard and he made the mistake of throwing up his shield instead of dodging. The lance-head tore through the light buckler and crashed full on his mail-clad breast. The point bent on his hauberk without piercing the links, but the terrific impact dashed the man from his saddle and as he rose, dazed and groping for his scimitar, the great black stallion was already looming horrific over him, and under those frenzied hoofs he went down, torn and shattered.

Without a second glance at his victim Conan rode under the gibbet and rising in the saddle, stared into the face of he who swung therefrom.

“By Crom,” muttered the big warrior, “‘Blaos— one of De Gissclin’s squires. What devil’s work is this?”

Drawing his sword he cut the rope and the youth slid into his arms. Young Bloaos’s lips were parched and swollen, his eyes dull with suffering. He was naked except for short leathern breeks, and the sun had dealt cruelly with his fair skin. Blood from a slight scalp wound caked his yellow hair, and there were shallow cuts on his limbs—marks left by his tormentor’s spear.

Conan laid the young Poitanian in the shade cast by the motionless stallion and trickled water through the parched lips from his canteen. As soon as he could speak, Blaos croaked: “Now I know in truth that I am dead, for there is but one soldier ever rode in Khoraja who could cast a long lance like a javelin—and Conan of Cimmeria has been dead for many months. But I be dead, where is De Gissclin—and Yulala?”

“Rest and be at ease,” growled Conan. “You live—and so do I.”

He loosed the cords that had cut deep into the flesh of Blaos’s wrists and set himself to gently rub and massage the numb arms. Slowly the delirium faded from the youth’s eyes. Like Conan, he too came of a race that was tough as spring steel; an hour’s rest and plenty of water, and his intense vitality asserted itself.

“How long have you hung from this gibbet?” asked Conan.

“Since dawn.” Blaos’s eyes were grim as he rubbed his lacerated wrists. “Nureddin and Kosru Malik said that since De Gissclin once hanged one of their race here, it was fitting that one of De Gissclin’s men should grace this gibbet.”

“Tell me how De Gissclin died,” growled the Cimmerian warrior. “Men hint at foul tales—”

Blaos’s fine eyes filled with tears. “Ah, Conan, I who loved him, brought about his death. Listen—there is more to this than meets the casual eye. I think that Nureddin and his comrade-at-arms have been stung by the hornet of empire. It is in my mind that they, with various dog-soldiers among the Franks, dream of a mongrel kingdom among these hills, which shall hold allegiance neither to Yildiz nor any king of the West.

“They begin to broaden their holdings by treachery. The nearest friendly hold was that of Ali-El-Yar, of course. De Gissclin was a true soldier, peace be upon his fair soul, and he must be removed. All this I learned later—would to God I had known it beforehand! Among Nureddin’s slaves is a Persian girl named Yulala, and with this innocent tool of their evil wishes, the twain sought to ensnare my lord—to slay at once his body and his good name. And God help me, through me they succeeded where otherwise they had failed.

“For my lord De Gissclin was honorable beyond all men. When in peace, and at Nureddin’s invitation, he visited El Ghor, he paid no heed to Yulala’s blandishments. For according to the commands of her masters, which she dared not disobey, the girl allowed De Gissclin to look on her, unveiled, as if by chance, and she pretended affection for him. But De Gissclin gave her no heed. But I—I fell victim to her charms.”

Conan snorted in disgust. Blaos clutched his arm.

“Conan,” he cried, “bethink you—all men are not iron like you! I swear I loved Yulala from the moment I first set eyes on her—and she loved me! I contrived to see her again—to steal into El Ghor itself—”

“Whence men got the tale that it was De Gissclin who was carrying on an affair with Nureddin’s slave,” snarled Conan.

Blaos hid his face in his hands. “Mine the fault,” he groaned. “Then one night a mute brought a note signed by Yulala—apparently—begging me to come with De Gissclin and his men-at-arms and save her from a frightful fate—our love had been discovered, the note read, and they were about to torture her. I was wild with rage and fear. I went to De Gissclin and told him all, and he, white soul of honor, vowed to aid me. He could not break the truce and bring Yildiz’s wrath upon the cities, but he donned his mail and rode forth alone with me. We would see if there was any way whereby we might steal Yulala away, secretly; if not, my lord would go boldly to Nureddin and ask the girl as a gift, or offer to pay a great ransom for her. I would marry her.

“Well, when we reached the place outside the wall of El Ghor, where I was wont to meet Yulala, we found we were trapped. Nureddin, Kosru Malik and their warriors rose suddenly about us on all sides. Nureddin first spoke to De Gissclin, telling him of the trap he had set and baited, hoping to entice my lord into his power alone. And the Shemite laughed to think that the chance love of a squire had drawn De Gissclin into the trap where the carefully wrought plan had failed. As for the missive—Nureddin wrote that himself, believing, in his craftiness, that De Gissclin would do just as indeed he did.

“Nureddin and the man offered to allow De Gissclin to join them in their plan of empire. They told him plainly that his castle and lands were the price a certain powerful nobleman asked in return for his alliance, and they offered alliance with De Gissclin instead of this noble. De Gissclin merely answered that so long as life remained in him, he would keep faith with his king and his creed, and at the word the Shemites rolled on us like a wave.

“Ah, Conan, Conan, had you but been there with our men-at-arms! De Gissclin bore himself right manfully as was his wont—back to back we fought and I swear to you that we trod a knee-deep carpet of the dead before De Gissclin fell and they dragged me down. ‘Christ and the Cross!’ were his last words, as the Turanian spears and swords pierced him through and through. And his fair body—naked and gashed, and thrown to the kites and the jackals!”

Blaos sobbed convulsively, beating his fists together in his agony. Conan rumbled deep in his chest like a savage bull. Blue lights burned and flickered in his eyes.

“And you?” he asked harshly.

“Me they flung into a dungeon for torture,” answered Blaos, “but that night Yulala came to me. An old servitor who loved her, and who had dwelt in El Ghor before it fell to Nureddin, freed me and led us both through a secret passage that leads from the torture chamber, beyond the wall. We went into the hills on foot and without weapons and wandered there for days, hiding from the horsemen sent forth to hunt us down. Yesterday we were recaptured and brought back to El Ghor. An arrow had struck down the old slave who showed us the passageway, unknown to the present masters of the castle, and we refused to tell how we had escaped though Nureddin threatened us with torture. This dawn he brought me forth from the castle and hanged me to this gibbet, leaving that one to guard me. What he has done to Yulala, God alone knows.”

“You knew that Ali-El-Yar had fallen?”

“Aye,” Blaos nodded dully. “Kosru Malik boasted of it. The lands of De Gissclin now fall heir to his enemy, the traitor soldier who will come to Nureddin’s aid when the Shemite strikes for a crown.”

“And who is this traitor?” asked Conan softly.

“The baron Von Gonler, whom I swear to spit like a hare—”

Conan smiled thinly and bleakly. “Swear me no oaths. Von Gonler has been in Hell since dawn. I knew only that he refused to come to De Gissclin’s aid. I could have slain him no deader had I known his whole infamy.”

Blaos’s eyes blazed. “A De Gissclin man to the rescue!” he shouted fiercely. “I thank thee, old war-dog! One traitor is accounted for—what now? Shall Nureddin and the man live while two men wear De Gissclin steel?”

“Not if steel cuts and blood runs red,” snarled Conan. “Tell me of this secret way—nay, waste no time in words—show me this secret way. If you escaped thereby, why should we not enter the same way? Here—take the arms from that carrion while I catch his steed which I see browses on the moss among the rocks. Night is not far away; mayhap we can gain through to the interior of the castle—there—”

His big hands clenched into iron sledges and his terrible eyes blazed; in his whole bearing there was apparent a plain tale of fire and carnage, of spears piercing bosoms and swords splitting skulls.

IV

The Faith of Conan

When Conan of Cimmeria took up the trail to El Ghor again, one would have thought at a glance that a man rode with him. Blaos de Blois rode the bay Turanian steed and wore the peaked Turanian helmet. He was girt with the curved scimitar and carried the bow and quiver of arrows, but he did not wear the mail shirt; the hammering hoofs of the plunging stallion had battered and brayed it out of all usefulness.

The companions took a circuitous route into the hills to avoid outposts, and it was dusk before they looked down on the towers of El Ghor which stood, grim and sullen, girt on three sides by scowling hills. Westward a broad road wound down the steeps on which the castle stood. On all other sides ravine-cut slopes straggled to the beetling walls. They had made such a wide circle that they now stood in the hills almost directly east of the keep, and Conan, gazing westward over the turrets, spoke suddenly to his friend.

“Look—a cloud of dust far out on the plain—”

Blaos shook his head: “Your eyes are far keener than mine. The hills are so clouded with the blue shadows of twilight I can scarcely make out the blurred expanse that is the plain beyond, much less discern any movement upon it.”

“My life has often depended on my eyesight,” growled the Cimmerian. “Look closely—see that tongue of plainsland that cleaves far into the hills like a broad valley, to the north? A band of horsemen, riding hard, are just entering the defiles, if I may judge by the cloud of dust they raise. Doubtless a band of raiders returning to El Ghor. Well—they are in the hills now where going is rough and it will be hours before they get to the castle. Let us to our task—stars are blinking in the east.”

They tied their horses in a place hidden from sight of any watcher below down among the gullies. In the last dim light of dusk they saw the turbans of the sentries on the towers, but gliding among boulders and defiles, they kept well concealed. At last Blaos turned into a deep ravine.

“This leads into the subterranean corridor,” said he. “Ishtar grant it has not been discovered by Nureddin. He had his warriors searching for something of the sort, suspecting its existence when we refused to tell how we had escaped.”

They passed along the ravine, which grew narrower and deeper, for some distance, feeling their way; then Blaos halted with a groan. Conan, groping forward, felt iron bars, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, made out an opening like the mouth of a cave. Solid iron sills had been firmly bolted into the solid rock, and into these sills were set heavy bars, too close together to allow the most slender human to slip through.

“They have found the tunnel and closed it,” groaned Blaos. “Conan, what are we to do?”

Conan came closer and laid hands tentatively on the bars. Night had fallen and it was so dark in the ravine even his catlike eyes could hardly make out objects close at hand. The big Cimmerian took a deep breath, and gripping a bar in each mighty hand, braced his iron legs and slowly exerted all his incredible strength. Blaos, watching in amazement, sensed rather than saw the great muscles roll and swell under the pliant mail, the veins swell in the giant’s forehead and sweat burst out. The bars groaned and creaked, and even as Blaos remembered that this man was stronger than King Richard himself, the breath burst from Conan’s lips in an explosive grunt and simultaneously the bars gave way like reeds in his iron hands. One came away, literally torn from its sockets, and the others bent deeply. Conan gasped and shook the sweat out of his eyes, tossing the bar aside.

“By the saints,” muttered Blaos, “are you man or devil, Conan of Cimmeria? That is a feat I deemed even beyond your power.”

“Enough words,” grunted the Poitanian. “Let us make haste, if we can squeeze through. It’s likely that we’ll find a guard in this tunnel, but it’s a chance we must take. Draw your steel and follow me.”

It was as dark as the maw of Hades in the tunnel. They groped their way forward, expecting every minute to blunder into a trap, and Blaos, stealing close at the heels of his friend, cursed the pounding of his own heart and wondered at the ability of the giant to move stealthily and with no rattling of arms.

To the comrades it seemed that they groped forward in the darkness for an eternity, and just as Blaos leaned forward to whisper that he believed they were inside the castle’s outer walls, a faint glow was observed ahead. Stealing warily forward they came to a sharp turn in the corridor around which shone the light. Peering cautiously about the corner they saw that the light emanated from a flickering torch thrust into a niche in the wall, and beside this stood a tall man, yawning as he leaned on his spear. Two other Shemites lay sleeping on their cloaks nearby. Evidently Nureddin did not lay too much trust in the bars with which he had blocked the entrance.

“The guard,” whispered Blaos, and Conan nodded, stepping back and drawing his companion with him. The Cimmerian's wary eyes had made out a flight of stone steps beyond the warriors, with a heavy door at the top.

“These seem to be all the weapon-men in the tunnel,” muttered Conan. “Loose a shaft at the waking warrior—and do not miss.”

Blaos fitted notch to string, and leaning close to the angle of the turn, aimed at the man’s throat, just above the hauberk. He silently cursed the flickering, illusive light. Suddenly the drowsy warrior’s head jerked up and he glared in their direction, suspicion flaring his eyes. Simultaneously came the twang of the loosed string and the man staggered and went down, gurgling horribly and clawing at the shaft that transfixed his bull neck.

The other two, awakened by their comrade’s death throes and the sudden swift drum of feet on the ground, started up—and were cut down as they rubbed at sleep-filled eyes and groped for weapons.

“That was well done,” growled Conan, shaking the red drops from his steel. “There was no sound that should have carried through yonder door. Still, if it be bolted from within, our work is useless and we undone.”

But it was not bolted, as the presence of the warriors in the tunnel suggested. As Conan gently opened the heavy iron door, a sudden pain-fraught whimper from the other side electrified them.

“Yulala!” gasped Blaos, whitening. “‘Tis the torture chamber, and that is her voice! In Ishtar’s name, Conan—in!”

And the big Cimmerian recklessly flung the door wide and leaped through like a charging tiger, with Blaos at his heels. They halted short. It was the torture chamber, right enough, and on the floor and the walls stood or hung all the hellish appliances that the mind of man has invented for the torment of his brother. Three people were in the dungeon and two of these were bestial-faced men in leathern breeches, who looked up, startled, as the Franks entered. The third was a girl who lay bound to a sort of bench, naked as the day she was born. Coals glowed in braziers nearby, and one of the mutes was in the very act of reaching for a pair of white-hot pinchers. He crouched now, glaring in amazement, his arm still outstretched.

From the white throat of the captive girl burst a piteous cry.

“Yulala!” Blaos cried out fiercely and leaped forward, a red mist floating before his eyes. One of the beast-faced mutes was before him, lifting a short sword, but the young Frank, without checking his stride, brought down his scimitar in a sweeping arc that drove the curved blade through scalp and skull. Wrenching his weapon free, he dropped to his knees beside the torture bench, a great sob tearing his throat.

“Yulala! Yulala! Oh girl, what have they done to you?”

“Blaos, my beloved!” Her great dark eyes were like stars in the mist. “I knew you would come. They have not tortured me—save for a whipping—they were just about to begin—”

The other mute had glided swiftly toward Conan as a snake glides, knife in hand.

“Crom!” grunted the big warrior. “I won’t sully my steel with such blood—”

His left hand shot out and caught the mute’s wrist and there was a crunch of splintering bones. The knife flew from the mute’s fingers, which spread wide suddenly like an inflated glove. Blood burst from the fingertips and the creature’s mouth gaped in silent agony. And at that instant Conan’s right hand closed on his throat and through the open lips burst a red deluge of blood as the Cimmerian's iron fingers ground flesh and vertebrae to a crimson pulp.

Flinging aside the sagging corpse, Conan turned to Blaos, who had freed the girl and now was nearly crushing her in his arms as he gripped her close in a very passion of relief and joy. A heavy hand on his shoulder brought him back to a realization of their position. Conan had found a cloak and this he wrapped about the naked girl.

“Go, at once,” he said swiftly. “It may not be long before others come to take the place of the guards in the tunnel. Here—you have no armor—take my shield—no, don’t argue. You may need it to protect the girl from arrows if you—if we, are pursued. Haste now—”

“But you, Conan?” Blaos lingered, hesitant.

“I will make fast that outer door,” said the Cimmerian. “I can heap benches against it. Then I will follow you. But don’t wait for me. This is a command, do you understand? Hasten through the tunnel and go to the horses. There, instantly mount the Turanian horse and ride! I will follow by another route—aye, by a road none but I can ride! Ride ye to De Vaile, Seneschal of Khoraja. He is our friend; hasten now.”

Conan stood a moment in the doorway at the head of the stairs and watched Blaos and the girl hurry down the steps, past the place where the silent sentries lay, and vanish about the turn in the tunnel. Then he turned back into the torture chamber and closed the door. He crossed the room, threw the bolt on the outer door and swung it wide. He gazed up a winding flight of stairs. Conan’s face was immobile. He had voluntarily sealed his doom.

The giant Cimmerian was an opportunist. He knew that such chance as had led him into the heart of his foe’s stronghold was not likely to favor him again. Life was uncertain in Khoraja; if he waited for another opportunity to strike at Nureddin and Kosru Malik, that opportunity might not come. This was his best opportunity for the vengeance for which his barbaric soul lusted.

That he would lose his own life in the consummating of that vengeance made no difference. Men were born to die in battle, according to his creed, and Conan of Cimmeria believed firmly that Crom would judge him fit if he were to take many lives in dying well. Blaos, having found the girl, had instantly forgotten the original plan of vengeance. Conan had no blame for him; life and love were sweet to the young. But the grim Cimmerian warrior owed a debt to the murdered De Gissclin and was prepared to pay with his own life. Thus Conan kept faith with the dead.

He wished that he could have bade Blaos ride the black stallion, but he knew that the horse would allow none but himself to bestride it. Now it would fall into Shemite hands, he thought with a sigh. He went up the stairs.

V

The Lion of Turan

At the top of the stairs, Conan came into a corridor and along this he strode swiftly but warily, the Norse sword shimmering bluely in his hand. Going at random he turned into another corridor and here came full on a Turanian warrior, who stopped short, agape, seeing a supernatural horror in this grim slayer who strode like a silent phantom of death through the castle. Before the man could regain his wits, the blue sword shore through his neck cords.

Conan stood above his victim for a moment, listening intently. Somewhere ahead of him he heard a low hum of voices, and the attitude of this man, with shield and drawn scimitar, had suggested that he stood guard before some chamber door. An irregular torch faintly illumined the wide corridor, and Conan, groping in the semi-darkness for a door, found instead a wide portal masked by heavy silk curtains. Parting them cautiously he gazed through into a great room thronged with armed men.

Warriors in mail and peaked helmets, and bearing wide-pointed, curved swords, lined the walls, and on silken cushions sat the chieftains—rulers of El Ghor and their satellites. Across the room sat Nureddin El Ghor, tall, lean, with a high-bridged, thin nose and keen dark eyes; his whole aspect distinctly hawk-like. His Semitic features contrasted with the Turanians about him. His lean strong hand continually caressed the ivory hilt of a long, lean saber, and he wore a shirt of mesh-mail. A renegade chief from southern Arabia, this sheik was a man of great ability; his dream of an independent kingdom in these hills was no mad hashish hallucination. Let him win the alliance of a few Seljuk chiefs, of a few Nemedian renegades like Von Gonler, and with the hordes of Shemites, Turanians and Khauranians that would assuredly flock to his banner, Nureddin would be a menace both to Yildiz and those who still clung to the fringes of Khoraja. Among the mailed Turanians Conan saw the sheepskin caps and wolf skins of wild chiefs from beyond the hills—Khauranians and Shemites. Already the man’s fame was spreading, if such unstable warriors as these were rallying to him.

Near the curtain-hung doorway sat Kosru Malik, known to Conan of old, a warrior typical of his race, strongly built, of medium height, with a dark cruel face. Even as he sat in council he wore a peaked helmet and a gilded mail hauberk and held across his knees a jeweled-hilted scimitar. It seemed to Conan that these men argued some matter just before setting out on some raid, as they were all fully armed. But he wasted no time on speculation. He tore the hangings aside with a mailed hand and strode into the room.

Amazement held the warriors frozen for an instant, and in that instant the giant Cimmerian reached Kosru Malik’s side. The man, his dark features paling, sprang to his feet like a steel spring released, raising his scimitar, but even as he did so, Conan braced his feet and smote with all his power. The Asgard sword shivered the curved blade and, rending the gilded mail, severed the man’s shoulder-bone and cleft his breast.

Conan wrenched the heavy blade free from the split breastbone and with one foot on Kosru Malik’s body, faced his foes like a lion at bay. His helmeted head was lowered, his cold blue eyes flaming from under the heavy black brows, and his mighty right hand held ready the stained sword. Nureddin had leaped to his feet and stood trembling in rage and astonishment. This sudden apparition came as near to unmanning him as anything had ever done. His thin, hawk-like features lowered in a wrathful snarl, his beard bristled and with a quick motion he unsheathed his ivory-hilted saber. Then even as he stepped forward and his warriors surged in behind him, a startling interruption occurred.

Conan, a fierce joy surging in him as he braced himself for the charge, saw, on the other side of the great room, a wide door swing open and a host of armed warriors appear, accompanied by sundry of Nureddin’s men, who wore empty scabbards and uneasy faces.

The man and his warriors whirled to face the newcomers. These men, Conan saw, were dusty as if from long riding, and his memory flashed to the horsemen he had seen riding into the hills at dusk. Before them strode a tall, slender man, whose fine face was traced with lines of weariness, but whose aspect was that of a ruler of men. His garb was simple in comparison with the resplendent armor and silken attendants. And Conan swore in amazed recognition.

Yet his surprize was no greater than that of the men of El Ghor.

“What do you in my castle, unannounced?” gasped Nureddin.

A giant in silvered mail raised his hand warningly and spoke sonorously: “The Lion of Turan, Protector of the Faithful, needs no announcement to enter yours or any castle.”

Nureddin stood his ground, though his followers began grovelling madly; there was iron in this renegade.

“My lord,” said he stoutly, “it is true I did not recognize you when you first came into the chamber; but El Ghor is mine, not by virtue of right or aid or grant from any king, but the might of my own arm. Therefore, I make you welcome but do not beg your mercy for my hasty words.”

Yildiz merely smiled in a weary way. Half a century of intrigue and warring rested heavily on his shoulders. His brown eyes, strangely mild for so great a lord, rested on the silent Nemedian giant who still stood with his mail-clad foot on what had been the chief Kosru Malik.

“And what is this?” asked the King.

Nureddin scowled: “An outlaw has stolen into my keep and assassinated my comrade. I beg your leave to dispose of him. I will give you his skull, set in silver—”

A gesture stopped him. Yildiz stepped past his men and confronted the dark, brooding warrior.

“I thought I had recognized those shoulders and that dark face,” said the king with a smile. “So you have turned your face east again, Conan?”

“Enough!” The deep voice of the Cimmerian giant filled the chamber. “You have me in your trap; my life is forfeit. Waste not your time in taunts; send your jackals against me and make an end of it. I swear by Crom, many of them shall bite the dust before I die, and the dead will be more than the living!”

Nureddin’s tall frame shook with passion; he gripped his hilt until the knuckles showed white. “Is this to be borne, my Lord?” he exclaimed fiercely. “Shall this Nazarene dog fling dirt into our faces—”

Yildiz shook his head slowly, smiling as if at some secret jest: “It may be his is no idle boast. In many battles I have seen his blade glitter like a star of death in the mist, and my soldiers fall before his sword like garnered grain.”

The great Kurd turned his head, leisurely surveying the ranks of silent warriors and the bewildered chieftains who avoided his level gaze.

“A notable concourse of chiefs, for these times of truce,” he murmured, half to himself. “Would you ride forth in the night with all these warriors to fight in the desert, or to honor some ghostly sultan, Nureddin? Nay, nay, Nureddin, thou hast tasted the cup of ambition—and thy life is forfeit!”

The unexpectedness of the accusation staggered Nureddin, and while he groped for reply, Yildiz followed it up: “It comes to me that you have plotted against me—aye, that it was your purpose to seduce various Shemite and Nemedian lords from their allegiances, and set up a kingdom of your own. And for that reason you broke the truce and murdered a good soldier, and burned his castle. I have spies, Nureddin.”

The tall man glanced quickly about, as if ready to dispute the question with Yildiz himself. But when he noted the number of his foe’s warriors, and saw his own fierce ruffians shrinking away from him, awed, a smile of bitter contempt crossed his hawk-like features, and sheathing his blade, he folded his arms.

“Very well,” he said simply, with the fatalism taught by the East.

Yildiz nodded in appreciation, but motioned back a chief who stepped forward to bind the man. “Here is one,” said the king, “to whom you owe a greater debt than to me, Nureddin. I have heard Conan of Cimmeria was brother-at-arms to the De Gissclin. You owe many debts of blood, oh Nureddin; pay one, therefore, by facing the lord Conan with the sword.”

The man’s eyes gleamed suddenly. “And if I slay him—shall I go free?”

“Who am I to judge?” asked Yildiz. “It shall be as the gods will it. But if you fight the Cimmerian you will die, Nureddin, even though you slay him; he comes of a breed that slays even in their death-throes. Yet it is better to die by the sword than by the cord, Nureddin.”

The sheik’s answer was to draw his ivory-hilted saber. Blue sparks flickered in Conan’s eyes and he rumbled deeply like a wounded lion. He hated Yildiz as he hated all of Turan, with the savage and relentless hatred of the Cimmerian. He refused to believe that there could be ought but trickery and craftiness in a king’s mind. Now he saw in his suggestion but the scheming of a crafty trickster to match two of his foes against each other, and a feline-like gloating over his victims. Conan grinned without mirth. He asked no more from life than to have his enemy at sword-points. But he felt no gratitude toward Yildiz, only a smoldering hate.

The king and the warriors gave back, leaving the rivals a clear space in the center of the great room. Nureddin came forward swiftly, having donned a plain round steel cap with a mail drop that fell about his shoulders.

“Death to you, Cimmerian!” he yelled, and sprang in with the pantherish leap and headlong recklessness of a Nemedian's attack. Conan had no shield. He parried the hacking saber with upflung blade, and slashed back. Nureddin caught the heavy blade on his round buckler, which he turned slightly slantwise at the instant of impact, so that the stroke glanced off. He returned the blow with a thrust that rasped against Conan’s coif, and leaped a spear’s length backward to avoid the whistling sweep of the Asgard sword.

Again he leaped in, slashing, and Conan caught the saber on his left forearm. Mail links parted beneath the keen edge, and blood spattered, but almost simultaneously the Norse sword crashed under the Arab’s arm, bones cracked and Nureddin was flung his full length to the floor. Warriors gasped as they realized the full power of the Cimmerian’s tigerish strokes.

Nureddin’s rise from the floor was so quick that he almost seemed to rebound from his fall. To the onlookers it seemed that he was not hurt, but the man knew. His mail had held; the sword edge had not gashed his flesh, but the impact of that terrible blow had snapped a rib like a rotten twig, and the realization that he could not long avoid the barbarian’s rushes filled him with a wild beast determination to take his foe with him to Eternity.

Conan was looming over Nureddin, sword high, but the Nemedian nerving himself to a dynamic burst of superhuman quickness, sprang up as a cobra leaps from its coil, and struck with desperate power. Full on Conan’s bent head the whistling saber clashed, and the Cimmerian staggered as the keen edge bit through steel cap and coif links into his scalp. Blood jetted down his face, but he braced his feet and struck back with all the power of arm and shoulders behind the sword. Again Nureddin’s buckler blocked the stroke, but this time the man had no time to turn the shield, and the heavy blade struck squarely. Nureddin went to his knees beneath the stroke, bearded face twisted in agony. With tenacious courage he reeled up again, shaking the shattered buckler from his numbed and broken arm, but even as he lifted the saber, the Asgard sword crashed down, cleaving the Shemite helmet and splitting the skull to the teeth.

Conan set a foot on his fallen foe and wrenched free his gory sword. His fierce eyes met the whimsical gaze of Yildiz.

“Well, Yildiz,” said the Cimmerian warrior challengingly, “I have killed your rebel for you.”

“And your enemy,” reminded Yildiz.

“Aye,” Conan grinned bleakly and ferociously. “I thank you—though well I know it was no love of me or mine that prompted you to send the man against me. Well—make an end, king of Turan.”

“Why do you hate me, Conan?” asked the king curiously.

Conan snarled. “Why do I hate any of my foes? You are no more and no less than any other robber chief, to me. Your empire is founded on lies, with courtly words and fine deeds, but you never deceived me, who well knew you sought to win by deceit where you and your son could not gain by force of arms.”

Yildiz shook his head, murmuring to himself. Conan glared at him, tensing himself for a sudden leap that would carry the king with him into the Dark. The Cimmerian was a product of his age and his country; among the warring chiefs of blood-drenched Cimmeria, mercy was unknown and chivalry an outworn and forgotten myth. Kindness to a foe was a mark of weakness; courtesy to an enemy a form of craft, a preparation for treachery; to such teachings had Conan grown up, in a land where a man took every advantage, gave no quarter and fought like a blood-mad devil if he expected to survive.

Now at a gesture from Yildiz, those crowding the door gave back.

“Your way is open, Conan.”

The Cimmerian glared, his eyes narrowing to slits: “What game is this?” he growled. “Shall I turn my back to your blades? Out on it!”

“All swords are in their sheaths,” answered the king. “None shall harm you.”

Conan’s lion-like head swung from side to side as he glared at the Shemites and Turanians alike.

“You honestly mean I am to go free, after leaving your army and slaying your jackals?”

“You were forced into my army,” answered Yildiz. “I find in you no fault for wanting to leave in time. You have repaid blood for blood, and kept your faith to the dead. You are rough and savage, and I would fain have men like you in mine own train once again. There is a fierce loyalty in you to your own code, you are a singular and ambitious man, and for this I honor you.”

Conan sheathed his sword ungraciously. A grudging admiration for this weary-faced king was born in him and it angered him. Dimly he realized at last that this attitude of fairness, justice and kindliness, even to foes, was not a crafty pose of Yildiz’s, not a manner of guile, but a natural nobility of the king’s nature. He saw suddenly embodied in the man, the ideals of chivalry and high honor so much talked of—and so little practiced—by the Nemedian soldiers. Blondel had been right then, and De Gissclin, when they argued with Conan that high-minded chivalry was no mere romantic dream of an outworn age, but had existed, and still existed and lived in the hearts of certain men. But Conan was born and bred in a savage land where men lived the desperate existence of the wolves whose hides covered their nakedness. He suddenly realized his own innate barbarism had prevented him from seeing this. He shrugged his lion’s shoulders.

“I have misjudged you, Yildiz,” he growled. “There can be fairness in you. I hope for your sake you never encounter me upon the battlefield again.”

“I thank you, Lord Conan,” smiled Yildiz. “Your road to the west is clear.”

And the warriors courteously saluted as Conan of Cimmeria strode from the royal presence of the king he was destined to strive against for having let him live.

Swords of the Northern Sea

- Robert E. Howard, Richard L. Tierney & J.R. Karlsson

“Skoal!” The smoke-stained rafters shook as the deep-throated roar went up. Drinking horns clashed and sword hilts beat upon the oaken board. Dirks hacked at the great joints of meat, and under the feet of the revelers gaunt, shaggy wolf-hounds fought over the remnants.

At the head of the board sat Rognor the Red, scourge of the Narrow Seas. The huge Vanir meditatively stroked his crimson beard, while his great, arrogant eyes roved about the hall, taking in the familiar scene. A hundred warriors feasted here, waited on by bold-eyed, yellow-haired women and by trembling slaves. Spoils of the Southland were flung about in careless profusion. Rare tapestries and brocades, bales of silk and spice, tables and benches of fine mahogany, curiously chased weapons and delicate masterpieces of art vied with the spoils of the hunt—horns and heads of forest beasts. Thus the Vanir proclaimed his mastery over man and beast.

The Northern nations were drunken with victory and conquest. Acheron may have fallen long ago; with many races looting the fairest possessions of the ancient world. But even now these peoples found themselves hard put to hold their prizes from the wilder, fiercer forces who swept down on them from the blue mists of the North. East, west and south to the ends of the world ranged the dragon-beaked long ships of the Vanir.

The Nordheimers had already begun to settle in the southern parts, though as yet it was more a rendezvous of pirates than the later colonization. And the lair of Rognor the Red was here, called by the Scots Ladbhan, the Picts Golmara and the Asgaard Valgaard. His word was law, the only law this wild horde recognized; his hand was heavy, his soul ruthless, his range the open world.

The sea-king’s eyes ranged about the board, while he nodded slightly in satisfaction. No pirate that sailed the seas could boast a fiercer assortment of fighting men than he; a mixed horde they were, Nordheimers and Hyperboreans—big, yellow-bearded men with wild, light eyes. Even now as they feasted they were fully armed and girt in mail, though they had laid aside their horned helmets. A ferocious, wayward race they were, with a latent madness burning in their brains, ready to leap into terrible flame at an instant.

Rognor’s gaze turned from them, with their great bare arms heavy with golden armlets, to rest on one who seemed strangely different from the rest. This was a tall, rangily built man, deep-chested and strong, whose square-cut black hair and dark, smooth face contrasted with the yellow manes and beards about him. This man’s eyes were narrow slits and of a cold-steel grey, and they, with a number of scars that marred his face, lent him a peculiarly sinister aspect. He wore no gold ornaments of any kind and his mail was of chain mesh instead of the scale type worn by the men about him.

Rognor frowned abstractedly as he eyed this man, but just as he was about to speak, another man entered the huge hall and approached the head of the board. This newcomer was a tall, splendidly made young Vanir, beardless but wearing a yellow mustache. Rognor greeted him.

“Hail, Hakon! I have not seen you since yesterday.”

“I was hunting wolves in the hills,” answered the young Vanir, glancing curiously at the dark stranger. Rognor followed his gaze.

“That is one Conan of Cimmeria, chief of a band of reavers. His galley was wrecked in the gale last night and he alone won through the breakers to shore. He came to the skalli doors early in the dawn, dripping wet, and argued the carles into bringing him in to me instead of slaying him as they had intended. He offered to prove his right to follow me on the Vanir path, and fought my best swordsmen, one after the other, weary as he was. Rane, Tostig. and Halfgar he played with as they were children and disarmed each without giving scathe or taking a wound himself.”

Hakon turned to the stranger and spoke a courtly greeting, and the Cimmerian answered in kind, with a stately inclination of his head.

“You speak our language well,” said the young Vanir.

“I have many friends among your people,” answered Conan. Hakon’s eyes rested on him strangely for a moment, but the inscrutable eyes of the Cimmerian gave back the gaze, with no hint of what was going on in his mind.

Hakon turned back to the sea-king. Cimmerians were common enough in the north, but their forays rarely carried them as far as here. There was little friendship between the races. When a Cimmerian met a Vanir, generally a ferocious battle ensued. They were rivals of the mountainous northern lands.

“You have come at a good time, Conan,” Rognor was rumbling. “You will see me take a wife tomorrow. By the hammer of Ymir! I have taken many women in my time—from the people of Aquilonia and Stygia, from the Border Kingdoms, from the Brythunians. But never have I married one before. Always I tired of them and gave them to my men for sport. But it is time I thought of sons and so I have found a woman, worthy even of the favors of Rognor the Red. Ho—Osric, Eadwig, bring in the Brythunian wench! You shall judge for yourself, Conan.”

Conan’s eyes roved to where Hakon sat. To the casual watcher the young Vanir seemed disinterested, almost bored. But the Cimmerian’s stare centered on the angle of his firm jaw as he caught the sudden, slight ripple of muscle that betrays controlled tenseness. The Cimmerian’s cold eyes flickered momentarily.

Three women entered the feasting-hall, closely followed by the two carles Rognor had sent for them. Two of the women led the third before Rognor, then fell back, leaving her facing him alone.

“See, Conan,” rumbled the Vanir: “is she not fit to bear the sons of a king?”

Conan’s eyes traveled impersonally up and down the girl who stood panting with anger before him. A fine, robust figure of young womanhood she was, quite evidently not yet twenty years old. Her proud bosom heaved with angry defiance, and her bearing was that of a young queen rather than a captive. She was clad in the rather scanty finery of a Norse woman, but she was quite apparently not of their race. With her blond hair and blazing blue eyes, coupled with her snowy skin, she was evidently a Celt; but Conan knew that she was not one of the softened and Latinized people of southern Britain. Her carriage and manner were as free and barbaric as that of her captors.

“She is the daughter of a chief of the western Brythunians,” said Rognor; “one of a tribe that never bowed the neck to Aquilonia and now, hemmed between the Hyperboreans on one side and the Nemedians of the other, holds both at bay. A fighting race! I took her from a galley, whose chief had in turn taken her captive during an inland raid. The moment I laid eyes on her, I knew she was the girl who should bear my sons. I have held her now for some months, having her taught our ways and language. She was a wildcat when we first caught her! I gave her in charge of old Eadna, a very she-bear of a woman—and by the hammer of Ymir, the old valkyrie nearly met her match! It took a dozen birchings across old Eadna’s knee to tame the spit-fire—”

“Are you done with me, pirate?” flamed the girl suddenly, defiantly, yet with a tearful catch, barely discernible, in her voice. “If so, let me go back to my chamber—for the hag-face of Eadna, ugly as it is, is more pleasant to my sight than your red-bearded swine-face!”

A roar of mirth went up, and Conan grinned thinly.

“It seems that her spirit is not utterly broken,” he commented dryly.

“I would not count her worth a broken twig if it were,” answered the sea-king, unabashed. “A woman without mettle is like a scabbard without a sword. You may return to your chamber, my pretty one, and prepare for your nuptials on the morrow. Mayhap you will look on me with more favor after you have borne me three or four stout sons!”

The girl’s eyes snapped blue fire, but without a word she turned her back squarely on her master and prepared to leave the hall—when a voice suddenly cut through the din:

“Hold!”

Conan’s eyes narrowed as a grotesque and abhorrent figure came shambling and lurching across the hall. It was a creature with the face of a mature man, but it was no taller than a young boy, and its body was strangely deformed with twisted legs, huge malformed feet and one shoulder much higher than the other. Yet the fellow’s breadth and girth were surprising; a stunted, malformed giant he seemed. From a dark, evil face gleamed two great, yellow eyes.

“What is this?” asked the Cimmerian. “I knew you Vanir sailed far, but I never heard that you sailed to the gates of Hell. Yet surely this thing had its birth nowhere else.”

Rognor grinned. “Aye, in Hell I caught him, for in many ways the lands I have been are Hell, where the Corinthians break and twist the bodies of babes that they may grow into such blasphemies as this, to furnish sport for the emperor and his nobles. What now Anzace?”

“Great lord,” wheezed the creature in a shrill, loathly voice, “tomorrow you take this girl, Tarala, to wife—is it not? Aye—oh, aye! But, mighty lord, what if she loves another?”

Tarala had turned back and now bent on the dwarf a wide-eyed stare in which aversion and anger vied with fear.

“Love another?” Rognor drank deep and wiped his beard. “What of it? Few girls love the men they have to marry. What care I for her love?”

“Ah, sneered the dwarf, “but would you care if I told you that one of your own men talked to her last night—aye, and for many nights before that—through the bars of her window?”

Down crashed the drinking-jack. Silence fell over the hall and all eyes turned toward the group at the head of the table. Hakon rose, flushing angrily.

“Rognor—” his hand trembled on his sword—“if you will allow this vile creature to insult your wife-to-be, I at least—”

“He lies!” cried the girl, reddening with shame and rage. “I—”

“Be silent!” roared Rognor. “You, too, Hakon. As for you—” his huge hand shot out and closed like a vise on the front of Anzace’s tunic—“speak, and speak quickly. If you lie—you die!”

The dwarf’s dusky hue paled slightly, but he shot a spiteful glance of reptilian malice toward Hakon. “My lord,” said he, “I have watched for many a night since I first saw the glances this girl exchanged with he who has betrayed you. Last night, lying close among the trees without her window, I heard them plan to flee tonight. You are to be robbed of your fine bride, master.”

Rognor shook the Corinthian as a mastiff shakes a rat. “Dog!” he roared. “Prove this or howl under the blood-eagle!”

“I can prove it,” purred the dwarf. “Last night I had another with me—one whom you know is a speaker of truth. Tostig!”

A tall, cruel-visaged warrior came forward, his manner one of sullen defiance. He was one of those on whom Conan had proved his swordsmanship.

“Tostig,”, grinned the dwarf, “tell our master whether I speak truth—tell him if you lay in the bushes with me last night and heard his most trusted man—who was supposed to be up in the hills hunting—plot with this yellow-haired wench to betray their master and flee tonight.”

“He speaks truth,” said the Nordheimer sullenly.

“By Ymir's bloody beard!” snarled Rognor, flinging the dwarf from him and crashing his fist down on the board. “And who was the traitor?—tell me, that I may break his vile neck with my two hands!”

“Hakon!” screamed the dwarf, a quivering finger stabbing at the young Vanir, his face writhing in a horrid contortion of venomous triumph. “Hakon, your right hand man!”

“Aye, Hakon it was,” growled Tostig.

Rognor’s jaw dropped, and for an instant a tense silence gripped the hall. Then Hakon’s sword was out like a flash of summer lightning and he sprang like a wounded panther at his betrayors. Anzace screeched and turned to run, and Tostig drew back and parried Hakon’s whistling stroke. But the fury of that headlong attack was not to be denied. Hakon’s single terrific blow shivered Tostig’s sword and flung the warrior at Rognor’s feet, brains oozing from his cleft skull. At the same time Tarala, with the desperate fury of a tigress, snatched up a bench and dealt Anzace such a blow as to stretch him stunned and bleeding on the floor.

The whole hall was in an uproar. Warriors roared their bewilderment and indecision as they shouldered each other and snarled out of the corners of their mouths, gripping their weapons and quivering with eagerness for action, but undecided which course to follow. Their two leaders were at variance, and their loyalty wavered. But close about Rognor were a group of hardened veterans who were assailed by no doubts. Their duty was to protect their chief at all times and this they now did, moving in a solid hedge against the enraged Hakon who was making a most sincere effort to detach the head of his former ally from its shoulders. Left alone, the matter might have been in doubt, but Rognor’s vassals had no intention of leaving their chief to fight his own battles. They closed in on Hakon, beat down his guard by the very weight of their numbers and stretched him on the floor, bleeding from a dozen minor cuts, where he was soon bound hand and foot. All up and down the hall the rest of the horde was pressing forward, exclaiming and swearing at each other, and there was some muttering and some black glances cast at Rognor; but the sea-king, sheathing the great sword with which he had been parrying Hakon’s vicious cuts, pounded on the board and shouted ferociously. The insurgents sank back, muttering, quelled by the blast of his terrific personality.

Anzace rose, glassy-eyed and holding his head. A great, bleak woman had wrested the bench away from Tarala and now held the blond girl tucked under her arm like an infant, while Tarala kicked and struggled and cursed. In the whole hall there was but one person who seemed not to share the general frenzy—the Cimmerianic pirate, who had not risen from his seat where he sipped his ale, with a cynical smile.

“You would betray me, eh?” bellowed Rognor, kicking his former lieutenant viciously. “You whom I trusted, whom I raised to high honor—” Words failed the outraged sea-king and he brought his feet into play again, while Tarala shrieked wrathful protests:

“Beast! Thief! Coward! If he were free you would not dare!”

“Be silent!” roared Rognor.

“I will not be silent!” she raged, kicking vainly in the old woman’s grasp. “I love him! Why should I not love him in preference to you? Where you are harsh and cruel, he is kind. He is brave and courteous, and the only man among you that has treated me with consideration in my captivity. I will marry him or no other—”

With a roar Rognor drew back his iron fist, but before he could crash it into that defiant, beautiful face, Conan rose and caught his wrist. Rognor grunted involuntarily; the Cimmerian’s fingers were like steel. For a moment the Nordheimer’s flaming eyes glared into the cold eyes of Conan and neither wavered.

“You cannot marry a dead woman, Rognor,” said Conan coolly. He released the other’s wrist and resumed his seat.

The sea-king growled something in his beard and shouted to his grim vassals: “Take this young dog and chain him in the cell; tomorrow he shall watch me marry the wench, and then she shall watch while with my own hands I cut the blood-eagle in his back.”

Two huge carles stolidly lifted the bound and raging Hakon, and as they started to bear him from the hall, he fell suddenly silent and his gaze rested full on the sardonic face of Conan of Cimmeria. The Cimmerian returned the glance, and suddenly Hakon spat a single word: “Wolf!”

Conan did not start; not by the flicker of an eyelash did he betray any surprise. His inscrutable gaze did not alter as Hakon was borne from the hall:

“What of the wench, master?” asked the woman who held Tarala captive. “Shall I not strip her and birch her?”

“Prepare her for the marrying,” growled Rognor with an impatient gesture. “Take her out of my sight before I lose my temper and break her white neck!”

A torch in a niche of the wall flickered, casting an indistinct light about the small cell, whose floor was of dirt and whose walls and roof were of square-cut logs. Hakon the Vanir, chained in the corner furthest from the door, just beneath the small, heavily-barred window, shifted his position and cursed fervently. It was neither his chains nor his wounds which caused his discomfiture. The wounds were slight and had already begun to heal—and, besides, the Nordheimers were inured to unbelievable physical discomforts. Nor was the thought of death what made him writhe and curse. It was the reflection that Rognor was going to take Tarala for his unwilling bride and that he, Hakon, was unable to prevent it...

He froze as a light, wary step sounded outside. Then he heard a voice say, with an alien accent: “Rognor desires me to talk with the prisoner.”

“How do I know you speak truth?” grumbled the guard.

“Go and ask Rognor; I will stand guard while you go. If he flays your back for disturbing him, don’t blame me.”

“Go in, in the name of Ymir,” snarled the guard. “But do not tarry too long.”

There was a fumbling of bolts and bars; the door swung open, framing a tall, lithe form; then it closed again. Conan of Cimmeria looked down at the prostrate Hakon. Conan was fully armed, and on his head he wore a helmet with a crest ornamented with flowing horse hair. This seemed to make him inhumanly tall and, in the flickering, illusive light which heightened the darkness and sinisterness of his appearance, the Cimmerianic pirate seemed not unlike some sombre demon come to taunt a captive in a shadowy corner of Hell.

“I thought you would come,” said Hakon, rising to a sitting position. “Speak softly, however, lest the guard outside hear us.”

“I came because I wished to know where you learned my language,” said the Cimmerian.

“You lie,” replied Hakon cheerfully. “You came lest I betray you to Rognor. When I spoke the name men have given you, in your own tongue, you knew that I knew who you really were. For that name means ‘Wolf’ in your language, and you are not only Conan of Cimmeria of Erin, but you are Conan the Wolf, a reaver and a killer, and the right-hand man of Wulfhere the Vanir, Rognor’s greatest enemy. What you are doing here I know not, but I do know that the presence of Wulfhere’s closest comrade means no good for Rognor. I have but to say a word to the guard and your fate is as certain as mine.”

Conan looked down at the youth and was silent for a moment.

“I might cut your throat before you could speak,” he said.

“You might,” agreed Hakon, “but you won’t. It is not in you to slay a defenseless man thus.”

Conan grinned bleakly. “True. What would you have of me?”

“My life for yours. Get me free and I keep your secret till Ragnarok.”

Conan seated himself on a small stool and meditated.

“What are your plans?”

“Free me—and let me get my hands on a sword. I’ll steal Tarala and we will seek to gain the hills.. If not, I’ll take Rognor with me to Valhalla.”

“And if you gain the hills?”

“I have men waiting there—fifteen of my closest friends, Hyperboreans, mainly, who have no love for Rognor. On the other side of the island we have hidden a longboat. In it we can win to another island where we can hide from Rognor until we have a band of our own. Masterless men and runaway carles will come to us and it may not be long until I can burn Rognor’s skalli over his head and pay him back for his kicks.”

Conan nodded. In that day of pirates and raiders, outlaws and reavers, such a thing as Hakon suggested was common enough.

“But first you must escape from this cell.”

“That is your part,” rejoined the youth.

“Wait,” said the Cimmerian. “You say you have fifteen friends in the forest—”

“Aye—on pretext of a wolf hunt we went up into the hills yesterday and I left them at a certain spot, while I slipped back and made the rest of my plans with Tarala. I was to spend the day at the skalli, and then, pretending to go for my friends tonight, I was to ride forth, returning stealthily and stealing Tarala. I reckoned not on Anzace, that twisted he-witch, whose foul heart, I swear, I will give to the kites—”

“Enough,” snapped Conan impatiently. “Have you any friends among the carles now in the steading? Methought I noted some displeasure among them at your rough handling.”

“I have a number of friends and half-friends,” answered Hakon, “but they waver—a carle is a stupid animal and apt to follow whoever seems strongest. Let Rognor fall, with his band of chosen henchmen, and the rest would likely as not join my forces.”

“Good enough.” Conan’s eyes glittered as his keen brain began racing with an idea. “Now, listen—I told Rognor truth when I said my galley was dashed on the rocks last night—but I lied when I said only I escaped. Well hidden beyond the southern point of this island, where the sand spits run out into the surf, is Wulfhere with, fifty-odd swordsmen. When we fought through the madness of the breakers last night and found ourselves ashore with no ship and only a part of our band left alive—and on Rognor’s island—we took council and decided that I, whom Rognor was less likely to know, should go boldly up to his skalli and, getting into his favor, look for a chance to outwit him and seize one of his galleys. For it is a ship we want. Now I will bargain with you. If I help you to escape, will you join your forces with mine and Wulfhere’s and aid us to overthrow Rognor? And, having overthrown him, will you give us one of his long ships? That is all we ask. The loot of the skalli and all Rognor’s carles and the rest of his ships shall be all yours. With a good long ship under our feet, Wulfhere and I will soon gain plunder enough—aye, and Vanir for a full crew.”

“It is a bargain,” promised the youth. “Aid me and I aid you; make me lord of this island with your help and you shall have the pick of the long ships.”

“Good enough; now attend me. Is your guard likely to be changed tonight?”

“Scarcely, I think.”

“Think you he could be bribed, Hakon?”

“Not he. He is one of Rognor’s picked band.”

“Well, then we must try some other way. If we can dispose of him, your escape will hardly be discovered before morning. Wait!”

The Cimmerian stepped to the door of the cell and spoke to the guard.

“What sort of a watchman are you, to leave a way of escape for your prisoner?”

“What mean you?” The Vanir’s beard bristled.

“Why, all the bars have been torn from the window.”

“You are mad!” growled the warrior, entering the cell. He raised his head to stare at the window, and even as his chin rose at an angle following his eyes, Conan’s iron fist, backed by every ounce of his mighty body, crashed against the Vanir’s jaw. The fellow dropped like a slaughtered ox, senseless.

The key to Hakon’s chains were at the guard’s girdle. In an instant the young Vanir rose, free of his bonds, and Conan, having gagged the unconscious warrior and chained him in turn, handed it to Hakon who grasped it eagerly. No word was said as the two stole from the cell and into the shadows of the surrounding trees. There Conan halted. He eyed the steading keenly. There was no moon but the starlight was sufficient for the Cimmerian’s purposes.

The skalli, a long rambling structure of logs, faced the bay where Rognor’s galleys rode at anchor. Grouped about the main building in a rough half circle were the store houses, the huts of the carles and the stables. A hundred or so yards separated the nearest of these from the skalli, and the hut wherein Hakon had been pent was the furthest away from the hall. The forest pressed closely on three sides, the tall trees overshadowing many of the store houses. There was no wall or moat about Rognor’s steading. He was sole lord of the island and expected no raid from the land side. At any rate, his steading was not intended as a fortress but as a sort of camp from which he swooped down on his victims.

While Conan was taking in all salient points, his quick ears caught a stealthy footstep. Straining his eyes, he glimpsed the hint of. a movement under the thick trees. Beckoning Hakon, he crept silently forward, dirk in hand. The brooding shadows masked all, but Conan’s wild beast instinct, that comes to men who live by their wits, told him that someone or something was gliding through the darkness close at hand. A twig snapped faintly some little distance away, and then, a moment later, he saw a vague shape detach itself from the blackness of the trees and drift swiftly toward the skalli. Even in the dimness of the starlight the creature seemed abnormal and uncanny.

“Anzace!” hissed Hakon, electrified. “He was hiding in the trees, watching the cell! Stop him, quickly!”

Conan’s grip on his arm stayed him from springing out recklessly in pursuit.

“Silence!” hissed the Cimmerian. “He knows you are free, but he may not know we know it. We have yet time before he reaches Rognor.”

“But Tarala!” exclaimed Hakon fiercely. “I’ll not leave her alone here now. Go if you will—I’ll steal her away now, or die here!”

Conan glanced quickly toward the skalli. Anzace had vanished around the corner. Apparently he was making for the front entrance.

“Lead to the girl’s chamber,” growled Conan. “It’s a desperate chance but Rognor might cut her throat when he learns we’ve fled, before we could return and rescue her.”

Hakon and his companion, emerging from the shadows, ran swiftly across the open starlit space which parted the forest from the skalli. The young Nordheimer led the way to a heavily barred window near the rear end of the long, rambling hall. Crouching there in the shadows of the building, he rapped cautiously on the bars, three times. Almost instantly Tarala’s white face was framed dimly in the aperture.

“Hakon!” came the passionate whisper. “Oh, be careful! Old Eadna is in the room with me. She is asleep, but—”

“Stand back,” whispered Hakon, raising his sword. “I’m going to hew these bars apart—”

“The clash of metal will wake every carle on the island,” grunted Conan. “We have a few minutes leeway while Anzace is telling his tale to Rognor. Let you not throw it away.”

“But how else—?”

“Stand away,” growled the Cimmerian, gripping a bar in each hand and bracing his feet and knees against the wall. Hakon’s eyes widened as he saw Conan arch his back and throw every ounce of his incredible frame into the effort. The young Vanir saw the great muscles writhe and ripple along the Cimmerian’s arms, shoulders and legs; the veins stood out on Conan’s temples, and then, before the astounded eyes of the watchers the bars bent and gave way, literally torn from their sockets. A dull, rending crash resulted, and in the room someone stirred with a startled exclamation.

“Quick, through the window!” snapped Conan fiercely, galvanized back into dynamic action in spite of the terrific strain of his feat.

Tarala flung one limb over the shattered sill—then there sounded a low, fierce exclamation behind her and a quick rush. A pair of thick, clutching hands closed on the girl’s shoulders—and then, twisting about, Tarala struck a heavy blow. The hands went limp and there was the sound of a falling body. In another instant the Brythunian girl was out of the window and in the arms of her lover.

“There!” she gasped breathlessly, half sobbing, throwing aside the heavy wine goblet with which she had knocked her guard senseless. “That pays old Eadna back for some of the spankings she gave me!”

“Haste!” rapped Conan, urging the pair toward the forest. “The whole steading will be roused in a moment—”

Already lights were flaring and Rognor’s bull voice was heard bellowing. In the shadows of the trees Conan halted an instant.

“How long will it take you to reach your men in the hills and return here?”

“Return here?”

“Yes.”

“Why—an hour and a half at the utmost.”

“Good!” snapped the Cimmerian. “Conceal your men on yonder side of the clearing and wait until you hear this signal—” And he cautiously made the sound of a night bird thrice repeated.

“Come to me—alone—when you hear that sound—and take care to avoid Rognor and his men as you come—”

“Why—he’ll most certainly wait until morning before he begins searching the island.”

Conan laughed shortly. “Not if I know him. He’ll be out with all his men combing the woods tonight. But we’ve wasted too much time—see, the steading is a-swarm with armed warriors. Get your Hyperboreans back here as soon as you may. I’m for Wulfhere.”

Conan waited until the girl and her lover had vanished in the shadows, then he turned and ran fleetly and silently as the beast for which he was named. Where the average man would have floundered and blundered through the shadows, caroming into trees and tripping over bushes, Conan sped lightly and easily, guided partly by his eyes, mainly by his unerring instinct. A lifetime in the forests and on the seas of the wild northern and eastern countries had given him the thews, wits and endurance of the fierce beasts that roamed there.

Behind him he heard shouts, clashing of arms and a bloodthirsty voice roaring threats and blasphemies. Evidently Rognor had discovered that both his birds had flown. These sounds grew fainter as he rapidly increased the distance between, and presently the Cimmerian heard the low lapping of waves against the sand bars. As he approached the hiding-place of his allies, he slackened his pace and went more cautiously. His Vanir friends lacked somewhat of his ability to see in the dark, and the Cimmerian had no wish to stop an arrow intended for an enemy.

He halted and sounded the low pitched call of the wolf. Almost instantly came an answer, and he went forward with more assurance. Soon a vague huge figure rose in the shadows in front of him and a rough voice accosted him.

“Conan—by Ymir, we had about decided you failed to trick them—”

“They are slow witted fools,” answered the Cimmerian. “But I know not if my plan shall succeed. We are only some seventy to over three hundred.”

“Seventy—why—?”

“We have some allies now—you know Hakon, Rognor’s mate?”

“Aye.”

“He has turned against his chief and now moves against him with fifteen Hyperboreans—or will shortly. Come, Wulfhere, order out the warriors. We go to throw the dice of chance again. If we lose, we gain an honorable death; if we win, we gain a goodly long ship, and you—vengeance!”

“Vengeance!” murmured Wulfhere softly. His fierce eyes gleamed in the starlight and his huge hand locked like iron about the handle of his battle-axe. A red-bearded giant was the Vanir, as tall as Conan and more heavily built. He lacked something of the Cimmerian’s tigerish musculature but he made up for that in oak-and-iron massiveness. His horned helmet increased the barbaric wildness of his appearance.

“Out of your dens, wolves!” he called into the darkness behind him. “Out! No more skulking for Wulfhere’s killers—we go to feed the ravens. Osric—Halfgar—Edric—Athelgard—Aslaf—out, wolves, the feast is ready!”

As if born from the night and the shadows of the brooding trees, the warriors silently took shape. There were few words spoken and the only sounds were the occasional rattle of a belt chain or the rasp of a swinging scabbard. Single file they trailed out behind their leaders, and Conan, glancing back, saw only a sinuous line of great, vague forms, darker shadows amid the shadows, with a swaying of horns above. To his imaginative Celtic mind it seemed that he led a band of horned demons through the midnight forest.

At the crest of a small rise, Conan halted so suddenly that Wulfhere, close behind, bumped into him. The Cimmerian’s steel fingers closed on the Vanir’s arm, halting his grumbled question. Ahead of them came a sudden murmer and a rattle of weapons, and now lights shone through the trees.

“Lie down!” hissed Conan, and Wulfhere obeyed, growling the order back to the men behind. As one man, they prostrated themselves and lay silently. The noise grew louder swiftly, the tramp of many men. Presently into view came a motley horde of men, waving torches as they scanned all sides of the sullen forest, whose menacing darkness the torches but accentuated. They were following a dim trail which cut across Conan’s line of march. In front of them strode Rognor, his face black with passion, his eyes terrible. He gnawed his beard as he strode, and his great sword trembled in his hand. Close behind him came his picked swordsmen in a compact, immobile-faced clump, and behind them the rest of the carles strung out in a straggling horde.

At the sight of his enemy Wulfhere shivered as with a chill. Under Conan’s restraining hand the great thews of his arm swelled and knotted into ridges of iron.

“A flight of arrows, Conan,” he urged in a passionate whisper, his voice heavy with hate. “Let’s loose a rain of shafts into them and then lash in with the blades—”

“No, not now!” hissed the Cimmerian. “There are nearly three hundred men with Rognor. He is playing into our hands and we must not lose the chance the gods have given us! Lie still and let them pass!”

Not a sound betrayed the presence of the fifty-odd Vanirs as they lay like the shadow of Doom above the slope. The Nordheimers passed at right angles and vanished in the forest beyond without having seen or heard anything of the men whose fierce eyes watched them. Conan nodded grimly. He had been right when he assumed that Rognor would not wait for the dawn before combing the island for his captive and her abductor. Here in this forest, where fifty-odd men could escape the eyes of the searchers, Rognor could scarcely have hoped to find the fugitives.

But the fury that burned in the Nordheimer’s brain would not allow him to keep still while those who defied him were still at liberty. It was not in a Vanir to sit still when fired with rage, even though action were useless. Conan knew these strange, fierce people better than they knew themselves.

Not until the clash of steel had died out in the forest beyond, and the torchlights had become mere fire-flies glimpsed occasionally through the trees, did Conan give the order to advance. Then at double quick time they hastened on, until they saw more lights ahead of them, and presently, crouching beneath the tall trees at the edge of the clearing, looked out on the steading of Rognor the Red. The main skalli and many of the smaller buildings were alight but only a few warriors were seen. Evidently Rognor had taken most of his carles with him on his useless chase.

“What now, Conan?” said Wulfhere.

“Hakon should be here,” answered Conan.

Even as he opened his mouth to give the signal agreed upon, a carle rounded the corner of a stable close by, carrying a torch. The watchers saw him alter his leisurely pace suddenly and glance fixedly in their direction. Some motion in the deep shadows had attracted his attention.

“What cursed luck!” hissed Wulfhere. “He’s coming straight for us. Edric—lose me an arrow—”

“No,” muttered Conan, “never kill, Wulfhere, save when it is necessary. Wait!”

The Cimmerian faded back into the darkness like a phantom. The carle came straight for the forest edge, waving his torch slightly, curious, but evidently not suspicious. Now he was under the trees and his out-thrust fagot shone full on Wulfhere, where the huge Vanir stood in grim silence, motionless as a statue.

“Rognor!” The flickering light was illusive; the carle saw only a red-bearded giant. “Back so soon? Have you caught—?”

The sentence broke off abruptly as he saw the red beards and fierce, unfamiliar faces of the silent men ranged behind Wulfhere; his gaze switched back to the chief and his eyes flared with sudden horror. His lips parted, but at that instant an iron arm hooked about his throat, strangling the threatened yell. Wulfhere knocked the torch from his hand and stamped it out, and in the darkness the carle was disarmed and bound securely with his own harness.

“Speak low and answer my questions,” sounded a sinister whisper at his ear. “How many weapon-men are there left at the steading?”

The carle was brave enough in open battle, but the suddenness of the surprise had unnerved him, and here in the darkness, surrounded by his ruthless hereditary foes, with the demonic Cimmerian muttering at his shoulder, the Nordheimer’s blood turned to ice.

“Thirty men remain,” he answered.

“Where are they?”

“Half of them are in the skalli. The rest are in the huts.”

“Good enough,” grunted the Cimmerian. “Gag him and bring him along with us. Now wait here until I find Hakon.”

He gave the cry of a sleepy bird, thrice repeated, and waited a moment. The answer came drifting back from the woods on the other side of the clearing.

“Stay here,” ordered the Cimmerian, and melted from the sight of Wulfhere and his Vanirs like a shadow.

Cautiously he made his way around the fringe of the forest, keeping well hidden in the trees, and presently a slight rustling noise ahead of him made him aware that a body of men lurked before him. He sounded the signal again, and presently heard Hakon whisper a sibilant warning. Behind the young Vanir the Cimmerian made out the vague forms of his warriors.

“By the gods,” muttered Conan impatiently, “you make enough noise to wake Caesar. Surely the carles had investigated but that they thought you a herd of buffalo—who is this?”

By Hakon’s side was a slim figure, clad in mail and armed with a sword, but strangely out of place among the giant warriors.

“Tarala,” answered Hakon. “She would not stay hidden in the hills—so I found a corselet that she could wear and—”

Conan cursed fervently. “Well—well. Now attend me closely. See you yon hut—the one wherein you were confined? Well, we are going to set fire to it.”

“But, man,” exclaimed Hakon, “the flame will bring Rognor on the run!”

“Exactly; that is what I wish. Now when the fire brings the carles running, you and your Hyperboreans sally from the forest and fall upon them. Cut down as many as you can, but the moment they rally and make head against you, fall back into the stables, which you can easily do. If you work it right, you should do this without losing a man. Then, once inside the stable, bar and bolt the doors and hold it against them. They will not set fire to it, because many fine horses are there, and you with your men can hold it easily against thirty.”

“But what of you and your Vanirs?” protested Hakon. “Are we to bear all the brunt and danger, while—”

Conan’s hand shot out and his steely fingers sank fiercely in Hakon’s shoulder.

“Do you trust me or do you not?” he snarled. “By the blood of the gods, are we to waste the night in argument? Do you not see that so long as Rognor’s men think they have only you to deal with, the surprise will be triply effective when Wulfhere strikes? Worry not—when the time comes my Vanirs will drink blood aplenty.”

“Well enough,” agreed Hakon, convinced by the dynamic impact of the Cimmerian’s will, “but you must have Tarala with you, out of harm’s way for the time—”

“Never!” cried the girl, stamping her small foot. “I shall be at your side, Hakon, as long as we both live. I am the daughter of a Brythunian prince and I can wield a sword as well as any of your men!”

“Well,” Conan grinned thinly, “easy to see who’ll be the real ruler in your family—but come, we have no time to waste. Leave her here with your men for now.”

As they glided through the shadows, Conan repeated his plans in a low voice, and soon they stood at the point where the forest most nearly approached the hut that served as Rognor’s prison. Warily they stole from the trees and swiftly ran to the hut. A large tree stood just without the door and as they passed under it, something bumped heavily against Conan’s face. His quick hand grasped a human foot and, looking up in surprise, he made out a vague figure swaying limply to and fro above him.

“Your jailor!” he grunted. “That was ever Rognor’s way, Hakon—when in anger, hang the first man handy. A poor custom—never kill except when necessary.”

The logs of the hut were dry, with much bark still on them. A few seconds’ work with flint and steel and a thin wisp of flame caught the shredded fibre and curled up the wall.

“Back to your men, now,” muttered Conan, “and wait until the carles are swarming about the huts. Then hack straight through them and gain the stables.”

Hakon nodded and darted away. A few minutes more found Conan back with his own men, who were muttering restlessly as they watched the flames eat their way up the wall of the hut. Suddenly a shout sounded from the skalli. Men came pouring out of the main hall and the huts, some fully armed and wide awake, some gaping and half clad as though just awakened from a sound sleep. Behind them peered the women and slaves. The men snatched buckets of water and ran for the hut and in a moment the scene was one of the usual confusion attendant to a fire. The carles jostled each other, shouted useless advice and made a vain attempt to stem the flame which now leaped roaring up through the roof and curled high in a blaze that was sure to be seen by Rognor wherever he was.

And in the midst of the turmoil there sounded a fierce medley of yells and a small, compact body of men crashed from the forest and smote the astonished carles like a thunderbolt. Hacking and hewing right and left, Hakon and his Hyperboreans cleft their way through the bewildered Nordheimers, leaving a wake of dead and dying behind them.

Wulfhere trembled with eagerness and behind him his Vanirs snarled and tensed like hunting dogs straining at the leash.

“How now, Conan,” cried the Vanir chief, “shall we not strike a blow? My axe is hungry!”

“Be patient, old sea-wolf,” grinned Conan savagely. “Your axe shall drink deep; see, Hakon and his Hyperboreans have gained the stable and shut the doors.”

It was true. The Nordheimers had recovered from their surprise and prepared to turn on their attackers with all the fury that characterized their race, but before they could make any headway, Hakon and his men had disappeared inside the stable whence came the neighing and stamping of frightened horses.

This stable, built to withstand the inroads of hunger-maddened wolves and the ravages of a Baltic winter, was a natural fortress, and against its heavy panels the axes of the carles thundered in vain. The only way into the building was through the windows. The heavy wooden bars that guarded these were soon hacked away, but climbing through them in the teeth of the defenders’ swords was another. After a few disastrous attempts, the survivors drew off and consulted with each other. As Conan had reasoned, burning the stable was out of the question because of the blooded horses within. Nor was a flight of arrows through the windows logical. All was dark inside the stable and a chance flown shaft was more likely to hit a horse than a man. Outside, however, the whole steading was lit like day by the burning hut; the Hyperboreans were not famed as archers, but there were a few bows among Hakon’s men and these did good execution among the men outside.

At last a carle shouted: “Rognor will have seen the fire and be returning—Olaf, run you and meet him; and tell him Hakon and his Hyperboreans are pent in the stable. We will surround the place and keep them there until Rognor gets here. Then we shall see!”

A carle set off at full speed and Conan laughed softly to himself.

“Just what I was hoping for! The gods have been good to us this night, Wulfhere! But back—further into the shadows, lest the flames discover us.”

Then followed a tense time of waiting for all concerned—for the Hyperboreans imprisoned in the stable, for the Nordheimers lying about it, and for the unseen Vanirs lurking just within the forest edge. The fire burnt itself out and the flames died in smoking embers. Away in the east shone the first touch of dawn. A wind blew up from the sea and stirred the forest leaves. And through the woods echoed the tramp of many men, the clash of steel and deep angry shouts. Conan’s nerves hummed like taut lute strings. Now was the crucial moment. If Rognor’s men passed from the forest into the clearing without seeing their hidden foes, all was well. Conan made the Vanirs lie prone and, with heart in his mouth, waited.

Again came the glimmer of torches through the trees, and with a sigh of relief Conan saw that Rognor was approaching the steading from another direction than that he had taken in leaving it. The motley horde broke cover almost opposite the point where Conan and his men lay.

Rognor was roaring like a wild bull and swinging his two-handed sword in great arcs.

“Break down the doors!” he shouted. “Follow me—shatter the walls!”

The whole horde streamed out across the clearing, Rognor and his veterans in the lead.

Wulfhere had leaped to his feet and his Vanirs rose as a man behind him. The chief’s eyes were blazing with battle-lust.

“Wait!” Conan thrust him hack. “Wait until they are pounding at the doors!”

Rognor’s Vanir crashed headlong against the stable. They bunched at the windows, stabbing and hacking at the blades that thrust from within. The clash of steel rose deafeningly, frightened horses screamed and kicked thunderously at their stalls, while the heavy doors shook to the impact of a hundred axes.

“Now!” Conan leaped to his feet, and across the clearing swept a sudden storm of arrows. Men went down in windrows, and the rest turned bewilderedly to face this sudden and unguessed foe. The Vanirs were bowmen as well as swordsmen; they excelled all other nations of the North in this art. Now as they leaped from their hiding place, they loosed their shafts as they ran with unerring aim. But the Nordheimers were not ready to break yet. Seeing their red-maned foes charging them, they supposed, dazedly, that a great host was upon them, but with the reckless valor of their breed they leaped to meet them.

Driving their last flight of shafts point-blank, the Vanirs dropped their bows and leaped into close quarters, yelling like fiends, to slash and hack with swords and axes.

They were far outnumbered, but the surprise told heavily and the unexpected arrows had taken terrific toll. Still Conan, slashing and thrusting with reddened sword, knew that their only chance lay in a quick victory. Let the battle be drawn out and the superior numbers of men must win. Hakon and his Hyperboreans had sallied from the stable and were assailing their former mates from that side. There in the first white light of dawn was enacted a scene of fury.

Rognor, thought Conan as he mechanically dodged an axe and ran the wielder through, must die quickly if the coup he wished for was to be brought about.

And now he saw Rognor and Wulfhere surging toward each other through the waves of battle. A Vanir, thrusting savagely at the Nordheimer, went down with a shattered skull, and then with a thunderous yell of fury the two red-bearded giants crashed together. All the pent up ferocity of years of hatred burst into flame, and the opposing hordes halted their own fight mutually to watch their chieftains battle.

There was little to choose between them in size and strength. Rognor was armed with a great sword that he swung in both hands, while Wulfhere bore a long-shafted axe and a heavy shield. That shield was rent in twain beneath Rognor’s first incredible stroke, and tossing the fragments away, Wulfhere struck back and hewed one of the horns from the Nordheimer’s helmet. Rognor roared and cut terrifically at Wulfhere’s legs, but the huge Vanir, with a quickness astounding in a man of his bulk, bounded high in the air, cleared the whistling blade and in mid-air chopped down at Rognor’s head. The heavy axe struck glancingly on the iron helmet, but even so Rognor went to his knees with a grunt. Then even as the Vanir heaved up his axe for another stroke, Rognor was up and his mighty arms brought down his great sword in an arc that crashed full on Wulfhere’s helmet. The huge blade shivered with a tremendous crash and Wulfhere staggered, his eyes filling with blood. Like a wounded tiger he struck back with all the might of his gigantic frame, and his blind, terrible stroke cleft Rognor’s helmet and shattered the skull beneath. Both hosts cried out at the marvel of that blow as Rognor’s corpse tumbled at Wulfhere’s feet—and the next instant the blinded giant went down before a perfect storm of swords as Rognor’s picked swordsmen rushed to avenge their chief.

With a yell Conan bounded into the press and his sword wove a web of death above the chief who, having grappled with some—of his attackers, now kicked and wrestled with them on the bloody earth. The Vanir surged in to aid their leaders, and about the fallen chieftains eddied a whirlpool of steel. Conan found himself opposed to Rane, one of Rognor’s prize swordsmen, while Hakon battled with his mate, Halfgar. Conan laughed; he had crossed swords with Rane, a lean shaggy wolf of a man, that morning and he knew all he wished to know about him. A quick parry of an overhand stroke, a dazzling feint to draw a wide lunge, and the Cimmerian’s sword was through the Vanir’s heart.

Then he turned to Hakon. The young Vanir was hard pressed; Halfgar, a giant, taller than Wulfhere, towered over him, raining terrific blows upon his shield so swiftly Hakon could make no attempt to launch an offensive of his own. An unusually vicious stroke beat his helmet down over his eyes and for an instant he lost touch of his opponent’s blade. In that instant he would have died, but a slim, girlish figure leaped in front of him and took the blow on her own blade, the force of it dashing her to her knees. Up went the giant’s sword again—but at that second Conan’s point pierced his bull throat just above the mail.

Then the Cimmerian wheeled back, just as a powerful carle raised an axe high above the still prostrate Wulfhere. The point was Conan’s favorite, but that he could use the edge as well he proved by splitting the carle’s skull to the chin. Then, grabbing Wulfhere’s shoulders, he hauled him off the men he was seeking to throttle and dragged him, cursing and bellowing like a bull, out of the press.

A quick glance showed him that Rognor’s veterans had fallen before the axes of the Vanirs, and that the rest of the Nordheimers, seeing their chief fall, had renewed the fight only halfheartedly. Then what he had hoped for occurred. One of the Nordheimers shouted: “The woods are full of Vanir!” And the strange, inexplicable panic that sometimes seizes men gripped the carles. Shouting, they gave back and fled for the skalli in a straggling body. Wulfhere, shaking the blood out of his eyes and bellowing for his axe; would have hurled his men after them, but Conan stopped him. His shouted commands kept the Vanirs from following the fugitives, who were fortified in the skalli and ready to sell their lives as dearly as only cornered men can.

Hakon, prompted by Conan, shouted to them: “Ho, warriors, will ye listen to me?”

“We listen, Hakon,” came back a shout from the barred windows, “but keep back; mayhap we be doomed men, but many shall die with us if you seek to take the skalli.”

“I have no quarrel with you,” answered Hakon. “I look upon you as friends, though you allowed Rognor to bind and imprison me. But that is past; let it be forgotten. Rognor is dead; his picked veterans are dead and ye have no leader. The forest about the steading swarms with Vanirs who but await my signal. But that signal I am loath to give. They will burn the skalli and cut the throats of every man, woman and child among you. Now attend me—if you will accept me as your chieftain, and swear fealty to me, no harm will come to you.”

“What of the Vanir?” came the shouted question. “Who are they that we should trust them?”

“You trust me, do you not? Have I ever broken my word?”

“No,” they admitted, “you have always kept faith.”

“Good enough. I swear to you that the Vanir will not harm you. I have promised them a ship; that promise I must keep if they are to go in peace. But if you follow me on the Vanir path, we can soon get another ship or build one. And one thing more—here stands beside me the girl who is to be my wife—the daughter of a Brythunian prince. She has promised me the aid of her people in all our endeavors. With friends on the Brythunian mainland we can have a source of supplies from whence we can raid the Angles and Saxons to our hearts’ content—with the aid of Tarala’s Brythunians we may carve us out a kingdom in Britain as Cerdic, Hengist and Horsa did. Now, speak—will you take me as your chief?”

A short silence followed in which the Vanir were evidently holding council with each other; then presently their spokesman shouted: “We agree to your wishes, O Hakon!”

Hakon laid down his notched and bloody sword and approached the skalli door emptyhanded. “And will you swear fealty to me on the bull, the fire and the sword?”

The great portals swung open, framing fierce, bearded faces. “We will swear, Hakon; our swords are yours to command.”

“And when they’ve found we’ve tricked them, they’ll turn and cut his throat and ours,” grunted Wulfhere, mopping the blood from his face.

Conan smiled and shook his head. “They’ve sworn, they will keep faith. Are you badly wounded?”

“A trifle,” growled the giant. “A gash in the thigh and a few more on the arms and shoulders. It was the cursed blood that got in my eyes when Rognor’s sword bit through my helmet and into my scalp, as it broke...”

“Your head’s harder than your helmet, Wulfhere,” laughed Conan. “But here, we must be attending to our wounded. Some ten of our men are dead and nearly all of them slashed more or less. Also, some of the Hyperboreans are down. But, by the gods, what a killing we have made this night!”

He indicated the stark and silent rows of arrow-feathered or sword-gashed Nordheimers.

The sun, not yet in the zenith of the clear blue sky, glimmered on the white sails of a long ship as they spread and swelled to catch the wind. On the deck stood a small group of figures.

Conan extended his hand to Hakon. “We have hunted together well this night, young sir. A few hours since you were a captive doomed to die and Wulfhere and I were hunted outlaws. Now you are lord of Ladbhan and a band of hardy Vanir, and Wulfhere and I have a staunch ship under our feet—though forsooth, the crew is rather scant. Still, that can be overcome as soon as the Vanirs hear that Wulfhere and Conan of Cimmeria need men.

“And you—” he turned to the girl who stood beside Hakon, still clad in the mail that hung loosely on her lithe form—“you are in truth a valkyrie—a shield woman. Your sons will be kings.”

“Aye, that they will,” rumbled Wulfhere, enveloping Tarala’s slim hand with his own huge paw. “Were I a marrying man, I might cut Hakon’s throat and carry you off for myself. But now the wind is rising and my very heart quivers to feel the deck rocking under my feet again. Good fortune attend you all.”

Hakon, his bride and the Nordheimers attending them swung down into the boat that waited to carry them ashore. At Wulfhere’s shout, his Vanirs cast off; the oars began to ply and the sails filled. The watchers in the boat and on shore saw the long ship stand off.

“What now, old wolf?” roared Wulfhere, dealing Conan a buffet between the shoulders that would have felled a horse. “Where away?—it is for you to say.”

“To the Isle of Swords, first, for a full crew,” the Cimmerian answered, his eyes alight. “Then—” he drank in deeply the crisp strong tang of the sea-wind—“then, skoal for the Vanir path again and the ends of the world!”

The Temple Of Abomination

- Robert E. Howard, Richard L. Tierney & J.R. Karlsson

“Easy all,” grunted Wulfhere the Vanir. “I see the glimmer of a stone building through the trees... Ymir’s blood, Conan! are you leading us into a trap?”

The tall Cimmerian shook his head, a frown darkening his sinister, scarred face.

“I never heard of a castle in these parts of the Vilayet; the Hyperborean tribes hereabouts don’t build in stone. It may be an old Ahceronian ruin—”

Wulfhere hesitated, glancing back at the compact lines of bearded, horn-helmeted warriors. “Maybe we’d best send out a scout.”

Conan laughed jeeringly. “Alaric led his soldiers through the lands thousands of years ago, yet you still start at the name of Acheron. Fear not; there are no legions in Hyperborea. I think this is a Druidic temple. We have nothing to fear from them—more especially as we are moving against their hereditary enemies.”

“And Cerdic’s brood will howl like wolves when we strike them from the east instead of the south or west,” said the Skull-splitter with a grin. “It was a crafty idea of yours, Conan, to hide our dragon-ship in the north coast and march straight through the eastern country to fall on the Hyperboreans. But it’s mad, too.”

“There’s method in my madness,” responded the Cimmerian. “I know that there are few warriors hereabouts; most of the chiefs are gathering about their leader for a great concerted drive. He’s no more a king than I am.”

“Has he become smooth and polished like the Aquilonians are?”

“Artur? Ha! One of your Vanir might seem a gentlewoman beside him. He’s a shock-headed savage with a love for battle.” Conan grinned ferociously and touched his scars. “By the blood of the gods, he has a hungry sword! It’s little gain we have gotten on his coasts!”

“Would I could cross steel with him,” grunted Wulfhere, thumbing the flaring edge of his great axe. “What of his right hand man?”

“A renegade who has made an art of throat-cutting. He varies reading with plotting and intriguing. Gavaine is a pure-blood like Artur, but he has Aquilonian leanings. You’d laugh to see him aping them—but he fights like a blood-hungry devil. Without these two, Artur would have been no more than a bandit chief. He can neither read nor write.”

“What of that?” rumbled the Vanir. “Neither can I... Look—there’s the temple.”

They had entered the tall grove in whose shadows crouched the broad, squat building that seemed to leer out at them from behind a screening row of columns.

“This can be no temple of the Brythunians nor Hyperboreans,” growled Wulfhere. “I thought the former were mostly of a sickly new sect that worshipped Wiccana.”

“Some of the mongrels are,” said Conan. “The pure Brythunians hold to the old gods, as do we of Cimmeria. By the blood of the gods, we Cimmerians will never turn to Wiccana while one Druid lives!”

“What do these Wiccanans?” asked Wulfhere curiously.

“They eat babies during their ceremonies, it is said.”

“But ’tis also said the Druids burn men in cages of green wood.”

“A lie spread by Numedides and believed by fools!” rasped Conan impatiently. “I laud not the Druids especially, but wisdom of the elements and ages is not denied to them. These Wiccanans teach meekness and the bowing of the neck to the blow.”

“What say you?” The great Vanir was sincerely amazed. “Is it truly their creed to take blows like slaves?”

“Aye—to return good for evil and to forgive their oppressors.”

The giant meditated on this statement for a moment. “That is not a creed, but cowardice,” he decided finally. “These Wiccanans be all madmen. Conan, if you recognize one of that breed, point him out and I will try his faith.” He lifted his axe meaningfully. “For look you,” he said, “that is an insidious and dangerous teaching which may spread like rust on the wheat and undermine the manhood of men if it be not stamped out like a young serpent under heel.”

“Let me but see one of these madmen,” said Conan grimly, “and I will begin the stamping. But let us see to this temple. Wait here—I’m of the same belief as these Brythunians, if I am of a different race. These Druids will bless our raid against the Hyperboreans. Much is mummery, but their friendship at least is desirable.”

The Cimmerian strode between the columns and vanished. The Vanir leaned on his axe; it seemed to him that from within came a faint rattle—like the hoofs of a goat on a marble floor.

“This is an evil place,” muttered Osric Jarl’s-bane. “I thought I saw a strange face peering about the top of the column a moment agone.”

“It was a fungus vine grown and twisted about,” Black Hrothgar contradicted him. “See how the fungus springs up all about the temple—how it twists and writhes like souls in torment—how human-like is its appearance—”

“You are both mad,” broke in Hakon Shorri’s son. “It was a goat you saw—I saw the horns that grew upon its head—”

“Ymir’s blood,” snarled Wulfhere, “be silent—listen!”

Within the temple had sounded the echo of a sharp, incredulous cry; a sudden, demonic rapping as of fantastic hoofs on marble flags; the rasp of a sword from its scabbard, and a heavy blow. Wulfhere gripped his axe and took the first step of a headlong charge for the portals. Then from between the columns, in silent haste, came Conan. Wulfhere’s eyes widened and a slow horror crept over him, for never till this moment had he seen the steel nerves of the lean, Cimmerian shaken—yet now the color was gone from Conan’s face and his eyes stared like those of a man who has looked into dark, nameless gulfs. His blade dripped red.

“What in the name of Ymir—?” growled Wulfhere, peering fearfully into the shadow-haunted shrine.

Conan wiped away beads of cold sweat and moistened his lips.

“By the blood of the gods,” he said, “we have stumbled upon an abomination—or else I am mad! From the inner gloom it came bounding and capering—suddenly—and it almost had me in its grasp before I had sense enough to draw and strike. It leaped and capered like a goat, but ran upright—and in the dim light it was not unlike a man.”

“You are mad,” said Wulfhere uneasily; his mythology did not include satyrs.

“Well,” snapped Conan, “the thing lies upon the flags within; follow me, and I will prove to you whether I am mad.”

He turned and strode through the columns, and Wulfhere followed, axe ready, his Vanirs trailing behind him in close formation and going warily. They passed between the columns, which were plain and without ornamentation of any kind, and entered the temple. Here they found themselves within a broad hall flanked with squat pillars of black stone—and these indeed were carved. A squat figure squatted on the top of each, as upon a pedestal, but in the dim light it was impossible to make out what sort of beings these figures represented, though there was an abhorrent hint of abnormality about each shape.

“Well,” said Wulfhere impatiently, “where is your monster?”

“There he fell,” said Conan, pointing with his sword, “and—by the black gods!” The flags lay bare.

“Moon-mist and madness,” said Wulfhere, shaking his head. “Cimmerian superstition. You see ghosts, Conan!”

“Yes?” snapped the badgered Cimmerian. “Who saw a troll on the beacon and roused the whole camp with shouts and bellowings? Who kept the band under arms all night and kept men feeding the fires till they nearly dropped, to scare away the things of darkness?”

Wulfhere growled uncomfortably and glared at his warriors as if to challenge anyone to laugh.

“Look,” said Conan, bending closer. On the tiling was a wide smear of blood, freshly spilt. Wulfhere took a single glance and then straightened quickly, glaring into the shadows. His men bunched closer, facing outward, beards a-bristle. A tense silence reigned.

“Follow me,” said Conan in a low tone, and they pressed close at his heels as he walked warily down the broad corridor. Apparently no entrance opened between the brooding, evil pillars. Ahead of them the shadows paled and they came forth into a broad circular chamber with a domed ceiling. Around this chamber were more pillars, regularly spaced, and in the light that flowed somehow through the dome the warriors saw the nature of those pillars and the shapes that crowned them. Conan swore between his teeth and Wulfhere spat. The figures were human, and not even the most perverse and degenerate geniuses of decadent Corinthia and later Aquilonia could have conceived such obscenities or breathed into the tortured stone such foul life. Conan scowled. Here and there in the sculpturing the unknown artists had struck a cord of unrealness—a hint of abnormality beyond any human deformity. These touches roused in him a vague uneasiness, a crawling, shuddersome half-fear that lurked white-maned and grisly at the back of his mind...

The thought that he had briefly entertained, that he had seen and slain an hallucination, vanished.

Besides the doorway through which they had entered the chamber, four other portals showed—narrow, arched doorways, apparently without doors. There was no altar visible. Conan strode to the center of the dome and looked up; its shadowy hollow arched above him, sullen and brooding. His gaze sought the floor on which he stood and he noted the pattern—of tiling rather than flags, and laid in a design the lines of which converged to the center of the floor. The focus of that design was a single, broad, octagonal slab on which he was standing...

Then, even as he realized that he was standing on that slab, it fell away silently from under his feet and he felt himself plunging into an abyss beneath.

Only the Cimmerian’s superhuman quickness saved him. Ymirfinn Jarl’s-bane was standing nearest him and, as the Cimmerian dropped, he shot out a long arm and clutched at the Van's sword-belt. The desperate fingers missed, but closed on the scabbard—and, as Ymirfinn instinctively braced his legs, Conan’s fall was checked and he swung suspended, life hanging on the grip of his single hand and the strength of the scabbard loops. In an instant Ymirfinn had seized his wrist, and Wulfhere, leaping forward with a roar of alarm, added the grasp of his huge hand. Between them they heaved the Cimmerian up out of the gaping blackness, Conan aiding them with a twist and a lift of his rangy form that swung his legs up over the brink.

“Ymir’s blood!” ejaculated Wulfhere, more shaken by the experience than was Conan. “It was touch and go then... By Ymir, you still hold your sword!”

“When I drop it, life will no longer be in me,” said Conan. “I mean to carry it into hell with me. But let me look into this gulf that opened beneath me so suddenly.”

“More traps may fall,” said Wulfhere uneasily.

“I see the sides of the well,” said Conan, leaning and peering, “but my gaze is swiftly swallowed in darkness... What a foul stench drifts up from below!”

“Come away,” said Wulfhere hurriedly. “That stench was never born on earth. This well must lead into some Ahceronian Hades—or mayhap the cavern where the serpent drips venom.”

Conan paid no heed. “I see the trap now,” said he. “That slab was balanced on a sort of pivot, and here is the catch that supported it. How it was worked I can’t say, but this catch was released and the slab fell, held on one side by the pivot...”

His voice trailed away. Then he said, suddenly: “Blood—blood on the edge of the pit!”

“The thing you slashed,” grunted Wulfhere. “It has crawled into the gulf.”

“Not unless dead things crawl,” growled Conan. “I killed it, I tell you. It was carried here and thrown in. Listen!”

The warriors bent close; from somewhere far down—an incredible distance, it seemed—there came a sound: a nasty, squashy, wallowing sound, mingled with noises indescribable and unrecognizable.

With one accord the warriors drew away from the well and, exchanging silent glances, gripped their weapons.

“This stone won’t burn,” growled Wulfhere, voicing a common thought. “There’s no loot here and nothing human. Let’s be gone.”

“Wait!” The keen-eared Cimmerian threw up his head like a hunting hound. He frowned, and drew nearer to one of the arched openings.

“A human groan,” he whispered. “Did you not hear it?”

Wulfhere bent his head, cupping palm to ear. “Aye—down that corridor.”

“Follow me,” snapped the Cimmerian. “Stay close together. Wulfhere, grip my belt; Hrothgar, hold Wulfhere’s, and Hakon, Hrothgar’s. There may be more pits. The rest of you dress your shields, and each man keep close touch with the next.”

So in a compact mass they squeezed through the narrow portal and found the corridor much wider than they had thought for. There it was darker, but further down the corridor they saw what appeared to be a patch of light.

They hastened to it and halted. Here indeed it was lighter, so that the unspeakable carven obscenities thronging the wall were cast into plain sight. This light came in from above, where the ceiling had, been pierced with several openings—and, chained to the wall among the foul carvings, hung a naked form. It was a man who sagged on the chains that held him half erect. At first Conan thought him dead—and, staring at the grisly mutilations that had been wrought upon him, decided it was better so. Then the head lifted slightly, and a low, moan sighed through the pulped lips.

“By Ymir,” swore Wulfhere in amazement, “he lives!”

“Water, in God’s name, whispered the man on the wall.

Conan, taking a well-filled flask from Hakon Snorri’s son, held’ it to the creature’s lips. The man drank in great, gasping gulps, then lifted his head with a mighty effort. The Cimmerian looked into deep eyes that were strangely calm.

“God’s benison on you, my lords,” came, the voice, faint and rattling, yet somehow suggesting that it had once been strong and resonant. “Has the long torment ended and am I in Paradise at last?”

Wulfhere and Conan glanced at each other curiously. Paradise! Strange indeed, thought Conan, would such red-handed reivers as we look in the temple of the humble ones!

“Nay, it is not Paradise,” muttered the man deliriously, “for I am still galled by these heavy chains.”

Wulfhere bent and examined the chains that held him. Then with a grunt he raised his axe and, shortening his hold upon the haft, smote a short, powerful blow. The links parted beneath the keen edge and the man slumped forward into Conan’s arms, free of the wall but with the heavy bands still upon wrists and ankles; these, Conan saw, sank deeply into the flesh which the rough and rusty metal envenomed.

“I think you have not long to live,” said Conan. “Tell us how you are named and where your village is, so it may be we might tell your people of your passing.”

“My name is Fabricus, my lord,” said the victim, speaking with difficulty. “My town is any which still holds the Hyperborean at bay.”

“You are a Wiccanan, by your words,” said Conan, and Wulfhere gazed curiously.

“I am but a humble priest of God, noble sir,” whispered the other. “But you must not linger. Leave me here and go quickly lest evil befall you.”

“By the blood of Ymir,” snorted Wulfhere, “I quit not this place until I learn who it is that treats living beings so foully!”

“Evil blacker than the dark side of the moon,” muttered Fabricus. “Before it, the differences of man fade so that you seem to me like a brother of the blood and of the milk, Hyperborean.”

“I am no Hyperborean, friend,” rumbled the Vanir.

“No matter—all men in the rightful form of man are brothers. Such is the word of the Lord—which I had not fully comprehended until I came to this place of abominations!”

“Ymir!” muttered Wulfhere. “Is this no Druidic temple?”

“Nay,” answered the dying man, “not a temple where men, even in heathenness, deify the cleaner forms of Nature. Ah, God—they hem me close! Avaunt, foul demons of the Outer Dark—creeping, creeping—crawling shapes of red chaos and howling madness—slithering, lurking blasphemies that hid like reptiles in the ships of Acheron—ghastly beings spawned in the ooze of the east, transplanted to cleaner lands, rooting themselves deep in good Brythunian soil—oaks older than the Druids, that feed on monstrous things beneath the bloating moon—”

The mutter of delirium faltered and faded, and Conan shook the priest lightly. The dying man roused as a man waking slowly from deep sleep.

“Go, I beg of you,” he whispered. “They have done their worst to me. But you—they will lap with evil spells—they will break your body as they have shattered mine—they will seek to break your souls as they had broken mine but for my everlasting faith in our good Lord God. He will come, the monster, the high priest of infamy, with his legions of the damned—listen!” The dying head lifted. “Even now he comes! Now may God protect us all!”

Conan snarled like a wolf and the great Vanir wheeled about, rumbling defiance like a lion at bay. Aye, something was coming down one of the smaller corridors which opened into that wider one. There was a myriad rattling of hoofs on the tiling—“Close the ranks!” snarled Wulfhere. “Make the shield-wall, wolves, and die with your axes red!”

The Vanir quickly formed into a half-moon of steel, surrounding the dying priest and facing outward, just as a hideous horde burst from the dark opening into the comparative light. In a flood of black madness and red horror their as sailants swept upon them. Most of them were goat-like creatures, that ran upright and had human hands and faces frightfully partaking of both goat and human. But among their ranks were shapes even more fearful. And behind them all, luminous with an evil light in the darkness of the winding corridor from which the horde emerged, Conan saw an unholy countenance, human, yet more and less than human. Then on that solid iron wall the noisome horde broke.

The creatures were unarmed, but they were horned, fanged and taloned. They fought as beasts fight, but with less of the beast’s cunning and skill. And the Vanirs, eyes blazing and beards a-bristle with the battle-lust, swung their axes in mighty strokes of death: Girding horn, slashing talon and gnashing fang found flesh and drew blood in streams, but protected by their helmets, mail and over-lapping shields, the Vanir suffered comparatively little while their whistling axes and stabbing spears took ghastly toll among their unprotected assailants.

“By the blood of Ymir,” cursed Wulfhere, cleaving a goat-thing clear through the body with a single stroke of his red axe, “mayhap ye find it a harder thing to slay armed men than to torture a naked priest, spawn of Helheim!”

Before that rain of hacking steel the hellh-orde broke, but behind them the half-seen man among the shadows drove them back to the onslaught with strange chanting words, unintelligible to the humans who strove against his vassals. So his creatures turned again to the fray with desperate fury, until the dead things lay piled high about the feet of their slayers, and the few survivors broke and fled down the corridor. The Vanirs would have scattered in pursuit but Wulfhere’s bellow halted them. But as the horde broke, Conan bounded across the sprawling corpses and raced down the winding corridor in pursuit of one who fled before him. His quarry turned up another corridor and finally raced out into the domed main chamber, and there he turned at bay—a tall man with inhuman eyes and a strange, dark face, naked but for fantastic ornaments.

With his strange short, curved sword he sought to parry the Cimmerian’s headlong attack—but Conan in his red fury drove his foe before him like a straw before the wind. Whatever else this high priest might be, he was mortal, for he winced and cursed in a weird tongue as Conan’s long lean blade broke through his guard again and again and brought blood from head, chest and arm. Back Conan drove him, inexorably, until he wavered on the very brink of the open pit—and there, as the Cimmerian’s point girded into his breast, he reeled and fell backward with a wild cry...

For a long moment that cry rang up ever more faintly from untold depths—then ceased abruptly. And far below rose sounds as of a grisly feast. Conan smiled fiercely. For the moment, not even the inhuman sounds from the gulf could shake him in his grim fury; he was the Avenger, and he had just sent a tormentor of one of his own kind to the maw of a devouring god of judgement...

He turned and strode back down the hall to join Wulfhere and his men. A few goat-things passed before him in the dim corridors, but fled bleating before his grim advance. Conan paid them no heed, and presently rejoined Wulfhere and the dying priest.

“You have slain the Dark Druid,” whispered Fabricus. “Aye, his blood stains your blade—I see it glowing even through your sheath, though others cannot, and so I know I am free at last to speak. Before the Ahceronians, before the true Druids, before the Cimmerians and the Picts, even, was the Dark Druid—the Teacher of Man. So he styled himself, for he was the last of the Serpent-Men, the last of that race that preceded humanity in dominion over the world. His was the hand that gave to Eve the apple, and set Adam’s foot upon the accursed path of awakening. King Kull of Atlantis slew the last of His brethren with the edge of the sword in desperate conflict, but He alone survived to ape the form of man and hand down the Satanic lore of olden times. I see many things now—things that life hid but which the opening doors of death reveal! Before Man were the Serpent-men, and before them were the Old Ones of the Star-shaped heads, who created mankind and, later, the abominable goat-spawn when they realized Man would not serve their purpose. This temple is the last Outpost of their accursed civilization to remain above ground—and beneath it ravages the last Shoggoth to remain near the surface of this world. The goat-spawn roam the hills only at night, fearful now of man, and the Old Ones and the Shoggoths hide deep beneath the earth till that day when God mayhap shall call them forth to be his scourge, at Armageddon...”

The old man coughed and gasped, and Conan’s skin prickled strangely. Too many of the things Fabricus said seemed to stir strange memories in his Cimmerianic racial soul.

“Rest easy, old man,” he said. “This temple—this Outpost, as you call it, shall not remain standing.”

“Aye,” grunted Wulfhere, strangely moved. “Every stone in this place shall be cast into the pit that lies beneath!”

Conan, too, felt an unaccustomed sadness—why he knew not, for often had he seen death before. “Wiccanan or no, your’s is a brave soul, old man. You shall be avenged...”

“Nay!” Fabricus held up a trembling, bloodless hand; his face seemed to shine with a mystic intensity. “I die, and vengeance means naught to my departing soul. I came to this evil place bearing the cross and speaking the cleansing words of our Lord, willing to die if only this world might be purged of that Dark One who has so foully slain so many and who plotted the Second Downfall of us all. And God has answered my prayers, for He has sent you here and you have slain the Serpent; now the Serpent’s goat-minions can but flee to the wooded hills, and the Shoggoth return to the dark bowels of Hell whence it came.” Fabricus gripped Conan’s right hand with his left, Wulfhere’s with his right; then he said: “Cimmerian—Nordheimer—fellow humans you be, though of different races, different beliefs... Look now!” His countenance seemed to shine with a strange light as he feebly raised himself on one elbow. “It is as our Lord told me—all difference between us pale before the menace of the Dark Powers—aye, we be all brothers...”

Then the mystic, far-seeing eyes of Fabricus rolled upward and closed—in death. Conan stood in grim silence, gripping his naked sword, then drew breath deeply and relaxed.

“What meant the man?” he grunted at last.

Wulfhere shook his shaggy mane. “I know not. He was mad, and his madness led him to his doom. Yet he had courage, for did he not go forth fearless, even as goes the berserker into battle, careless of death? He was a brave man—but this temple is an evil place that were better quitted...”

“Aye—and the sooner the better!”

Conan sheathed his sword with a clang; again he breathed deeply.

“On to the north,” he growled. “We’ll clean our steel in good Hyperborean blood.”

Night of the Wolf

- Robert E. Howard, Richard L. Tierney & J.R. Karlsson

Thorwald Shield-hewer’s gaze wandered from the glittering menace in the hard eyes of the man who fronted him, and strayed down the length of his great skalli. He marked the long lines of mailed, horn-helmed carles, the hawk-faced chiefs who had ceased feasting to listen. And Thorwald Shield-hewer laughed.

True, the man who had just flung his defiance into the Vanir’s teeth did not look particularly impressive beside the armored giants who thronged the hall. He was a short, heavily-muscled man, smooth-faced and very dark. His only garments or ornaments were rude sandals on his feet, a deerskin loincloth, and a broad leather girdle from which swung a short curiously-barbed sword. He wore no armor and his square-cut black mane was confined only by a thin silver band about his temples. His cold eyes glittered with concentrated fury and his inner passions stirred the expressions of his usually immobile face.

“A year ago,” said he, in barbarous tongue, “you came to our lands, desiring only peace with my people. You would be our friend and protect us from the raids of others of your accursed race. We were fools; we dreamed there was faith in a sea-thief. We listened. We brought you game and fish and cut timbers when you built your steading, and shielded you from others of our people who were wiser than we. Then you were a handful with one longship. But as soon as your stockade was built, more of you came. Now your warriors number four hundred, and six dragonships are drawn up on the beach.

“Soon you became arrogant and overbearing. You insulted our chiefs, beat our young men —of late your devils have been carrying off our women and murdering our children and our warriors.”

“And what would you have me do?” cynically asked Thorwald. “I have offered to pay your chief man-bote for each warrior slain causelessly by my carles. And as for your wenches and brats—a warrior should not trouble himself about such trifles.”

“Man-bote!” the dark chief’s eyes flashed in fierce anger. “Will silver wash out spilt blood? What is silver to we of the isles? Aye—the women of other races are trifles to you Vanir, I know. But you may find that dealing thus with the girls of the forest people is far from a trifle!”

“Well,” broke in Thorwald sharply, “speak your mind and get hence. Your betters have more important affairs than listening to your clamor.”

Though the other’s eyes burned wolfishly, he made no reply to the insult.

“Go!” he answered, pointing seaward. “Back to Nordheim or Hell or wherever you came from. If you will take your accursed presence hence, you may go in peace. I, Brulla, a chief of Hjaltland, have spoken.”

Thorwald leaned back and laughed deeply; his comrades echoed his laughter and the smoky rafters shook with roars of jeering mirth.

“Why, you fool,” sneered the Nordheimer, “do you think that Vanir ever let go of what they have taken hold? You Picts were fools enough to let us in—now we are the stronger. We of the North rule! Down on your knees, fool, and thank the fates that we allow you to live and serve us, rather than wiping out your verminous tribe altogether! But henceforth ye shall no longer be known as the Free People—nay, ye shall wear the silver collar of thralldom and men shall know ye as Thorwald’s serfs!”

The Pict’s face went livid and his self-control vanished.

“Fool!” he snarled in a voice that rang through the great hall like the grating of swords in battle. “You have sealed your doom! You Nordheim rule all nations, eh? Well, there be some who die, mayhap, but never serve alien masters! Remember this, you blond swine, when the forest comes to life about your walls and you see your skalli crumble in flames and rivers of blood! We were kings of the world in the long ago when your ancestors ran with wolves in the Arctic forests, and we do not bow the neck to such as you! The hounds of Doom whine at your gates and you shall die, Thorwald Shield-hewer, and you, Aslaf Jarl’s-bane, and you, Grimm Snorri’s son, and you Osric, and you, Hakon Skel, and—” the Pict’s finger, stabbing at each of the flaxen-haired chiefs in turn, wavered; the man who sat next to Hakon Skel differed strangely from the others. Not that he was a whit less wild and ferocious in his appearance. Indeed, with his dark, scarred features and narrow, cold blue eyes, he appeared more sinister than any of the rest. But he was black-haired and clean-shaven, and his mail was of the chain-mesh type forged by southern armor-makers instead of the scale-mail of the Nordheim. His helmet, crested with flowing horse-hair, lay on the bench beside him.

The Pict passed over him and ended with the pronunciation of doom on the man beyond him—“And you, Hordi Raven.”

Aslaf Jarl’s-bane, a tall, evil-visaged chief, leaped to his feet: “Ymir’s blood, Thorwald, are we to listen to the insolence of this jackal? I, who have been the death of a jarl in my day—”

Thorwald silenced him with a gesture. The sea-king was a yellow-bearded giant, whose eyes were those of a man used to rule. His every motion and intonation proclaimed the driving power, the ruthless strength of the man.

“You have talked much and loudly, Brulla,” he said mildly. “Mayhap you are thirsty.”

He extended a brimming drinking horn, and the Pict, thrown off guard by surprise, reached a mechanical hand for it, moving as if against his will. Then with a quick turn of his wrist, Thorwald dashed the contents full in his face. Brulla staggered with a catlike scream of hellish fury, then his sword was out like a flash of summer lightning, and he bounded at his baiter. But his eyes were blinded by the stinging ale and Thorwald’s quick-drawn sword parried his blind slashes while the Vanir laughed mockingly. Then Aslaf caught up a bench and struck the Pict a terrible blow that stretched him stunned and bleeding at Thorwald’s feet. Hakon Skel drew his dagger, but Thorwald halted him.

“I’ll have no vermin’s blood polluting my skalli floor. Ho, carles, drag this carrion forth.”

The men-at-arms sprang forward with brutal eagerness. Brulla, half-senseless and bleeding, was struggling uncertainly to his knees, guided only by the wild beast fighting instinct of his race and his Age. They beat him down with shields, javelin shafts and the flat of axes, showering cruel blows on his defenseless body until he lay still. Then, jeering and jesting, they dragged him through the hall by the heels, arms trailing, and flung him contemptuously from the doorway with a kick and a curse. The Pictish chief lay face down and limply in the reddened dust, blood oozing from his pulped mouth—a symbol of the Vanir’s ruthless power.

Back at the feasting board, Thorwald drained a jack of foaming ale and laughed.

“I see that we must have a Pict-harrying,” quoth he. “We must hunt these vermin out of the wood or they’ll be stealing up in the night and loosing their shafts over the stockade.”

“It will be a rare hunting!” cried Aslaf with an oath. “We cannot with honor fight such reptiles, but we can hunt them as we hunt wolves—”

“You and your vaporings of honor,” sourly growled Grimm Snorri’s son. Grimm was old, lean and cautious.

“You speak of honor and vermin,” he sneered, “but the stroke of a maddened adder can slay a king. I tell you, Thorwald, you should have used more caution in dealing with these people. They outnumber us ten to one—”

“Naked and cowardly,” replied Thorwald carelessly. “One Nordheimer is worth fifty such. And as for dealing with them, who is it that has been having his carles steal Pictish girls for him? Enough of your maunderings, Grimm. We have other matters to speak of.”

Old Grimm muttered in his beard and Thorwald turned to the tall, powerfully-made stranger whose dark, inscrutable face had not altered during all the recent events. Thorwald’s eyes narrowed slightly and a gleam came into them such as is seen in the eyes of a cat who plays with a mouse before devouring it.

“Conan of Cimmeria,” said he, playing with the name, “it is strange that so noted a Reaver as you must be—though sooth to say, I never heard of your name before—comes to a strange steading in a small boat, alone.”

“Not so strange as it would have been had I come with a boat-load of my blood-letters,” answered the Cimmerian. “Each of them has a half dozen blood feuds with the Nordheim. Had I brought them ashore, they and your carles would have been at each others’ throats spite all you and I could do. But we, though we fight against each other at times, need not be such fools as to forego mutual advantage because of old rivalry.”

“True, the Vanir folk and the Reavers of Cimmeria are not friends.”

“And so, when my galley passed the lower tip of the island,” continued the Cimmerian, “I put out in the small boat, alone, with a flag of peace, and arrived here at sundown as you know. My galley continued to Makki Head, and will pick me up at the same point I left it, at dawn.”

“So ho,” mused Thorwald, chin on fist, “and that matter of my prisoner—speak more fully, Conan of Cimmeria.”

It seemed to the Cimmerian that the Vanir put undue accent on the name, but he answered: “Easy to say. My cousin Nial is captive among the Hyperboreans. My clan cannot pay the ransom they ask. It is no question of niggardliness—we have not the price they ask. But word came to us that in a sea-fight with the Hyperboreans off Helgoland you took a chief prisoner. I wish to buy him from you; we can use his captivity to force an exchange of prisoners with his tribe, perhaps.”

“The Hyperboreans are ever at war with each other, curse them. How know you but that my Hyperborean is an enemy to they who hold your cousin?”

“So much the better,” grinned the Cimmerian. “A man will pay more to get a foe in his power than he will pay for the safety of a friend.”

Thorwald toyed with his drinking horn. “True enough; you Cimmerians are crafty. What will you pay for this Hyperborean—Hrut, he calls himself.”

“Five hundred pieces of silver.”

“His people would pay more.”

“Possibly. Or perhaps not a piece of copper. It is a chance we are willing to take. Besides, it will mean a long sea voyage and risks taken to communicate with them. You may have the price I offer at dawn—coin you never made more easily. My clan is not rich. The sea-kings of the North and the strong Reavers of Cimmeria have harried we lesser wolves to the edge of the seas. But a Hyperborean we must have, and if you are too exorbitant, why we must sail eastward and take one by force of arms.”

“That might be easy,” mused Thorwald, “Hyperborea is torn by civil wars. Two kings contend against each other, or did, for I hear that Erik had the best of it, and Thorfinn fled the land.”

“Aye—so the sea-wanderers say. Thorfinn was the better man, and beloved by the people, but Erik had the support of Jarl Anlaf, the most powerful man among the Hyperboreans, not even excepting the kings themselves.”

“I heard that Thorfinn fled to the Jutes in a single ship, with a few followers,” said Thorwald. “Would that I might have met that ship on the high seas! But this Hrut will serve. I would glut my hate for the Hyperboreans on a king, but I am content with the next noblest. And noble this man is, though he wears no title. I thought him a jarl at least, in the sea-fight, when my carles lay about him in a heap waist-high. Ymir’s blood, but he had a hungry sword! I made my wolves take him alive—but not for ransom. I might have wrung a greater price from his people than you offer, but more pleasant to me than the clink of gold, are the death groans of a Hyperborean.”

“I have told you,” the Cimmerian spread his hands helplessly. “Five hundred pieces of silver, thirty olden torts, ten swords we wrested from the brown men, and a suit of chain-mail armor I took from the body of a prince. More I cannot offer.”

“Yet I can scarce forego the pleasure of carving the blood-eagle in the back of this Hyperborean,” murmured Thorwald, stroking his long, fair beard. “How will you pay this ransom—have you the silver and the rest in your garments?”

The Cimmerian sensed the sneer in the tone, but paid no heed.

“Tomorrow at dawn you and I and the Hyperborean will go to the lower point of the island. You may take ten men with you. While you remain on shore with the Hyperborean, I will row out to my ship and bring back the silver and the rest, with ten of my own men. On the beach we will make the exchange. My men will remain in the boats and not even put foot ashore if you deal fairly with me.”

“Well said,” nodded Thorwald, as if pleased, yet the wolfish instinct of the Cimmerian warned him that events were brewing. There was a gathering tension in the air. From the tail of his eye he saw the chiefs casually crowding near him. Grimm Snorri’s son’s lined, lean face was overcast and his hands twitched nervously. But no change in the Cimmerian’s manner showed that he sensed anything out of the ordinary.

“Yet it is but a poor price to pay for a man who will be the means of restoring a great Cimmerian prince to his clan,” Thorwald’s tone had changed; he was openly baiting the other now, “besides I think I had rather carve the blood-eagle on his back after all—and on yours as well—Conan of Cimmeria!”

He spat the last words as he straightened, and his chiefs surged about him. They were not an instant too soon. They knew by reputation the lightning-like coordination of the famous Cimmerian pirate which made his keen brain realize and his steel thews act while an ordinary man would still be gaping. Before the words were fully out of Thorwald’s mouth, Conan was on him with a volcanic burst of motion that would have shamed a starving wolf. Only one thing saved the Shield-hewer’s life; almost as quick as Conan he flung himself backward off the feasting bench, and the Cimmerian’s flying sword killed a carle who stood behind it.

In an instant the flickering of swords made lightning in the smoky vastness of the skalli. It had been Conan’s intention to hack a swift way to the door and freedom, but he was hemmed too closely by blood-lusting warriors.

Scarcely had Thorwald crashed cursing to the floor, than Conan wheeled back to parry the word of Aslaf Jarl’s bane who loomed over him like the shadow of Doom. The Cimmerian’s reddened blade turned Aslaf’s stroke and before the Jarl slayer could regain his balance, death flooded his throat beneath Conan’s slicing point.

A backhand stroke shore through the neckcords of a carle who was heaving up a great ax, and at the same instant Hordi Raven struck a blow that was intended to sever Conan’s shoulder bone. But the chain-mail turned the Raven’s sword edge, and almost simultaneously Hordi was impaled on that glimmering point that seemed everywhere at once, weaving a web of death about the tall Cimmerian. Hakon Skel, hacking at Conan’s unhelmed head, missed by a foot and received a slash across his face, but at that instant the Cimmerian’s feet became entangled with the corpses that littered the floor with shields and broken benches.

A concerted rush bore him back across the feasting board, where Thorwald hacked through his mail and gashed the ribs beneath. Conan struck back desperately, shattering Thorwald’s sword and beating the sea-king to his knees beneath the shock of the blow, but a club in the hands of a powerful carle crashed down on the Cimmerian’s unprotected head, laying the scalp open, and as he crumpled, Grimm Snorri’s son struck the sword from his hand. Then, urged by Thorwald, the carles leaped upon him, smothering and crushing the half-senseless Reaver by sheer weight of manpower. Even so, their task was not easy, but at last they had torn the steel fingers from the bull throat of one of their number, about which they had blindly locked, and bound the Cimmerian hand and foot with cords not even his dynamic strength could break. The carle he had half-strangled gasped on the floor as they dragged Conan upright to face the sea-king who laughed in his face.

Conan was a grim sight. He was red-stained by the blood both of himself and his foes, and from the gash in his scalp a crimson trickle seeped down to dry on his scarred face. But his wild beast vitality already asserted itself and there was no hint of a numbed brain in the cold eyes that returned Thorwald’s domineering stare.

“Ymir’s blood!” swore the sea-king. “I’m glad your comrade Wulfhere Hausakliufr—the Skull-splitter—was not with you. I have heard of your prowess as a killer, but to appreciate it, one must see for himself. In the last three minutes I have seen more weapon-play than I have seen in battles that lasted hours. By Ymir, you ranged through my carles like a hunger-maddened wolf through a flock of sheep! Are all your race like you?”

The Reaver deigned no reply.

“You are such a man as I would have for comrade,” said Thorwald frankly. “I will forget all old feuds if you will join me.” He spoke like a man who does not expect his wish to be granted.

Conan’s reply was merely a glimmer of cold scorn in his icy eyes.

“Well,” said Thorwald, “I did not expect you to accede to my demand, and that spells your doom, because I cannot let such a foe to my race go free.”

Then Thorwald laughed: “Your weapon-play has not been exaggerated but your craft has. You fool—to match wits with a Vanir! I knew you as soon as I laid eyes on you, though I had not seen you in years. Where on the North Seas is such a man as you, with your height, shoulder-breadth—and scarred face? I had all prepared for you, before you had ceased telling me your first lie. Bah! A chief of Cimmerian Reavers. Aye—once, years ago. But now I know you for Conan of Cimmeria, which is to say the Wolf, righthand man of Wulfhere Hausakliufr, a Vanir. Aye, Wulfhere Hausakliufr, hated of my race.

“You desired my prisoner Hrut to trade for your cousin! Bah! I know you of old, by reputation at least. And I saw you once, years ago—you came ashore with a lie on your lips to spy out my steading, to take report of my strength and weaknesses to Wulfhere, that you and he might steal upon me some night and burn the skalli over my head.

“Well, now you can tell me—how many ships has Wulfhere and where is he?”

Conan merely laughed, a remarkably hard contemptuous laugh that enraged Thorwald. The sea-king’s beard bristled and his eyes grew cruel.

“You will not answer me, eh?” he swore. “Well, it does not matter. Whether Wulfhere went on to Makki Head or not, three of my dragon ships will be waiting for him off the Point at dawn. Then mayhap when I carve the blood-eagle on Hrut I will have Wulfhere’s back also for my sport—and you may look on and see it well done, .ere I hang you from the highest tree on Golara. To the cell with him!”

As the carles dragged Conan away, the Cimmerian heard the querulous, uneasy voice of Grimm Snorri’s son raised in petulant dispute with his chief. Outside the door he noted, no limp body lay in the red-stained dust. Brulla had either recovered consciousness and staggered away, or been carried away by his tribesmen. These Picts were hard as cats to kill, Conan knew, having fought them many times. A beating such as Brulla had received would have left the average man a crippled wreck, but the Pict would probably be fully recovered in a few hours, if no bones had been broken.

Thorwald Shield-hewer’s steading fronted on a small bay, on the beach of which were drawn up six long, lean ships, shield-railed and dragon-beaked. As was usual, the steading consisted of a great hall—the skalli—about which were grouped smaller buildings—stables, storehouses and the huts of the carles. Around the whole stretched a high stockade, built, like the houses, of heavy logs. The logs of the stockade were some ten feet high, set deep in the earth and sharpened on the top. There were loopholes here and there for arrows and at regularly-spaced intervals, shelves on the inner side on which the defenders might stand and strike down over the wall at the attackers. Beyond the stockade the tall dark forest loomed menacingly.

The stockade was in the form of a horseshoe with the open side seaward. The horns ran out into the shallow bay, protecting the dragon ships drawn up on the beach. An inner stockade ran straight across in front of the steading, from one horn to the other, separating the beach from the skalli. Men might swim out around the ends of the main stockade and gain the beach but they would still be blocked from the steading itself.

Thorwald’s holdings seemed well protected, but vigilance was lax. Still, the Shetlands did not swarm with sea-rovers then as they did at a later date. The few Nordheim holdings there were like Thorwald’s—mere pirate camps from which the Vanir swooped down on the northern shores.

Thorwald did not ordinarily expect a raid from the sea and Conan had seen with what contempt the Vanir looked on the natives of the Shetlands. Wulfhere and his Hyperboreans were different; outlawed even among their own people, they ranged even farther than Thorwald himself, and they were keen-beaked birds of prey, whose talons tore all alike.

Conan was dragged to a small hut built against the stockade at a point some distance from the skalli, and in this he was chained. The door slammed behind him and he was left to his meditations.

The Cimmerian’s shallow cuts had ceased to bleed, and inured to wounds—an iron man in an Age of iron—he gave them hardly a thought. Stung vanity bothered him; how easily he had slipped into Thorwald’s trap, he whom kings had either cursed or blessed for his guile! Next time he would not be so over-confident, he mused; and a next time he was determined there should be. He did not worry overmuch about Wulfhere, even when he heard the shouts, scraping of slides, and later the clack of oars that announced that three of Thorwald’s longships were under way. Let them sneak to the Point and wait there till the dawn of Doom’s Day! Neither he nor Wulfhere had been such utter fools as to trust themselves in the power of Thorwald’s stronger force. Wulfhere had but one ship and some eighty men. They and the ship were even now hidden securely in a forest-screened cove on the other side of the island, which was less than a mile wide at this point. There was little chance of their being discovered by Thorwald’s men and the risk of being spied out by some Pict was a chance that must be taken. If Wulfhere had followed their plan, he had run in after dark, feeling his way; there was no real reason why either Pict or Nordheimer should be lurking about. The shore about the cove was mainly wild, high cliffs, rugged and uninviting; moreover Conan had heard that the Picts ordinarily avoided that part of the island because of some superstitious reason. There were ancient stone columns on the cliffs and a grim altar that hinted of ghastly rites in bygone ages.

Wulfhere would lurk there until Conan returned to him, or until a smoke drifting up from the Point assured him that Thorwald was on hand with the prisoner and meaning no treachery. Conan had carefully said nothing about the signal that was to bring Wulfhere, though he had not expected to be recognized for what he was. Thorwald had been wrong when he assumed that the prisoner had been used only for a blind. The Cimmerian had lied about himself and about his reason for wishing the custody of Hrut, but it was true when he had said that it was news of the Hyperborean’s captivity that brought him here.

Conan heard the cautious oars die away in silence. He heard the clash of arms and the shouts of the carles. Then these noises faded, all but the steady tramp of sentries, guarding against a night attack.

It must be nearly midnight, Conan decided, glancing up at the stars gleaming through his small heavily-barred window. He was chained close to the dirt floor and could not even rise to a sitting posture. His back was against the rear wall of the hut, which was formed by the stockade, and as he reclined there, he thought he heard a sound that was not of the sighing of the night-wind through the mighty trees without. Slowly he writhed about and found himself staring through a tiny aperture between two of the upright logs.

The moon had already set; in the dim starlight he could make out the vague outline of great, gently-waving branches against the black wall of the forest. Was there a subtle whispering and rustling among those shadows that was not of the wind and the leaves? Faint and intangible as the suggestion of nameless evil, the almost imperceptible noises ran the full length of the stockade. The whole night seemed full of ghostly murmurings—as if the midnight forest were stirring and moving its darksome self, like a shadowy monster coming to uncanny life. “When the forest comes to life,” the Pict had said—

Conan heard, within the stockade, one carle call to another. His rough voice reechoed in the whispering silence.

“Ymir’s blood, the trolls must be out tonight! How the wind whispers through the trees.”

Even the dull-witted carle felt a hint of evil in the darkness and shadows. Gluing his eye to the crack, Conan strove to pierce the darkness. The Cimmerianic pirate’s faculties were as much keener than the average man’s as a wolf’s are keener than a hog’s; his eyes were like a cat’s in the dark. But in that utter blackness he could see nothing but the vague forms of the first fringe of trees. Wait!

Something took shape in the shadows. A long line of figures moved like ghosts just under the shadows of the trees; a shiver passed along Conan’s spine. Surely these creatures were elves, evil demons of the forest. Short and mightily built, half stooping, one behind the other, they passed in almost utter silence. In the shadows their silence and their crouching positions made them monstrous travesties on men. Racial memories, half lost in the misty gulfs of consciousness, came stealing back to claw with icy fingers at Conan’s heart. He did not fear them as a man fears a human foe; it was the horror of world-old, ancestral memories that gripped him—dim felt, chaotic dream-recollections of darker Ages and grimmer days when primitive men battled for supremacy in a new world.

For these Picts were a remnant of a lost tribe—the survivals of an elder epoch—last outposts of a dark Stone Age empire that crumbled before the bronze swords of the first Celts. Now these survivors, thrust out on the naked edges of the world they had once ruled, battled grimly for their existence.

There could be no accurate counting of them because of the darkness and the swiftness of their slinking gait, but Conan reckoned that at least four hundred passed his line of vision. That band alone was equal to Thorwald’s full strength and far outnumbered the men left in the steading now, since Thorwald had sent out three of his ships. The skulking figures passed as they had come, soundless, leaving no trace behind, like ghosts of the night.

Conan waited in a silence that had become suddenly tense. Then without warning the night was shattered by one fearful death-yell! Pandemonium broke loose and a mad hell of sound burst on the air. And now the forest came to life! From all sides stocky figures broke cover and swarmed on the barricades. A lurid glare shed a ghastly light over all and Conan tore savagely at his chains, wild with excitement. Monstrous events were occurring without, and here he was, chained like a sheep for the slaughter! He cursed incredibly.

The Nordheimers were holding the wall; the clash of steel rose deafeningly in the night, the hum of arrows filled the air, and the deep fierce shouts of the Vanir vied with the hellish wolf-howling of the Picts. Conan could not see, but he sensed the surging of human waves against the stockade, the plying of spears and axes, the reeling retreat and the renewed onset. The Picts, he knew, were without mail and indifferently armed. It was very possible that the limited force of Vanir could hold the stockade until Thorwald returned with the rest, as he would assuredly do when he saw the. flame—but whence came the flame?

Someone was fumbling at the door. It swung open and Conan saw the lean shambling frame and livid bearded face of Grimm Snorri’s son limned against the red glare. In one hand he held a helmet and a sword Conan recognized as his own, in the other a bunch of keys which jangled as his hand shook.

“We are all dead men!” squawked the old Vanir, “I warned Thorwald! The woods are alive with Picts! There are thousands of them! We can never hold the stockade until Thorwald returns! He is doomed too, for the Picts will cut him off when he comes into the bay and feather his men with arrows before they can come to grips! They have swum around the outer horns of the stockade and set the three remaining galleys on fire! Osric would run like a fool with a dozen carles to save the ships and he had scarcely gotten outside the gates before he was down with a score of black shafts through him and his men were cut off and hemmed in by a hundred howling demons! Not a man of them escaped, and we barely had time to shut the gates when the whole screaming mob was battering at them!

“We have slain them by the scores, but for every one that drops, three spring to take his place. I have seen more Picts tonight than I knew were here—or in all of Hyboria. Conan, you are a bold man; you have a ship somewhere off the isle—swear to save me and I will set you free! Mayhap the Picts will not harm you—that devil Brulla did not name you in his death rune.

“If any man can save me it is you! I will show you where Hrut is hidden and we’ll take him with us—” he threw a quick glance over his shoulder toward the roar of battle beachward, and went white. “Ymir’s blood!” he screamed, “The gates have given way and the Picts are inside the inner, stockade!”

The howling rose to a crescendo of demoniac passion and fiendish exultation.

“Loose me, you gibbering fool!” raged Conan, tearing at his chains. “You’ve time enough for babbling when—”

Chattering with fear, Grimm Snorri’s son stepped inside the hut, fumbling with the keys—even as his foot crossed the threshold a lean shape raced swift and silent as a wolf out of the flame-shot shadows. A dark arm hooked about the old Vanir’s withered neck, jerking his chin up. One fearful shriek burst from his writhing lips to break short in a ghastly gurgle as a keen edge whipped across his leathery throat.

Over the twitching corpse of his victim, the Pict eyed Conan of Cimmeria, and the Cimmerian stared back, expecting death, but unafraid. Then in the glare of the burning ships, that made the cell-hut as light as day, Conan saw that the slayer was the chief, Brulla.

“You are he who slew Aslaf and Hordi. I watched through the door of the skalli before I dragged myself away to the forests,” said the Pict, as calmly as though no inferno of combat was raging without, “I told my people of you and warned them not to harm you, if you still lived. You hate Thorwald as well as I. I will free you; glut your vengeance; soon will Thorwald return in his ships and we will cut his throat. There shall be no more Nordheim or Golara. All the free people of the isles here-abouts are gathering to aid us, and Thorwald is doomed!”

He bent over the Cimmerian and released him. Conan sprang erect, a fresh fire of confidence surging through his veins. He snatched his helmet with its flowing horsehair crest, and his long straight sword. He also took the keys from Brulla.

“Know you where was prisoned the Hyperborean called Hrut?” he asked, as they stepped through the door. Brulla pointed across a seething whirlpool of flame and hacking swords.

“The smoke obscures the hut at present, but it lies next the storehouse on that side.”

Conan nodded and set off at a run. Where Brulla went he neither knew nor cared. The Picts had fired stable, storehouse and skalli, as well as the ships on the beach outside the inner stockade. About the skalli and here and there close to the stockade which was also burning in a score of places, stubborn fighting went on, as the handful of survivors sold their lives with all the desperate ferocity of their breed. There were, indeed, thousands of the short, dark men, who swarmed about each tall blond warrior in a slashing, hammering mass. The heavy swords of the mailed Vanir took fearful toll, but the smaller men lashed in with a wild beast frenzy that made naught of wounds, and pulled down their giant foes by sheet weight of numbers. Once on the ground, the stabbing swords of the dark men did their work. Screams of death and yells of fury rent the flame-reddened skies, but as Conan ran swiftly toward the storehouse, he heard no pleas for mercy. Driven to madness by countless outrages, the Picts were glutting their vengeance to the uttermost, and the Nordheim people neither looked nor asked for mercy.

Blond-haired women, cursing and spitting in the faces of their killers, felt the knife jerked across their white throats, and Nordheim babes were butchered with no more compunction than their sires had shown in the slaughter—for sport—of Pictish infants.

Conan took no part in this holocaust. None of these people was his friend—either race would cut his throat if the chance arose. As he ran he used his sword merely to parry chance cuts that fell on him from Pict and Nordheimer alike, and so swiftly he moved between staggering clumps of gasping, slashing men, that he ran his way across the open space without serious opposition. He reached the hut and a few seconds’ work with the lock opened the heavy door. He had not come too soon; sparks from the burning storehouse nearby had caught on the hut thatch and already the interior was full of smoke. Through this Conan groped his way toward a figure he could barely make out in the corner. There was a jangling of chains and a voice with a Vanir accent spoke: “Slay me, in the name of Loki; better a sword thrust than this accursed smoke!”

Conan knelt and fumbled at his chains. “I come to free you, oh Hrut,” he gasped. A moment later he dragged the astonished warrior to his feet and together they staggered out of the hut, just as the roof fell in. Drawing in great draughts of air, Conan turned and stared curiously at his companion—a splendid, red maned giant of a man, with the bearing of a noble. He was half-naked, ragged and unkempt from weeks of captivity, but his eyes gleamed with an unconquerable light.

“A sword!” he cried, those eyes blazing as they swept the scene, “A sword, good sir, in the name of Ymir! Here is a goodly brawl and we stand idle!”

Conan stooped and tore a reddened blade from the stiffening hand of an arrow-feathered Nordheimer.

“Here is a sword, Hrut,” he growled, “but for whom will you strike the Nordheim who have kept you cooped like a caged wolf and would have slain you—or the Picts who will cut your throat because of the color of your hair?”

“There can be but little choice,” answered the Hyperborean, “I heard the screams of women—”

“The women are all dead,” grunted the Cimmerian. “We cannot help them now; we must save ourselves. It is the night of the wolf—and the wolves are biting!”

“I would like to cross swords with Thorwald,” the big Hyperborean hesitated as Conan drew him toward the flaming barrier.

“Not now, not now,” the Reaver rasped, “bigger game is afoot, Ymir—Hrut! Later we will come back and finish what the Picts leave—just now we have more than ourselves to think about, for if I know Wulfhere Skullsplitter he is already marching through the woods at double-quick time!”

The stockade was in places a smoldering mass of coals; Conan and his companion battered a way through and even as they stepped into the shadows of the trees outside, three figures rose about them and set upon them with bestial howls. Conan shouted a warning, but it was useless. A whirling blade was at his throat and he had to strike to save himself. Turning from the corpse he had been loath to make, he saw Hrut, bestriding the mangled body of one Pict, take the barbed sword of the other in his left arm and split the wielder’s skull with an overhand stroke.

Cursing, the Cimmerian sprang forward. “Are you badly hurt?” Blood was gushing from a deep wound in Hrut’s mighty arm.

“A scratch,” the Hyperborean’s eyes blazed with the battle-light. But despite his protests Conan tore a strip from his own garments and bound the arm so as to staunch the flow of blood.

“Here, help me drag these bodies under the brush,” growled the Reaver. “I hated to strike—but when they saw your red beard it was our lives or theirs. I think Brulla would see our point of view, but if the rest find we killed their brothers neither Brulla nor the devil can keep their swords from our throats.”

This done—“Listen!” commanded Hrut. The roar of battle had dwindled in the main to a crackle and roar of flames and the hideous and triumphant yelling of the Picts. Only in a single room in the flaming skalli, yet untouched by the fire, a handful of Vanir still kept up a stubborn defense. Through the noise of the fire there sounded a rhythmic clack-clack-clack!

“Thorwald is returning!” exclaimed Conan, springing back to the edge of the forest to peer over the ruins of the stockade. Into the bay swept a single dragon ship. The long ash oars drove her plunging through the water and from her rowers and from the men massed on poop and gunwale rose a roar of deep-toned ferocity as they saw the smoking ruins of the steading and the mangled bodies of their people. From the burning skalli came an echoing shout. In the smoldering glare that turned the bay to a gulf of blood, Conan and Hrut saw the hawk-face of Hakon Skel where he stood on the poop. But where were the other two ships? Conan thought he knew and a smile of grim appreciation crossed his somber face.

Now the dragon-ship was sweeping in to the beach and hundreds of screaming Picts were wading out to meet it. Waist deep in water, holding their heavy black bows high to keep the cords dry, they loosed their arrows and a storm of shafts swept the dragon-ship from stem to stern. Full into the teeth of the deadliest gale it had ever faced the dragon-ship drove, while men went down in windrows along the gunwales, transfixed by the long black shafts that rent through lindenwood buckler and scale mail armor to pierce the flesh beneath.

The rest crouched behind their shields and rowed and steered as best they could. Now the keel grated on the water-flooded sand and the swarming savages closed about her. By the hundreds they scrambled up the sides, the stern and the arching prow, while others maintained a steady fire from the water and the beach. Their marksmanship was almost uncanny. Flying between two slashing Picts a long shaft would strike down a Nordheimer. But when it came to handgrips, the advantage was immensely with the Vanir. Their giant stature, their armor and long swords, and their position on the gunwales above their foes made them for the moment invincible.

Swords and axes rose and fell, spattering blood and brains, and stocky shapes dropped writhing from the sides of the galley to sink like stones. The water about the ship grew thick with dead, and Conan caught his breath as he realized the lavishness with which the naked Picts were spending. their lives. But soon he heard their chiefs shouting to them and he realized, as the attackers drew sullenly away, that their leaders were shouting for them to fall back and pick off the Vanir at long range.

The Vanir soon realized that also. Hakon Skel dropped with an arrow through his brain and with yells of fury the Nordheimers began leaping from their ship into the water, in one desperate attempt to close with their foes and take toll in death. The Picts accepted the challenge. About each Nordheimer closed a dozen Picts and the bay along the beach seethed and eddied with battle. The waves grew red as blood and corpses floated thick or littered the bottom, tripping the feet and clogging the aims of the living. The warriors penned in the skalli sallied forth to die with their tribesmen.

Then what Conan had looked for, occurred. A deep-chested roar thundered above the fury of the fight, and from the woods that fringed the bay burst Thorwald Shield-hewer, with the crews of two dragon ships at his back. Conan knew that, guessing what had occurred, he had sent the other ship on to draw the Picts out and give him time to land below the bay and march through the forest with the rest of his men.

Now in a solid formation, shield locking shield, they swept from the woods along the shore and bore down the beach toward their foes. With howls of unquenchable fury, the Picts turned on them with a rain of shafts and a headlong charge of stocky bodies and stabbing blades. But the arrows in the main glanced from the close-lapping shields and the mob-like rush met a solid wall of iron. But with the same desperation they had shown all during the fight, the Picts hurled charge after charge on the shield-wall. It was a living sea that broke in red waves on that iron bulwark. The ground grew thick under foot with corpses, not all Pictish. But as often as a Nordheimer fell, his comrades locked their great shields close as ever, trampling the fallen under foot. No longer did the Vanir surge forward, but they stood like a solid rock and took not a single backward step. The wings of their wedge-shaped formation were forced inward as the Picts entirely surrounded them, until it was more like a square, facing all ways. And like a square of stone and iron it stood, and all the wild, blind charges of the Picts failed to shake it, though they hurled their bare breasts against the steel until their corpses formed a wall over which the living clambered.

Then suddenly, apparently without warning, they broke and fled in all directions, some across the flame-lit space of the steading, some into the forest. With yells of triumph the Vanir broke formation and plunged after them, though Conan saw Thorwald screaming frantic orders and beating at his men with the flat of his reddened sword. A trick! Conan knew it as well as Thorwald but the blind fighting frenzy of the carles betrayed them as their foes had guessed. The moment they streamed out loosely in pursuit, the Picts turned howling and a dozen Vanir went down before a hail of arrows. Before the rest could reform their position they were surrounded singly and in struggling clumps, and the work of death began. From a single massed battle, the combat became a score of single skirmishes on the beach—where the survivors of the dragon ship had made their way—before the skalli’s embers and in the fringe of the forest.

And suddenly as from a dream Conan woke and cursed himself.

“By the blood of the gods, what a fool I am! Are we boys who have never seen a battle, to stand here gaping when we should be legging it through the forest?”

He was forced to fairly drag Hrut away, and the two ran swiftly through the forest, hearing on all sides the clangor of arms and the shouts of death. The battle had spilled over into the forest and that grim and darksome wood was the scene of many a bloody deed. But Conan and Hrut, warned by the sounds, managed to keep clear of such struggles, though once vague figures leaped at them from the shadows, and in the blind brief whirl of battle that followed, they never knew whether it was Picts or Nordheimers who fell before their swords.

Then the sounds of conflict were behind them and in front sounded the tramp of many men. Hrut stopped short, gripping his red-stained sword, but Conan pulled him on.

“Men marching in time; they can be none but Wulfhere’s wolves!”

The next instant they burst into a glade, dimly lighted by the first whiteness of dawn, and from the opposite side strode a band of red-bearded giants, whose chief, looking like a very god of war, bellowed a welcome:

“Conan! Ymir’s blood, it seems we’ve been marching through these accursed woods forever! When I saw the glow above the trees and heard the yelling I brought every carle on the ship, for I knew not but what you were burning and looting Thorwald’s steading single handed! What is forward—and who is this?”

“This is Hrut—whom we sought,” answered Conan. “Hell and the red whirlpools of war are what is forward—there’s blood on your axe!”

“Aye—we had to hack our way through a swarm of small, dark fellows—Picts I believe you call ’em.”

Conan cursed. “We’ll pile up a blood-score that even Brulla can’t answer for—”

“Well,” grumbled the giant, “the woods are full of them, and we heard them howling like wolves behind us—”

“I had thought all would be at the steading,” commented Hrut.

Conan shook his head. “Brulla spoke of a gathering of clans; they have come from all the isles of the Hjaltlands and probably landed on all sides of the island—listen!”

The clamor of battle grew louder as the fighters penetrated deeper into the mazes of the forest, but from the way Wulfhere and his Vanir had come there sounded a long-drawn yell like a pack of running wolves, swiftly rising higher and higher.

“Close ranks!” yelled Conan, paling, and the Hyperboreans had barely time to lock their shields before the pack was upon them. Bursting from the thick trees a hundred Picts whose swords were yet unstained broke like a tidal wave on the shields of the Hyperboreans.

Conan, thrusting and slashing like a fiend, shouted to Wulfhere: “Hold them hard—I must find Brulla. He will tell them we are foes of Thorwald and allow us to depart in peace!”

All but a handful of the original attackers were down, trodden under foot and snarling in their death throes. Conan leaped from the shelter of the overlapping shields and darted into the forest. Searching for the Pictish chief in that battle-tortured forest was little short of madness, but it was their one lone chance. Seeing the fresh Picts coming up from behind them had told Conan that he and his comrades would probably have to fight their way across the whole island to regain their galley. Doubtless these were warriors from some island lying to the east, who had just landed on Golara’s eastern coast.

If he could find Brulla—he had not gone a score of paces past the glade when he stumbled over two corpses, locked in a death-grapple. One was Thorwald Shield-hewer. The other was Brulla. Conan stared at them and as the wolf-yell of the Picts rose about him, his skin crawled. Then he sprang up and ran back to the glade where he had left the Hyperboreans.

Wulfhere leaned on his great ax and stared at the corpses at his feet. His men stolidly held their position.

“Brulla is dead,” snapped the Cimmerian. “We must aid ourselves. These Picts will cut our throats if they can, and the gods know they have no cause to love a Vanir. Our only chance is to get backto our ship if we can. But that is a slim chance indeed, for I doubt not but that the woods are full of the savages. We can never keep the shield-wall position among the trees, but—”

“Think of another plan, Conan,” said Wulfhere grimly, pointing to the east with his great ax. There a lurid glow was visible among the trees and a hideous medley of howling came faintly to their ears. There was but one answer to that red glare.

“They’ve found and fired our ship,” muttered Conan. “By the blood of the gods, Fate’s dice are loaded against us.”

Suddenly a thought came to him.

“After me! Keep close together and hew your way through, if needs be, but follow me close!”

Without question they followed him through the corpse-strewn forest, hearing on each hand the sound of fighting men, until they stood at the forest fringe and gazed over the crumbled stockade: at the ruins of the steading. By merest chance no body of Picts had opposed their swift march, but behind them rose a frightful and vengeful clamor as a band of them came upon the corpse-littered glade the Hyperboreans had just left.

No fighting was going on among the steading’s ruins. The only Nordheimers in sight were mangled corpses. The fighting had swept back into the forest whither the close-pressed Vanir had retreated or been driven. From the incessant clashing of steel within its depths, those who yet remained alive were giving a good account of themselves. Under the trees where bows were more or less useless, the survivors might defend themselves for hours, though, with the island swarming with Picts, their ultimate fate was certain.

Three or four hundred tribesmen, weary of battle at last, had left the fighting to their fresher tribesmen and were salvaging what loot they could from the embers of the storehouses.

“Look!” Conan’s sword pointed to the dragon ship whose prow, driven in the sands, held her grounded, though her stern was afloat. “In a moment we will have a thousand yelling demons on our backs. There lies our one chance, wolves—Hakon Skel’s Raven. We must hack through and gain it, shove it free and row off before the Picts can stop us. Some of us will die, and we may all die, but it’s our only chance!

The Vanir said nothing, but their fierce light eyes blazed and many grinned wolfishly. Touch and go! Life or death on the toss of the dice! That Was a Vanir’s only excuse for living!

“Lock shields!” roared Wulfhere. “Close ranks! The flying-wedge formation—Hrut in the center.”

“What—!” began Hrut angrily, but Conan shoved him unceremoniously between the mailed ranks.

“You have no armor,” he growled impatiently. “Ready old wolf? Then charge, and the gods choose the winners!”

Like an avalanche the steel-tipped wedge shot from the trees and raced toward the beach. The Picts looting the ruins turned with howls of amazement, and a straggling line barred the way to the water’s edge. But without slacking gait the flying shield-wall struck the Pictish line, buckled it, crumpled it, hacked it down and trampled it under, and over its red ruins rushed upon the beach.

Here the formation was unavoidably broken. Waist-deep in water, tripping among corpses, harried by the rain of arrows that now poured upon them from the beach, the Vanir gained the dragon ship and swarmed up its sides, while a dozen giants set their shoulders against the prow to push it off the sands. Half of them died in the attempt, but the titanic efforts of the rest triumphed and the galley began to give way.

The Hyperboreans were the bowmen among the Vanir races. Thirty of the eighty-odd warriors who followed Wulfhere wore heavy bows and quivers of long arrows strapped to their backs. As many of these as could be spared from oars and sweeps now unslung their weapons and directed their shafts on the Picts wading into the water to attack the men at the prow. In the first light of the rising sun the Danish shafts did fearful execution, and the advance wavered and fell back. Arrows fell all about the craft and some found their marks, but crouching beneath their shields the warriors toiled mightily, and soon, though it seemed like hours, the dragon ship rolled and wallowed free, the men in the water leaped and caught at chains and gunwale, and the long oars drove her out into the bay, just as a howling horde of wolfish figures swept out of the woods and down the beach. Their arrows fell in a rain, rattling harmlessly from shield-rail and hull as the Raven shot toward the open sea.

“Touch and go!” roared Wulfhere with a great laugh, smiting Conan terrifically between the shoulders. Hrut shook his head. To his humiliated anger, a big carle had been told off to keep a shield over him, during the fight.

“Many brave warriors are dying in yonder woods. it pains me to desert them thus, though they are our foes and would have put me to death.”

Conan shrugged his shoulders. “I, too, would have aided them had I seen a way. But we could have accomplished naught by remaining and dying with them. By the blood of the gods, what a night this has been! Golara is rid of her Vanir, but the Picts paid a red price! All of Thorwald’s four hundred are dead now or soon will be, but not less than a thousand Picts have died outright in the steading and the gods only know how many more in the forest.”

Wulfhere glanced at Hrut where he stood on the poop, outstretched hand on the sword whose reddened point rested on the deal planking. Unkempt, bloodstained, tattered, wounded, yet still his kingly carriage was unabated.

“And now that you have rescued me so boldly against incredible odds,” said he, “what would you have of me besides my eternal gratitude, which you already have?”

Wulfhere did not reply; turning to the men who rested on their oars to gaze eagerly and expectantly up at the group on the poop, the Vanir chief lifted his red axe and bellowed: “Skoal, wolves! Yell hail for Thorfinn Eaglecrest, king of Hyperborea!”

A thunderous roar went up to the blue of the morning skies that startled the wheeling sea gulls. The tattered king gasped in amazement, glancing quickly from one to the other, not yet certain of his status.

“And now that you have recognized me,” said he, “am I guest or prisoner?”

Conan grinned. “We traced you from Skagen, whence you fled in a single ship to Helgoland, and learned there that Thorwald Shield-hewer had taken captive a Hyperborean with the bearing of a king. Knowing you would conceal your identity, we did not expect him to know that he had a king of the Hyperboreans in his hands.

“Well, King Thorfinn, this ship and our swords are yours. We be outlaws, both from our own lands. You cannot alter my status in Cimmeria, but you can inlaw Wulfhere and make your ports free to us.”

“Gladly would I do this, my friends,” said Thorfinn, deeply moved. “But how can I aid my friends, who cannot aid myself? I, too, am an outcast, and my cousin Erik rules the Hyperboreans.”

“Only until we set foot on Hyperborean soil!” exclaimed Conan. “Oh, Thorfinn, you fled too soon, but who can foresee the future? Even as you put to sea like a hunted pirate, the throne was rocking under Erik’s feet. While you lay captive on Thorwald’s dragon ship, Jarl Anlaf fell in battle with the Jutes and Erik lost his greatest supporter. Without Anlaf, his rule will crumble overnight and hosts will flock to your banner!”

Thorfinn’s eyes lighted with a wondrous gleam. He threw his head back as a lion throws back his mane and flung up his reddened sword into the eye of the rising sun.

“Skoal!” he cried. “Head for Hyperborea, my friends, and may Ymir fill our sail!”

“Aim her prow eastward, carles,” roared Wulfhere to the men at the sweeps. “We go to set a new king on the throne of Hyperborea!”

Tigers Of The Sea

Robert E. Howard, Richard L. Tierney & J.R. Karlsson

I

“Tigers of the sea! Men with the hearts of wolves and thews of fire and steel! Feeders of ravens whose only joy lies in slaying and dying! Giants to whom the death-song of the sword is sweeter than the love-song of a girl!”

The tired eyes of King Gerinth were shadowed.

“This is no new tale to me; for a score of years such men have assailed my people like hunger-maddened wolves.”

“Take a page from your conqueror’s book,” answered Donal the minstrel as he lifted a wine goblet and drank deep. “Have we not read in the books how he pitted wolf against wolf? Aye—that way he conquered our ancestors, who in their day were wolves also.”

“And now they are more like sheep,” murmured the king, a quiet bitterness in his voice. “In the years of the peace, our people forgot the arts of war. Our protector has fallen and we fight for our lives—and cannot even protect our women.”

Donal set down the goblet and leaned across the finely carved oak table.

“Wolf against wolf!” he cried. “You have told me—as well I knew!—that no warriors could be spared from the borders to search for your sister, the princess Helen—even if you knew where she is to be found. Therefore, you must enlist the aid of other men—and these men I have just described to you are as superior in ferocity and barbarity to the savage Hyperboreans that assail us as the Hyperboreans themselves are superior to our softened peasantry.”

“But would they serve under a Brythunian against their own blood?” demurred the king. “And would they keep faith with me?”

“They hate each other as much as we hate them both,” answered the minstrel. “Moreover, you can promise them the reward—only when they return with the princess Helen.”

“Tell me more of them,” requested King Gerinth.

“Wulfhere the Skull-splitter, the chieftain, is a red-bearded giant like all his race. He is crafty in his way, but leads his Vanir mainly because of his fury in battle. He handles his heavy, long shafted axe as lightly as if it were a toy, and with it he shatters the swords, shields, helmets and skulls of all who oppose him. When Wulfhere crashes through the ranks, stained with blood, his crimson beard bristling and his terrible eyes blazing and his great axe clotted with blood and brains, few there are who dare face him.

“But it is on his righthand man that Wulfhere depends for advice and council. That one is crafty as a serpent and is known to us Hyperboreans of old—for he is no Vanir at all by birth, but a Cimmerian, by name Conan of Cimmeria, called the lion. Of old he led a band of reavers and harried the coasts with piracy—aye, and he preyed also on the Vanir themselves, But civil war broke up his band and he joined the forces of Wulfhere—they dwell in a land south of the people who are called Nordheimers.

“Conan of Cimmeria has all the guile and reckless valor of his race. He is tall and muscular, a tiger where Wulfhere is a wild bull. His weapon is the sword, and his skill is incredible. The Vanir rely little on the art of fencing; their manner of fighting is to deliver mighty blows with the full sweep of their arms. Well, the Cimmerian can deal a full arm blow with the best of them, but he favors the point. In a world where the old-time skill of the Acheronian swordsman is almost forgotten, Conan of Cimmeria is well-nigh invincible. He is cool and deadly as the lion for which he is named, yet at times, in the fury of battle, a madness comes upon him that transcends the frenzy of the Berserk. At such times he is more terrible than Wulfhere, and men who would face him flee before the blood-lust of the Cimmerian.”

King Gerinth nodded. “And could you find these men for me?”

“Lord King, even now they are within reach. In a lonely bay on the western coast, in a little-frequented region, they have beached their dragon-ship and are making sure that it is fully sea-worthy before moving against the Hyperboreans. Wulfhere is no sea-king; he has but one ship—but so swiftly he moves and so fierce is his crew that the Hyperboreans fear him more than any of their other foes. He revels in battle. He will do as you wish him, if the reward is great enough.”

“Promise him anything you will, answered Gerinth. “It is more than a princess of the realm that has been stolen—it is my little sister.”

His fine, deeply-lined face was strangely tender as he spoke.

“Let me attend to it,” said Donal, refilling his goblet. “I know where these Vanir are to be found. I can pass among them—but I tell you before I start that it will take your Majesty’s word, from your own lips, to convince Conan of Cimmeria of—anything! Those Western Æsir are more wary than the Vanir themselves.”

Again King Gerinth nodded. He knew that the minstrel had walked strange paths and that though he was loquacious on most subjects, he was tight-lipped on others. Donal was blessed or cursed with a strange and roving mind and his skill with the harp, opened many doors to him that axes could not open. Where a warrior had died, Donal of the Harp walked unscathed. He knew well many fierce sea-kings who were but grim legends and myths to most of the people of the north, but Gerinth had never had cause to doubt the minstrel’s loyalty.

II

Wulfhere of the Vanir fingered his crimson beard and scowled abstractedly. He was a giant; his breast muscles bulged like twin shields under his scale mail corselet. The horned helmet on his head added to his great height, and with his huge hand knotted about the long shaft of a great axe he made a picture of rampant barbarism not easily forgotten. But for all his evident savagery, the chief of the Vanir seemed slightly bewildered and undecided. He turned and growled a question to a man who sat near.

This man was tall and muscular. He was big and powerful, and though he lacked the massive bulk of the Vanir, he more than made up for it by the tigerish litheness that was apparent in his every move. He was dark, with a smooth-shaven face and square-cut black hair. He wore none of the golden armlets or ornaments of which the Vanir were so fond. His mail was of chain mesh and his helmet, which lay beside him, was crested with flowing horse-hair.

“Well, Conan,” growled the pirate chief, “what think you?”

Conan of Cimmeria did not reply directly to his friend. His cold, narrow, grey eyes gazed full into the blue eyes of Donal the minstrel. Donal was a thin man of more than medium height. His wayward unruly hair was yellow. Now he bore neither harp nor sword and his dress was whimsically reminiscent of a court jester. His thin, patrician face was as inscrutable at the moment as the sinister, scarred features of the Cimmerian.

“I trust you as much as I trust any man,” said Conan, “but I must have more than your mere word on the matter. How do I know that this is not some trick to send us on a wild goose chase, or mayhap into a nest of our enemies? We have business on the east coast—”

“The matter of which I speak will pay you better than the looting of some pirate’s den,” answered the minstrel. “If you will come with me, I will bring you to the man who may be able to convince you. But you must come alone, you and Wulfhere.”

“A trap,” grumbled the Vanir. “Donal, I am disappointed in you—”

Conan, looking deep into the minstrel’s strange eyes, shook his head slowly.

“No, Wulfhere; if it be a trap, Donal too is duped and that I cannot believe.”

“If you believe that,” said Donal, “why can you not believe my mere word in regard to the other matter?”

“That is different,” answered the barbarian. “Here only my life and Wulfhere’s is involved. The other concerns every member of our crew. It is my duty to them to require every proof. I do not think you lie; but you may have been lied to.”

“Come, then, and I will bring you to one whom you will believe in spite of yourself.”

Conan rose from the great rock whereon he had been sitting and donned his helmet. Wulfhere, still grumbling and shaking his head, shouted an order to the Vanir who sat grouped about a small fire a short distance away, cooking a haunch of venison. Others were tossing dice in the sand, and others still working on the dragonship which was drawn up on the beach. Thick forest grew close about this cove, and that fact, coupled with the wild nature of the region, made it an ideal place for a pirate’s rendezvous.

“All sea-worthy and ship-shape,” grumbled Wulfhere, referring to the galley. “On the morrow we could have sailed forth on the Vanir path again—”

“Be at ease, Wulfhere,” advised the Cimmerian. “If Donal’s man does not make matters sufficiently clear for our satisfaction, we have but to return and take the path.”

“Aye—if we return.”

“Why, Donal knew of our presence. Had he wished to betray us, he could have led a troop of Gerinth’s horsemen upon us, or surrounded us with Brythunian bowmen. Donal, at least, I think, means to deal squarely with us as, he has done in the past. It is the man behind Donal I mistrust.”

The three had left the small bay behind them and now walked along in the shadow of the forest. The land tilted upward rapidly and soon the forest thinned out to straggling clumps and single gnarled oaks that grew between and among huge boulders—boulders broken as if in a Titan’s play. The landscape was rugged and wild in the extreme. Then at last they rounded a cliff and saw a tall man, wrapped in a purple cloak, standing beneath a mountain oak. He was alone and Donal walked quickly toward him, beckoning his companions to follow. Conan showed no sign of what he thought, but Wulfhere growled in his beard as he gripped the shaft of his axe and glanced suspiciously on all sides, as if expecting a horde of swordsmen to burst out of ambush. The three stopped before the silent man and Donal doffed his feathered cap. The man dropped his cloak and Conan gave a low exclamation.

“By the blood of the gods! King Gerinth himself!”

He made no movement to kneel or to uncover his head, nor did Wulfhere. These wild rovers of the sea acknowledged the rule of no king. Their attitude was the respect accorded a fellow warrior; that was all. There was neither insolence nor deference in their manner, though Wulfhere’s eyes did widen slightly as he gazed at the man whose keen brain and matchless valor had for years, and against terrific odds, stemmed the triumphant march of foreign influence into the Western sea.

The Vanir saw a tall, slender man with a weary aristocratic face and kindly grey eyes. Only in his black hair was the southern strain in his veins evident. Behind him lay the ages of a civilization now crumbled to the dust before the onstriding barbarians. He represented the last far-flung remnant of Acheron's once mighty empire, struggling on the waves of barbarism which had engulfed the rest of that empire in one red inundation. Conan, while possessing the true Cimmerian antipathy for his kin in general, sensed the pathos and valor of this brave, vain struggle, and even Wulfhere, looking into the far-seeing eyes of the king, felt a trifle awed. Here was a people, with their back to the wall, fighting grimly for their lives and at the same time vainly endeavoring to uphold the culture and ideals of an age already gone forever. ‘The gods of Acheron had faded under the ruthless heel of barbarians. Flaxen-haired savages reigned in the purple halls of the vanished generals. Only in this far-flung isle a little band of Acheronians clung to the traditions of yesterday.

“These are the warriors, your Majesty,” said Donal, and Gerinth nodded and thanked him with the quiet courtesy of a born nobleman.

“They wish to hear again from your lips what I have told them,” said the bard.

“My friends,” said the king quietly, “I come to ask your aid. My sister, the princess Helen, a girl of twenty years of age, has been stolen—how, or by whom, I do not know. She rode into the forest one morning attended only by her maid and a page, and she did not return. It was on one of those rare occasions when our coasts were peaceful; but when search parties were sent out, they found the page dead and horribly mangled in a small glade deep in the forest. The horses were found later, wandering loose, but of the princess Helen and her maid there was no trace. Nor was there ever a trace found of her, though we combed the kingdom from border to sea. Spies sent among the Hyperboreans and Vanirs found no sign of her, and we at last decided that she had been taken captive and borne away by some wandering band of sea-farers who, roaming inland, had seized her and then taken to sea again.

“We are helpless to carry on such a search as must be necessary if she is to be found. We have no ships—the last remnant of our fleet was destroyed in a sea-fight by the enemy. And if we had ships, we could not spare the men to man them, not even for the princess Helen. The Hyperboreans press hard on our eastern borders and Cerdic’s brood raven upon us from the south. In my extremity I appeal to you. I cannot tell you where to look for my sister. I cannot tell you how to recover her if found. I can only say: in the name of God, search the ends of the world for her, and if you find her, return with her and name your price.”

Wulfhere glanced at Conan as he always did in matters that required thought.

“Better that we set a price before we go,” grunted the Cimmerian.

“Then you agree?” cried the king, his fine face lighting.

“Not so fast,” returned the wary Cimmerian. “Let us first bargain. It is no easy task you set us: to comb the seas for a girl of whom nothing is known save that she was stolen. How if we search the oceans and return empty-handed?”

“Still I will reward you,” answered the king. “I have gold in plenty. Would I could trade it for warriors—but I have Vortigern’s example before me.”

“If we go and bring back the princess, alive or dead,” said Conan, “you shall give us a hundred pounds of virgin gold, and ten pounds of gold for each man we lose on the voyage. If we do our best and cannot find the princess, you shall still give us ten pounds for every man slain in the search, but we will waive further reward. We are not Vanirs, to haggle over money. Moreover, in either event you will allow us to overhaul our long ship in one of your bays, and furnish us with material enough to replace such equipment as may be damaged during the voyage. Is it agreed?"

“You have my word and my hand on it,” answered the king, stretching out his arm, and as their hands met Conan felt the nervous strength in the man’s fingers.

“You sail at once?”

“As soon as we can return to the cove.”

“I will accompany you,” said Donal suddenly, “and there is another who would come also.”

He whistled abruptly—and came nearer to sudden decapitation than he guessed; the sound was too much like a signal of attack to leave the wolf-like nerves of the sea-farers untouched. Conan and Wulfhere, however, relaxed as a single man strode from the forest.

“This is Marcus, of a noble house,” said Donal, “the betrothed of the princess Helen. He too will accompany us if he may.”

The young man was above medium height and well built. He was in full chain mail armor and wore the crested helmet of a legionary; a straight thrusting-sword was girt upon him. His eyes were grey, but his black hair and the faint olive-brown tint of his complexion showed that the warm blood of the South ran far more strongly in his veins than in those of his king. He was undeniably handsome, though now his face was shadowed with worry.

“I pray you will allow me to accompany you.” He addressed himself to Wulfhere. “The game of war is not unknown to me—and waiting here in ignorance of the fate of my promised bride would be worse to me than death.”

“Come if you will,” growled Wulfhere. “It’s like we’ll need all the swords we can muster before the cruise is over. King Gerinth, have you no hint whatever of who took the princess?"

“None. We found only a single trace of anything out of the ordinary in the forests. Here it is.”

The king drew from his garments a tiny object and passed it to the chieftain. Wulfhere stared, unenlightened, at the small, polished flint arrowhead which lay in his huge palm. Conan took it and looked closely at it. His face was inscrutable but his cold eyes flickered momentarily. Then the Cimmerian said a strange thing:

“I will not shave today, after all.”

III

The fresh wind filled the sails of the dragonship and the rhythmic clack of many oars answered the deep-chested chant of the rowers. Conan of Cimmeria, in full armor, the horse-hair of his helmet floating in the breeze, leaned on the rail of the poop-deck. Wulfhere banged his axe on the deal planking and roared an unnecessary order at the steersman.

“Conan,” said the huge Vanir, “what make you of Brythunia?”

“It is a land worth fighting for,” responded the Cimmerian. “What think you of the men we have shipped aboard?”

“Donal we know of old. He can tear the heart from my breast with his harp when he is so minded, or make me a boy again. And in a pinch we know he can wield a sword. As for the Acheronian—” so Wulfhere termed Marcus, “he has the look of a seasoned warrior.”

“His ancestors were commanders of Brythunian legions for three centuries. It is but the remnant of Acheronian strategy lingering in the Brythunian soldiers that has enabled them to beat back their enemies thus far. But, Wulfhere, what think you of my beard?” The Cimmerian rubbed the bristly stubble that covered his face.

“I never saw you so unkempt before,” grunted the Vanir, “save when we had fled or fought for days so you could not be hacking at your face with a razor.”

“It will hide my scars in a few days,” grinned Conan. “When I told you to head to the east, did naught occur to you?”

“Why, I assumed you would ask for news of the princess among the wild men there.”

“And why did you suppose I would expect them to know?”

Wulfhere shrugged his shoulders. “I am done seeking to reason out your actions.”

Conan drew from his pouch the flint arrowhead. “In all the Brythunian Isles there is but one race who makes such points for their arrows. They are the Picts, who ruled these isles before we Æsir came, in the age of stone. Even now they tip their arrows often with flint, as I learned when I fought against them. There was a time, soon after the Acheronian legions left what would become Brythunia, when the Picts ranged, like wolves clear to the southern coast. But they were driven back into the heather country, and for so long have the lands to the west served as a buffer between them and Gerinth that he and his people have forgotten their ways.”

“Then you think Picts stole the princess? But how did they—?”

“That is for me to learn; that’s why we are heading for the shores of Asgard. The Æsir and the Picts have been fighting against each other for hundreds of years. Just now there is relative peace, and they are likely to know much of what goes on in the Dark Empire, as the Pictish kingdom is called—and dark it is, and strange. For these Picts come of an old, old race and their ways are beyond our ken.”

“And we will capture a man of Asgard and question him?”

Conan shook his head. “I will go ashore and mingle with them; they are of my race and language.”

“And when they recognize you,” grunted Wulfhere, “they will hang you to the highest tree. They have no cause to love you. True, you fought with them in your early youth, but since then you have raided their coasts more than once—not only with your barbarians, but with me, likewise.”

“And that is why I am growing a beard, old sea-dragon,” laughed the Cimmerian.

IV

Night had fallen over the rugged western coast of Asgard. Eastward loomed against the stars the distant mountains; westward, the dark seas stretched away to uncharted gulfs and unknown shores. The Raven rode at anchor on the northern side of a wild and rugged promontory that ran out into the sea, hugging close those beetling cliffs. Under cover of darkness Conan had steered her inshore, threading the treacherous reefs of that grim shore with a knowledge born of long experience. Conan was born in land-locked Cimmeria, but all the isles of the Northern Sea had been his stamping ground since the day he had been able to lift his first sword.

“And now,” said Conan, “I go ashore—alone.”

“Let me go with you!” cried Marcus, eagerly, but the Cimmerian shook his head.

“Your appearance and accent would betray us both. Nor can you either, Donal, for though I know the kings of the Æsir have listened to your harp, you are the only one besides myself who knows this coast, and if I fail to return you must take her out.”

The Cimmerian’s appearance was vastly altered. A thick, short beard masked his features, concealing his scars. He had laid aside his horse-hair crested helmet and his finely worked mail shirt, and had donned the round helmet and crude scale mail corselet of the Æsir. The arms of many nations were part of the Raven’s cargo.

“Well, old sea-wolf,” said he with a wicked grin, as he prepared to lower himself over the rail, “you have said nothing, but I see a gleam in your eyes; do you also wish to accompany me? Surely the Æsir could have nothing but welcome for so kind a friend who has burnt their villages and sunk their hide-bottomed boats.”

Wulfhere cursed him heartedly. “We seafarers are so well loved by the Æsir that my red beard alone would be enough to hang me. But even so, were I not captain of this ship, and bound by duty to it, I’d chance it rather than see you go into danger alone, and you such an empty-headed fool!”

Conan laughed deeply. “Wait for me until dawn,” he instructed, “and no longer.”

Then, dropping from the after rail, he struck out for the shore, swimming strongly in spite of his mail and weapons. He swam along the base of the cliffs and presently found a shelving ledge from which a steep incline led upward. It might have taxed the agility of a mountain goat to have made the ascent there, but Conan was not inclined to make the long circuit about the promontory. He climbed straight upward and, after a considerable strain of energy and skill, he gained the top of the cliffs and made his way along them to the point where they joined a steep ridge on the mainland. Down the southern slope of this he made his way toward the distant twinkle of fires that marked the Æsir town of Ara.

He had not taken half a dozen steps when a sound behind him brought him about, blade at the ready. A huge figure bulked dimly in the starlight.

“Hrut! What in the name of seven devils—”

“Wulfhere sent me after you,” rumbled the big carle. “He feared harm might come to you.”

Conan was a man of irascible temper. He cursed Hrut and Wulfhere impartially. Hrut listened stolidly and Conan knew the futility of arguing with him. The big Vanir was a silent, moody creature whose mind had been slightly affected by a sword-cut on the head. But he was brave and loyal and his skill at woodcraft was second only to Conan’s.

“Come along,” said Conan, concluding his tirade, “but you cannot come into the village with me. You understand that you must hide outside the walls?”

The carle nodded, and motioning him to follow, Conan took up his way at a steady trot. Hrut followed swiftly and silently as a ghost for all his bulk. Conan went swiftly, for he would be crowded indeed to accomplish what he had set out to do and return to the dragon-ship by mid-day—but he went warily, for he expected momentarily to meet a party of warriors leaving or returning to the town. Yet luck was with him, and soon he crouched among the trees within arrow shot of the village.

“Hide here,” he whispered to Hrut, “and on no account come any nearer the town. If you hear a brawl, wait until an hour before dawn; then, if you have heard naught from me, go back to Wulfhere. Do you understand?”

The usual nod was the answer and as Hrut faded back among the trees, Conan went boldly toward the village.

Ara was build close to the shore of a small, land-locked bay and Conan saw the crude hide coracles of the Æsir drawn up on the beach. In these they swept south in fierce raids on the Hyperboreans’ and Vanir, or crossed to their island nations for supplies and reinforcements. Ara was more of an army camp than a town, the real seat of Asgard lying some distance inland.

The village was not a particularly imposing place. Its few hundred wattle and mud huts were surrounded by a low wall of rough stones, but Conan knew the temper of its inhabitants. What the Æsir lacked in wealth and armament they made up in unquenchable ferocity. A hundred years of ceaseless conflict with Pict, Van, Brythunian and Cimmerian had left them little opportunity to cultivate the natural seeds of civilization that was a heritage of their native land. The Æsir had gone backward a step; they were behind their cousins in culture and artisanship, but they had not lost an iota of their fighting fury.

He strode up to the crude gate and shouted for entrance before he was perceived by the guard, who were prone to be lax in their vigilance in the face of apparent quietude-a universal Æsir trait. A harsh voice ordered him to stand still, while a torch thrust above the gate shone its flickering light full on him. In its illumination Conan could see, framed above the gate, fierce faces with unkempt beards and cold grey or blue eyes.

“Who are you?” one of the guards demanded.

“Partha of Ulahd. I have come to take service under your chief, Eochaidh.”

“Your garments are dripping wet.”

“And they were not it would be a marvel,” answered Conan. “There was a boat load of us set sail from Ulahd this morning. On the way a Vanir sea-rover ran us down and all but I perished in the waves and the arrows the pirates rained upon us. I caught a piece of the broken mast and essayed to float.”

“And what of the Vanir?”

“I saw the sails disappear southward. Mayhap they raid the Hyperboreans.”

“How is it that the guard along the beach did not see you when you finally came ashore?”

“I made shore more than a mile to the south, and glimpsing the lights through the trees, came here. I have been here aforetime and knew it to be Ara, whither I was bound.”

“Let him in,” growled one of the Æsir. “His tale rings true.”

The clumsy gate swung open and Conan entered the fortified camp of his hereditary foes. Fires blazed between the huts, and gathered close about the gate was the curious throng who had heard the guard challenge Conan. Men, women and children partook of the wildness and savagery of their hard country. The women, splendidly built amazons with loose flowing hair, stared at him curiously, and dirty-faced, half-naked children peered at him from under shocks of tangled hair—and Conan noted that each held’ a weapon of sorts. Brats scarcely able to toddle held a stone or a piece of wood. This symbolized the fierce life they led, when even the very babes had learned to snatch up a weapon at the first hint of alarm—aye, and to fight like wounded wildcats if need be. Conan noted the fierceness of the people, their lean, hard savagery. No wonder none had never broken these people!

Some fifteen years had passed since Conan had fought in the ranks of the ferocious warriors. He had no fear of being recognized by any of his former comrades. Nor, with his thick beard as a disguise, did he expect recognition as Wulfhere’s comrade.

Conan followed the warrior who led him toward the largest hut in the village. This, the pirate was sure, housed the chieftain and his folk. There was no elegance in the north. King Gol’s palace was a wattled hut. Conan smiled to himself as he compared this village with the cities he had seen in his wanderings. Yet it was not walls and towers that made a city, he reflected, but the people within.

He was escorted into the great hut where a score of warriors were drinking from leather jacks about a crudely carved table. At the head sat the chief, known to Conan of old, and at his elbow the inevitable minstrel—a characteristic of Æsir court life, however crude the court. Conan involuntarily compared this skin-clad, shock-headed kern to the cultured and chivalrous Donal.

“Son of Ailbe,” said Conan’s escort, “here is a weapon-man from the north who wishes to take service under you.”

“Who is your chief?” hiccupped Eochaidh, and Conan saw that the Æsir was drunk.

“I am a free wanderer,” answered Conan. “Aforetime I followed the bows of Donn Ruadh, in Ulahd.”

“Sit ye down and drink,” ordered Eochaidh with an uncertain wave of his hairy hand. “Later I will talk with you.”

No more attention was paid to Conan, except the Æsir made a place for him and a shockheaded gilly filled his cup with the fiery potheen so relished by the Æsir. The Wolf’s ranging eye took in all the details of the scene, passed casually over the Æsir fighting-men and rested long on two men who sat almost opposite him. One of these Conan knew—he was a renegade Nordheimer, Sigrel by name, who had found sanctuary among the foes of his race. Conan’s pulse quickened as he caught the evil eyes of the man fixed narrowly on him, but the sight of the man beside the Nordheimer made him forget Sigrel for the moment.

This man was short and strongly made. He was dark, much darker than Conan himself, and from a face as immobile as an idol’s, two black eyes glittered reptile-like. His square-cut black hair was caught back and confined by a narrow silver band about his temples, and he wore only a loin cloth and a broad leather girdle from which hung a short, barbed sword. A Pict! Conan’s heart leaped. He had intended drawing Eochaidh into conversation at once and, by the means of a tale he had already fabricated, to draw from him any information he might have of the whereabouts of the princess Helen. But the Æsir chief was too drunk for that now. He roared barbaric songs, pounded the board with his sword hilt in accompaniment to the wild strains of his minstrel’s harp, and between times guzzled potheen at an astounding rate. All were drunk—all save Conan and Sigrel, who furtively eyed the Cimmerian over the rim of his goblet.

While Conan racked his brain for a convincing way of drawing the Pict into conversation, the minstrel concluded one of his wild chants with a burst of sound and a rhyme that named Eochaidh “Wolf of Alba, greatest of raven-saters!”

The Pict reeled drunkenly to his feet, dashing his drinking-jack down on the board. The Picts habitually drank a smooth ale made from the heather blossoms. The fiery barley malt brewed by the Æsir maddened them. This particular Pict’s brain was on fire. His face, no longer immobile, writhed demoniacally and his eyes glowed like coals of black fire.

“True, Eochaidh is a great warrior,” he cried in his barbarous tongue, “but even he is not the greatest warrior in the north. Who is greater than King Brogar, the Dark One, who rules the ancient throne of Pictdom? And next to him is Grulk! I am Grulk the Skull-cleaver! In my house in Grothga there is a mat woven of the scalps of Hyperboreans, Hyperboreans, Vanirs—aye, and Æsir!”

Conan shrugged his shoulders in impatience. The drunken boastings of this savage would be likely to bring him a sword-thrust from the drink-fired Æsir, that would cut off all chance of learning anything from him. But the Pict’s next words electrified the Cimmerian.

“Who of all the north has taken a more beautiful women from the Hyperboreans than Grulk?” he shouted, reeling and glaring. “There were five of us in the hide-bottomed boat the gale blew southward. We went ashore in Gerinth’s realm for fresh water, and there we came upon three Hyperboreans deep in the forest—one lad and two beautiful maidens. The boy showed fight, but I, Grulk, leaping upon his shoulders, bore him to earth and disembowelled him with my sword. The women we took into our boat and fled with them northward, and gained the coast of the north, and took the women to Grothga!”

“Words—and empty words,” sneered Conan, leaning across the table. “There are no such women in Grothga now!”—taking a long chance.

The Pict howled like a wolf and fumbled drunkenly for his sword.

“When old Gonar, the high priest, looked on the face of the most finely dressed one—she who called herself Atalanta—he cried out that she was sacred to the moon god—that the symbol was upon her breast, though none but he could, see. So he sent her, with the other, Marcia, to the Isle of Altars, in the north, in a long boat the Æsir lent him, with fifteen warriors. The girl Atalanta is the daughter of a Brythunian nobleman and she will be acceptable in the eyes of Golka of the moon.”

“How long since they departed for the north?” asked Conan, as the Pict showed signs of making a quarrel of it.

“Three weeks; the night of the Nuptials of the Moon is not yet. But you said I lied—”

“Drink and forget it,” growled a warrior, thrusting a brimming goblet at him. The Pict seized it with both hands and thrust his face into the liquor, guzzling ravenously, while the liquid slopped down on his bare chest. Conan rose from his bench. He had learned all he wished to know, and he believed the Æsir were too drunk to notice his casual departure from the hut. Outside it might be a different matter to get past the wall. But no sooner had he risen than another was on his feet. Sigrel, the renegade Vanir, came around the table toward him.

“What, Partha,” he said maliciously, “is your thirst so soon satisfied?”

Suddenly he thrust out a hand and pushed back the Cimmerian’s helmet from his brows. Conan angrily struck his hand away, and Sigrel leaped back with a yell of ferocious triumph.

“Eochaidh! Men of the north! A thief and a liar is among you!”

The drunken warriors gaped stupidly.

“This is Conan!” shouted Sigrel, reaching for his sword, “Conan of Cimmeria, comrade of Wulfhere the Vanir!”

Conan moved with the volcanic quickness of a wounded tiger. Steel flashed in the flickering torchlight and Sigrel’s head rolled grinning beneath the feet of the astonished revelers. A single bound carried the barbarian to the door and he vanished while the Æsir were struggling to their feet, roaring bewilderedly and tugging at their swords.

In an instant the whole village was in an uproar. Men had seen Conan leap from the chief’s hut with his red-stained sword in his hand and they gave chase without asking the reason for his flight. The partially sobered feasters came tumbling out of the hut yelling and cursing, and when they shouted the real identity of their erstwhile guest a thunderous roar of rage went up and the whole village joined vengefully in the chase.

Conan, weaving in and out among the huts like a flying shadow, came on an unguarded point of the wall and, without slackening his headlong gait, cleared the low barrier with a bound and raced toward the forest. A quick glance over his shoulder showed him that his escape had been seen. Warriors were swarming over the wall, weapons in their hands.

It was some distance to the first thick tangle of trees. Conan took it full speed, running low and momentarily expecting an arrow between his shoulders. But the Æsir had no skill at archery and he reached the fringe of forest unscathed.

He had outfooted the fleetest of them, all save one who had outdistanced his fellows by a hundred yards and was now close upon the barbarian’s heels. Conan wheeled to dispose of this single foe, and even as he turned a stone rolled under his foot and flung him to his knee. He flung up his blade to block the sword that hovered over him like the shadow of Doom—but before it could fall, a giant shape catapulted from the trees, a heavy sword crashed down, and the man fell limply across Conan, his skull shattered.

The Cimmerian flung off the corpse and leaped to his feet. The yelling pursuers were close now, and Hrut, snarling like a wild beast, faced them—but Conan seized his wrist and dragged him back among the trees. The next instant they were fleeing in the direction from which they had first come to Ara, ducking and dodging among the trees.

Behind them, and presently on either side, they heard the crashing of men through the underbrush, and savage yells. Hundreds of warriors had joined in the hunt of their arch-enemy. Conan and Hrut slackened their speed and went warily, keeping in the deep shadows, flitting from tree to tree, now lying prone in the bushes to let a band of searchers go by. They had progressed some little distance when Conan was galvanized by the deep baying of hounds far behind them.

“We are ahead of our pursuers now, I think,” muttered the Cimmerian. “We might make a dash of it and gain the ridge and from thence the promontory and the ship. But they have loosed the wolfhounds on our trail and if we take that way, we will lead them and the warriors straight to Wulfhere’s ship. There are enough of them to swim out and board her and take her by storm. We must swim for it.”

Conan turned westward, almost at right-angles to the course they had been following, and they quickened their pace recklessly—and emerging into a small glade ran full into three Æsir who assailed them with yells. Evidently they had not been ahead of their hunters as far as Conan had thought, and the Cimmerian, hurling himself fiercely into the fray, knew that the fight must be short or else the sound would bring scores of warriors hastening to the spot.

One, of the Æsir engaged Conan while the other two fell upon the giant Hrut. A buckler turned Conan’s first vicious thrust and the Æsir’s sword beat down on his helmet, biting through the metal and into the scalp beneath. But before the warrior could strike again, Conan’s sword cut his left leg from under him, through the knee, and as he crumpled another stroke shore through his neck cords.

In the meantime Hrut had killed one of his opponents with a bear-like stroke that rended the upflung shield as though it had been paper and crushed the skull it sought to guard, and as Conan turned to aid him, the remaining foe leaped in with the desperate recklessness of a dying wolf, and it seemed to the Cimmerian that his stabbing sword sank half way to the hilt in the Vanir’s mighty bosom. But Hrut gripped the Scot’s throat in his huge left hand, thrust him away and struck a blow that shore through corselet and ribs and left the broken blade wedged in the dead man’s spinal column.

“Are you hurt badly, Hrut?” Conan was at his side, striving to undo the Vanir’s rent corselet so that he might staunch the flow of blood. But the carle pushed him away.

“A scratch,” he said thickly. “I’ve broken my sword—let us haste.”

Conan cast a doubtful look at his companion, then turned and hurried on in the direction they had been following. Seeing that Hrut followed with apparent ease, and hearing the baying of the hounds grow nearer, Conan increased his gait until the two were running fleetly through the midnight forest. At length they heard the lapping of the sea, and even as Hrut’s breathing grew heavy and labored they emerged upon a steep rocky shore, where the trees overhung the water. To the north, jutting out into the sea could be seen the vague bulk of the promontory behind which lay the Raven. Three miles of rugged coast lay between the promontory and the bay of Ara. Conan and Hrut were at a point a little over halfway between, and slightly nearer the promontory than the bay.

“We swim. from here,” growled Conan, “and it’s a long swim to Wulfhere’s ship, around the end of the promontory for the cliffs are too steep to climb on this side—but we can make it and the hounds can’t follow our tracks in the water—what in the name of gods—!”

Hrut had reeled and pitched headlong down the steep bank, his hands trailing in the water. Conan reached him instantly and turned him on his back; but the Vanir’s fierce face was set in death. Conan tore open his corselet and felt beneath it for an instant, then withdrew his hand and swore in amazement at the vitality that had enabled the carle to run for nearly half a mile with that terrible wound beneath his heart. The Cimmerian hesitated; then to his ears came the deep baying of the hounds. With a bitter curse he tore off his helmet and corselet and threw them aside, kicking off his sandals. Drawing his sword belt up another notch, he waded out into the water and then struck out strongly.

In the darkness before dawn Wulfhere, pacing the deck of his dragon-ship, heard a faint sound that was not the lapping of the waves against the hull or the cliffs. With a quick word to his comrades, the Vanir stepped to the rail and peered over. Marcus and Donal pressed close behind him, and presently saw a ghostly figure clamber out of the water and up the side. Conan of Cimmeria, blood-stained and half naked, clambered over the rail and snarled:

“Out oars, wolves, and pull for the open sea, before we have half a thousand Æsir on our backs! And head her prow for the north—the Picts have taken Gerinth’s sister there.”

“Where’s Hrut?” rumbled Wulfhere, as Conan started toward the sweep-head.

“Drive a brass nail into the main-mast,” snarled the Cimmerian. “Gerinth owes us ten pounds already.”

The bitterness in his eyes belied the harsh callousness of his words.

V

Marcus paced the deck of the dragon-ship. The wind filled the sails and the long ash oars of the rowers sent the long, lean craft hurtling through the water, but to the impatient Brythunian it seemed that they moved at a snail’s pace.

“But why did the Pict call her Atalanta?” he cried, turning to Conan. “True, her maid was named Marcia—but we have no real proof that the woman with her is the princess Helen.”

“We have all the proof in the world,” answered the Cimmerian. “Do you think the princess would admit her true identity to her abductors? If they knew they held Gerinth’s sister, they would have half his kingdom as ransom.”

“But what did the Pict mean by the Nuptials of the Moon?”

Wulfhere looked at Conan and Conan started to speak, shot a quick glance at Marcus and hesitated.

“Tell him,” nodded Donal. “He must know eventually.”

“The Picts worship strange and abhorrent gods,” said the Cimmerian, “as is well known to we who roam the sea, eh Wulfhere?”

“Right,” growled the giant. “Many a Vanir has died. on their altar stones.”

“One of their gods is Golka of the Moon. Every so often they present a captured virgin of high rank to him. On a strange, lonely isle in the north stands a grim black altar, surrounded by columns of stone, such as you have seen at Stonehenge. On that altar, when the moon is full, the girl is sacrificed to Golka.”

Marcus shuddered; his nails bit into his palms.

“Gods of Acheron, can such things be?”

“Acheron has fallen long ago,” grunted the Skull-splitter. “Her gods are dead. They will not aid us. But fear not—” he lifted his gleaming, keen-edged axe, “here is that which will aid us. Let me lead my wolves into the stone circle and we will give Golka such a blood-sacrifice as he has never dreamed of!”

“Sail on the port bow!” came the sudden shout of the look-out in the cross-trees. Wulfhere wheeled suddenly, beard bristling. A few moments later all on board could make out the long, low lines of the strange craft.

“A dragon-ship,” swore Conan, “and making full speed with oar and sail—she means to cut across our bows, Wulfhere.”

The chieftain swore, his cold blue eyes beginning to blaze. His whole body quivered with eagerness and a new roaring note came into the voice that bellowed commands to his crew.

“By the bones of , he must be a fool! But we’ll give him his fill!”

Marcus caught the Vanir’s mighty arm and swung him about.

“Our mission is not to fight every sea-thief we meet,” the young Brythunian cried angrily. “You were engaged to search for the princess Helen; we must not jeopardize this expedition. Now we have at last a clue; will you throw away our chances merely to glut your foolish lust for battle?”

Wulfhere’s eyes flamed.

“This to me on my own deck?” he roared. “I’ll not show my stern to any rover for Gerinth and all his gold! If it’s fight he wants, it’s fight he’ll get.”

“The lad’s right, Wulfhere,” said Conan quietly, “but by the blood of the gods we’ll have to run for it, for yon ship is aimed straight for us and I see a running about on the deck that can mean naught but preparation for a sea-fight.”

“And run we cannot,” said Wulfhere in deep satisfaction, “for I know her—that ship is Thorwald’s Fire-Woman, and he is my life-long enemy. She is as fleet as the Raven and if we flee we will have her hanging on our stern all the way to the north. We must, fight.”

“Then let us make it short and desperate,” snapped Conan, scowling. “There’s scant use in trying to ram her; run alongside and we’ll take her by storm.”

“I was born in a sea-fight, and I sank dragon-ships before I ever saw you,” roared Wulfhere. “Take the sweep-head.” He turned to Marcus. “Hast ever been in a sea-brawl, youngster?”

“No, but if I fail to go further than you can lead, hang me to your dragon-beak!” snapped the angered Brythunian.

Wulfhere’s cold eyes glinted in amused appreciation as he turned away.

There was little maneuvering of ships in that primitive age. The Vanir attained the sea-craft they had in a later day. The long, low serpents of the sea drove straight for each other, while warriors lined the sides of each, yelling and clashing sword on shield.

Marcus, leaning on the rail, glanced at the wolfish warriors beside and below him, and glanced across the intervening waves at the fierce, light-eyed, yellow-bearded Vanir who lined the sides of the opposing galley—pirates they were, and hereditary enemies of the red-maned Vanir. The young Brythunian shuddered involuntarily, not from fear but because of the innate, ruthless savagery of the scene, as a man might shudder at a pack of ravening wolves, without fearing them.

And now there came a giant twanging of bowstrings and a rain of death leaped through the air. Here the Vanir had the advantage; they were the bowmen of the North Sea. The pirates, like their Vanir cousins, knew little of archery. Arrows came whistling back, but their flight lacked the deadly accuracy of the other shafts. Marcus saw men go down in windrows aboard the craft, while the rest crouched behind the shields that lined the sides. The three men at the sweep-head fell and the long sweep swung in a wide, erratic arc; the galley lost way and Marcus saw a blond giant he instinctively knew to be Thorwald himself leap to the sweep-head. Arrows rattled off his mail like hailstones, and then the two craft ran alongside with a rending and crashing of oars and a grinding of timbers.

The wolf-yell of the Vanir split the skies and in an instant all was a red chaos. The grappling hooks bit in, gripping keel to keel. Shields locked, the double line writhed and rocked as each crew sought to beat the other back from its bulwarks and gain the opposing deck. Marcus, thrusting and parrying with a wild-eyed giant across the rails, saw in a quick glance over his foe’s shoulder Thorwald rushing from the sweep-head to the rail. Then his straight sword was through the pirate’s throat and he flung one leg over the rail. But before he could leap into the other ship, another howling devil was hacking and hewing at him, and only a shield suddenly flung above his head saved his life. It was Donal the minstrel who had come to his aid.

Toward the waist of the ship, Wulfhere surged on through the fray and one mighty sweep of his axe cleared a space for him for an instant. In that instant he was over the rail on the deck of the Fire-Woman and Conan, Thorfinn, Edric and Snorri were close behind him. Snorri died the moment his feet touched the Fire-Woman’s deck and a second later an axe split Edric’s skull, but already the Vanir were pouring through the breach made in the lines of the defenders and in a moment the pirates were fighting with their backs to the wall.

On the blood-slippery deck the two Vanir chieftains met. Wulfhere’s axe hewed the shaft of Thorwald’s spear in twain, but before the Vanir could strike again, the man snatched a sword from a dying hand and the edge bit through Wulfhere’s corselet over his ribs. In an instant the Skull-splitter’s mail was dyed red, but with a mad roar he swung his axe in a two-handed stroke that rent Thorwald’s armor like paper and cleft through shoulder bone and spine. The pirate chief fell dead in a red welter of blood and the warriors, disheartened, fell back, fighting desperately.

The Vanir yelled with fierce delight. But the battle was not over. The pirates, knowing there was no mercy for the losers of a sea-fight, battled stubbornly. Marcus was in the thick of it, with Donal close at his side. A strange madness had gripped the young Brythunian. To his mind, distorted momentarily by the fury of the fray, it seemed that these pirates were holding him back from Helen. They stood in his way and while he and his comrades wasted time with them, Helen might be in desperate need of rescue. A red haze burned before Marcus’ eyes and his sword wove a web of death in front of him. A huge pirate dented his shield with a sweeping axe-head and Marcus flung his shield away, ripping the warrior open with the other hand.

“By the blood of the gods,” Conan rasped, “I never heard before that Acheronians went berserk, but—”

Marcus had forced his way over the corpse-littered benches to the poop. A sword battered down on his helm as he leaped upward, but he paid no heed; even as he thrust mechanically, his eyes fell on a strangely incongruous ornament suspended by a slender, golden chain from the pirate’s bull neck. On the end of that chain, glittering against his broad, mailed chest, hung a tiny jewel—a single ruby carved in the symbol of the acanthus. Marcus cried out like a man with a death wound under his heart and like a madman plunged in blindly, scarcely knowing what he did. He felt his blade sink deep and the force of his charge hurled him to the poop deck on top of his victim.

Struggling to his knees, oblivious to the hell of battle about him, Marcus tore the jewel from the pirate’s neck and pressed it to his lips. Then he gripped the pirate’s shoulders fiercely.

“Quick!” he cried in the tongue of the Hyperboreans, which the pirates understood. “Tell me, before I rend the heart from your breast, whence you got this gem!”

The pirate’s eyes were already glazing. He was past acting on his own initiative. He heard an insistent voice questioning him, and answered dully, scarcely knowing that he did so: “From one of the girls we took... from the... Pictish boat.”

Marcus shook him, frantic with a sudden agony. “What of them? Where are they?”

Conan, seeing something was forward, had broken from the fight and now bent, with Donal, over the dying pirate.

“We... sold... them,” muttered the pirate in a fading-whisper, “to... Thorleif Hordi’s son... at..”

His head fell back; the voice ceased.

Marcus looked up at Donal with pain-haunted eyes.

“Look, Donal,” he cried, holding up the chain with the ruby pendant. “See? It is Helen’s! I myself gave it to her—she and Marcia were on this very ship—but now—who is this Thorleif Hordi’s son?”

“Easy to say,” broke in Conan. “He is a Nordheimers barbarian who has established himself in the northern isles. Be of good cheer, young sir; Helen is better off in the hands of the Vanir than in those of the Pictish savages of the Hjaltlands.”

“But surely we must waste no time now!” cried Marcus. “The gods have cast this knowledge into our hands; if we tarry we may again be put upon a false scent!”

Wulfhere and his Vanir had cleared the poop and waist, but on the after deck the survivors still stubbornly contended with their conquerors. There was scant mercy shown in a sea-fight of that age. Had the pirates been victorious they would have spared none; nor did they expect or ask for mercy.

Conan made his way through the waist of the ship where dead and dying lay heaped, and struggled his way through the yelling Vanir to where Wulfhere stood plying his dripping axe. By main force he tore the Skull-splitter from his prey and jerked him about.

“Have done, old wolf,” he growled. “The fight is won; Thorwald is dead. Would you waste steel on these miserable carles?”

“I leave this ship when no pirate remains alive!” thundered the battle-maddened Vanir. Conan laughed grimly.

“Have done! Bigger game is afoot! These pirates will drink blood before you slaughter them all and we will need every man before the faring is over. From the lips of a dying pirate we have heard it—the princess is in the steading of Thorleif Hordi’s son, in the northern isles.”

Wulfhere’s beard bristled with ferocious joy. So many were his foes that it was hard to name a Vanir farer with whom he had no feud.

“Is it so? Then, ho, wolves—leave the rest of these sea-rats to drown or swim as they will! We go to burn Thorleif Hordi’s son’s skalli over his head!”

Slowly, by words and blows, he beat his raging Vanir off and, marshalling them together, drove them over the gunwales into their own ship. The bleeding, battle-weary pirates watched them go, leaning on their reddened weapons in sullen silence. The toll taken had been terrific, but by far the greater loss aboard the Fire-Woman. From stem to stern dead men wallowed among the broken benches in a welter of crimson.

“Ho, rats!” Wulfhere shouted, as his Vanir cast off and the oars of the Raven began to ply, “I leave you your blood-gutted craft and the carrion that was Thorwald. Make the best you can of them and thank the gods that I spared your lives!”

The losers harkened in sullen silence, answering only with black scowls, all save one—a lean, wolfish figure of a warrior, who brandished a notched and bloody axe and shouted: “Mayhap you will curse the gods some day, Skull-splitter, because you spared Halfgar Wolf’s-tooth!”

It was a name, in sooth, that Wulfhere had cause to remember well in later days. But now the chief merely roared in laughter, though Cork mac frowned.

“It is a foolish thing to taunt beaten men, Wulfhere,” said he. “But you have a nasty cut across your ribs. Let me see to it.”

Marcus turned away with the gem that Helen had worn. The flood of savagery during the last few hours left him dazed and weary. But he had discovered strange, dark deeps in his own soul. A few minutes of fierce sword-play on the gunwales of a sea-rover had sufficed to bridge the gap of three centuries. Coolness in action, a characteristic drilled into his forebears by countless Acheronian officers, and inherited by him, had been swept away in an instant before the wild, old Æsir fury before which many an attacker had staggered on the northern beaches. For a few mad moments he had been one with the wild men about him. The shadows of Acheron were fading; was he, too, like all the world, reverting to the nature of his Brythunian ancestors, bloodbrothers in savagery to Wulfhere Skull-splitter?

VI

“It is not far from here to Kaldjorn where Thorleif Hordi’s son has built his stealing,” said Conan, glancing abstractedly at the mast where now sixteen brass nails gleamed dully.

“The Sudeyar lie to the east, just out of sight over the sea-rim,” Conan continued. “We must resort to craft again. Thorleif Hordi’s son has four long ships and three hundred carles. We have one ship and less than eighty men. We can not do as Wulfhere wishes: go ashore and burn Thorleif’s skalli—and he will not be likely to give up such a prize as the princess Helen without a battle.

“This is what I suggest: Thorleif’s steading is on the east side of the isle of Kaldjorn, which luckily is a small one. We will draw in under cover of night, on the west side. There are high cliffs there and the ship should be safe from detection for a time, since none of Thorleif’s folk have any reason to wander about on the western part of the island. Then I will go ashore and seek to steal the princess.”

Wulfhere laughed. “You will find it a more difficult matter to hoax the Nordheimers than you did the Æsir. Your locks will brand you as a Cimmerian and they will cut the blood-eagle in your back.”

“I will creep among them like a serpent and they will know naught of my coming,” answered the Cimmerian. “Your Nordheimer is a very dullard when it comes to stealth, and easy to deceive.”

“I will go with you,” broke in Marcus. “This time I will not be denied.”

“While I must gnaw my thumb on the west side of the isle,” grumbled Wulfhere enviously.

“Wait,” said Donal. “I have a better plan, Conan.”

“Say on,” the Cimmerian prompted him.

“We shall buy the princess from Thorleif Hordi’s son. Wulfhere—how much loot have you aboard this ship?”

“Enough gold to ransom a noble lady, mayhap,” grunted the Vanir, “but not enough to buy back Gerinth’s sister—that would cost half a kingdom. Moreover, Thorleif is my bloodenemy, and would rather see my head on a spear at his skalli-door than all Gerinth’s gold in his coffers.”

“Thorleif need not know this is your ship,” said Donal. “Nor can he know that the lady he holds captive is the princess Helen; to him she will be the lady Atalanta, no more. Now, here is my plan: you, Wulfhere, shall disguise yourself and take your place with your warriors, while Thorfinn, your second-in-command, acts as chief. Marcus here shall play the part of Atalanta’s brother, while I shall be her childhood mentor; we shall say we have come to ransom her, cost what it may—hiring this Vanir-crew to aid us, since the Hyperboreans have no more ships and no men to spare from their borders.”

“It will cost a-plenty,” grumbled Wulfhere. “Thorleif is as shrewd as he is rapacious; he will drive a hard bargain.”

“Let him. Gerinth will pay you back, though it cost you all the loot in your hold. The king has sent me with you to be his judge in these matters—and let my head be forfeit for any promise I should make in his name, for he shall keep it!”

“I trust your sincerity and Gerinth’s,” said Wulfhere, “yet this plan is not to my liking. Rather would I fall on Thorleif’s skalli like a thunderbolt, with arrow-storm and sharp-edged steel.”

“As would I,” said Conan; “yet Donal’s plan is best if rescue of the princess Helen is our goal. Thorleif’s carles outnumber us at least three to one, and even were we to best them in a surprise attack the princess might well be slain in the fray. Donal’s plan is good; Thorleif would contest us with steel were he to know whom he holds as captive, but if he thinks he holds hostage only a noble lady of the Hyperboreans, Atalanta, then doubtless he’ll accept a hold full of loot for her rather than risk his ships and men in a fight. And if Donal’s plan fails, then we’ll still have mine to try.

“Well,” said Wulfhere, “there’s wisdom in Donal’s way, I’ll not gainsay it. But I’ll stay on the strand with the crew while Thorfinn and Marcus and Donal bargain for Gerinth’s sister, lest I should betray our venture; for I have sworn that when next I see Thorleif Hordi’s son’s treacherous face I shall cleave it to the chin!”

“I’ll be in on the bargaining,” said Conan. “Thorleif shall not recognize me through this beard.”

“Likely not,” grunted the Vanir, “for he saw you but briefly, and that during a sea-fight. Yet I’ll be ready to lead the crew in a charge should aught go wrong at the dickering. Steersman!” he bellowed, “make for the Scottish mainland—we’ll need a day’s rest to lick our wounds and, gather provisions before we sail for the northern isles.”

As the ship headed for the wild coastland, not one man of its sharp-eyed crew noticed the ship of the defeated pirates, with barely enough men left to man the oars, bearing off across the horizon of the gray sea toward the northeast, its square sail belled to the wind, its rowers working frantically—

Nor, far in its wake, too far to be seen save by the most keen-eyed of lookouts, the small, dark longboat full of small, dark men—men with bows, flint-tipped arrows and dark eyes full of intent watchfulness and grim purpose.

A cold, thin drizzle chilled the air and made the rocks on the beach before Thorleif Hordi’s son’s steading glimmer as if with dark slime. Beyond drifting wraiths of mist the forest of spruce and pine rose like minarets in a sea of murk. Four long ships lay drawn up on the shore. Farther down the beach lay a fifth with the forepart of its keel upon the sand; near it stood a large band of red-bearded men in scale mail corselets and horned helmets, bearing spears, bows and shields. A high wall of pointed logs paralleled the upper edge of the beach, and from behind this wall rose smoke from the skalli of Thorleif and the lesser dwellings of his carles; while before it and about its broad gate stood ranked over a hundred blond Vanir, armored and armed much like those clustered about the lone long ship. Between the two large bands of warriors, some distance from either, stood a small knot of men divided into two parts and facing one another.

“Bring forth your loot,” rumbled Thorleif Hordi’s son. “You’ll not purchase the Lady Atalanta without a lot of it. By Ymir, she’s a comely wench, and I’d minded to have her for one of my own brides.”

Conan eyed the huge Vanir chieftain closely. Thorleif was a giant of a man, greater even than Wulfhere, with a face pitted with scars and creased with lines of hard cruelty. There was a gap in the jawline where pale flesh showed through the thick blond beard, and Conan hoped the man would not remember who had given him that scar in battle; but the Cimmerian’s dark beard had grown thickly, and Thorleif had given no sign of recognition since the opening of negotiations.

“What is a wench to you,” said Conan, “even a noble one, to a hold full of riches? Bring the lady forth, and we’ll lay the gold at your feet.”

“The gold first,” grunted Thorleif. “If it’s not enough, I’ll keep her.”

“Who will pay you more,” said Donal, “than her own brother? Your raids will bring you wenches aplenty, even noble ones; but the price offered you by the noble Marcus, Atalanta’s brother, is far greater than another would pay, as you must well know.”

“Aye,” said Marcus, “and if you’ll not accept this lavish sum, I’ll spend a greater to return with a fleet that’ll sweep this island clean of pirates! By Mitra, when Acheron was in power...”

Thorleif laughed; Conan laid a hand on Marcus’ shoulder.

“Acheron is long dead!” roared the Vanir. “And not even at the height of her power did her rule touch these islands. But you are a headstrong youth. If you could bring an army here, why do you come now with this single shipload of Vanir pirates? Bah! bring forth your gold, and I’ll decide whether it’s worthy to ransom the Lady Atalanta and her maid.”

Conan signalled the group of Vanir clustered about the long ship, and a dozen of them lifted burdens and trudged up the beach toward the debating parties.

“’Ware a trap,” growled one of Thorleif’s aides—a lean, hard sea-wolf. “We be but twenty here, and with this approaching twelve they will outnumber us.”

“Well, then—” Thorleif raised his hand, and twenty men detached themselves from those ranks by the fortress-wall, striding down the beach to join the score or so that already formed his band. Conan felt a twinge of suspicion. Then Thorleif turned to the Vanir Thorfinn and said: “I recognize your ship, the Raven—it belonged to my enemy Wulfhere Hausakluifr. How came you into possession of it?”

“Wulfhere was my captain,” said Thorfinn, “but he wronged me and I split his skull in combat.”

The dozen men from the Vanir ship joined the group and let fall their burdens on the beach. Knives ripped open the cloth bags and a glittering profusion of gold-wrought works of art and sparkling jewelry spilled out on the sand.

“This is a ransom worthy of a princess,” said Donal, “not merely a noble lady. Give us Atalanta and we shall go in peace.”

The eyes of Thorleif Hordi’s son lit up at the sight of so much gold and jewelry. “Let it be so,” he said, and Conan relaxed slightly. The twenty-odd men who had detached themselves from the ranked warriors near the wall had now joined Thorleif’s group; the Cimmerian now saw that in their midst was a woman of surpassing beauty, and he knew that she could be none other than the princess Helen. Yet as she drew closer he saw that her white garments were torn—her dark hair was in disarray—her beautiful features were strained as if in agony, and her wide dark eyes seemed to burn with a hopeless yearning, a mute appeal mingled with a near-hopeless resignation.

“Helen!”

The girl looked up at the sound of Marcus’ involuntary cry; her face suddenly lost its look of hopeless apathy and took on an expression of animation and joy. Then, before her guards could stop her, she leaped away and dashed across the narrow space between the two opposing groups and threw herself into her lover’s arms.

“Marcus—oh Marcus, help me!” she cried. “They tortured Marcia—O Mitra! They made her tell all, and then they killed her—and they mean to kill you. Flee, Marcus—flee! It’s a trap!”

Suddenly Conan saw, too late, that the men who had joined Thorleif’s delegation were not Vanir but—pirates. In the fore-front of them stood Halfgar Wolf’s-tooth—and Conan suddenly realized that the twenty-odd men who had joined Thorleif’s party were the survivors of the pirate ship Fire-Woman.

“Fools!” roared Thorleif. “I knew who you were from the start of your thievish bargainings. These pirate wolves sailed night and day to beat you here, for a wounded member of their crew overheard what Marcus learned from the dying carle. Aye, the princess Helen, sister of Gerinth, is she you seek to regain—deny it not, for Halfgar and I learned it from the lips of the maid Marcia ere she died under the torture. And now you shall die also, Conan of Cimmeria, and your fool chieftain who doubtless hides amid his red-bearded carles by the long ship. I shall have your treasure, your long ship, the princess Helen—and the head of Wulfhere!”

Marcus, only half-comprehending what was said, looked up from Helen’s tear-stained face and realized that Thorleif and Halfgar were the ones who had tortured the girl beyond endurance. With a frantic roar he unsheathed his sword and drove straight at Thorleif. The Vanir chief laughed as he drew his own blade and parried the youth’s frantic stroke.

“Devil!” shrieked Marcus. “I’ll have your heart...”

Thorleif laughed again as his blade parried Marcus’ once more and shattered the youth’s sword like glass. Marcus sprang for the Vanir with a fury equal to the Nordheimer’s berserker-rage, and only Conan’s sword, intercepting Thorleif’s whistling blade, saved the youth from a split skull; as it was, the Cimmerian’s blade was shattered to flinders as well. Then Marcus leaped and his fingers locked about Thorleif’s throat; the bearlike Vanir gasped at the steely grip of the youth’s fingers, at the desperate strength and ferocity of the Brythunian who was scarcely half his weight, and tried to cry out in terror, but felt his windpipe choked off. Dropping his sword, useless at these close quarters, he battered with his massive fists at the youth’s rib-cage till Marcus fell back, half conscious yet still clutching at the Vanir’s bull neck...

The Nordheimers rushed in and Conan, striving to save Marcus from the bull-like Thorleif, was driven back. A fierce blond warrior swung at him with an axe; Conan’s shield fended off the blow but his broken sword left him helpless to retaliate; then, as the Vanir hove up his axe for another stroke, Donal’s blade darted in to pierce the links of his scale armor and the warrior crashed to the earth like a fallen tree. Conan saw a pirate warrior leaping toward Donal like a maddened wolf; with all his strength he sprang and interposed his battered shield between Donal and the pirate’s axe. The arching blade crashed through the lifted shield and Conan cried out involuntarily as pain lanced his left arm; then Donal’s sword slashed in a silvery arc and the pirate carle fell with his head half-severed, blood spurting from his heart-veins while his last dying war-cry turned abruptly to bloody gurglings from his sundered windpipe.

Battle-cries rang out and the clash of steel, filled the air. Conan rose shakily as the battle surged about him; his right hand clutched the hilt of a broken sword, his shield hung shattered on his bleeding left arm. He saw, amid the press of fighting-men around him, Thorleif Hordi’s son contending against Wulfhere’s captain Thorfinn, who held his ground with valor while Marcus attempted to crawl away with the fainting Helen. Then, even as Conan watched, a dying pirate slashed across Thorfinn’s ankles with a dagger and the Vanir fell—and as he fell Thorleif’s blade lashed out and split his skull. Donal was engaged with the lean Vanir who was Thorleif’s lieutenant, and Conan saw with horror that Thorleif Hordi’s son was about to cleave the defenseless Marcus in half as he strove to hurry Helen to safety. Without thinking Conan roared and launched himself toward the Vanir; Thorleif wheeled and, seeing the Cimmerian charging him with shattered blade and broken shield, laughed aloud and hove his sword aloft for the death-stroke...

Conan wheeled and dodged the whistling blade just in time. Then his foot slipped in a patch of beach-slime and he fell sprawling. Thorleif hove up his sword for a final blow—but as he swung it down the blade crashed on an upraised shield and suddenly he was gazing into the blazing eyes of Wulfhere the Skull-splitter.

“Smite again!” roared the Vanir chieftain. “Aye, try your steel against another than wounded warriors and helpless women, spawn of Helheim!”

Conan lurched to his feet and raced to the aid of Marcus; a Nordheimer warrior surged to stop him, but Conan was beneath the sweep of the man’s axe like a cat and his broken sword ripped into his bull-throat.

Thorleif Hordi’s son roared with rage and struck with all his might, and his great thick-bladed sword crashed ringingly against the rim of Wulfhere’s horned helmet and sent sparks flying. The Vanir chief reeled back, half-dazed, and Thorleif rushed in for the kill; but Wulfhere, rallying, roared and swung his axe with all his strength. The axe-blade dipped beneath Thorleif’s shield and crunched in through steel mail and into flesh. Thorleif, maddened, lashed back with a blow that clove Wulfhere’s shield asunder—but the Vanir, bellowing like a wounded bear, gave back a blow of his axe that shore through the Nordheimer’s helmet and split his skull to the jawbone, and Thorleif crashed to the earth like a felled tree.

The battle raged like a maelstrom of steel as the Vanir from the long ship rushed to battle with the Nordheimers warriors, who in turn had charged from their position by the stockade-wall. Conan raced to the side of Marcus, who with the help of Donal was protecting the princess Helen.

“Back to the ship!” yelled Conan. “Leave the treasure and forget your blood-feuds! Protect the princess!”

The Vanir paused in their retreat to draw bow to ear, and at least a score of the charging Nordheimers went down before a storm of arrows, somewhat evening the odds—but the rest came on. Halfgar and his pirates had retreated slightly, but now with their Nordheimers allies at their backs returned to the offense with wild war-cries.

The rushing factions crashed together in a storm of ringing steel; flashing blades ripped through mail and flesh, bones snapped under the impact of mighty blows, and in a moment the beach-stones were slippery with blood while Vanir strove against pirate and Nordheimer in a desperate fury that neither gave nor asked for quarter. Halfgar slew a Vanir with a mighty stroke of his axe, then leaped for Donal who was warding the frightened princess. Donal was a competent swordsman but he could not stand before the berserker fury of the pirate’s charge; the force of Halfgar’s blow against the buckler he threw up barely in time drove him to his knees. Then the pirate chief hove up his axe for a killing blow.

Conan, his sword and shield useless, tensed to charge Halfgar bare-handed—yet knew with a pang of despair that he was too far away to avert the blow that would slay Donal. Then with a roar of rage a hurtling form crashed into the pirate and the two went down together, threshing and snarling. It was Marcus, unarmed, yet in the grip of a berserker-rage as terrible as any Vanir’s.

Conan ducked a singing sword-blade, leaped under his attacker’s guard and drove his dagger against the warrior’s scale-mail with all his strength. The blade snapped—but not before it had ripped through the mail and buried itself deep in the Vanir’s heart.

Snatching up the fallen warrior’s sword and shield, Conan leaped to where Marcus and Halfgar were battling. The young Brythunian was having the worst of it; his wounds had weakened him, and his strength was not equal to his fury. Even as Conan sprang forward Halfgar broke the furious grip of his opponent and smashed the front of his shield into the youth’s face; then, even as he shifted his axe to slay the stunned Marcus, the pirate saw a glitter of bright crimson at his feet. It was the gem that had adorned the princess Helen, its slender chain now broken, torn from Marcus during the fight. Halfgar stooped quickly and snatched it up, hastily looping the chain round his axe-belt. That instant of avarice was all Conan needed to close the gap and save Marcus from the stroke of a butcher’s axe; when the pirate looked up the Cimmerian was already upon him like a whirlwind of fury. He hove up his axe in an instinctive attempt to ward off Conan’s furious stroke, but the sword-blade bit through the handle, sending the axe-head flying, and crashed to fragments on his iron helm. The good metal saved Halfgar’s skull but the force of Conan’s blow sent the pirate crashing senseless to the beach.

“Fall back to the ship,” yelled Conan. “Aid here for the prince Marcus!”

Donal rushed to Conan’s aid, and the princess Helen with him, her face white and tearful but strong with a concern that overrode her fear. Ignoring Conan’s bewildered cursings, she helped the minstrel lift the stunned Marcus and bear him away.

The pirates and Nordheimers, having seen both their chieftains fall, had momentarily slackened in their battle-fury; but now, seeing the Vanir withdrawing rapidly toward their ship with the hostage Brythunian noblewoman in their midst, they surged back to the fight with renewed frenzy. And then, as if in answer to a prearranged signal, the war-cries of a mighty host came roaring from the far end of the beach, beyond when the Raven lay with her prow on the sand—and from the forest burst a horde of charging Nordheimers that outnumbered both the contesting groups put together.

“The trap’s sprung!” yelled Conan, raging. “To the ship!”

“Ymir!” Wulfhere scattered a Nordheimer’s brains with a mighty stroke of his axe. “Let your blades drink blood, sons of Vanir-mark!”

But even as the retreating Vanir reached the prow of their beached ship, Conan saw it was too late. They had barely time to group themselves into a knot about the bow, with shields overlapping and blades bristling from their ranks like steel quills, when Thorleif’s forces smote from both sides like giant ocean waves dashing in fury against a great rock. The Vanir raged like giants at Ragnarok in their battlefury, dealing death to two for every one of their own that was slain, yet even as Conan raged and slew with the best of them he knew that the odds were too great. They were outnumbered three to one and the newcomers to the battle were fresh. The Vanir could not practice their superior archery at these close quarters, nor could they scramble up the sides of their long ship...

Suddenly a howl of fury seemed to shake the skies—a scream of war-fury that welled up from a thousand throats—and then a storm of arrows from all sides darkened the already murky skies. Wooden shafts rattled down like rain and splintered against the scaled corselets of Vanir, pirate and Nordheimer alike. Conan saw one of Wulfhere’s men reel, his neck transfixed by a dark, flint-tipped arrow; a blond Nordheimer warrior staggered and fell with a similar arrow jutting from his right eye-socket. Most of the shafts that found a mark broke and splintered harmlessly against the bucklers and mail of the Vanir, but all too many out of those hurtling thousands thudded to rest in living flesh.

The Nordheimers and pirates whirled to face this new foe, and Conan, straining to see above the heads of his enemies, saw the beach in both directions a-swarm with dark, running figures—Picts! Now the arrow-storm ceased and the dark runners, with howls of blood-mad battle frenzy, hurled themselves on the confused outer ranks of the Nordheimers.

“Into the ship!” yelled Conan as the battle-press slackened. “Once there we can hold off both Pict and Nordheimer with arrow-storm if need be.”

The Vanir surged over the sides of their long ship, unhindered by the Nordheimers who had turned to meet the savage charge of the Picts. A second rain of arrows from the charging Picts swept the deck as the warriors clambered aboard. Donal and Conan, who had shielded Helen with their bucklers at some risk to themselves, hurried the girl to the hold despite her protests over the safety of Marcus. Wulfhere himself helped lift the wounded prince to the deck and bear him to safety.

“A sword!” gasped the half-conscious youth. “Give me a sword to slay the damned pirate who tortured my lady’s maid before her eyes!”

“Methinks Halfgar is dead,” rumbled the Vanir gently, admiration for the Brythunian’s courage stirring his fierce soul. “I saw Conan smite him on the helm in battle, and he rose not from that stroke.”

“Then he died too swiftly!” cried Marcus, striving to lift himself from the deck; but Wulfhere held him down firmly.

The surviving Vanir were now all aboard ship and ranged with their bows behind the row of shields that lined both rails; but the ship’s bow was still grounded on the strand and they could not escape to sea. The Nordheimers on shore, rallying from the confusion of the Pictish onslaught, closed ranks and locked shields and began a slow retreat to the stockade where the dark warriors were already swarming in through the open gates. The Picts hurled themselves in screaming fury upon the retreating Nordheimer phalanx, clad only in animal hides and wielding weapons of flint and bronze against the iron mail and blades of the Vanir, seemingly willing to lose three or four men for every Nordheimer they dragged down to death. Then smoke began to curl up from behind the stockade wall, and the Vanir roared with dismay as they realized their huts and storehouses were being fired. The phalanx wavered, then broke as the enraged Nordheimers charged in frenzied rage toward the skalli, hewing down the naked warriors who barred their path, while the bulk of the Pictish force pursued and harried them through the gates and into the stockade.

A wave of Picts rushed the long ship, but a storm of arrows from Wulfhere’s archers drove them back. The dark warriors retreated to the edge of the forest, where they rallied. The Vanir tensed for another attack, but it did not come; instead, a flag of truce was raised. Then a half dozen warriors strode down the beach and halted before the prow of the long ship. In their midst was an old man, spare but erect, who wore a robe of wolf-hides ornamented barbarically with the feathered heads of birds and the skulls of animals.

“What do you want?” demanded Conan in the language of the Picts.

“I am Gonar, High Priest of Pictdom.” The old man’s voice, though high-pitched, was resonant and strong. “Give us the moon-maid who is to be our sacrifice to Golka, and whom the pirates stole from us—else we shall burn your ship with fire-arrows.”

“There is no moon-maid here,” said Conan.

“We saw her borne aboard your ship,” persisted the Pictish priest. “She was brought to us from a land far to the south, wearing the Bloodstone of the Moon on a golden chain. A generation agone that gem was stolen from its shrine on the Isle of the Altar, and now Golka has sent it back to us about the neck of the sacrifice.”

“The ruby!” muttered Donal, who had learned much of the Pictish tongue in his wandering life as a minstrel. “I remember now—Marcus once told me his father found it on a beach amid the wreckage of a Pictish longboat...”

Conan recalled the red gem Halfgar had snatched up from the sand. Automatically he glanced to the spot where the man had fallen—and saw the pirate chieftain rising unsteadily to his feet. Evidently Conan’s swordblow had merely stunned him.

“Give us the girl who bears the Blood-stone,” persisted the old man.

“Your god has chosen another for you than her,” said Conan, pointing down the beach. “See, Gonar—that man rising up amid the slain corpses; go to him, and you will find Golka’s token.”

The old man started, then nodded to the warriors with him, who immediately sprinted off like lean wolves and surrounded Halfgar. Then savage cries of glee rang out as they spied the gem dangling at the pirate’s belt. Halfgar drew his dagger and strove to fight, but the Picts overpowered him easily in his dazed condition and began to bind him with rawhide cords.

“Go then, Vanir,” cried old Gonar, “and return no more, for this isle belongs to the Pictish clans, and for too long have your Nordheimers brethren ravaged its forests with their axes and sullied its turf with their heavy tread.”

Vanir warriors swarmed over the gunwales and put their shoulders to the hull; the keel grated upon the beach until the long-ship floated free, and a great shout went up from the Vanir as they realized they were seaborne again.

“But the gem,” shouted Conan from the deck as the shore receded, “—surely it is of Acheron rather than Pictdom, for I saw the ancient symbol, graven on its face.”

“Not the acanthus,” Gonar cried back, “but the Blood of the Sacrifice—the crimson fountain that spurts from the ripped breast to pleasure the heart of Golka of the Moon.”

Conan turned away with a sudden revulsion as the oarsmen swept the craft about and pulled for the clean open sea. Behind him rose a high keening like the wail of a lost soul, and the Cimmerian shuddered as he realized Halfgar had come to full comprehension of his impending fate. Nothing of civilized weakness clung to Conan’s red, barbaric soul—yet something in the complete raw savagery of the Picts rasped on the armor around his heart.

“Well, you were right, Conan,” rumbled Wulfhere as the shore of the isle of Kaldjorn receded into the murk; “it was ill of me to taunt a defeated man, for my taunts doubtless spurred Halfgar on to vengeance at any price, and in the end it cost me near half my carles. It will take another voyage to Vanir-mark to replenish my crew.”

“Halfgar was a treacherous wolf and a torturer of women,” said Conan moodily, “yet he was a brave fighter, and it sits ill with me that a sea-warrior should spill his heart’s blood on the altar of “Golka of the Moon.”

“Well, then,” said Donal, “gladden your heart with the happiness in the faces of the princess Helen and her lover Marcus. Look—even under the leaden drizzle of these murky-skies their evident joy as they gaze on one another, oblivious to the rest of us, is like the sunrise heralding the return of the gods. Be glad, too, at the thought of the gold King Gerinth will pay you for the safe return of his sister—and knowing the generosity of the man, I doubt not he’ll pay you twice what you ask out of joy to see her alive.” So saying, the minstrel lifted his ancient lyre, plucked its iron strings and began to sing:

Picts stole King Gerinth’s sister fair
And the king knew black despair.
‘’Las, what can I do?” cried he.
“Foes assail by land and sea;
“Warriors I have none to spare.
“Thieves have ta’en my sister fair.”

Then to the king his minstrel came:
“Wulfhere’s crew of Vanir-fame
“Rests for a space in yonder bay;
“Stout of heart and true be they.
“Even to Ocean’s utmost lair
“They’ll ply to find your sister fair.”

The King, his face a-streak with tears,
Bared to the Vanir-men his fears.
“By Wotan!” Wulfhere roared, “my blade
“Shall cleave the rogues who stole the maid.”
Then quoth black Conan wrathfully:
“They’ll face the Tigers of the Sea!”

Far on the roaring, wind-wracked tide
The dragon-ship of the rovers plied.
pirate dragons barred their way;
Then did the tigers rend and slay.
Thorwald died ’neath Wulfhere’s steel—
See, how the hungry raven’s wheel!

Anon they sailed to Kaldjorn’s strand
Where Thorleif with his mighty band
Held the fair maid in bondage sore.
“Ho, ho!” quoth Hordi’s son, “no more
“The shores of your native land you’ll see.”
And the poor maid wept bitterly.

Then Kaldjorn felt the dragon’s keel
And the tigers raged with fangs of steel.
Wulfhere roared with joy of battle—
Nordheimers fell to’s blade like cattle.
Thorleif’s skull he clove in twain;
Long his rovers heaped the slain.

Now Pict and raven prowl the strand
Where the Nordheimers lie heaped on the crimson sand;
The rovers ply from their valiant raid
With an empty hold and a joyful maid.
And Brythunian’s king most happily
Shall greet the Tigers of the Sea.

“By Ymir, Donal!” roared Wulfhere gruffly, his great eyes a-swim with tears. “’Tis a song, for the gods! Sing it again—aye, and this time forget not how I turned Thorleif’s blow aside and shore through his mail with my axe. What think you Conan—is it not a good song?”

Conan gazed broodingly toward the shore, where flames from the burning skalli were now glimmering redly through the murk.

“Aye, it’s a good song, I’ll not gainsay it. But already it differs in ways from the things I saw, and I doubt not the difference will grow with each singing. Well, it matters little—the world itself shifts and changes and fades to mist like the strains of a minstrel’s harp, and mayhap the dreams we forge are more enduring than the works of kings and gods.”

The Thunder-Rider

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

When they broke free of the thickets and fled northward, there were only fifteen of them left to flee, and the Æsir hounded them for nearly a hundred miles, even after the rest had given up the chase. How they hated Conan and his group!

It was near the mountains Fork of the Brazos that they met the Nordheimers. They had struck them on their road south and sent them howling to lick their wounds, and they were eager for revenge. They got it. It was a running Eight on tired horses, and of the forty men who rode south so proudly, only five of them lived to cross the ice sheet – that ragged irregular frozen river that lies like a giant stair-step across the frozen plains, mounting to a higher level.

They were fifteen men against a hundred Æsir and they fled, turning to drive arrow or thrust with lance only when they could no longer elude them.

But somehow, when night fell they scattered and eluded them, and came together again above the frozen hill – weary, hungry, with empty quivers, on exhausted horses. Sometimes they walked and led them, which shows in what state they were, for his band never walked unless the need was most desperate. But they stumbled on, feeling that they were doomed already, groping their way northward, swinging further to the west than any of them had ever gone before, in the hopes of avoiding their implacable enemies. They were in the heart of Asgard and none of them had any hope of ever reaching their camp alive. But they struggled on, through a vast and frozen waste, where not even trees grew, and on which not even the unshod hoof of a horse left any impression on the iron-hard ice.

It must have been towards dawn that they crossed the Line. There was no actual line there, and yet at one stride they all felt – they knew – that they had come into a different country. There was a sort of vague shock, felt by both horses and men. They were all walking and leading the horses and they all fell to their knees, as if thrown by an earthquake shock. The horses snorted, reared and would have torn free and bolted if they had not been too weak.

Without comment – they were too far gone to care for anything – they rose and struggled on, noting that apparently clouds had formed in the sky, for the stars were dim, almost obscured. Moreover the wind, which blows almost incessantly across that vast plateau, had subsided suddenly, so it was in a strange silence that they staggered across the plain, stumbling ever northward, until dawn came slowly, sullenly and dimly, and they halted and stared haggardly at each other, like ghosts in the morn after the destruction of the world.

They knew now that they were in a haunted country. Somehow, some time in the night they had crossed a line that separated this strange, haunted, forgotten region from the rest of the natural world. Like the rest of the plain, it stretched drearily, flat and monotonous from horizon to horizon. But a strange dimness hung over it, a sort of dusky mist that was less mist than a lessening of the light of the sun. When it rose it looked pale and watery, more like the moon than the sun. Truly, they had come into the Darkening Land, the dread country still whispered of in Nordheim mythology, though how they came to know of it, Conan did not know.

They could not see beyond its confines, but they could see, ahead of them, a cluster of small huts on the plain. They mounted their tired horses and rode slowly toward them. They knew instinctively there was no life in them. They looked upon an encampment of the dead. They sat their horses in silence, under the leaden sky, with the drab, darkened waste stretching away from them. It was like looking through a smoked glass. Away to the west of them loomed a more solid mass of mist their sight could not penetrate.

Corus shuddered and averted his eyes, covering his mouth with his hand. ‘This is a medicine place,’ said he. ‘It is not good to be here.’ And he made an involuntary movement to pull about his shoulders the blanket lost in the long flight before the Æsir.

But Conan was iron hearted, and fear was dead in him. He reined his terrified horse to the nearest hut – and all were of the skins of dark shaggy bull – and drew aside the flap. Then, though Conan was not afraid, his flesh crawled curiously, for he saw the inmate of that tent.

There was an old, old legend, which had been forgotten for more than a hundred years. In Conan's life it was already dim and vague and distorted. But it told how long, long ago, before the tribes had taken shape as men know them now, a strange and terrible people came out of the North which then was populated by many wild and fearful tribes. They passed southward, slaying and destroying all in their path, until they vanished on the great high plains to the south. The old men said they walked into a mist and vanished. And that was long ago, so long ago, even before the ancestors of the Cimmerians came into the land they called their home. Yet here before his eyes lay one of the Terrible People.

He was a giant, he who sprawled on the bearskin within the hut; erect he must have stood fully seven feet in height, and his mighty shoulders and huge limbs were knotted with great muscles. His face was that of a brute, thin lipped, jutting jawed, sloping brow, with a tangled mop of shaggy hair. Beside him lay an axe, a keen-edged blade of what Conan now knew to be green jade, set in the cleft of a shaft of a strange, hard wood which once grew in the far north, and which took a polish like mahogany. At the sight he desired to possess it, though it was too long-hafted and heavy for easy use on horseback.

Conan thrust his lance through the door of the lodge and drew the thing out, laughing at the protests of his companions.

‘I commit no sacrilege!’ Conan maintained. ‘This is no death-lodge, where warriors laid the corpse of a great chief. This man died in his sleep, as they all died. Why he has lain here so many ages without being devoured by wolves or buzzards, or his flesh rotting I do not know, but this whole land is a medicine land. And I will take this axe.’

It was just as Conan was about to dismount and secure it, having drawn it outside the lodge, that a sudden cry brought them wheeling about – to face a dozen Hyperboreans in full war-paint! And one was a woman! She bestrode her horse like a warrior, and waved a flint-headed war-axe.

Warrior-women were rare among the plains tribes, but they did occur now and then. They knew her, instantly, Casima, the warrior-girl of the southern Hyperboreans. She was a war-bird, in truth, leading a band of picked fighting men in reckless forays all over the Southwest.

Conan whirled and saw her – a slim, supple, arrogant figure, vibrant with life and menace, barbarically magnificent as she sat her rearing charger, with the fierce painted faces of her braves crowding close behind her. She was naked save for a huge skin about her shoulders. Her girdle supported a knife in a beaded sheath. Moccasins were on her slender feet, and her black hair, done up in two thick glossy braids hung down her supple back. Her dark eyes flashed, her red lips parted in a cry of mockery as she brandished her axe at them, managing her bridleless, saddleless steed with a horsemanship that was breath-taking in its negligent grace.

All this Conan saw and knew in the brief glance as he turned, for with a shrill cry she hurled herself at them and her braves swept in behind her. Horse and rider seemed to lunge at them rather than gallop, so swiftly did she come to the attack.

The fight was short. How could it be otherwise? They were twelve men, on comparatively fresh horses. They were five weary Cimmerians on foundered steeds. The tall chief with the scarred face came at him with a rush. In the fog they had not seen each other, until they were almost together. Seeing their empty quivers they came in to finish them with their lances and war-axes. The tall chief thrust at him, and Conan wheeled his horse who responded to the nudge of his knee with his last strength. No Hyperborean could ever equal a Cimmerian in open battle, not even a southern Hyperborean. The lance swished past his breast, and as the horse and rider plunged past him, carried by their own momentum, Conan drove his own lance through the Hyperborean’s back, so the point came out from his breast.

Even as Conan did so he was aware of another brave charging down on him from the left, and Conan sought to wheel his steed again, as Conan dragged the lance free. But the horse was foredone. He rolled like a foundered canoe in the swift tide of the black river, and the club in the Hyperborean’s hand smashed down. Conan threw himself side-wise and saved his skull from crushing like an egg, but the club fell stunningly on his shoulder, knocking him from his horse. Cat-like Conan got to his feet, drawing his knife, but then the shoulder of a horse hit him and knocked him sprawling. It was Casima who had ridden him down and now as Conan struggled slowly to his knees, half-stunned, she leaped lightly down and swung up her flint-headed axe above his head.

Conan saw the dull glint of the edge, knew in a slow, stunned way that he could not avoid the downward swing – and then she froze, axe lifted, staring wide-eyed over his head towards something beyond him. Impelled beyond his will, Conan turned his dizzy head and looked.

The other Cimmerians were down, and five of the Hyperboreans. All the living froze, just as Casima had frozen. One who knelt on dead Corus’s back, wrenching at the scalp, his knife between his teeth, crouched there like one suddenly petrified, staring in the direction towards which all heads were turned.

For the fog to the west was lifting, and into view floated the walls and flat roofs of a strange structure. It was like, yet strangely unlike, the pueblos of the corn-raising Indians far to the west. Like them it was made of adobe, and the architecture was something similar, and yet there was a strange unlikeness.

And from it came a train of strange figures – short brown men, clad in garments of brightly-dyed feathers, men who looked somewhat like Picts. They were weaponless and carried only ropes of rawhide and whips in their hands. Only the foremost, a taller, gaunter Pict, bore a strange shield shaped disk of gleaming metal in his left hand and a copper mallet in his right.

The curious parade halted before them, and they stared – the warrior-girl, with her axe still poised; the Hyperboreans, afoot or a-horse, wounded or whole; Conan, crouching on one knee and shaking his fast-clearing head. Then Casima, sensing sudden peril, cried out a shrill, desperate command and sprang, lifting her axe – and as the warriors tensed for the onslaught, the man with the vulture feathers in his hair smote the gong with the mallet, and a terrible crash of sound leaped at them like an invisible panther. It was like the impact of a thunderbolt, that awful crash of sound, a thing so terrible it was almost tangible. Casima and the Hyperboreans went down as if struck by lightning, and the horses reared in agony and bolted. Casima rolled on the ground, crying out in agony, and clutching her ears.

Conan came up from the ground in a leap, knife in hand, though his skull seemed bursting from that awful blast of sound. Straight at the throat he sprang. But his knife never sheathed itself in that brown flesh. Again the awful gong clanged and yet again, smiting him in mid-leap like a tangible force, hurling him back and back. And again and yet again the mallet crashed against the gong, so that earth and sky seemed split asunder by its deafening reverberation. Down Conan went like a man beaten to the ground by a war-club.

When he could see, hear and think again, Conan found his hands were bound behind him, a rawhide thong about his neck. He was dragged to his feet and their captors began marching them toward the city. Conan called it that, though it was more like a castle. Casima and her Hyperboreans were served in like manner, except one who was badly wounded. Him they slew, cutting his throat with his own knife, and left him lying among the others. One took up the axe Conan had dragged from the hut, looked at it curiously, and then swung it over his shoulder. It took both his hands to manage it.

So they stumbled on towards the castle, half-strangled by the thongs about their necks, and occasionally encouraged by the bite of a rawhide lash across their shoulders. Only Casima was not so treated, though her captor jerked brutally on her rope when she lagged. Her warriors looked haggard. They were the most warlike of the Hyperborean nation – a branch which lived on the headwaters of the Vilayet, and which differed in many ways and customs from their northern brothers. They were more typical of a plains culture than their tribal relatives. They wore their hair in long braids that swept the ground and loaded the braids with silver ornaments.

The castle stood on the crest of a low rise, not worthy of the name of hill, which broke the flat monotony of the plain. There was a wall around it and a gate in the wall. On one of the flat stages of the roof they saw a tall figure standing, wrapped in a shining mantle of feathers that glistened even in the subdued light. A lifted arm made an imperious gesture and the figure moved majestically through a doorway and vanished.

The gate-posts were of bronze, carved with the feathered serpent, and at the sight the Hyperboreans shuddered and averted their eyes. Like all the northern peoples, they remembered that abomination from the days of old, when the great and terrible kingdoms of the far South warred with those of the far North.

They led them across a courtyard, up a short flight of bronze steps, and into a corridor, and once within all resemblance to the pueblos ceased. But they knew that once houses like this had risen in mighty cities far in the serpent-haunted jungles of the dim South, for in their souls stirred the echoes of ancient legends.

They came into a broad circular room through which the dim light streamed from an open dome. A black stone altar rose in the centre of the room, with darkly stained channels along the rims. Facing it, on a raised dais, on an ivory throne heaped with sea-otter furs, there lounged the figure they had seen on the roof.

He was a tall man, slender and wiry, with a high forehead and a narrow, keen, hawk-like face. There was no mercy in that face, only a cruel arrogance, a mocking cynicism. It was the face of a man who felt himself above the human passions of anger or mercy or love.

With a cruel amusement he swept his eyes over them, and the Hyperboreans lowered their gaze. Even Casima, after boldly meeting his stare for a moment, winced and dropped her eyes. But Conan was unlike any other northerner, and fear slept in him. He met that piercing stare with his smouldering blue eyes unwinking. He looked long at him, and presently spoke in the common language of the northerners.

‘You are like a wild beast. There is the fire of killing in your eyes. Are you not afraid?’

‘I am Conan of Cimmeria,’ he answered scornfully. ‘Ask the Aquilonians if there is anything I fear! My axe is still sticking in their heads. Ask the Æsir, the Picts, the Turanians, the Vanir, the Zamboulans, the Hyperboreans! If I were flayed alive and my skin cut into pieces no larger than a man’s palm, and each piece used to cover a dead warrior I had slain, the dead uncovered would still be more than the covered ones!’

Even in their fear the eyes of the Hyperboreans smouldered murderously at this boasting. The man on the throne laughed without mirth.

‘He is tough, he is strong, he is nerved by his vanity,’ he said to the gaunt man with the gong. ‘He will endure much, place him in the last cell.’

‘And the woman, lord Tezcatlipoca?’ quoth Xototl, bowing low, and Casima started and stared wide-eyed at the fantastic figure on the throne. She knew the legends, and the name was the name of one of the sun’s incarnations – taken, no doubt, in a spirit of blasphemy by the ruler of this evil castle.

‘Place her in the Room of Gold,’ said Tezcatlipoca, whom they called the Lord of the Mist. Curiously he glanced at the jade axe which had been placed on the altar.

‘Why, it is the axe of Guar, the chief of the Northerners!’ quoth he. ‘He swore that the axe he wore would some day split his skull! But Guar and all his tribe have been dead in their caribou hide tents for more centuries than even I like to remember, and his skull still holds the magic of the ancients! Leave the axe there and take them away! I will talk to the girl presently, and then there shall be sport, as it was in the days of the Golden Kings!’

They led them out of the circular chamber and across a series of broad rooms, where cat-footed brown women, beautiful with a sinister beauty and naked but for their golden ornaments, crowded close to stare at the prisoners, and especially the warrior-girl of the Hyperboreans. And they laughed at her, sweet, soft, evil laughter, venomous as poisoned honey.

They came into a long corridor, with heavy doors opening into it, and into each cell as they passed it, a warrior was thrust. Conan was the last and as Conan was dragged inside Conan saw terror flare in her lovely eyes as she was led away. Within the cell Conan was thrown roughly to the floor, and his legs were bound with rawhide. Neither food nor water was given to him.

Presently the door opened and Conan looked up to see the Lord of the Mist looking down at him.

‘Poor fool!’ he murmured. ‘I could almost pity you! Bloodthirsty beast of the prairies, with your swaggerings and boastings, your tale of slayings. Fool! Soon you will howl for death!’

‘A Cimmerian does not cry out at the stake,’ Conan answered, his eyes burning red with the murder-lust. His thews swelled and knotted until the rawhide cut into the flesh. But the thongs held.

He laughed and silently left the cell, closing the door behind him. Outside a bolt clashed into place.

What happened next Conan did not see, nor did he learn until long afterward. But Xototl took Casima up a flight of stairs and into a chamber where the walls, ceiling, and floor were of gold. The doors were of gold and there were gold bars on the windows. There was a golden couch heaped with sea-otter fur. Xototl unbound her and stood gazing at her for a moment with hot desire in his eyes. Then, sullenly and grudgingly, he turned away and locked the door behind her, leaving her alone. Presently to her came the Lord of the Mist, tall, striding like a god, with his strange mantle of rich-hued feathers about him and about his black mane a band in the form of a golden serpent with head upreared above his forehead.

He told her he was a magician of an ancient, ancient kingdom which was declining even before the barbaric Picts wandered into it. For his own reasons he had come far to the north and established his kingdom on that bleak plain, casting about it a mist of enchantment. He had found a tribe of Picts besieged by the invaders from the North, and they had appealed to him for aid, giving themselves fully into his hands. He had made magic and brought death to the Northerners. But he left them in their huts, and told the people that he could bring them to life whenever he wished. Beneath his cruel hands the tribe dwindled away until now not more than a hundred lived to do his bidding. He had come from the south more than a thousand years before. He was not immortal, but almost so.

Then he left her; and as he went the great serpent which did his bidding slithered silently and evilly through the corridors after him; this serpent had devoured many of the subjects of the Lord of the Mist.

Meanwhile, Conan lay in his cell and heard them drag forth a Hyperborean and haul him along the corridor. After a long while Conan heard a fearful, animal-like scream of agony, and wondered what torment could wring a cry from the throat of a southern Hyperborean. Conan had heard them laugh under the knives of the flayers. Then for the first time fear awoke in him – not physical fear so much as the fear that under the unknown torment Conan would cry out and so bring shame to the Cimmerian nation. Conan lay there and listened to the end of the Hyperboreans. Each warrior cried out but once.

Meanwhile Xototl had glided into Casima’s chamber, his eyes red with lust.

‘You are soft and beautiful,’ he mumbled. ‘I am weary of these women.’

He seized her in his arms and forced her back on the golden couch. She did not resist. But suddenly the dagger that had been in his girdle was in her hand. She sank it into his back, swiftly and deadly. Before he could voice the cry that welled to his lips, she choked it in his throat and, falling with him to the floor, stabbed at him again and again until he lay still. Then, rising like a cat, she hurried through the door, snatching up a bow, a knife, and a handful of arrows as she went.

In an instant she was in his cell, bending over him, her wide eyes blazing.

‘Quickly!’ she hissed. ‘He is slaying the last of the warriors! Prove that you are a man!’

The knife was keen, but the blade was slender and the rawhide tough. She kept at it persistently, finally sawing through. Then Conan was on his feet, knife in his girdle, bow and arrows in his hand.

They stole from the cell and moved cautiously down the corridor, to come face to face with a surprised guard. Dropping his weapons Conan had him by the throat before he could cry out, and bearing him to the floor, Conan broke his neck with his bare hands before he could release his spear and bring his knife into play.

Rising, they stole down the corridor toward the circular room of the open dome. Before it was the gigantic serpent which coiled menacingly at their approach. Quickly and silently Conan moved forward and placed a single arrow deep in the reptile’s eye, and they moved cautiously past its fearsome death throes.

They slipped into the domed room and saw the last Hyperborean die in a strange and hideous torment. As the Lord of the Mist turned to face them, Conan drove an arrow straight at his breast. It glanced harmlessly away. Conan was paralysed with surprise when a second arrow behaved similarly.

Casting aside his bow he leaped at him with knife in hand, and they rolled about the chamber seeking a death grip. He was alone; his retainers had been dispatched to another part of the castle while he worked his evil.

His knife would not bite through the strange, close-fitting garment that he wore beneath his feather-mantle, and, try as he would, Conan could not reach his throat or face. Finally his foe cast him aside and made ready to invoke his magic when Casima stopped him with a cry: ‘The dead men rise from the tents of the Northerners. They march towards the castle!’

‘A lie!’ he cried, going ashy. ‘They are dead! They can not rise!’

‘Nevertheless, they come!’ she cried with a wild laugh.

He faltered, turned toward a window, then wheeled back in realization of the trick. Nearby lay the axe of Guar the Northerner, a mighty weapon out of another age. In the instant of his hesitation, Conan seized it, and, swinging it high, leaped forward. As the Lord of the Mist turned back to him, fear leaped into his eyes as the axe crashed through his skull, spilling his brains on the floor.

Thunder crashed and rolled, and balls of fire swept over the plains; the castle rocked. Casima and Conan raced for safety, the screams of the trapped echoing in their ears. And when dawn rose upon the plains, no mist showed. There was only a rare, icy expanse on which a few bones lay mouldering.

‘Now we will go to my people,’ Conan said, taking her wrist. ‘There are some horses which did not run away.’

But she tried to wrench away from him, crying disdainfully: ‘Cimmerian dog! You live only because of my aid! Go your way! You are fit only to be the slave of a Hyperborean!’

There was no hesitation. Conan took her by her glossy braids and flung her to the ground, face down, before binding her hands and slinging her across the mount. Then he rode northward, towards the camp, and his captive did not struggle, now that she was on horseback. And Conan knew that in this Hyperborean foe he had found a woman worthy even of him.

The Vengeance of Amra

(Originally Black Vulmea's Vengeance)

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

Out of the Cockatoo’s cabin staggered Conan of Cimmeria, known as Amra the Lion, a flagon in his drunken hand. He stood with booted legs wide, teetering slightly to the gentle lift of the lofty poop. He was bareheaded and his shirt was open, revealing his broad hairy chest. He emptied the flagon and tossed it over the side with a gusty sigh of satisfaction, then directed his somewhat blurred gaze on the deck below. From poop ladder to forecastle it was littered by sprawling figures. The ship smelt like a brewery. Empty barrels, with their heads stove in, stood or rolled between the prostrate forms. Amra was the only man on his feet. From galley-boy to first mate the rest of the ship’s company lay senseless after a debauch that had lasted a whole night long. There was not even a man at the helm.

But it was lashed securely and in that placid sea no hand was needed on the wheel. The breeze was light but steady. Land was a thin blue line to the east. A stainless blue sky held a sun whose heat had not yet become fierce.

Amra blinked indulgently down upon the sprawled figures of his crew, and glanced idly over the larboard side. He grunted incredulously and batted his eyes. A ship loomed where he had expected to see only naked ocean stretching to the skyline. She was little more than a hundred yards away, and was bearing down swiftly on the Cockatoo, obviously with the intention of laying her alongside. She was tall and square-rigged, her white canvas flashing dazzlingly in the sun. From the maintruck the flag of Turan whipped in the air. Her bulwarks were lined with tense figures, bristling with boarding-pikes and grappling irons, and through her open ports the astounded pirate glimpsed the readiness of the boarding crews of the other craft.

“All hands to battle-quarters!” yelled Amra confusedly. Reverberant snores answered the summons. All hands remained as they were.

“Wake up, you lousy dogs!” roared their captain. “Up, curse you! A king’s ship is at our throats!”

His only response came in the form of staccato commands from the frigate’s deck, barking across the narrowing strip of blue water.

“Damnation!”

Cursing luridly he lurched in a reeling run across the poop to the swivel-gun which stood at the head of the larboard ladder. Seizing this he swung it about until its muzzle bore full on the bulwark of the approaching frigate. Objects wavered dizzily before his bloodshot eyes, but he squinted vaguely, unable to make them out.

“Strike your colors, you damned pirate!” came a hail from the trim figure that trod the warship’s poop, sword in hand.

“Go to a watery grave, you dogs!” roared Amra. He let loose with the ships ballista, and a huge bolt mowed a ghastly lane through the boarding party clustered along the frigate’s bulwark. Unwavering in their aggression the answering storm of metal raked the Cockatoo’s decks, turning them into a red shambles.

Sails ripped, ropes parted, timbers splintered, and blood and brains mingled with the pools of liquor spilt on the decks. A bolt as big as a man’s head smashed into the ballista, ripping it loose and dashing it against a man nearby. The impact knocked Amra backward headlong across the poop where his head hit the rail with a crack that was too much even for a Cimmerian skull. Amra sagged senseless to the boards. He was as deaf to the triumphant shouts and the stamp of victorious feet on his red-streaming decks as were his men who had gone from the sleep of drunkenness to the black sleep of death without knowing what had hit them.

Captain Wakim, of the Redoubtable, sipped his wine delicately and set down the glass with a gesture that in another man would have smacked of affectation. Wakim was a tall man, with a narrow, pale face, colorless eyes, and a prominent nose. His costume was almost sober in comparison with the glitter of his officers who sat in respectful silence about the mahogany table in the main cabin.

“Bring in the prisoner,” he ordered, and there was a glint of satisfaction in his cold eyes.

They brought in Amra, between four brawny sailors, his hands manacled before him and a chain on his ankles that was just long enough to allow him to walk without tripping. Blood was clotted in the pirate’s thick black hair. His shirt was in tatters, revealing a torso bronzed by the sun and rippling with great muscles. Through the stern windows, he could see the topmasts of the Cockatoo, just sinking out of sight. That close-range broadside had robbed the frigate of a prize. His conquerors were before him and there was no mercy in their stares, but Amra did not seem at all abashed or intimidated. He met the stern eyes of the officers with a level gaze that reflected only a sardonic amusement. Wakim frowned. He preferred that his captives cringe before him. It made him feel more like Justice personified, looking unemotionally down from a great height on the sufferings of the evil.

“You are Amra, the notorious pirate?”

“I’m Amra,” was the laconic answer.

“I suppose you will say, as do all these rogues,” sneered Wakim, “that you hold a commission from the Governor? These privateer commissions from the Hyrkanians mean nothing to his Majesty. You –”

“Save your breath, fish-eyes!” Amra grinned hardly. “I hold no commission from anybody. I’m not one of your accursed swashbucklers who hide behind the name of buccaneer. I’m a pirate, and I’ve plundered Turanian ships as well as Hyrkanian – and be damned to you, heron-beak!”

The officers gasped at this effrontery, and Wakim smiled a ghastly, mirthless smile, white with the anger he held in rein.

“You know that I have the authority to hang you out of hand?” he reminded the other.

“I know,” answered the pirate softly. “It won’t be the first time you’ve hanged me, Wakim.”

“What?” The Turanian stared.

A flame grew in Amra’s blue eyes and his voice changed subtly in tone and inflection; his tongue thickened almost imperceptibly.

“On the northern coast it was, years ago, captain. You were a young officer then, scarce more than a boy – but with all your present characteristics already fully developed. There were some wholesale evictions, with the military to see the job was done, and the Hyperboreans were mad enough to make a fight of it – poor, ragged, half-starved peasants, fighting with sticks against full-armed Turanian soldiers and sailors. After the massacre there were the usual hangings, and there was a young rogue crept into a thicket to watch – who didn’t even know what it was all about. You spied him, Wakim, and had your dogs drag him forth and string him up alongside the kicking bodies of the others. ‘He’s a Cimmerian,’ you said as they heaved him aloft. ‘Little snakes grow into big ones.’ I was that rebel. I’ve looked forward to this meeting, you Turanian dog!”

Amra still smiled, but the veins knotted in his temples and the great muscles stood out distinctly on his manacled arms. Ironed and guarded though the pirate was, Wakim involuntarily drew back, daunted by the stark and naked hate that blazed from those savage eyes.

“How did you escape your just deserts?” he asked coldly, recovering his poise.

Amra laughed shortly.

“Some of the peasants escaped the massacre and were hiding in the thickets. As soon as you left they came out, and not being civilized, cultured Turanians, but only poor, savage Nordheimers, they cut me down along with the others, and found there was still a bit of life in me. We Cimmerians are hard to kill, as you Turanians have learned to your cost.”

“You fell into our hands easily enough this time,” observed Wakim.

Amra grinned. His eyes were grimly amused now, but the glint of murderous hate still lurked in their deeps.

“Who’d have thought to meet a king’s ship in these eastern seas? It’s been weeks since we sighted a sail of any kind, save for the carrack we took yesterday, with a cargo of wine bound eventually for Argos from Khitai. It’s not the time of year for rich prizes. When the lads wanted a drinking bout, who was I to deny them? We drew out of the lanes the Hyrkanians mostly follow, and thought we had the ocean to ourselves. I’d been sleeping in my cabin for some hours before I came on deck to survey the men, and saw you about to board us without firing a shot.”

“You killed seven of my men,” harshly accused Wakim.

“And you killed all of mine,” retorted Amra. “Poor devils, they’ll wake up in hell without knowing how they got there.”

He grinned again, fiercely. His toes dug hard against the floor, unnoticed by the men who gripped him on either side. The blood was rioting through his veins, and the berserk feel of his great strength was upon him. He knew he could, in a sudden, volcanic explosion of power, tear free from the men who held him, clear the space between him and his enemy with one bound, despite his chains, and crush Wakim’s skull with a smashing swing of his manacled fists. That he himself would die an instant later mattered not at all. In that moment he felt neither fears nor regrets – only a reckless, ferocious exultation and a cruel contempt for these stupid Turanians about him. He laughed in their faces, joying in the knowledge that they did not know why he laughed. So they thought to chain the tiger, did they? Little they guessed of the devastating fury that lurked in his catlike thews.

He began filling his great chest, drawing in his breath slowly, imperceptibly, as his calves knotted and the muscles of his arms grew hard. Then Wakim spoke again.

“I will not be overstepping my authority if I hang you within the hour. In any event you hang, either from my yard-arm or from a gibbet on the wharves. But life is sweet, even to rogues like you, who notoriously cling to every moment granted them by outraged society. It would gain you a few more months of life if I were to take you back to Jamaica to be sentenced by the governor. This I might be persuaded to do, on one condition.”

“What’s that?” Amra’s tensed muscles did not relax; imperceptibly he began to settle into a semi-crouch.

“That you tell me the whereabouts of the pirate, Van Raven.”

In that instant, while his knotted muscles went pliant again, Amra unerringly gauged and appraised the man who faced him, and changed his plan. He straightened and smiled.

“And why him, Wakim?” he asked softly. “Why not Tranicos, or Villiers, or Veigh, or a dozen others more destructive to Turanian trade than Van Raven? Is it because of the treasure he took from the plate-fleet? Aye, the king would like well to set his hands on that hoard, and there’s a rich prize would go to the captain lucky or bold enough to find Van Raven and plunder him. Is that why you came all the way around the coast, Wakim?”

“We are at peace with the peoples of the coast,” answered Wakim acidly. “As for the purposes of an officer in his Majesty’s navy, they are not for you to question.”

Amra laughed at him, the blue flame in his eyes.

“Once I sank a king’s cruiser off the eastern coast,” he said. “Damn you and your prating of ‘His Majesty’! Your Turanian king Yildiz is no more to me than so much rotten driftwood. Van Raven? He’s a bird of passage. Who knows where he sails? But if it’s treasure you want, I can show you a hoard that would make his loot look like a peat-pool beside the Vilayet Sea!”

A pale spark seemed to snap from Wakim’s colorless eyes, and his officers leaned forward tensely. Amra grinned hardly. He knew the credulity of navy men, which they shared with landsmen and honest mariners, in regard to pirates and plunder. Every seaman not himself a rover believed that every buccaneer had knowledge of vast hidden wealth. The loot the men of the Red Brotherhood took from the Turanians, rich enough as it was, was magnified a thousand times in the telling, and rumor made every swaggering sea-rat the guardian of a treasure-trove.

Coolly plumbing the avarice of Wakim’s hard soul, Amra said: “Ten days’ sail from here there’s a nameless bay on the coast of Ecuador. Four years ago Harston, the Turanian pirate, and I anchored there, in a quest of a hoard of ancient jewels called the Fangs of Satan. A Vendhyan swore he had found them, hidden in a ruined temple in an uninhabited jungle a day’s march inland, but superstitious fear of the old gods kept him from helping himself. But he was willing to guide us there.

“We marched inland with both crews, for neither of us trusted the other. To make a long tale short, we found the ruins of an old city, and beneath an ancient, broken altar, we found the jewels – rubies, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, bloodstones, big as hen eggs, making a quivering flame of fire about the crumbling old shrine!”

The flame grew in Wakim’s eyes. His white fingers knotted about the slender stem of his wine glass.

“The sight of them was enough to madden a man,” Amra continued, watching the captain narrowly. “We camped there for the night, and, one way or another, we fell out over the division of the spoil, though there was enough to make every man of us rich for life. We came to blows, though, and whilst we fought among ourselves, there came a scout running with word that a Turanian fleet had come into the bay, driven our ships away, and sent five hundred men ashore to pursue us. By Satan, they were on us before the scout ceased the telling! One of my men snatched the plunder away and hid it in the old temple, and we scattered, each band for itself. There was no time to take the plunder. We barely got away with our naked lives. Eventually I, with most of my crew, made my way back to the coast and was picked up by my ship which came slinking back after escaping from the Turanians.

“Harston gained his ship with a handful of men, after skirmishing all the way with the Turanians who chased him instead of us, and later was slain by savages on the coast.

“They harried me all the way around the coast, and I never had an opportunity to go back after the loot – until this voyage. It was there I was going when you overhauled me. The treasure’s still there. Promise me my life and I’ll take you to it.”

“That is impossible,” snapped Wakim. “The best I can promise you is trial before the governor.”

“Well,” said Amra, “maybe the governor might be more lenient than you. And much may happen between here and there.”

Wakim did not reply, but spread a map on the broad table.

“Where is this bay?”

Amra indicated a certain spot on the coast. The sailors released their grip on his arms while he marked it, and Wakim’s head was within reach, but the Cimmerian’s plans were changed, and they included a chance for life – desperate, but nevertheless a chance.

“Very well. Take him below.”

Amra went out with his guards, and Wakim sneered coldly.

“A gentleman of his Majesty’s navy is not bound by a promise to such a rogue as he. Once the treasure is aboard the Redoubtable, gentlemen, I promise you he shall swing from a yard-arm.”

Ten days later the anchors rattled down in the nameless bay Amra had described.

II

It seemed desolate enough to have been the coast of an uninhabited continent. The bay was merely a shallow indentation of the shore-line. Dense jungle crowded the narrow strip of white sand that was the beach. Gay-plumed birds flitted among the broad fronds, and the silence of primordial savagery brooded over all. But a dim trail led back into the twilight vistas of green-walled mystery.

Dawn was a white mist on the water when seventeen men marched down the dim path. One was Wakim. On an expedition designed to find treasure, he would trust the command to none but himself. Fifteen were soldiers, armed with hangers and bows. The seventeenth was Amra. The Cimmerian’s legs, perforce, were free, and the irons had been removed from his arms. But his wrists were bound before him with cords, and one end of the cord was in the grip of a brawny marine whose other hand held a cutlass ready to chop down the pirate if he made any move to escape.

“Fifteen men are enough,” Amra had told Wakim. “Too many! Men go mad easily in the tropics, and the sight of the Fangs of Satan is enough to madden any man, king’s man or not. The more that see the jewels, the greater chance of mutiny before you raise the Horn again. You don’t need more than three or four. Who are you afraid of? You said Turan was at peace with the coasts, and there are no enemies anywhere near this spot, in any event.”

“I wasn’t thinking of enemies,” answered Wakim coldly. “I am providing against any attempt you might make to escape.”

“Well,” laughed Amra, “do you think you need fifteen men for that?”

“I’m taking no chances,” was the grim retort. “You are stronger than two or three ordinary men, Amra, and full of wiles. My men will march with pieces ready, and if you try to bolt, they will shoot you down like the dog you are – should you, by any chance, avoid being cut down by your guard. Besides, there is always the chance of savages.”

The pirate jeered.

“Go beyond Zamboula if you seek real savages. There are savages there who cut off your head and shrink it no bigger than your fist. But they never come on this side of the mountains. As for the race that built the temple, they’ve all been dead for centuries. Bring your armed escort if you want to. It will be of no use. One strong man can carry away the whole hoard.”

“One strong man!” murmured Wakim, licking his lips as his mind reeled at the thought of the wealth represented by a load of jewels that required the full strength of a strong man to carry. Confused visions of admiralty whirled through his head. “What about the path?” he asked suspiciously. “If this coast is uninhabited, how comes it there?”

“It was an old road, centuries ago, probably used by the race that built the city. In some places you can see where it was paved. But Harston and I were the first to use it for centuries. And you can tell it hasn’t been used since. You can see where the young growth has sprung up above the scars of the axes we used to clear a way.”

Wakim was forced to agree. So now, before sunrise, the landing party was swinging inland at a steady gait that ate up the miles. The bay and the ship were quickly lost to sight. All morning they tramped along through steaming heat, between green, tangled jungle walls where gay-hued birds flitted silently and monkeys chattered. Thick vines hung low across the trail, impeding their progress, and they were sorely annoyed by gnats and other insects. At noon they paused only long enough to drink some water and eat the ready-cooked food they had brought along. The men were stolid veterans, inured to long marches, and Wakim would allow them no more rest than was necessary for their brief meal. He was afire with savage eagerness to view the hoard Amra had described.

The trail did not twist as much as most jungle paths. It was overgrown with vegetation, but it gave evidence that it had once been a road, well-built and broad. Pieces of paving were still visible here and there. By mid-afternoon the land began to rise slightly to be broken by low, jungle-choked hills. They were aware of this only by the rising and dipping of the trail. The dense walls on either hand shut off their view.

Neither Wakim nor any of his men glimpsed the furtive, shadowy shapes which now glided along through the jungle on either hand. Amra was aware of their presence, but he only smiled grimly and said nothing. Carefully and so subtly that his guard did not suspect it, the pirate worked at the cords on his wrists, weakening and straining the strands by continual tugging and twisting. He had been doing this all day, and he could feel them slowly giving way.

The sun hung low in the jungle branches when the pirate halted and pointed to where the old road bent almost at right angles and disappeared into the mouth of a ravine.

“Down that ravine lies the old temple where the jewels are hidden.”

“On, then!” snapped Wakim, fanning himself with his plumed hat. Sweat trickled down his face, wilting the collar of his crimson, gilt-embroidered coat. A frenzy of impatience was on him, his eyes dazzled by the imagined glitter of the gems Amra had so vividly described. Avarice makes for credulity, and it never occurred to Wakim to doubt Amra’s tale. He saw in the Cimmerian only a hulking brute eager to buy a few months more of life. Gentlemen of his Majesty’s navy were not accustomed to analyzing the characters of pirates. Wakim’s code was painfully simple: a heavy hand and a roughshod directness. He had never bothered to study or try to understand outlaw types.

They entered the mouth of the ravine and marched on between cliffs fringed with overhanging fronds. Wakim fanned himself with his hat and gnawed his lip with impatience as he stared eagerly about for some sign of the ruins described by his captive. His face was paler than ever, despite the heat which reddened the bluff faces of his men, tramping ponderously after him. Amra’s brown face showed no undue moisture. He did not tramp; he moved with the sure, supple tread of a panther, and without a suggestion of a seaman’s lurching roll. His eyes ranged the walls above them and when a frond swayed without a breath of wind to move it, he did not miss it.

The ravine was some fifty feet wide, the floor carpeted by a low, thick growth of vegetation. The jungle ran densely along the rims of the walls, which were some forty feet high. They were sheer for the most part, but here and there natural ramps ran down into the gulch, half-covered with tangled vines. A few hundred yards ahead of them they saw that the ravine bent out of sight around a rocky shoulder. From the opposite wall there jutted a corresponding crag. The outlines of these boulders were blurred by moss and creepers, but they seemed too symmetrical to be the work of nature alone.

Amra stopped, near one of the natural ramps that sloped down from the rim. His captors looked at him questioningly.

“Why are you stopping?” demanded Wakim fretfully. His foot struck something in the rank grass and he kicked it aside. It rolled free and grinned up at him – a rotting human skull. He saw glints of white in the green all about him – skulls and bones almost covered by the dense vegetation.

“Is this where you piratical dogs slew each other?” he demanded crossly. “What are you waiting on? What are you listening for?”

Amra relaxed his tense attitude and smiled indulgently.

“That used to be a gateway there ahead of us,” he said. “Those rocks on each side are really gate-pillars. This ravine was a roadway, leading to the city when people lived there. It’s the only approach to it, for it’s surrounded by sheer cliffs on all sides.” He laughed harshly. “This is like the road to Hell, Wakim: easy to go down – not so easy to go up again.”

“What are you maundering about?” snarled Wakim, clapping his hat viciously on his head. “You Cimmerians are all babblers and mooncalves! Get on with –”

From the jungle beyond the mouth of the ravine came a sharp twang. Something whined venomously down the gulch, ending its flight with a vicious thud. One of the soldiers gulped and started convulsively. His weapon clattered to the earth and he reeled, clawing at his throat from which protruded a long shaft, vibrating like a serpent’s head. Suddenly he pitched to the ground and lay twitching.

“Savages!” yelped Wakim, and turned furiously on his prisoner. “Dog! Look at that! You said there were no savages hereabouts!”

Amra laughed scornfully.

“Do you call them savages? Bah! Poor-spirited dogs that skulk in the jungle, too fearful to show themselves on the coast. Don’t you see them slinking among the trees? Best give them a volley before they grow too bold.”

Wakim snarled at him, but the Turanian knew the value of a display of agression when dealing with natives, and he had a glimpse of brown figures moving among the green foliage. He barked an order and fourteen bows fired, and the arrows rattled among the leaves. A few severed fronds drifted down; that was all. As his captor's attentions lay elsewhere, Amra snapped the frayed cords on his wrists, knocked his guard staggering with a buffet under the ear, snatched his cutlass and was gone, running like a cat up the steep wall of the ravine. The soldiers with their empty bows gaped helplessly after him, and Wakim’s bow shot futilely, an instant too late. From the green fringe above them came a mocking laugh.

“Fools! You stand in the door of Hell!”

“Dog!” yelled Wakim, beside himself, but with his greed still uppermost in his befuddled mind. “We’ll find the treasure without your help!”

“You can’t find something that doesn’t exist,” retorted the unseen pirate. “There never were any jewels. It was a lie to draw you into a trap. Harston never came here. I came here, and the Savages butchered all my crew in that ravine, as those skulls in the grass there testify.”

“Liar!” was all Wakim could find tongue for. “Lying dog! You told me there were no Savages hereabouts!”

“I told you the head-hunters never came over the mountains,” retorted Amra. “They don’t, either. I told you the people who built the city were all dead. That’s so, too. I didn’t tell you that a tribe of brown devils live in the jungle near here. They never go down to the coast, and they don’t like to have white men come into the jungle. I think they were the people who wiped out the race that built the city, long ago. Anyway, they wiped out my men, and the only reason I got away was because I’d lived with the savages of the coasts and learned their woodscraft. You’re in a trap you won’t get out of, Wakim!”

“Climb that wall and take him!” ordered Wakim, and half a dozen men slung their bows on their backs and began clumsily to essay the rugged ramp up which the pirate had run with such catlike ease.

“Better trim sail and stand by to repel boarders,” Amra advised him from above. “There are hundreds of red devils out there – and no tame dogs to run at the crack of a caliver, either.”

“And you’d betray white men to savages!” raged Wakim.

“It goes against my principles,” the Cimmerian admitted, “but it was my only chance for life. I’m sorry for your men. That’s why I advised you to bring only a handful. I wanted to spare as many as possible. There are enough Savages out there in the jungle to eat your whole ship’s company. As for you, you filthy dog, what you did in the north forfeited any consideration you might expect as a white man. I gambled on my neck and took my chances with all of you. It might have been me that arrow hit.”

________

The voice ceased abruptly, and just as Wakim was wondering if there were no Savages on the wall above them, the foliage was violently agitated, there sounded a wild yell, and down came a naked brown body, all asprawl, limbs revolving in the air. It crashed on the floor of the ravine and lay motionless – the figure of a brawny warrior, naked but for a loin-cloth of bark. The dead man was deep-chested, broad-shouldered and muscular, with features not unintelligent, but hard and brutal. He had been slashed across the neck.

The bushes waved briefly, and then again, further along the rim, which agitation Wakim believed marked the flight of the Cimmerian along the ravine wall, pursued by the companions of the dead warrior, who must have stolen up on Amra while the pirate was shouting his taunts.

The chase was made in deadly silence, but down in the ravine conditions were anything but silent. At the sight of the falling body a bloodcurdling ululation burst forth from the jungle outside the mouth of the ravine, and a storm of arrows came whistling down it. Another man fell, and three more were wounded, and Wakim called down the men who were laboriously struggling up the vine-matted ramp. He fell back down the ravine, almost to the bend where the ancient gate posts jutted, and beyond that point he feared to go. He felt sure that the ravine beyond the Gateway was filled with lurking savages. They would not have hemmed him in on all sides and then left open an avenue of escape.

At the spot where he halted there was a cluster of broken rocks that looked as though they might once have formed the walls of a building of some sort. Among them Wakim made his stand. He ordered his men to lie prone, their musket barrels resting on the rocks. One man he detailed to watch for savages creeping up the ravine from behind them, the others watched the green wall visible beyond the path that ran into the mouth of the ravine. Fear chilled Wakim’s heart. The sun was already lost behind the trees and the shadows were lengthening. In the brief dusk of the tropic twilight, how could a white man’s eye pick out a swift, flitting brown body, or a musket ball find its mark? And when darkness fell – Wakim shivered despite the heat.

Arrows kept singing down the ravine, but they fell short or splintered on the rocks. But now bowmen hidden on the walls drove down their shafts, and from their vantage point the stones afforded little protection. The screams of men skewered to the ground rose harrowingly. Wakim saw his command melting away under his eyes. The only thing that kept them from being instantly exterminated was the steady fire he had them keep up at the foliage on the cliffs. They seldom saw their foes; they only saw the fronds shake, had an occasional glimpse of a brown arm. But the heavy balls, ripping through the broad leaves, made the hidden archers wary, and the shafts came at intervals instead of in volleys. Once a piercing death yell announced that a blind ball had gone home, and the Turanian raised a croaking cheer.

Perhaps it was this which brought the infuriated warriors out of the jungle. Perhaps, like the white men, they disliked fighting in the dark, and wanted to conclude the slaughter before night fell. Perhaps they were ashamed longer to lurk hidden from a handful of men.

At any rate, they came out of the jungle beyond the trail suddenly, and by the scores, not scrawny primitives, but brawny, hard-muscled warriors, confident of their strength and physically a match for even the sinewy Turanians. They came in a wave of brown bodies that suddenly flooded the ravine, and others leaped down the walls, swinging from the lianas. They were hundreds against the handful of Turanians left. These rose from the rocks without orders, meeting death with the bulldog stubbornness of their breed. They fired a volley of arrows full into the tide of snarling faces that surged upon them, and then drew hangers and clubbed empty bows. There was no time to reload. Their blast tore lanes in the onsweeping human torrent, but it did not falter; it came on and engulfed the white men in a snarling, slashing, smiting whirlpool.

Hangers whirred and bit through flesh and bone, clubbed bows rose and fell, spattering brains. But copper-headed axes flashed dully in the twilight, war-clubs made a red ruin of the skulls they kissed, and there were a score of red arms to drag down each struggling white man. The ravine was choked with a milling, eddying mass, revolving about a fast-dwindling cluster of desperate, white-skinned figures.

Not until his last man fell did Wakim break away, blood smeared on his arms, dripping from his sword. He was hemmed in by a surging ring of ferocious figures, but he had one loaded bow left. He fired it full in a painted face surmounted by a feathered crest and saw it vanish in red ruin. He clubbed a shaven head with the empty barrel, and rushed through the gap made by the falling bodies. A wild figure leaped at him, swinging a war-club, but the sword was quicker. Wakim tore the blade free as the savage fell. Dusk was ebbing swiftly into darkness, and the figures swirling about him were becoming indistinct, vague of outline. Twilight waned quickly in the ravine and darkness had settled there before it veiled the jungle outside. It was the darkness that saved Wakim, confusing his attackers. As the sworded Savage fell he found himself free, though men were rushing on him from behind, with clubs lifted.

Blindly he fled down the ravine. It lay empty before him. Fear lent wings to his feet. He raced through the stone abutted Gateway. Beyond it he saw the ravine widen out; stone walls rose ahead of him, almost hidden by vines and creepers, pierced with blank windows and doorways. His flesh crawled with the momentary expectation of a thrust in the back. His heart was pounding so loudly, the blood hammering so agonizingly in his temples, that he could not tell whether or not bare feet were thudding close behind him.

His hat and coat were gone, his shirt torn and blood-stained, though somehow he had come through that desperate mêlée unwounded. Before him he saw a vine-tangled wall, and an empty doorway. He ran reelingly into the door and turned, falling to his knee from sheer exhaustion. He shook the sweat from his eyes, panting gaspingly as he fumbled to reload bow. The ravine was a dim alleyway before him, running to the rock-buttressed bend. Moment by moment he expected to see it thronged with fierce faces, with swarming figures. But it lay empty and fierce cries of the victorious warriors drew no nearer. For some reason they had not followed him through the Gateway.

Terror that they were creeping on him from behind brought him to his feet, bow at the ready, staring this way and that.

He was in a room whose stone walls seemed ready to crumble. It was roofless, and grass grew between the broken stones of the floor. Through the gaping roof he could see the stars just blinking out, and the frond-fringed rim of the cliff. Through a door opposite the one by which he crouched he had a vague glimpse of other vegetation-choked, roofless chambers beyond.

Silence brooded over the ruins, and now silence had fallen beyond the bend of the ravine. He fixed his eyes on the blur that was the Gateway, and waited. It stood empty. Yet he knew that the Savages were aware of his flight. Why did they not rush in and cut his throat? Were they afraid of his bow? They had shown no fear of his soldiers’ bows. Had they gone away, for some inexplicable reason? Were those shadowy chambers behind him filled with lurking warriors? If so, why in Bel’s name were they waiting?

He rose and went to the opposite door, craned his neck warily through it, and after some hesitation, entered the adjoining chamber. It had no outlet into the open. All its doors led into other chambers, equally ruinous, with broken roofs, cracked floors and crumbling walls. Three or four he traversed, his tread, as he crushed down the vegetation growing among the broken stones, seeming intolerably loud in the stillness. Abandoning his explorations – for the labyrinth seemed endless – he returned to the room that opened toward the ravine. No sound came up the gulch, but it was so dark under the cliff that men could have entered the Gateway and been crouching near him, without his being able to see them.

________

At last he could endure the suspense no longer. Walking as quietly as he was able, he left the ruins and approached the Gateway, now a well of blackness. A few moments later he was hugging the left-hand abutment and straining his eyes to see into the ravine beyond. It was too dark to see anything more than the stars blinking over the rims of the walls. He took a cautious step beyond the Gateway – it was the swift swish of feet through the vegetation on the floor that saved his life. He sensed rather than saw a black shape loom out of the darkness, and he fired blindly and point-blank. The flash lighted a ferocious face, falling backward, and beyond it the Turanian dimly glimpsed other figures, solid ranks of them, surging inexorably toward him.

With a choked cry he hurled himself back around the gate-pillar, stumbled and fell and lay dumb and quaking, clenching his teeth against the sharp agony he expected in the shape of a spear-thrust. None came. No figure came lunging after him. Incredulously he gathered himself to his feet, his bow shaking in his hands. They were waiting, beyond that bend, but they would not come through the Gateway, not even to glut their blood-lust. This fact forced itself upon him, with its implication of inexplicable mystery.

Stumblingly he made his way back to the ruins and groped into the black doorway, overcoming an instinctive aversion against entering the roofless chamber. Starlight shone through the broken roof, lightening the gloom a little, but black shadows clustered along the walls and the inner door was an ebon well of mystery. Like most Turanians of his generation Wakim more than half believed in ghosts, and he felt that if ever there was a place fit to be haunted by the phantoms of a lost and forgotten race, it was these sullen ruins.

He glanced fearfully through the broken roof at the dark fringe of overhanging fronds on the cliffs above, hanging motionless in the breathless air, and wondered if moonrise, illuminating his refuge, would bring arrows questing down through the roof. Except for the far lone cry of a night-bird, the jungle was silent. There was not so much as the rustle of a leaf. If there were men on the cliffs there was no sign to show it. He was aware of hunger and an increasing thirst; rage gnawed at him, and a fear that was already tinged with panic.

He crouched at the doorway, bow in his hands, naked sword at his knee, and after a while the moon rose, touching the overhanging fronds with silver long before it untangled itself from the trees and rose high enough to pour its light over the cliffs. Its light invaded the ruins, but no arrows came from the cliff, nor was there any sound from beyond the Gateway. Wakim thrust his head through the door and surveyed his retreat.

The ravine, after it passed between the ancient gate-pillars, opened into a broad bowl, walled by cliffs, and unbroken except for the mouth of the gulch. Wakim saw the rim as a continuous, roughly circular line, now edged with the fire of moonlight. The ruins in which he had taken refuge almost filled this bowl, being built against the cliffs on one side. Decay and smothering vines had almost obliterated the original architectural plan. He saw the structure as a maze of roofless chambers, the outer doors opening upon the broad space left between it and the opposite wall of the cliff. This space was covered with low, dense vegetation, which also choked some of the chambers. Wakim saw no way of escape. The cliffs were not like the walls of the ravine. They were of solid rock and sheer, even jutting outward a little at the rim. No vines trailed down them. They did not rise many yards above the broken roofs of the ruins, but they were as far out of his reach as if they had towered a thousand feet. He was caught like a rat in a trap. The only way out was up the ravine, where the blood-lusting warriors waited with grim patience. He remembered Amra’s mocking warning: “–Like the road to Hell: easy to go down; not so easy to go up again!” Passionately he hoped that the Savages had caught the Cimmerian and slain him slowly and painfully. He could have watched Amra flayed alive with intense satisfaction.

Presently, despite hunger and thirst and fear, he fell asleep, to dream of ancient temples where drums muttered and strange figures in parrot-feather mantles moved through the smoke of sacrificial fires; and he dreamed at last of a silent, hideous shape which came to the inner door of his roofless chamber and regarded him with cold, inhuman eyes.

It was from this dream that he awakened, bathed in cold sweat, to start up with an incoherent cry, clutching his bow. Then, fully awake, he stood in the middle of the chamber, trying to gather his scattered wits. Memory of the dream was vague but terrifying. Had he actually seen a shadow sway in the doorway and vanish as he awoke, or had it been only part of his nightmare? The red, lopsided moon was poised on the western rim of the cliffs, and that side of the bowl was in thick shadow, but still an illusive light found its way into the ruins. Wakim peered through the inner doorway, bow readied. Light floated rather than streamed down from above, and showed him an empty chamber beyond. The vegetation on the floor was crushed down, but he remembered having walked back and forth across it several times.

Cursing his nervous imagination he returned to the outer doorway. He told himself that he chose that place the better to guard against an attack from the ravine, but the real reason was that he could not bring himself to select a spot deeper in the gloomy interior of the ancient ruins.

He sat down cross-legged just inside the doorway, his back against the wall, his bow beside him and his sword across his knees. His eyes burned and his lips felt baked with the thirst that tortured him. The sight of the heavy globules of dew that hung on the grass almost maddened him, but he did not seek to quench his thirst by that means, believing as he did that it was rank poison. He drew his belt closer, against his hunger, and told himself that he would not sleep. But he did sleep, in spite of everything.

III

It was a frightful scream close at hand that awakened Wakim. He was on his feet before he was fully awake, glaring wildly about him. The moon had set and the interior of the chamber was dark as Stygia, in which the outer doorway was but a somewhat lighter blur. But outside it there sounded a blood-chilling gurgling, the heaving and flopping of a heavy body. Then silence.

It was a human being that had screamed. Wakim groped for his bow, found his sword instead, and hurried forth, his taut nerves thrumming. The starlight in the bowl, dim as it was, was less Stygian than the absolute blackness of the ruins. But he did not see the figure stretched in the grass until he stumbled over it. That was all he saw, then – just that dim form stretched on the ground before the doorway. The foliage hanging over the cliff rustled a little in the faint breeze. Shadows hung thick under the wall and about the ruins. A score of men might have been lurking near him, unseen. But there was no sound.

After a while Wakim knelt beside the figure, straining his eyes in the starlight. He grunted softly. The dead man was not a savage, but a black man, a brawny ebon giant, clad, like the red men, in a bark loin clout, with a crest of parrot feathers on his kinky head. A murderous copper-headed axe lay near his hand, and a great gash showed in his muscular breast, a lesser wound under his shoulder blade. He had been stabbed so savagely that the blade had transfixed him and come out through his back.

Wakim swore at the accumulated mystery of it. The presence of the black man was not inexplicable. Negro slaves, fleeing from Turanian masters, frequently took to the jungle and lived with the natives. This black evidently did not share in whatever superstition or caution kept the Savages outside the bowl; he had come in alone to butcher the victim they had at bay. But the mystery of his death remained. The blow that had impaled him had been driven with more than ordinary strength. There was a sinister suggestion about the episode, though the mysterious killer had saved Wakim from being brained in his sleep – it was as if some inscrutable being, having claimed the Turanian for its own, refused to be robbed of its prey. Wakim shivered, shaking off the thought.

Then he realized that he was armed only with his sword. He had rushed out of the ruins half asleep, leaving his bow behind him, after a brief fumbling that failed to find them in the darkness. He turned and hurried back into the chamber and began to grope on the floor, first irritably, then with growing horror. The bow was gone.

At this realization panic overwhelmed Wakim. He found himself out in the starlight again without knowing just how he had got there. He was sweating, trembling in every limb, biting his tongue to keep from screaming in hysterical terror.

Frantically he fought for control. It was not imagination, then, which peopled those ghastly ruins with furtive, sinister shapes that glided from room to shadowy room on noiseless feet, and spied upon him while he slept. Something besides himself had been in that room – something that had stolen his bow either while he was fumbling over the dead Negro outside, or – grisly thought! – while he slept. He believed the latter had been the case. He had heard no sound in the ruins while he was outside. But why had it not taken his sword as well? Was it the Savages, after all, playing a horrible game with him? Was it their eyes he seemed to feel burning upon him from the shadows? But he did not believe it was the Savages. They would have no reason to kill their black ally.

Wakim felt that he was near the end of his rope. He was nearly frantic with thirst and hunger, and he shrank from the contemplation of another day of heat in that waterless bowl. He went toward the ravine mouth, grasping his sword in desperation, telling himself that it was better to be speared quickly than haunted to an unknown doom by unseen phantoms, or perish of thirst. But the blind instinct to live drove him back from the rock-buttressed Gateway. He could not bring himself to exchange an uncertain fate for certain death. Faint noises beyond the bend told him that men, many men, were waiting there, and retreated, cursing weakly.

In a futile gust of passion he dragged the black man’s body to the Gateway and thrust it through. At least he would not have it for a companion to poison the air when it rotted in the heat.

He sat down about half-way between the ruins and the ravine-mouth, hugging his sword and straining his eyes into the shadowy starlight, and felt that he was being watched from the ruins; he sensed a Presence there, inscrutable, inhuman, waiting – waiting –

He was still sitting there when dawn flooded jungle and cliffs with grey light, and a brown warrior, appearing in the Gateway, bent his bow and sent an arrow at the figure hunkered in the open space. The shaft cut into the grass near Wakim’s foot, and the white man sprang up stiffly and ran into the doorway of the ruins. The warrior did not shoot again. As if frightened by his own temerity, he turned and hurried back through the Gateway and vanished from sight.

Wakim spat dryly and swore. Daylight dispelled some of the phantom terrors of the night, and he was suffering so much from thirst that his fear was temporarily submerged. He was determined to explore the ruins by each crevice and cranny and bring to bay whatever was lurking among them. At least he would have daylight by which to face it.

To this end he turned toward the inner door, and then he stopped in his tracks, his heart in his throat. In the inner doorway stood a great gourd, newly cut and hollowed, and filled with water; beside it was a stack of fruit, and in another calabash there was meat, still smoking faintly. With a stride he reached the door and glared through. Only an empty chamber met his eyes.

Sight of water and scent of food drove from his mind all thoughts of anything except his physical needs. He seized the water-gourd and drank gulpingly, the precious liquid splashing on his breast. The water was fresh and sweet, and no wine had ever given him such delirious satisfaction. The meat he found was still warm. What it was he neither knew nor cared. He ate ravenously, grasping the joints in his fingers and tearing away the flesh with his teeth. It had evidently been roasted over an open fire, and without salt or seasoning, but it tasted like food of the gods to the ravenous man. He did not seek to explain the miracle, nor to wonder if the food were poisoned. The inscrutable haunter of the ruins which had saved his life that night, and which had stolen his bow, apparently meant to preserve him for the time being, at least, and Wakim accepted the gifts without question.

And having eaten he lay down and slept. He did not believe the Savages would invade the ruins; he did not care much if they did, and speared him in his sleep. He believed that the unknown being which haunted the rooms could slay him any time it wished. It had been close to him again and again and had not struck. It had showed no signs of hostility so far, except to steal his bow. To go searching for it might drive it into hostility.

Wakim, despite his slaked thirst and full belly, was at the point where he had a desperate indifference to consequences. His world seemed to have crumbled about him. He had led his men into a trap to see them butchered; he had seen his prisoner escape; he was caught like a caged rat himself; the wealth he had lusted after and dreamed about had been proved a lie. Worn out with vain ragings against his fate, he slept.

The sun was high when he awoke and sat up with a startled oath. Amra stood looking down at him.

“Damn!” Wakim sprang up, snatching at his sword. His mind was a riot of maddening emotions, but physically he was a new man, and nerved to a rage that was tinged with near-insanity.

“You dog!” he raved. “So the Savages didn’t catch you on the cliffs!”

“Those red dogs?” Amra laughed. ‘“They didn’t follow me past the Gateway. They don’t come on the cliffs overlooking these ruins. They’ve got a cordon of men strung through the jungle, surrounding this place, but I can get through any time I want to. I cooked your breakfast – and mine – right under their noses, and they never saw me.”

“My breakfast!” Wakim glared wildly. “You mean it was you brought water and food for me?”

“Who else?”

“But – but why?” Wakim was floundering in a maze of bewilderment.

Amra laughed, but he laughed only with his lips. His eyes were burning. “Well, at first I thought it would satisfy me if I saw you get an arrow through your guts. Then when you broke away and got in here, I said, ‘Better still! They’ll keep the swine there until he starves, and I’ll lurk about and watch him die slowly.’ I knew they wouldn’t come in after you. When they ambushed me and my crew in the ravine, I cut my way through them and got in here, just as you did, and they didn’t follow me in. But I got out of here the first night. I made sure you wouldn’t get out the way I did that time, and then settled myself to watch you die. I could come or go as I pleased after nightfall, and you’d never see or hear me.”

“But in that case, I don’t see why –”

“You probably wouldn’t understand!” snarled Amra. “But just watching you starve wasn’t enough. I wanted to kill you myself – I wanted to see your blood gush, and watch your eyes glaze!” The Cimmerian’s voice thickened with his passion, and his great hands clenched until the knuckles showed white. “And I didn’t want to kill a man half-dead with want. So I went back up into the jungle on the cliffs and got water and fruit, and knocked a monkey off a limb with a stone, and roasted him. I brought you a good meal and set it there in the door while you were sitting outside the ruins. You couldn’t see me from where you were sitting, and of course you didn’t hear anything. You Turanian are all dull-eared.”

“And it was you who stole my bow last night!” muttered Wakim, staring at the butts jutting from Amra’s Turanian girdle.

“Aye! I took them from the floor beside you while you slept. I learned stealth from the Savages of North America. I didn’t want you to shoot me when I came to pay my debt. While I was getting them I heard somebody sneaking up outside, and saw a black man coming toward the doorway. I didn’t want him to be robbing me of my revenge, so I stuck my cutlass through him. You awakened when he howled, and ran out, as you’ll remember, but I stepped back around the corner and in at another door. I didn’t want to meet you except in broad open daylight and you in fighting trim.”

“Then it was you who spied on me from the inner door,” muttered Wakim. “You whose shadow I saw just before the moon sank behind the cliffs.”

“Not I!” Amra’s denial was genuine. “I didn’t come down into the ruins until after moonset, when I came to steal your bow. Then I went back up on the cliffs, and came again just before dawn to leave your food.”

“But enough of this talk!” he roared gustily, whipping out his cutlass. “I’m mad with thinking of the Galway coast and dead men kicking in a row, and a rope that strangled me! I’ve tricked you, trapped you, and now I’m going to kill you!”

Wakim’s face was a ghastly mask of hate, livid, with bared teeth and glaring eyes.

“Dog!” with a screech he lunged, trying to catch Amra off-guard.

But the cutlass met and deflected the straight blade, and Wakim bounded back just in time to avoid the decapitating sweep of the pirate’s steel. Amra laughed fiercely and came on like a storm, and Wakim met him with a drowning man’s desperation.

Like most officers of the British navy, Wakim was proficient in the use of the long straight sword he carried. He was almost as tall as Amra, and though he looked slender beside the powerful figure of the pirate, he believed that his skill would offset the sheer strength of the Cimmerian.

He was disillusioned within the first few moments of the fight. Amra was neither slow nor clumsy. He was as quick as a wounded panther, and his sword-play was no less crafty than Wakim’s. It only seemed so, because of the pirate’s furious style of attack, showering blow on blow with what looked like sheer recklessness. But the very ferocity of his attack was his best defense, for it gave his opponent no time to launch a counter-attack.

The power of his blows, beating down on Wakim’s blade, rocked and shook the Turanian to his heels, numbing his wrist and arm with their impact. Blind fury, humiliation, naked fright combined to rob the captain of his poise and cunning. A stamp of feet, a louder clash of steel, and Wakim’s blade whirred into a corner. The Turanian reeled back, his face livid, his eyes like those of a madman.

“Pick up your sword!” Amra was panting, not so much from exertion as from rage. Wakim did not seem to hear him.

“Bah!” Amra threw aside his cutlass in a spasm of disgust. “Can’t you even fight? I’ll kill you with my bare hands!”

He slapped Wakim viciously first on one side of the face and then on the other. The Turanian screamed wordlessly and launched himself at the pirate’s throat, and Amra checked him with a buffet in the face and knocked him sprawling with a savage smash under the heart. Wakim got to his knees and shook the blood from his face, while Amra stood over him, his brows black and his great fists knotted.

“Get up!” muttered the Cimmerian thickly. “Get up, you hangman of peasants and children!”

Wakim did not heed him. He was groping inside his shirt, from which he drew out something he stared at with painful intensity.

“Get up, damn you, before I set my boot-heels on your face –”

Amra broke off, glaring incredulously. Wakim, crouching over the object he had drawn from his shirt, was weeping in great, racking sobs.

“What in Crom's name!” Amra jerked it away from him, consumed by wonder to learn what could bring tears from Wakim. It was a skillfully painted miniature. The blow he had struck Wakim had cracked it, but not enough to obliterate the soft gentle faces of a pretty young woman and child which smiled up at the scowling Cimmerian.

“Well, I’m damned!” Amra stared from the broken drawing in his hand to the man crouching miserably on the floor. “Your wife and daughter?”

Wakim, his bloody face sunk in his hands, nodded mutely. He had endured much within the last night and day. The breaking of the portrait he always carried over his heart was the last straw; it seemed like an attack on the one soft spot in his hard soul, and it left him dazed and demoralized.

Amra scowled ferociously, but it somehow seemed forced.

“I didn’t know you had a wife and child,” he said almost defensively.

“The lass is but five years old,” gulped Wakim. “I haven’t seen them in nearly a year. By the gods, what’s to become of them now? A navy captain’s pay is none so great. I’ve never been able to save anything. It was for them I sailed in search of Van Raven and his treasure. I hoped to get a prize that would take care of them if aught happened to me. Kill me!” he cried shrilly, his voice cracking at the highest pitch. “Kill me and be done with it, before I lose my manhood with thinking of them, and beg for my life like a craven dog!”

But Amra stood looking down at him with a frown. Varying expressions crossed his dark face, and suddenly he thrust the portrait back in the Turanian’s hand.

“You’re too poor a creature for me to soil my hands with!” he sneered, and turning on his heel, strode through the inner door.

Wakim stared dully after him, then, still on his knees, began to caress the broken picture, whimpering softly like an animal in pain as if the breaks in the ivory were wounds in his own flesh. Men break suddenly and unexpectedly in the tropics, and Wakim’s collapse was appalling.

He did not look up when the swift stamp of boots announced Amra’s sudden return, without the pirate’s usual stealth. A savage clutch on his shoulder raised him to stare stupidly into the Cimmerian’s convulsed face.

“You’re an infernal dog!” snarled Amra, in a fury that differed strangely from his former murderous hate. He broke into lurid imprecations, cursing Wakim with all the proficiency he had acquired during his years at sea. “I ought to split your skull,” he wound up. “For years I’ve dreamed of it, especially when I was drunk. I’m a cursed fool not to stretch you dead on the floor. I don’t owe you any consideration, blast you! Your wife and daughter don’t mean anything to me. But I’m a fool, like all the Cimmerian, a blasted, chicken-hearted, sentimental fool, and I can’t be the cause of a helpless woman and her colleen starving. Get up and quit sniveling!”

Wakim looked up at him stupidly.

“You – you came back to help me?”

“I might as well stab you as leave you here to starve!” roared the pirate, sheathing his sword. “Get up and stick your skewer back in its scabbard. Who’d have ever thought that a scraun like you would have women-folk like those innocents? Hell’s fire! You ought to be shot! Pick up your sword. You may need it before we get away. But remember, I don’t trust you any further than I can throw a whale by the tail, and I’m keeping your bow. If you try to stab me when I’m not looking I’ll break your head with my cutlass hilt.”

Wakim, like a man in a daze, replaced the painting carefully in his bosom and mechanically picked up his sword and sheathed it. His numbed wits began to thaw out, and he tried to pull himself together.

“What are we to do now?” he asked.

“Shut up!” growled the pirate. “I’m going to save you for the sake of the lady and the lass, but I don’t have to talk to you!” With rare consistency he then continued: “We’ll leave this trap the same way I came and went.

“Listen: four years ago I came here with a hundred men. I’d heard rumors of a ruined city up here, and I thought there might be loot hidden in it. I followed the old road from the beach, and those brown dogs let me and my men get in the ravine before they started butchering us. There must have been five or six hundred of them. They raked us from the walls, and then charged us – some came down the ravine and others jumped down the walls behind us and cut us off. I was the only one who got away, and I managed to cut my way through them, and ran into this bowl. They didn’t follow me in, but stayed outside the Gateway to see that I didn’t get out.

“But I found another way – a slab had fallen away from the wall of a room that was built against the cliff, and a stairway was cut in the rock. I followed it and came out of a sort of trap door up on the cliffs. A slab of rock was over it, but I don’t think the Savages knew anything about it anyway, because they never go up on the cliffs that overhang the basin. They never come in here from the ravine, either. There’s something here they’re afraid of – ghosts, most likely.

“The cliffs slope down into the jungle on the outer sides, and the slopes and the crest are covered with trees and thickets. They had a cordon of men strung around the foot of the slopes, but I got through at night easily enough, made my way to the coast and sailed away with the handful of men I’d left aboard my ship.

“When you captured me the other day, I was going to kill you with my manacles, but you started talking about treasure, and a thought sprang in my mind to steer you into a trap that I might possibly get out of. I remembered this place, and I mixed a lot of truth in with some lies. The Fangs of Satan are no myth; they are a hoard of jewels hidden somewhere on this coast, but this isn’t the place. There’s no plunder about here.

“The Savages have a ring of men strung around this place, as they did before. I can get through, but it isn’t going to be so easy getting you through. You Turanian are like buffaloes when you start through the brush. We’ll start just after dark and try to get through before the moon rises.

“Come on; I’ll show you the stair.”

Wakim followed him through a series of crumbling, vine-tangled chambers, until he halted before a doorway that gaped in the wall that was built against the cliff. A thick slab leaned against the wall which obviously served as a door. The Turanian saw a flight of narrow steps, carved in the solid rock, leading upward through a shaft tunneled in the cliff.

“I meant to block the upper mouth by heaping big rocks on the slab that covers it,” said Amra. “That was when I was going to let you starve. I knew you might find the stair. I doubt if the Savages know anything about it, as they never come in here or go up on the cliffs. But they know a man might be able to get out over the cliffs some way, so they’ve thrown that cordon around the slopes.

“That black man I killed was a different proposition. A slave ship was wrecked off this coast a year ago, and the blacks escaped and took to the jungle. There’s a regular mob of them living somewhere near here. This particular black man wasn’t afraid to come into the ruins. If there are more of his kind out there with the Savages, they may try again tonight. But I believe he was the only one, or he wouldn’t have come alone.”

“Why don’t we go up the cliff now and hide among the trees?” asked Wakim.

“Because we might be seen by the men watching below the slopes, and they’d guess that we were going to make a break tonight, and redouble their vigilance. After awhile I’ll go and get some more food. They won’t see me.”

The men returned to the chamber where Wakim had slept. Amra grew taciturn, and Wakim made no attempt at conversation. They sat in silence while the afternoon dragged by. An hour or so before sundown Amra rose with a curt word, went up the stair and emerged on the cliffs. Among the trees he brought down a monkey with a dextrously-thrown stone, skinned it, and brought it back into the ruins along with a calabash of water from a spring on the hillside. For all his woodscraft he was not aware that he was being watched; he did not see the fierce black face that glared at him from a thicket that stood where the cliffs began to slope down into the jungle below.

Later, when he and Wakim were roasting the meat over a fire built in the ruins, he raised his head and listened intently.

“What do you hear?” asked Wakim.

“A drum,” grunted the Cimmerian.

“I hear it,” said Wakim after a moment. “Nothing unusual about that.”

“It doesn’t sound like a savage drum,” answered Amra. “Sounds more like an African drum.”

Wakim nodded agreement; his ship had lain off the mangrove swamps of the Slave Coast, and he had heard such drums rumbling to one another through the steaming night. There was a subtle difference in the rhythm and timbre that distinguished it from a savage drum.

Evening came on and ripened slowly to dusk. The drum ceased to throb. Back in the low hills, beyond the ring of cliffs, a fire glinted under the dusky trees, casting brown and black faces into sharp relief.

A Savage whose ornaments and bearing marked him as a chief squatted on his hams, his immobile face turned toward the ebony giant who stood facing him. This man was nearly a head taller than any other man there, his proportions overshadowing both the Savages squatting about the fire and the black warriors who stood in a close group behind him. A jaguar-skin mantle was cast carelessly over his brawny shoulders, and copper bracelets ornamented his thickly-muscled arms. There was an ivory ring on his head, and parrot-feathers stood up from his kinky hair. A shield of hard wood and toughened bull-hide was on his left arm, and in his right hand he gripped a great spear whose hammered iron head was as broad as a man’s hand.

“I came swiftly when I heard the drum,” he said gutturally, in the bastardised tongue that served as a common speech for the savages of both colors. “I knew it was N’Onga who called me. N’Onga had gone from my camp to fetch Ajumba, who was lingering with your tribe. N’Onga told me by the drum-talk that a white man was at bay, and Ajumba was dead. I came in haste. Now you tell me that you dare not enter the Old City.”

“I have told you a devil dwells there,” answered the Savage doggedly. “He has chosen the white man for his own. He will be angry if you try to take him away from him. It is death to enter his kingdom.”

The black chief lifted his great spear and shook it defiantly.

“I was a slave to the Turanians long enough to know that the only devil is a white man! I do not fear your devil. In my land his brothers are big as he, and I have slain one with a spear like this. A day and a night have passed since the white man fled into the Old City. Why has not the devil devoured him, or this other who lingers on the cliffs?”

“The devil is not hungry,” muttered the Savage. “He waits until he is hungry. He has eaten recently. When he is hungry again he will take them. I will not go into his lair with my men. You are a stranger in this country. You do not understand these things.”

“I understand that Bigomba who was a king in his own country fears nothing, neither man nor demon,” retorted the black giant. “You tell me that Ajumba went into the Old City by night, and died. I have seen his body. The devil did not slay him. One of the white men stabbed him. If Ajumba could go into the Old City and not be seized by the devil, then I and my thirty men can go. I know how the big white man comes and goes between the cliffs and the ruins. There is a hole in the rock with a slab for a door over it. N’Onga watched from the bushes high up on the slopes and saw him come forth and later return through it. I have placed men there to watch it. If the white men come again through that hole, my warriors will spear them. If they do not come, we will go in as soon as the moon rises. Your men hold the ravine, and they can not flee that way. We will hunt them like rats through the crumbling houses.”

IV

“Easy now,” muttered Amra. “It’s dark in this shaft.”

Dusk had deepened into early darkness. The white men were groping their way up the steps cut in the rock. Looking back and down Wakim made out the lower mouth of the shaft only as a slightly lighter blur in the blackness. They climbed on, feeling their way, and presently Amra halted with a muttered warning. Wakim, groping, touched his thigh and felt the muscles tensing upon it. He knew that Amra had placed his shoulders under the slab that closed the upper entrance, and was heaving it up. He saw a crack appear suddenly in the blackness above him, limning the Cimmerian’s bent head and foreshortened figure.

The stone came clear and starlight gleamed through the aperture, laced by the overhanging branches of the trees. Amra let the slab fall on the stone rim, and started to climb out of the shaft. He had emerged head, shoulders and hips when without warning a black form loomed against the stars and a gleam of steel hissed downward at his breast.

Amra threw up his cutlass and the spear rang against it, staggering him on the steps with the impact. Snatching a bow from his belt with his left hand he fired point-blank and the black man groaned and fell, head and arms dangling in the opening. He struck the pirate as he fell, destroying Amra’s already precarious balance. He toppled backward down the steps, carrying Wakim with him. A dozen steps down they brought up in a sprawling heap, and staring upward, saw the square well above them fringed with indistinct black blobs they knew were heads outlined against the stars.

“I thought you said the Savages never –” panted Wakim.

“They’re not Savages,” growled Amra, rising. “They’re negroes. Cimarroons! The same dogs who escaped from the slave ship. That drum we heard was one of them calling the others. Look out!”

Spears came whirring down the shaft, splintering on the steps, glancing from the walls. The white men hurled themselves recklessly down the steps at the risk of broken limbs. They tumbled through the lower doorway and Amra slammed the heavy slab in place.

“They’ll be coming down it next,” he snarled. “We’ve got to heap enough rocks against it to hold it – no, wait a minute! If they’ve got the guts to come at all, they’ll come by the ravine if they can’t get in this way, or on ropes hung from the cliffs. This place is easy enough to get into – not so damned easy to get out of. We’ll leave the shaft open. If they come this way we can get them in a bunch as they try to come out.”

He pulled the slab aside, standing carefully away from the door.

“Suppose they come from the ravine and this way, too?”

“They probably will,” growled Amra, “but maybe they’ll come this way first, and maybe if they come down in a bunch we can kill them all. There may not be more than a dozen of them. They’ll never persuade the Savages to follow them in.”

He set about reloading the bow he had fired, with quick, sure hands in the dark. It consumed the last grain of powder in the flask. The white men lurked like phantoms of murder about the doorway of the stair, waiting to strike suddenly and deadlily. Time dragged. No sound came from above. Wakim’s imagination was at work again, picturing an invasion from the ravine, and dusky figures gliding about them, surrounding the chamber. He spoke of this and Amra shook his head.

“When they come I’ll hear them; nothing on two legs can get in here without my knowing it.”

Suddenly Wakim was aware of a dim glow pervading the ruins. The moon was rising above the cliffs. Amra swore.

“No chance of our getting away tonight. Maybe those black dogs were waiting for the moon to come up. Go into the chamber where you slept and watch the ravine. If you see them sneaking in that way, let me know. I can take care of any that come down the stair.”

Wakim felt his flesh crawl as he made his way through those dim chambers. The moonlight glinted down through vines tangled across the broken roofs, and shadows lay thick across his path. He reached the chamber where he had slept, and where the coals of their fire still glowed dully. He started across toward the outer door when a soft sound brought him whirling around. A cry was wrenched from his throat.

Out of the darkness of a corner rose a swaying shape; a great wedge-shaped head and an arched neck were outlined against the moonlight. In one brain-staggering instant the mystery of the ruins became clear to him; he knew what had watched him with lidless eyes as he lay sleeping, and what had glided away from his door as he awoke – he knew why the Savages would not come into the ruins or mount the cliffs above them. He was face to face with the devil of the deserted city, hungry at last – and that devil was a giant anaconda!

In that moment Wakim experienced such fear and loathing horror as ordinarily come to men only in foul nightmares. He could not run, and after that first scream his tongue seemed frozen to his palate. Only when the hideous head darted toward him did he break free from the paralysis that engulfed him and then it was too late.

He struck at it wildly and futilely, and in an instant it had him – lapped and wrapped about with coils which were like huge cables of cold, pliant steel. He shrieked again, fighting madly against the crushing constriction – he heard the rush of Amra’s boots – then the pirate’s bow crashed together and he heard plainly the thud of the arrows into the great snake’s body. It jerked convulsively and whipped from about him, hurling him sprawling to the floor, and then it came at Amra like the rush of a hurricane through the grass, its forked tongue licking in and out in the moonlight, and the noise of its hissing filling the chamber.

Amra avoided the battering-ram stroke of the blunt nose with a sidewise spring that would have shamed a starving jaguar, and his cutlass was a sheen in the moonlight as it hewed deep into the mighty neck. Blood spurted and the great reptile rolled and knotted, sweeping the floor and dislodging stones from the wall with its thrashing tail. Amra leaped high, clearing it as it lashed but Wakim, just climbing to his feet, was struck and knocked sprawling into a corner. Amra was springing in again, cutlass lifted, when the monster rolled aside and fled through the inner door, with a loud rushing sound through the thick vegetation.

Amra was after it, his berserk fury fully roused. He did not wish the wounded reptile to crawl away and hide, perhaps to return later and take them by surprise. Through chamber after chamber the chase led, in a direction neither of the men had followed in his former explorations, and at last into a room almost choked by tangled vines. Tearing these aside Amra stared into a black aperture in the wall, just in time to see the monster vanishing into its depths. Wakim, trembling in every limb, had followed, and now looked over the pirate’s shoulder. A reptilian reek came from the aperture, which they now saw as an arched doorway, partly masked by thick vines. Enough moonlight found its way through the roof to reveal a glimpse of stone steps leading up into darkness.

“I missed this,” muttered Amra. “When I found the stair I didn’t look any further for an exit. Look how the door-sill glistens with scales that have been rubbed off that brute’s belly. He uses it often. I believe those steps lead to a tunnel that goes clear through the cliffs. There’s nothing in this bowl that even a snake could eat or drink. He has to go out into the jungle to get water and food. If he was in the habit of going out by the way of the ravine, there’d be a path worn away through the vegetation, like there is in this room. Besides, the Savages wouldn’t stay in the ravine. Unless there’s some other exit we haven’t found, I believe that he comes and goes this way, and that means it lets into the outer world. It’s worth trying, anyway.”

“You mean to follow that fiend into that black tunnel?” ejaculated Wakim aghast.

“Why not? We’ve got to follow and kill him anyway. If we run into a nest of them – well, we’ve got to die some time, and if we wait here much longer they will be cutting our throats. This is a chance to get away, I believe. But we won’t go in the dark.”

Hurrying back to the room where they had cooked the monkey, Amra caught up a fagot, wrapped a torn strip of his shirt about one end and set it smouldering in the coals which he blew into a tiny flame. The improvised torch flickered and smoked, but it cast light of a sort. Amra strode back to the chamber where the snake had vanished, followed by Wakim who stayed close within the dancing ring of light, and saw writhing serpents in every vine that swayed overhead.

The torch revealed blood thickly spattered on the stone steps. Squeezing their way between the tangled vines which did not admit a man’s body as easily as a serpent’s, they mounted the steps warily. Amra went first, holding the torch high and ahead of him, his cutlass in his right hand. He had thrown away the useless, empty bow. They climbed half a dozen steps and came into a tunnel some fifteen feet wide and perhaps ten feet high from the stone floor to the vaulted roof. The serpent-reek and the glisten of the floor told of long occupancy by the brute, and the blood-drops ran on before them.

The walls, floor and roof of the tunnel were in a much better state of preservation than were the ruins outside, and Wakim found time to marvel at the ingenuity of the ancient race which had built it.

Meanwhile, in the moonlit chamber they had just quitted, a giant black man appeared as silently as a shadow. His great spear glinted in the moonlight, and the plumes on his head rustled as he turned to look about him. Four warriors followed him.

“They went into that door,” said one of these, pointing to the vine-tangled entrance. “I saw their torch vanish into it. But I feared to follow them, alone as I was, and I ran to tell you, Bigomba.”

“But what of the screams and the shot we heard just before we descended the shaft?” asked another uneasily.

“I think they met the demon and slew it,” answered Bigomba. “Then they went into this door. Perhaps it is a tunnel which leads through the cliffs. One of you go gather the rest of the warriors who are scattered through the rooms searching for the white dogs. Bring them after me. Bring torches with you. As for me, I will follow with the other three, at once. Bigomba sees like a lion in the dark.”

As Amra and Wakim advanced through the tunnel Wakim watched the torch fearfully. It was not very satisfactory, but it gave some light, and he shuddered to think of its going out or burning to a stump and leaving them in darkness. He strained his eyes into the gloom ahead, momentarily expecting to see a vague, hideous figure rear up amidst it. But when Amra halted suddenly it was not because of an appearance of the reptile. They had reached a point where a smaller corridor branched off the main tunnel, leading away to the left.

“Which shall we take?”

Amra bent over the floor, lowering his torch. “The blood-drops go to the left,” he grunted. “That’s the way he went.”

“Wait!” Wakim gripped his arm and pointed along the main tunnel. “Look! There ahead of us! Light!”

Amra thrust his torch behind him, for its flickering glare made the shadows seem blacker beyond its feeble radius. Ahead of them, then, he saw something like a floating gray mist, and knew it was moonlight finding its way somehow into the tunnel. Abandoning the hunt for the wounded reptile, the men rushed forward and emerged into a broad square chamber, hewn out of solid rock. But Wakim swore in bitter disappointment. The moonlight was coming, not from a door opening into the jungle, but from a square shaft in the roof, high above their heads.

An archway opened in each wall, and the one opposite the arch by which they had entered was fitted with a heavy door, corroded and eaten by decay. Against the wall to their right stood a stone image, taller than a man, a carven grotesque, at once manlike and bestial. A stone altar stood before it, its surface channeled and darkly stained. Something on the idol’s breast caught the moonlight in a frosty sparkle.

“The devil!” Amra sprang forward and wrenched it away. He held it up – a thing like a giant’s necklace, made of jointed plates of hammered gold, each as broad as a man’s palm and set with curiously-cut jewels.

“I thought I lied when I told you there were gems here,” grunted the pirate. “It seems I spoke the truth unwittingly! These are not the Fangs of Satan, but they’ll fetch a tidy fortune anywhere in Europe.”

“What are you doing?” demanded Wakim, as the Cimmerian laid the huge necklace on the altar and lifted his cutlass. Amra’s reply was a stroke that severed the ornament into equal halves. One half he thrust into Wakim’s astounded hands.

“If we get out of here alive that will provide for the wife and child,” he grunted.

“But you –” stammered Wakim. “You hate me – yet you save my life and then give me this –”

“Shut up!” snarled the pirate. “I’m not giving it to you; I’m giving it to the girl and her baby. Don’t you venture to thank me, curse you! I hate you as much as I–”

He stiffened suddenly, wheeling to glare down the tunnel up which they had come. He stamped out the torch and crouched down behind the altar, drawing Wakim with him.

“Men!” he snarled. “Coming down the tunnel, I heard steel clink on stone. I hope they didn’t see the torch. Maybe they didn’t. It wasn’t much more than a coal in the moonlight.”

They strained their eyes down the tunnel. The moon hovered at an angle above the open shaft which allowed some of its light to stream a short way down the tunnel. Vision ceased at the spot where the smaller corridor branched off. Presently four shadows bulked out of the blackness beyond, taking shape gradually like figures emerging from a thick fog. They halted, and the white men saw the largest one – a giant who towered above the others – point silently with his spear, up the tunnel, then down the corridor. Two of the shadowy shapes detached themselves from the group and moved off down the corridor out of sight. The giant and the other man came on up the tunnel.

“The Savages, hunting us,” muttered Amra. “They’re splitting their party to make sure they find us. Lie low; there may be a whole crew right behind them.”

They crouched lower behind the altar while the two blacks came up the tunnel, growing more distinct as they advanced. Wakim’s skin crawled at the sight of the broad-bladed spears held ready in their hands. The biggest one moved with the supple tread of a great panther, head thrust forward, spear poised, shield lifted. He was a formidable image of rampant barbarism, and Wakim wondered if even such a man as Amra could stand before him with naked steel and live.

They halted in the doorway, and the white men caught the white flash of their eyes as they glared suspiciously about the chamber. The smaller black seized the giant’s arm convulsively and pointed, and Wakim’s heart jumped into his throat. He thought they had been discovered, but the negro was pointing at the idol. The big man grunted contemptuously. However slavishly in awe he might be of the fetishes of his native coast, the gods and demons of other races held no terrors for him.

But he moved forward majestically to investigate, and Wakim realized that discovery was inevitable.

Amra whispered fiercely in his ear: “We’ve got to get them, quick! Take the brave. I’ll take the chief. Now!”

They sprang up together, and the blacks cried out involuntarily, recoiling from the unexpected apparitions. In that instant the white men were upon them.

The shock of their sudden appearance had stunned the smaller black. He was small only in comparison with his gigantic companion. He was as tall as Wakim and the great muscles knotted under his sleek skin. But he was staggering back, gaping stupidly, spear and shield lowered on limply hanging arms. Only the bite of steel brought him to his senses, and then it was too late. He screamed and lunged madly, but Wakim’s sword had girded deep into his vitals and his lunge was wild. The Turanian side-stepped and thrust again and yet again, under and over the shield, fleshing his blade in groin and throat. The black man swayed in his rush, his arms fell, shield and spear clattered to the floor and he toppled down upon them.

Wakim turned to stare at the battle waging behind him, where the two giants fought under the square beam of moonlight, black and white, spear and shield against cutlass.

Bigomba, quicker-witted than his follower, had not gone down under the unexpected rush of the white man. He had reacted instantly to his fighting instinct. Instead of retreating he had thrown up his shield to catch the down-swinging cutlass, and had countered with a ferocious lunge that scraped blood from the Cimmerian’s neck as he ducked aside.

Now they fought in grim silence, while Wakim circled about them, unable to get in a thrust that might not imperil Amra. Both moved with the sure-footed quickness of tigers. The black man towered above the white, but even his magnificent proportions could not overshadow the sinewy physique of the pirate. In the moonlight the great muscles of both men knotted, rippled and coiled in response to their herculean exertions. The play was bewildering, almost blinding the eye that tried to follow it.

Again and again the pirate barely avoided the dart of the great spear, and again and again Bigomba caught on his shield a stroke that otherwise would have shorn him asunder. Speed of foot and strength of wrist alone saved Amra, for he had no defensive armor. But repeatedly he either dodged or side-stepped the savage thrusts, or beat aside the spear with his blade. And he rained blow on blow with his cutlass, slashing the bull-hide to ribbons, until the shield was little more than a wooden framework through which, slipping in a lightning-like thrust, the cutlass drew first blood as it raked through the flesh across the black chief’s ribs.

At that Bigomba roared like a wounded lion, and like a wounded lion he leaped. Hurling the shield at Amra’s head he threw all his giant body behind the arm that drove the spear at the Cimmerian’s breast. The muscles leaped up in quivering bunches on his arm as he smote, and Wakim cried out, unable to believe that Amra could avoid the lunge. But chain-lightning was slow compared to the pirate’s shift. He ducked, side-stepped, and as the spear whipped past under his arm-pit, he dealt a cut that found no shield in the way. The cutlass was a blinding flicker of steel in the moonlight, ending its arc in a butcher-shop crunch. Bigomba fell as a tree falls and lay still. His head had been all but severed from his body.

Amra stepped back, panting. His great chest heaved under the tattered shirt, and sweat dripped from his face. At last he had met a man almost his match, and the strain of that terrible encounter left the tendons of his thighs quivering.

“We’ve got to get out of here before the rest of them come,” he gasped, catching up his half of the idol’s necklace. “That smaller corridor must lead to the outside, but those niggers are in it, and we haven’t any torch. Let’s try this door. Maybe we can get out that way.”

The ancient door was a rotten mass of crumbling panels and corroded copper bands. It cracked and splintered under the impact of Amra’s heavy shoulder, and through the apertures the pirate felt the stir of fresh air, and caught the scent of a damp river-reek. He drew back to smash again at the door, when a chorus of fierce yells brought him about snarling like a trapped wolf. Swift feet pattered up the tunnel, torches waved, and barbaric shouts re-echoed under the vaulted roof. The white men saw a mass of fierce faces and flashing spears, thrown into relief by the flaring torches, surging up the tunnel. The light of their coming streamed before them. They had heard and interpreted the sounds of combat as they hurried up the tunnel, and now they had sighted their enemies, and they burst into a run, howling like wolves.

“Break the door, quick!” cried Wakim.

“No time now,” grunted Amra. “They’d be on us before we could get through. We’ll make our stand here.”

He ran across the chamber to meet them before they could emerge from the comparatively narrow archway, and Wakim followed him. Despair gripped the Turanian and in a spasm of futile rage he hurled the half-necklace from him. The glint of its jewels was mockery. He fought down the sick memory of those who waited for him in Turan as he took his place at the door beside the giant pirate.

As they saw their prey at bay the howls of the oncoming blacks grew wilder. Spears were brandished among the torches – then a shriek of different timbre cut the din. The foremost blacks had almost reached the point where the corridor branched off the tunnel – and out of the corridor raced a frantic figure. It was one of the black men who had gone down it exploring. And behind him came a blood-smeared nightmare. The great serpent had turned at bay at last.

It was among the blacks before they knew what was happening. Yells of hate changed to screams of terror, and in an instant all was madness, a clustering tangle of struggling black bodies and limbs, and that great sinuous cable-like trunk writhing and whipping among them, the wedge-shaped head darting and battering. Torches were knocked against the walls, scattering sparks. One man, caught in the squirming coils, was crushed and killed almost instantly, and others were dashed to the floor or hurled with bone-splintering force against the walls by the battering-ram head, or the lashing, beam-like tail. Shot and slashed as it was, wounded mortally, the great snake clung to life with the horrible vitality of its kind, and in the blind fury of its death throes it became an appalling engine of destruction.

Within a matter of moments the blacks who survived had broken away and were fleeing down the tunnel, screaming their fear. Half a dozen limp and broken bodies lay sprawled behind them, and the serpent, unlooping himself from these victims, swept down the tunnel after the living who fled from him. Fugitives and pursuer vanished into the darkness, from which frantic yells came back faintly.

“God!” Wakim wiped his brow with a trembling hand. “That might have happened to us!”

“Those niggers who went groping down the corridor must have stumbled onto him lying in the dark,” muttered Amra. “I guess he got tired of running. Or maybe he knew he had his death-wound and turned back to kill somebody before he died. He’ll chase those niggers until either he’s killed them all, or died himself. They may turn on him and spear him to death when they get into the open. Pick up your part of the necklace. I’m going to try that door again.”

Three powerful drives of his shoulder were required before the ancient door finally gave way. Fresh, damp air poured through, though the interior was dark. But Amra entered without hesitation, and Wakim followed him. After a few yards of groping in the dark, the narrow corridor turned sharply to the left, and they emerged into a somewhat wider passage, where a familiar, nauseating reek made Wakim shudder.

“The snake used this tunnel,” said Amra. “This must be the corridor that branches off the tunnel on the other side of the idol-room. There must be a regular net-work of subterranean rooms and tunnels under these cliffs. I wonder what we’d find if we explored all of them.”

Wakim fervently disavowed any curiosity in that direction, and an instant later jumped convulsively when Amra snapped suddenly: “Look there!”

“Where? How can a man look anywhere in this darkness?”

“Ahead of us, damn it! It’s light at the other end of this tunnel!”

“Your eyes are better than mine,” muttered Wakim, but he followed the pirate with new eagerness, and soon he too could see the tiny disk of grey that seemed set in a solid black wall. After that it seemed to the Turanian that they walked for miles. It was not that far in reality, but the disk grew slowly in size and clarity, and Wakim knew that they had come a long way from the idol-room when at last they thrust their heads through a round, vine-crossed opening and saw the stars reflected in the black water of a sullen river flowing beneath them.

“This is the way he came and went, all right,” grunted Amra.

The tunnel opened in the steep bank and there was a narrow strip of beach below it, probably existent only in dry seasons. They dropped down to it and looked about at the dense jungle walls which hung over the river.

“Where are we?” asked Wakim helplessly, his sense of direction entirely muddled.

“Beyond the foot of the slopes,” answered Amra, “and that means we’re outside the cordon the Savages have strung around the cliffs. The coast lies in that direction; come on!”

The sun hung high above the western horizon when two men emerged from the jungle that fringed the beach, and saw the tiny bay stretching before them.

Amra stopped in the shadow of the trees.

“There’s your ship, lying at anchor where we left her. All you’ve got to do now is hail her for a boat to be sent ashore, and your part of the adventure is over.”

Wakim looked at his companion. The Turanian was bruised, scratched by briars, his clothing hanging in tatters. He could hardly have been recognized as the trim captain of the Redoubtable. But the change was not limited to his appearance. It went deeper. He was a different man than the one who marched his prisoner ashore in quest of a mythical hoard of gems.

“What of you? I owe you a debt that I can never –”

“You owe me nothing,” Amra broke in. “I don’t trust you, Wakim.”

The other winced. Amra did not know that it was the cruelest thing he could have said. He did not mean it as cruelty. He was simply speaking his mind, and it did not occur to him that it would hurt the Turanian.

“Do you think I could ever harm you now, after this?” exclaimed Wakim. “Pirate or not, I could never –”

“You’re grateful and full of the milk of human kindness now,” answered Amra, and laughed hardly. “But you might change your mind after you got back on your decks. Wakim lost in the jungle is one man; Captain Wakim aboard his king’s warship is another.”

“I swear –” began Wakim desperately, and then stopped, realizing the futility of his protestations. He realized, with an almost physical pain, that a man can never escape the consequences of a wrong, even though the victim may forgive him. His punishment now was an inability to convince Amra of his sincerity, and it hurt him far more bitterly than the Cimmerian could ever realize. But he could not expect Amra to trust him, he realized miserably. In that moment he loathed himself for what he had been, and for the smug, self-sufficient arrogance which had caused him to ruthlessly trample on all who fell outside the charmed circle of his approval. At that moment there was nothing in the world he desired more than the firm handclasp of the man who had fought and wrought so tremendously for him; but he knew he did not deserve it.

“You can’t stay here!” he protested weakly.

“The Savages never come to this coast,” answered Amra. “I’m not afraid of the Cimarroons. Don’t worry about me.” He laughed again, at what he considered the jest of anyone worrying about his safety. “I’ve lived in the wilds before now. I’m not the only pirate in these seas. There’s a rendezvous you know nothing about. I can reach it easily. I’ll be back on the Main with a ship and a crew the next time you hear about me.”

And turning supply, he strode into the foliage and vanished, while Wakim, dangling in his hand a jeweled strip of gold, stared helplessly after him.

The Blood of the Gods

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I —

A Shot Through the Window

It was the wolfish snarl on Hawkston’s thin lips, the red glare in his eyes, which first roused terrified suspicion in the Shemite’s mind, there in the deserted hut on the outskirts of the little town of Azem. Suspicion became certainty as he stared at the three dark, lowering faces of the other white men, bent toward him, and all beastly with the same cruel greed that twisted their leader’s features.

The brandy glass slipped from the Shemite’s hand and his swarthy skin went ashy.

“Lah!” he cried desperately. “No! You lied to me! You are not friends —you brought me here to murder me—”

He made a convulsive effort to rise, but Hawkston grasped the bosom of his gumbaz in an iron grip and forced him down into the camp chair again. The Shemite cringed away from the dark, hawk-like visage bending close to his own.

“You won’t be hurt, Dirdar,” rasped the Bossonian. “Not if you tell us what we want to know. You heard my question. Where is Al Wazir?”

The beady eyes of the Shemite glared wildly up at his captor for an instant, then Dirdar moved with all the strength and speed of his wiry body. Bracing his feet against the floor, he heaved backward suddenly, toppling the chair over and throwing himself along with it. With a rending of worn cloth the bosom of the gumbaz came away in Hawkston’s hand, and Dirdar, regaining his feet like a bouncing rubber ball, dived straight at the open door, ducking beneath the pawing arm of the big Gunderman, Van Brock. But he tripped over Ortelli’s extended leg and fell sprawling, rolling on his back to slash up at the Ophirian with the curved knife he had snatched from his girdle. Ortelli jumped back, yowling, blood spurting from his leg, but as Dirdar once more bounced to his feet, the Hyperborean, Krakovitch, struck him heavily from behind with a weapon barrel.

As the Shemite sagged to the floor, stunned, Hawkston kicked the knife out of his hand. The Bossonian stooped, grabbed him by the collar of his abba, and grunted: “Help me lift him, Van Brock.”

The burly Gunderman complied, and the half-senseless Shemite was slammed down in the chair from which he had just escaped. They did not tie him, but Krakovitch stood behind him, one set of steely fingers digging into his shoulder, the other poising the long bow-barrel.

Hawkston poured out a glass of brandy and thrust it to his lips. Dirdar gulped mechanically, and the glassiness faded out of his eyes.

“He’s coming around,” grunted Hawkston. “You hit him hard, Krakovitch. Shut up, Ortelli! Tie a rag about your bally leg and quit grousing about it! Well, Dirdar, are you ready to talk?”

The Shemite looked about like a trapped animal, his lean chest heaving under the torn gumbaz. He saw no mercy in the flinty faces about him.

“Let’s burn his cursed feet,” snarled Ortelli, busy with an improvised bandage. “Let me put the hot irons to the swine—”

Dirdar shuddered and his gaze sought the face of the Bossonian, with burning intensity. He knew that Hawkston was leader of these lawless men by virtue of sharp wits and a sledge-like fist.

The Shemite licked his lips.

“As Nergal is my witness, I do not know where Al Wazir is!”

“You lie!” snapped the Bossonian. “We know that you were one of the party that took him into the desert—and he never came back. We know you know where he was left. Now, are you going to tell?”

“Conan will kill me!” muttered Dirdar.

“Who’s Conan?” rumbled Van Brock.

“Cimmerian,” snapped Hawkston. “Adventurer. He led the caravan that took Al Wazir into the desert. Dirdar, you needn’t fear Conan. We’ll protect you from him.”

A new gleam entered the Shemite’s shifty eyes; avarice mingled with the fear already there. Those beady eyes grew cunning and cruel.

“There is only one reason why you wish to find Al Wazir,” he said. “You hope to learn the secret of a treasure richer than the secret hoard of Shahrazar the Forbidden! Well, suppose I tell you? Suppose I even guide you to the spot where Al Wazir is to be found—will you protect me from Conan— will you give me a share of the Blood of the Gods?”

Hawkston frowned, and Ortelli ripped out an oath.

“Promise the dog nothing! Burn the soles off his feet! Here! I’ll heat the irons!”

“Let that alone!” said Hawkston with an oath. “One of you better go to the door and watch. I saw that old devil Salim sneaking around through the alleys just before sundown.”

No one obeyed. They did not trust their leader. He did not repeat the command. He turned to Dirdar, in whose eyes greed was much stronger now than fear.

“How do I know you’d guide us right? Every man in that caravan swore an oath he’d never betray Al Wazir’s hiding place.”

“Oaths were made to be broken,” answered Dirdar cynically. “For a share in the Blood of the Gods I would foreswear Ishtar. But even when you have found Al Wazir, you may not be able to learn the secret of the treasure.”

“We have ways of making men talk,” Hawkston assured him grimly. “Will you put our skill to the test, or will you guide us to Al Wazir? We will give you a share of the treasure.” Hawkston had no intention of keeping his word as he spoke.

“Mashallah!” said the Shemite. “He dwells alone in an all but inaccessible place. When I name it, you, at least, Hawkston effendi, will know how to reach it. But I can guide you by a shorter way, which will save two days. And a day saved on the desert is often the difference between life and death.

“Al Wazir dwells in the Caves of El Khour-arrrgh!” His voice broke in a scream, and he threw up his hands, a sudden image of frantic terror, eyes glaring, teeth bared. Simultaneously the deafening report of a shot filled the hut, and Dirdar toppled from his chair, clutching at his breast. Hawkston whirled, caught a glimpse through the window of a bow and a grim bearded face. He swept the candle from the table and plunged the hut into darkness.

His companions were cursing, yelling, falling over each other, but Hawkston acted with unerring decision. He plunged to the door of the hut, knocking aside somebody who stumbled into his path, and threw the door open. He saw a figure running across the road, into the shadows on the side. He threw up his crossbow, fired, and saw the figure sway and fall headlong, to be swallowed up by the darkness under the trees. He crouched for an instant in the doorway, bow lifted, left arm barring the blundering rush of the other men.

“Keep back, curse you! That was old Salim. There may be more, under the trees across the road.”

But no menacing figure appeared, no sound mingled with the rustling of the palm-leaves in the wind, except a noise that might have been a man flopping in his death-throes—or dragging himself painfully away on hands and knees. This noise quickly ceased and Hawkston stepped cautiously out into the starlight. No shot greeted his appearance, and instantly he became a dynamo of energy. He leaped back into the hut, snarling: “Van Brock, take Ortelli and look for Salim. I know I hit him. You’ll probably find him lying dead over there under the trees. If he’s still breathing, finish him! He was Al Wazir’s steward. We don’t want him taking tales to Conan.”

Followed by Krakovitch, the Bossonian groped his way into the darkened hut, struck a light and held it over the prostrate figure on the floor; it etched a grey face, staring glassy eyes, and a naked breast in which showed a round blue hole from which the blood had already ceased to ooze.

“Shot through the heart!” swore Hawkston, clenching his fist. “Old Salim must have seen him with us, and trailed him, guessing what we were after. The old devil shot him to keep him from guiding us to Al Wazir—but no matter. I don’t need any guide to get me to the Caves of El Khour— well?” As the Gunderman and the Ophirian entered.

Van Brock spoke: “We didn’t find the old dog. Smears of blood all over the grass, though. He must have been hard hit.”

“Let him go,” snarled Hawkston. “He’s crawled away to die somewhere. It’s a mile to the nearest occupied house. He won’t live to get that far. Come on! The camels and the men are ready. They’re behind that palm grove south of this hut. Everything’s ready for the jump, just as I planned it. Let’s go!”

Soon thereafter there sounded the soft pad of camel’s hoofs and the jingle of accoutrements, as a line of mounted figures, ghostly in the night, moved westward into the desert. Behind them the flat roofs of el-Azem slept in the starlight, shadowed by the palm-leaves which stirred in the breeze that blew from Iranistan.

II

The Abodes of Emptiness

Conan’s thumb was hooked easily in his belt, keeping his hand near the butt of his heavy weapon, as he rode leisurely through the starlight, and his gaze swept the palms which lined each side of the road, their broad fronds rattling in the faint breeze. He did not expect an ambush or the appearance of an enemy. He had no blood-feud with any man in el-Azem. And yonder, a hundred yards ahead of him, stood the flat-roofed, wall-encircled house of his friend, Achmet ibn Mitkhal, where the Cimmerian was living as an honored guest. But the habits of a life-time are tenacious. For years Conan had carried his life in his hands, and if there were hundreds of men proud to call him friend, there were hundreds of others who would have given the teeth out of their heads for a clean sight of him, etched against the stars with a poisoned dart or arrow at hand.

Conan reached the gate, and was about to call to the gate-keeper, when it swung open, and the portly figure of his host emerged.

“Nergal be with thee, Conan! I was beginning to fear some enemy had laid an ambush for you. Is it wise to ride alone, by night, when within a three days’ ride dwell men who bear blood-feud with you?”

Conan swung down, and handed his reins to a groom who had followed his master out of the compound. The Cimmerian was a large man, square-shouldered and deep-chested, with corded sinews and steely nerves which had been tempered and honed by the tooth-and-nail struggle for survival in the wild outlands of the world. His blue eyes gleamed in the starlight like the untamed son of the wilderness that he was.

“I think my enemies have decided to let me die of old age or inertia,” he replied. “There has not been—”

“What’s that?” Achmet ibn Mitkhal had his own enemies. In an instant the curious dragging, choking sounds he had heard beyond the nearest angle of the wall had transformed him into a tense image of suspicion and menace.

Conan had heard the sounds as quickly as his Shemite host, and he turned with the smooth speed of a cat, the big weapon appearing in his right hand as if by magic. He took a single quick stride toward the angle of the wall— then around that angle came a strange figure, with torn, trailing garments. A man, crawling slowly and painfully along on his hands and knees. As he crawled he gasped and panted with a grisly whistling and gagging in his breathing. As they stared at him, he slumped down almost at their feet, turning a blood-streaked visage to the starlight.

“Crom!” ejaculated Conan softly, and with one stride he was at the angle, staring around it, weapon poised. No living thing met his eye; only an expanse of bare ground, barred by the shadows of the palms. He turned back to the prostrate man, over whom Achmet was already bending.

“Effendi!” panted the old man. “Conan!” Conan dropped to his knee beside him, and Salim’s bony fingers clenched desperately on his arm.

“A hakim, quick, Achmet!” snapped Conan.

“Nay,” gasped Salim. “I am dying—”

“Who shot you, Salim?” asked Conan, for he had already ascertained the nature of the wound which dyed the old man’s tattered abba with crimson.

“Hawkston— the Bossonian.” The words came with an effort. “I saw him—the three rogues who follow him—beguiling that fool Dirdar to the deserted hut near Mekmet’s Pool. I followed for I knew—they meant no good. Dirdar was a dog. He drank liquor—like an Infidel. Conan! He betrayed Al Wazir! In spite of his oath. I shot him—through the window—but not in time. He will never guide them—but he told Hawkston—of the Caves of El Khour. I saw their caravan-camels —seven Shemite servants. Conan! They have departed— for the Caves —the Caves of El Khour!”

“Don’t worry about them, Salim,” replied Conan, responding to the urgent appeal in the glazing eyes. “They’ll never lay hand on Al Wazir. I promise you.”

“Al Hamud Lillah—” whispered the old Shemite, and with a spasm that brought frothy blood to his bearded lips, his grim old face set in iron lines, and he was dead before Conan could ease his head to the ground.

The Cimmerian stood up and looked down at the silent figure. Achmet came close to him and tugged his sleeve.

“Al Wazir!” murmured Achmet. “Wallah! I thought men had forgotten all about that man. It is more than a year now since he disappeared.”

“White men don’t forget—, not when there’s loot in the offing,” answered Conan sardonically. “All up and down the coast men are still looking for the Blood of the Gods, —those marvelous matched rubies which were Al Wazir’s especial pride, and which disappeared when he forsook the world and went into the desert to live as a hermit, seeking the Way to Truth through meditation and self-denial.”

Achmet shivered and glanced westward where, beyond the belt of palms, the shadowy desert stretched vast and mysterious to mingle its immensity with the dimness of the starlit night.

“A hard way to seek Truth,” said Achmet, who was a lover of the soft things and the rich things of life.

“Al Wazir was a strange man,” answered Conan. “But his servants loved him. Old Salim there, for instance. Good God, Mekmet’s Pool is more than a mile from here. Salim crawled—crawled all that way, shot through and through. He knew Hawkston would torture Al Wazir—maybe kill him. Achmet, have my racing camel saddled—”

“I’ll go with you!” exclaimed Achmet. “How many men will we need? You heard Salim—, Hawkston will have at least eleven men with him—”

“We couldn’t catch him now,” answered Conan. “He’s got too much of a start on us. His camels are hejin racing-camels, too. I’m going to the Caves of El Khour, alone.”

“But—”

“They’ll go by the caravan road that leads to Riyadh; I’m going by the Well of Amir Khan.”

Achmet blenched.

“Amir Khan lies within the country of Shalan ibn Mansour, who hates you as an iman hates Shaitan the Damned!”

“Perhaps none of his tribe will be at the Well,” answered Conan. “I’m the only Feringhi who knows of that route. If Dirdar told Hawkston about it, the Bossonian couldn’t find it, without a guide. I can get to the Caves a full day ahead of Hawkston. I’m going alone, because we couldn’t take enough men to whip the Zuagir if they’re on the war-path. One man has a better chance of slipping through than a score. I’m not going to fight Hawkston—not now. I’m going to warn Al Wazir. We’ll hide until Hawkston gives it up and comes back to el-Azem. Then, when he’s gone, I’ll return by the caravan road.”

Achmet shouted an order to the men who were gathering just within the gate, and they scampered to do his bidding.

“You will go disguised, at least?” he urged.

“No. It wouldn’t do any good. Until I get into Zuagir country I won’t be in any danger, and after that a disguise would be useless. The Zuagir kill and plunder every stranger they catch, whether Christian or Ishtaran.”

He strode into the compound to oversee the saddling of the white racing camel.

“I’m riding light as possible,” he said. “Speed means everything. The camel won’t need any water until we reach the Well. After that it’s not a long jump to the Caves. Load on just enough food and water to last me to the Well, with economy.”

His economy was that of a true son of the desert. Neither water-skin nor food-bag was over-heavy when the two were slung on the high rear pommel. With a brief word of farewell, Conan swung into the saddle, and at the tap of his bamboo stick, the beast lurched to its feet. “Yahh!” Another tap and it swung into motion. Men pulled wide the compound gate and stood aside, their eyes gleaming in the torchlight.

“Bismillah el rahman el rahhim!” quoth Achmet resignedly, lifting his hands in a gesture of benediction, as the camel and its rider faded into the night.

“He rides to death,” muttered a bearded Zuagir.

“Were it another man I should agree,” said Achmet. “But it is Conan who rides. Yet Shalan ibn Mansour would give many horses for his head.”

The sun was swinging low over the desert, a tawny stretch of rocky soil and sand as far as Conan could see in every direction. The solitary rider was the only visible sign of life, but Conan’s vigilance was keen. Days and nights of hard riding lay behind him; he was coming into the Zuagir country, now, and every step he took increased his danger by that much. The Zuagir, whom he believed to be kin to the powerful Roualla of El Hamad, were true sons of Ishmael—hawks of the desert, whose hands were against every man not of their clan. To avoid their country the regular caravan road to the west swung wide to the south. This was an easy route, with wells a day’s march apart, and it passed within a day’s ride of the Caves of El Khour, the catacombs which pit a low range of hills rising sheer out of the wastelands.

Few white men know of their existence, but evidently Hawkston knew of the ancient trail that turned northward from the Well of Khosru, on the caravan road. Hawkston was perforce approaching El Khour circuitously. Conan was heading straight westward, across waterless wastes, cut by a trace so faint only a Zuagir or Conan could have followed it. On that route there was but one watering place between the fringe of oases along the coast and the Caves —the half-mythical Well of Amir Khan, the existence of which was a secret jealously guarded by the Zuagirs.

There was no fixed habitation at the oasis, which was but a clump of palms, watered by a small spring, but frequently bands of Zuagir camped there. That was a chance he must take. He hoped they were driving their camel herds somewhere far to the north, in the heart of their country; but like true hawks, they ranged far afield, striking at the caravans and the outlying villages.

The trail he was following was so slight that few would have recognized it as such. It stretched dimly away before him over a level expanse of stone-littered ground, broken on one hand by sand dunes, on the other by a succession of low ridges. He glanced at the sun, and tapped the water-bag that swung from the saddle. There was little left, though he had practised the grim economy of a Zuagir or a wolf. But within a few hours he would be at the Well of Amir Khan, where he would replenish his supply, —though his nerves tightened at the thought of what might be waiting there for him.

Even as the thought passed through his mind, the sun struck a glint from something on the nearer of the sand dunes. The quick duck of his head was instinctive, and simultaneously there rang out the crack of a bow and he heard the thud of an arrow into flesh. The camel leaped convulsively and came down in a headlong sprawl, shot through the heart. Conan leaped free as it fell, bow in hand, and in an instant was crouching behind the carcass, watching the crest of the dune over the tip of a cocked arrow. A strident yell greeted the fall of the camel, and another shot set the echoes barking. The arrow ploughed into the ground beside Conan’s stiffening breastwork, and the Cimmerian replied. Dust spurted into the air so near the target that it evoked a volley of lurid oaths in a choked voice.

The black glittering ring was withdrawn, and presently there rose the rapid drum of hoofs. Conan saw a white kafieh bobbing among the dunes, and understood the Zuagir’s plan. He believed there was only one man. That man intended to circle Conan’s position, cross the trail a few hundred yards west of him, and get on the rising ground behind the Cimmerian, where his vantage-point would allow him to shoot over the bulk of the camel—, for of course he knew Conan would keep the dead beast between them. But Conan shifted himself only enough to command the trail ahead of him, the open space the Shemite must cross after leaving the dunes before he reached the protection of the ridges. Conan rested his bow across the stiff forelegs of the camel.

A quarter of a mile up the trail there was a sandstone rock jutting up in the skyline. Anyone crossing the trail between it and himself would be limned against it momentarily. He set his sights and drew a bead against that rock. He was betting that the Zuagir was alone, and that he would not withdraw to any great distance before making the dash across the trail.

Even as he meditated a white-clad figure burst from among the ridges and raced across the trail, bending low in the saddle and flogging his mount. It was a long shot, but Conan’s nerves did not quiver. At the exact instant that the white-clad figure was limned against the distant rock, the Cimmerian loosed an arrow. For a fleeting moment he thought he had missed; then the rider straightened convulsively, threw up two wide-sleeved arms and reeled back drunkenly. The frightened horse reared high, throwing the man heavily. In an instant the landscape showed two separate shapes where there had been one —a bundle of white sprawling on the ground, and a horse racing off southward.

Conan lay motionless for a few minutes, too wary to expose himself. He knew the man was dead; the fall alone would have killed him. But there was a slight chance that other riders might be lurking among the sand dunes, after all.

The sun beat down savagely; vultures appeared from nowhere—black dots in the sky, swinging in great circles, lower and lower. There was no hint of movement among the ridges or the dunes.

Conan rose and glanced down at the dead camel. His jaws were set more grimly; that was all. But he realized what the killing of his steed meant. He looked westward, where the heat waves shimmered. It would be a long walk, a long, dry walk, before it ended.

Stooping, he unslung water-skin and food-bag and threw them over his shoulders. Bow in hand he went up the trail with a steady, swinging stride that would eat up the miles and carry him for hour after hour without faltering.

When he came to the shape sprawling in the path, he set the butt of his bow on the ground and stood looking briefly, one hand steadying the bags on his shoulders. The man he had killed was a Zuagir, right enough: one of the tall, sinewy, hawk-faced and wolf-hearted plunderers of the southern desert. Conan’s arrow had caught him just below the arm-pit. That the man had been alone, and on a horse instead of a camel, meant that there was a larger party of his tribesmen somewhere in the vicinity. Conan shrugged his shoulders, shifted the bow to the crook of his arm, and moved on up the trail. The score between himself and the men of Shalan ibn Mansour was red enough, already. It might well be settled once and for all at the Well of Amir Khan.

As he swung along the trail he kept thinking of the man he was going to warn: Al Wazir, the Shemites called him, because of his former capacity with the Sultan. A Hyperborean nobleman, in reality, wandering over the world in search of some mystical goal Conan had never understood, just as an unquenchable thirst for adventure drove Conan around the planet in constant wanderings. But the dreamy soul of the man coveted something more than material things. Al Wazir had been many things. Wealth, power, position; all had slipped through his unsatisfied fingers. He had delved deep in strange religions and philosophies, seeking the answer to the riddle of Existence, as Conan sought the stimulation of hazard. The mysticisms of the Sufia had attracted him, and finally the ascetic mysteries of the Hindus.

A year before Al Wazir had been governor of Shem, next to the Sultan the wealthiest and most powerful man in the land. Without warning he had given up his position and disappeared. Only a chosen few knew that he had distributed his vast wealth among the poor, renounced all ambition and power, and gone like an ancient prophet to dwell in the desert, where, in the solitary meditation and self denial of a true ascetic, he hoped to read at last the eternal riddle of Life—as the ancient prophets read it. Conan had accompanied him on that last journey, with the handful of faithful servants who knew their master’s intentions—, old Salim among them, for between the dreamy philosopher and the hard-bitten man of action there existed a powerful tie of friendship.

But for the traitor and fool, Dirdar, Al Wazir’s secret had been well kept. Conan knew that ever since Al Wazir’s disappearance, adventurers of every breed had been searching for him, hoping to secure possession of the treasure that the Hyperborean had possessed in the days of his power—the wonderful collection of perfectly matched rubies, known as the Blood of the Gods, which had blazed a lurid path through history for five hundred years. These jewels had not been distributed among the poor with the rest of Al Wazir’s wealth. Conan himself did not know what the man had done with them. Nor did the Cimmerian care. Greed was not one of his faults. And Al Wazir was his friend.

The blazing sun rocked slowly down the sky, its flame turned to molten copper; it touched the desert rim, and etched against it, a crawling black tiny figure, Conan moved grimly on, striding inexorably into the somber immensities of the Ruba al Khali, —the Empty Abodes.

III

—

The Fight at the Well of Amir Khan

Etched against a white streak of dawn, motionless as figures on a tapestry, Conan saw the clump of palms that marked the Well of Amir Khan grow up out of the fading night.

A few moments later he swore, softly. Luck, the fickle jade, was not with him this time. A faint ribbon of blue smoke curled up against the whitening sky. There were men at the Well of Amir Khan.

Conan licked his dry lips. The water-bag that slapped against his back at each stride was flat, empty. The distance he would have covered in a matter of hours, skimming over the desert on the back of his tireless camel, he had trudged on foot, the whole night long, even though he had held a gait that few even of the desert’s sons could have maintained unbroken. Even for him, in the coolness of the night, it had been a hard trek, though his iron muscles resisted fatigue like a wolf’s.

Far to the east a low blue line lay on the horizon. It was the range of hills that held the Caves of El Khour. He was still ahead of Hawkston, forging on somewhere far to the south. But the Bossonian would be gaining on him at every stride. Conan could swing wide to avoid the men at the Well, and trudge on. Trudge on, afoot, and with empty water-bag? It would be suicide. He could never reach the Caves on foot and without water. Already he was bitten by the devils of thirst.

A red flame grew up in his eyes, and his dark face set in wolfish lines. Water was life in the desert; life for him and for Al Wazir. There was water at the Well, and camels. There were men, his enemies, in possession of both. If they lived, he must die. It was the law of the wolf-pack, and of the desert. He slipped the limp bags from his shoulders, cocked his bow and went forward to kill or be killed—not for wealth, nor the love of a woman, nor an ideal, nor a dream, but for as much water as could be carried in a sheep-skin bag.

A wadi or gully broke the plain ahead of him, meandering to a point within a few hundred feet of the Well. Conan crept toward it, taking advantage of every bit of cover. He had almost reached it, at a point a hundred yards from the Well, when a man in white kafieh and ragged abba materialized from among the palms. Discovery in the growing light was instant. The Shemite yelled and fired. The arrow knocked up dust a foot from Conan’s knee, as he crouched on the edge of the gully, and he fired back. The Shemite cried out, dropped his bow and staggered drunkenly back among the palms.

The next instant Conan had sprung down into the gully and was moving swiftly and carefully along it, toward the point where it bent nearest the Well. He glimpsed white-clad figures flitting briefly among the trees, and then bows began to crack viciously. Bullets sang over the gully as the men fired from behind their saddles and bales of goods, piled like a rampart among the stems of the palms. They lay in the eastern fringe of the clump; the camels, Conan knew, were on the other side of the trees. From the volume of the firing it could not be a large party.

A rock on the edge of the gully provided cover. Conan thrust his knocked bow under a jutting corner of it and watched for movement among the palms. An arrow whined off the rock—. Dwindling in the distance like the dry whir of a rattler. Conan fired at the source of the shot, and a defiant yell answered him.

His eyes were slits of black flame. A fight like this could last for days. And he could not endure a siege. He had no water; he had no time. A long march to the south the caravan of Hawkston was swinging relentlessly westward, each step carrying them nearer the Caves of El Khour and the unsuspecting man who dreamed his dreams there. A few hundred feet away from Conan there was water, and camels that would carry him swiftly to his destination; but lead-fanged wolves of the desert lay between.

Fire came at his retreat thick and fast, and vehement voices rained maledictions on him. They let him know they knew he was alone, and on foot, and probably half-mad with thirst. They howled jeers and threats. But they did not expose themselves. They were confident but wary, with the caution taught by the desert deep ingrained in them. They held the winning hand and they intended to keep it so.

An hour of this, and the sun climbing over the eastern rim, and the heat beginning—, the molten, blinding heat of the southern desert. It was fierce already; later it would be a scorching hell in that unshielded gully. Conan licked his blackened lips and staked his life and the life of Al Wazir on one desperate cast of Fate’s blind dice.

Recognizing and accepting the terrible odds against success, he raised himself high enough to expose head and one shoulder above the gully rim, firing as he did so. Three bows cracked together and lead hummed about his ears; the arrow of one raked a white-hot line across his upper arm. Instantly Conan cried out, the loud, agonized cry of a man hard hit, and threw his arms above the rim of the gully in the convulsive gesture of a man suddenly death-stricken. One hand held the bow and the motion threw it out of the gully, to fall ten feet away, in plain sight of the Shemites.

An instant’s silence, in which Conan crouched below the rim, then blood-thirsty yells echoed his cry. He dared not raise himself high enough to look, but he heard the slap-slap-slap of sandalled feet, winged by hate and bloodlust. They had fallen for his ruse. Why not? A crafty man might feign a wound and fall, but who would deliberately cast away his bow? The thought of a stranger, lying helpless and badly wounded in the bottom of the gully, with a defenseless throat ready for the knife, was too much for the bloodlust of the Zuagirs. Conan held himself in iron control, until the swift feet were only a matter of yards away, —then he came erect like a steel spring released, sword in hand.

As he leaped up he caught one split-second glimpse of three of them, halting dead in their tracks, wild-eyed at the unexpected apparition— even as he straightened—his bow was roaring. One man spun on his heel and fell in a crumpled heap, cut through the head. Another fired once, with a bow, but it was reckless and without aim. An instant later he was down, with a cut through his groin and another ripping through his breast as he fell. And then Fate took a hand again—. Fate in the form of a gust of sand blown into Conan’s eyes. The shot went wild as he was momentarily blinded, just as he had drawn to end the remaining man.

This one had no bow; only a long knife. With a howl he wheeled and legged it back for the grove, his rags whipping on the wind of his haste. And Conan was after him like a starving wolf. His strategy might go for nothing if the man got back among the trees, where he might have left a bow.

The Zuagir ran like an antelope, but Conan was so close behind him when they reached the trees, the Shemite had no time to snatch up the bow leaning against the improvised rampart. He wheeled at bay, yowling like a mad dog, and slashing with the long knife. The point tore Conan’s shirt as the Cimmerian dodged, and brought down the heavy weapon on the Shemite’s head. The thick kafieh saved the man’s skull from being crushed, but his knees buckled and he went down, throwing his arms about Conan’s waist and dragging down the white man as he fell. Somewhere on the other side of the grove the wounded man was calling down curses on Conan.

The two men rolled on the ground, ripping and smiting like wild animals. Conan struck once again with his knife, a glancing blow that laid open the Zuagir’s face from eye to jaw, and then caught at the arm that wielded the knife. He got a grip with his left hand on the wrist and the guard of the knife itself, and with his other hand began to fight for a throat-hold. The Zuagirs’s ghastly, blood-smeared countenance writhed in a tortured grin of muscular strain. He knew the terrible strength that lurked in Conan’s iron fingers, knew that if they closed on his throat they would not let go until his jugular was torn out.

He threw his body frantically from side to side, wrenching and tearing. The violence of his efforts sent both men rolling over and over, to crash against palm stems and carom against saddles and bales. Once Conan’s head was driven hard against a tree, but the blow did not weaken him, nor did the vicious drive the man got in with a knee to his groin. The Zuagir grew frantic, maddened by the fingers that sought his throat, the dark face, inexorable as iron, that glared into his own. Somewhere on the other side of the grove a weapon was being loosed, but Conan did not hear the whistle of arrows.

With a shriek like a wounded panther’s, the man whirled over again, a knot of straining muscles, and his hand, thrown out to balance himself, fell on the barrel of the weapon Conan had dropped. Quick as a flash he lifted it, just as Conan found the hold he had been seeking, and crashed the butt down on the Cimmerian’s head with every ounce of strength in his lean sinews, backed by the fear of death. A tremor ran through the Cimmerian’s iron frame, and his head fell forward. And in that instant the Zuagir tore free like a wolf breaking from a trap, leaving his long knife in Conan’s hand.

Even before Conan’s brain cleared, his war-trained muscles were responding instinctively. As the Zuagir sprang up, he shook his head and rose more slowly, the long knife in his hand. The desert warrior hurled the weapon at him, and caught up the knife which lay om the samd. He gripped it with both hands and wheeled, whirling the blade above his head; but before the blow could fall Conan struck with all the blinding speed he could muster. In under the descending blade he lunged and his knife, driven with all his strength and the momentum of his charge, plunged into his foe’s breast and drove him back against a tree into which the blade sank a hand’s breadth deep. The Zuagir cried out, a thick, choking cry that death cut short. An instant he sagged against the haft, dead on his feet and nailed upright to the palm tree. Then his knees buckled and his weight tore the knife from the wood and he pitched into the sand.

Conan wheeled, shaking the sweat from his eyes, glaring about for the fourth man—the wounded man. The furious fight had taken only a matter of moments. The weapon was still twanging freely on the other side of the trees, and an animal scream of pain mingled with the shots.

With a curse Conan caught up his bow and burst through the grove. The wounded man lay under the shade of the trees, propped on an elbow, and aiming his weapon, not at Conan but at the one camel that still lived. The other three lay stretched in their blood. Conan sprang at the man, swinging the bow as a makeshift club. He was a split-second too late. The shot cracked and the camel moaned and crumpled even as the bow fell on the lifted arm, snapping the bone like a twig. The crossbow fell into the sand and the Shemite sank back, laughing like a ghoul.

“Now see if you can escape from the Well of Amir Khan, Conan!” he gasped. “The riders of Shalan ibn Mansour are out! Tonight or tomorrow they will return to the Well! Will you await them here, or flee on foot to die in the desert, or be tracked down like a wolf? Ya kalb! Forgotten of God! They will hang thy skin on a palmtree! Laan abuk—!”

Lifting himself with an effort that spattered his beard with bloody foam, he spat toward Conan, laughed croakingly and fell back, dead before his head hit the ground.

Conan stood like a statue, staring down at the dying camels. The dead man’s vengeance was grimly characteristic of his race. Conan lifted his head and looked long at the low blue range on the western horizon. Cheeringly the dying Shemite had foretold the grim choice left him. He could wait at the Well until Shalan ibn Mansour’s wild riders returned and wiped him out by force of numbers, or he could plunge into the desert again on foot. And whether he awaited certain doom at the Well, or sought the uncertain doom of the desert, inexorably Hawkston would be marching westward, steadily cutting down the lead Conan had had at the beginning.

But Conan never had any doubt concerning his next move. He drank deep at the Well, and bolted some of the food the Zuagirs had been preparing for their breakfast. Some dried dates and crusted cheese-balls he placed in a food-bag, and he filled a water-skin from the Well. He had come into the desert intending to run and hide from his overwhelming number of foes, not to fight. But it looked very much as if he would do much more fighting before this venture was over, and the added weight of the sword was more than balanced by the feeling of added security in the touch of the lean curved blade.

Then he slung the water-skin and food-bag over his shoulders, took up his bow and strode out of the shadows of the grove into the molten heat of the desert day. He had not slept at all the night before. His short rest at the Well had put new life and spring into his resilient muscles, hardened and toughened by an incredibly strenuous life. But it was a long, long march to the Caves of El Khour, under a searing sun. Unless some miracle occurred, he could not hope to reach them before Hawkston now. And before another sun-rise the riders of Shalan ibn Mansour might well be on his trail, in which case— but all he had ever asked of Fortune was a fighting chance.

The sun rocked its slow, torturing way up the sky and down; twilight deepened into dusk, and the desert stars winked out; and on, grimly on, plodded that solitary figure, pitting an indomitable will against the merciless immensity of thirst-haunted desolation.

IV —

The Djinn of the Caves

The Caves of El Khour pit the sheer eastern walls of a gaunt hill-range that rises like a stony backbone out of a waste of rocky plains. There is only one spring in the hills; it rises in a cave high up in the wall and curls down the steep rocky slope, a slender thread of silver, to empty into a broad shallow pool below. The sun was hanging like a blood-red ball above the western desert when Francis Xavier Conan halted near this pool and scanned the rows of gaping cave-mouths with bloodshot eyes. He licked heat-blackened lips with a tongue from which all moisture had been baked. Yet there was still a little water in the skin on his shoulder. He had economized on that gruelling march, with the savage economy of the wilderness-bred.

It seemed a bit hard to realize he had actually reached his goal. The hills of El Khour had shimmered before him for so many miles, unreal in the heat-waves, until at last they had seemed like a mirage, a fantasy of a thirst-maddened imagination. The desert sun plays tricks even with a brain like Conan’s. Slowly, slowly the hills had grown up before him—now he stood at the foot of the eastern-most cliff, frowning up at the tiers of caves which showed their black mouths in even rows.

Nightfall had not brought Shalan ibn Mansour’s riders swooping after the solitary wanderer, nor had dawn brought them. Again and again through the long, hot day, Conan had halted on some rise and looked back, expecting to see the dust of the hurrying camels; but the desert had stretched empty to the horizon.

And now it seemed another miracle had taken place, for there were no signs of Hawkston and his caravan. Had they come and gone? They would have at least watered their camels at the pool; and from the utter lack of signs about it, Conan knew that no one had camped or watered animals at the pool for many moons. No, it was indisputable, even if unexplainable. Something had delayed Hawkston and Conan had reached the Caves ahead of him after all.

The Cimmerian dropped on his belly at the pool and sank his face into the cool water. He lifted his head presently, shook it like a lion shaking his mane, and leisurely washed the dust from his face and hands.

Then he rose and went toward the cliff. He had seen no sign of life, yet he knew that in one of those caves lived the man he had come to seek. He lifted his voice in a far-carrying shout.

“Al Wazir! Ho there, Al Wazir!”

“Wazirrr!” whispered the echo back from the cliff. There was no other answer. The silence was ominous. With his bow at the ready Conan went toward the narrow trail that wound up the rugged face of the cliff. Up this he climbed, keenly scanning the eaves. They pitted the whole wall, in even tiers —too even to be the chance work of nature. They were man-made. Thousands of years ago, in the dim dawn of pre-history they had served as dwelling-places for some race of people who were not mere savages, who nitched their caverns in the soft strata with skill and cunning. Conan knew the caves were connected by narrow passages, and that only by this ladder-like path he was following could they be reached from below.

The path ended at a long ledge, upon which all the caves of the lower tier opened. In the largest of these Al Wazir had taken up his abode.

Conan called again, without result. He strode into the cave, and there he halted. It was square in shape. In the back wall and in each side wall showed a narrow door-like opening. Those at the sides led into adjoining caves. That at the back let into a smaller cavern, without any other outlet. There, Conan remembered, Al Wazir had stored the dried and tinned foods he had brought with him. He had brought no furniture, nor weapons.

In one corner of the square cave a heap of charred fragments indicated that a fire had once been built there. In one corner lay a heap of skins —Al Wazir’s bed. Nearby lay the one book Al Wazir had brought with him —The Bhagavat-Gita. But of the man himself there was no evidence.

Conan went into the storeroom, struck a match and looked about him. The tins of food were there, though the supply was considerably depleted. But they were not stacked against the wall in neat columns as Conan had seen them stowed under Al Wazir’s directions. They were tumbled and scattered about all over the floor, with open and empty tins among them. This was not like Al Wazir, who placed a high value on neatness and order, even in small things. The rope he had brought along to aid him in exploring the caves lay coiled in one corner.

Conan, extremely puzzled, returned to the square cave. Here, he had fully expected to find Al Wazir sitting in tranquil meditation, or out on the ledge meditating over the sun-set desert. Where was the man?

He was certain that Al Wazir had not wandered away to perish in the desert. There was no reason for him to leave the caves. If he had simply tired of his lonely life and taken his departure, he would have taken the book that was lying on the floor, his inseparable companion. There was no blood-stain on the floor, or anything to indicate that the hermit had met a violent end. Nor did Conan believe that any Shemite, even the Zuagir, would molest the “holy man.” Anyway, if Shemites had done away with Al Wazir, they would have taken away the rope and the tins of food. And he was certain that, until Hawkston learned of it, no white man but himself had known of Al Wazir’s whereabouts.

He searched through the lower tiers of caves without avail. The sun had sunk out of sight behind the hills, whose long shadows streamed far eastward across the desert, and deepening shadows filled the caverns. The silence and the mystery began to weigh on Conan’s nerves. He began to be irked by the feeling that unseen eyes were watching him. Men who live lives of constant peril develop certain obscure faculties or instincts to a keenness unknown to those lapped about by the securities of “civilization.” As he passed through the caves, Conan repeatedly felt an impulse to turn suddenly, to try to surprise those eyes that seemed to be boring into his back. At last he did wheel suddenly, thumb pressing back the hammer of his bow, eyes alert for any movement in the growing dusk. The shadowy chambers and passages stood empty before him.

Once, as he passed a dark passageway he could have sworn he heard a soft noise, like the stealthy tread of a bare, furtive foot. He stepped to the mouth of the tunnel and called, without conviction: “Is that you, Ivan?” He shivered at the silence which followed; he had not really believed it was Al Wazir. He groped his way into the tunnel, bow poked ahead of him. Within a few yards he encountered a blank wall; there seemed to be no entrance or exit except the doorway through which he had come. And the tunnel was empty, save for himself.

He returned to the ledge before the caves, in disgust.

“Hell, am I getting jumpy?”

But a grisly thought kept recurring to him—recollection of the Zuagirs” belief that a supernatural fiend lurked in these ancient caves and devoured any human foolish enough to be caught there by night. This thought kept recurring, together with the reflection that the Orient held many secrets, which the West would laugh at, but which often proved to be grim realities. That would explain Al Wazir’s mysterious absence: if some fiendish or bestial dweller in the caves had devoured him— Conan’s speculations revolved about a hypothetical rock-python of enormous size, dwelling for generations, perhaps centuries, in the hills —that would explain the lack of any blood-stains. Abruptly he swore: “Crom! I’m going mad. There are no snakes like that in here. These caves are getting on my nerves.”

It was a fact. There was a brooding weirdness about these ancient and forgotten caverns that roused uncanny speculations in Conan’s mind. What race had occupied them, so long ago? What wars had they witnessed, against what fierce barbarians sweeping up from the south? What cruelties and intrigues had they known, what grim rituals of worship and human sacrifice? Conan shrugged his shoulders, wishing he had not thought of human sacrifice. The idea fitted too well with the general atmosphere of these grim caverns.

Angry at himself, he returned to the big square cavern, which, he remembered, the Shemites called Niss’rosh, The Eagle’s Nest, for some reason or other. He meant to sleep in the caves that night, partly to overcome the aversion he felt toward them, partly because he did not care to be caught down on the plain in case Hawkston or Shalan ibn Mansour arrived in the night. There was another mystery. Why had not they reached the Caves, one or both of them? The desert was a breeding-place of mysteries, a twilight realm of fantasy. Al Wazir, Hawkston and Shalan ibn Mansour— had the fabled djinn of the Empty Abodes snatched them up and flown away with them, leaving him the one man alive in all the vast desert? Such whims of imagination played through his exhausted brain, as, too weary to eat, he prepared for the night.

He put a large rock in the trail, poised precariously, which anyone climbing the path in the dark would be sure to dislodge. The noise would awaken him. He stretched himself on the pile of skins, painfully aware of the stress and strain of his long trek, which had taxed even his iron frame to the utmost. He was asleep almost the instant he touched his rude bed.

It was because of this weariness of body and mind that he did not hear the velvet-footed approach of the thing that crept upon him in the darkness. He woke only when taloned fingers clenched murderously on his throat and an inhuman voice whinnied sickening triumph in his ear.

Conan’s reflexes had been trained in a thousand battles. So now he was fighting for his life before he was awake enough to know whether it was an ape or a great serpent that had attacked him. The fierce fingers had almost crushed his throat before he had a chance to tense his neck muscles. Yet those powerful muscles, even though relaxed, had saved his life. Even so the attack was so stunning, the grasp so nearly fatal, that as they rolled over the floor Conan wasted precious seconds trying to tear away the strangling hands by wrenching at the wrists. Then as his fighting brain asserted itself, even through the red, thickening mists that were enfolding him, he shifted his tactics, drove a savage knee into a hard-muscled belly, and getting his thumbs under the little finger of each crushing hand, bent them fiercely back. No strength can resist that leverage. The unknown attacker let go, and instantly Conan smashed a trip-hammer blow against the side of his head and rolled clear as the hard frame went momentarily limp. It was as dark in the cave as the gullet of Hell, so dark Conan could not even see his antagonist.

He sprang to his feet, drawing his scimitar. He stood poised, tense, wondering uncomfortably if the thing could see in the dark, and scarcely breathing as he strained his ears. At the first faint sound he sprang like a panther, and slashed murderously at the noise. The blade cut only empty air, there was an incoherent cry, a shuffle of feet, then the rapidly receding pad of hurried footsteps. Whatever it was, it was in retreat. Conan tried to follow it, ran into a blank wall, and by the time he had located the side door through which, apparently, the creature had fled, the sounds had faded out. The Cimmerian struck a match and glared around, not expecting to see anything that would give him a clue to the mystery. Nor did he. The rock floor of the cavern showed no footprint.

What manner of creature he had fought in the dark he did not know. Its body had not seemed hairy enough for an ape, though the head had been a tangled mass of hair. Yet it had not fought like a human being; he had felt its talons and teeth, and it was hard to believe that human muscles could have contained such iron strength as he had encountered. And the noises it had made had certainly not resembled the sounds a man makes, even in combat.

Conan picked up his bow and went out on the ledge. From the position of the stars, it was past midnight. He sat down on the ledge, with his back against the cliff wall. He did not intend to sleep, but he slept in spite of himself, and woke suddenly, to find himself on his feet, with every nerve tingling, and his skin crawling with the sensation that grim peril had crept close upon him.

Even as he wondered if a bad dream had awakened him, he glimpsed a vague shadow fading into the black mouth of a cave not far away. He threw up his bow and the shot sent the echoes flying and ringing from cliff to cliff. He waited tensely, but neither saw nor heard anything else.

After that he sat with his bow across his knees, every faculty alert. His position, he realized, was precarious. He was like a man marooned on a deserted island. It was a day’s hard ride to the caravan road to the south. On foot it would take longer. He could reach it, unhindered—but unless Hawkston had abandoned the quest, which was not likely, the Bossonian’s caravan was moving along that road somewhere. If Conan met it, alone and on foot—Conan had no illusions about Hawkston. But there was still a greater danger: Shalan ibn Mansour. He did not know why the shaykh had not tracked him down already, but it was certain that Shalan, scouring the desert to find the man who slew his warriors at the Well of Amir Khan, would eventually run him down. When that happened, Conan did not wish to be caught out on the desert, on foot. Here, in the Caves, with water, food and shelter, he would have at least a fighting chance. If Hawkston and Shalan should chance to arrive at the same time—that offered possibilities. Conan was a fighting man who depended on his wits as much as his sword, and he had set his enemies tearing at each other before now. But there was a present menace to him, in the Caves themselves, a menace he felt was the solution to the riddle of Al Wazir’s fate. That menace he meant to drive to bay with the coming of daylight.

He sat there until dawn turned the eastern sky rose and white. With the coming of the light he strained his eyes into the desert, expecting to see a moving line of dots that would mean men on camels. But only the tawny, empty waste levels and ridges met his gaze. Not until the sun was rising did he enter the caves; the level beams struck into them, disclosing features that had been veiled in shadows the evening before.

He went first to the passage where he had first heard the sinister footfalls, and there he found the explanation to one mystery. A series of hand and foot holds, lightly nitched in the stone of the wall, led up through a square hole in the rocky ceiling into the cave above. The djinn of the Caves had been in that passage, and had escaped by that route, for some reason choosing flight rather than battle just then.

Now that he was rested, he became aware of the bite of hunger, and headed for The Eagle’s Nest, to get his breakfast out of the tins before he pursued his exploration of the caves. He entered the wide chamber, lighted by the early sun which streamed through the door—and stopped dead.

A bent figure in the door of the storeroom wheeled erect, to face him. For an instant they both stood frozen. Conan saw a man confronting him like an image of the primordial—naked, gaunt, with a great matted tangle of hair and beard, from which the eyes blazed weirdly. It might have been a caveman out of the dawn centuries who stood there, a stone gripped in each brawny hand. But the high, broad forehead, half hidden under the thatch of hair, was not the slanting brow of a savage. Nor was the face, almost covered though it was by the tangled beard.

“Ivan!” ejaculated Conan aghast, and the explanation of the mystery rushed upon him, with all its sickening implications. Al Wazir was a madman.

As if goaded by the sound of his voice, the naked man started violently, cried out incoherently, and hurled the rock in his right hand. Conan dodged and it shattered on the wall behind him with an impact that warned him of the unnatural power lurking in the maniac’s thews. Al Wazir was taller than Conan, with a magnificent, broad-shouldered, lean-hipped torso, ridged with muscles. Conan half turned and set his bow against the wall, and as he did so, Al Wazir hurled the rock in his left hand, awkwardly, and followed it across the cave with a bound, shrieking frightfully, foam flying from his lips.

Conan met him breast to breast, bracing his muscular legs against the impact, and Al Wazir grunted explosively as he was stopped dead in his tracks. Conan pinioned his arms at his side, and a wild shriek broke from the madman’s lips as he tore and plunged like a trapped animal. His muscles were like quivering steel wires under Conan’s grasp, that writhed and knotted. His teeth snapped beast-like at Conan’s throat, and as the Cimmerian jerked back his head to escape them, Al Wazir tore loose his right arm, and whipped it over Conan’s left arm and down. Before the Cimmerian could prevent it, he had grasped the scimitar hilt and torn the blade from its scabbard. Up and back went the long arm, with the sheen of naked steel, and Conan, sensing death in the lifted sword, smashed his left fist to the madman’s jaw. It was a short terrific hook that traveled little more than a foot, but it was like the jolt of a mule’s kick.

Al Wazir’s head snapped back between his shoulders under the impact, then fell limply forward on his breast. His legs gave way simultaneously and Conan caught him and eased him to the rocky floor.

Leaving the limp form where it lay, Conan went hurriedly into the storeroom and secured the rope. Returning to the senseless man he knotted it about his waist, then lifted him to a sitting position against a natural stone pillar at the back of the cave, passed the rope about the column and tied it with an intricate knot on the other side. The rope was too strong, even for the superhuman strength of a maniac, and Al Wazir could not reach backward around the pillar to reach and untie the knot. Then Conan set to work reviving the man—no light task, for Conan, with the peril of death upon him, had struck hard, with the drive and snap of steel-trap muscles. Only the heavy beard had saved the jawbone from fracture.

But presently the eyes opened and gazed wildly around, flaring redly as they fixed on Conan’s face. The clawing hands with their long black nails, came up and caught at Conan’s throat, as the Cimmerian drew back out of reach. Al Wazir made a convulsive effort to rise, then sank back and crouched, with his unwinking stare, his fingers making aimless motions. Conan looked at him somberly, sick at his soul. What a miserable, revolting end to dreams and philosophies! Al Wazir had come into the desert seeking meditation and peace and the visions of the ancient prophets; he had found horror and insanity. Conan had come looking for a hermit-philosopher, radiant with mellow wisdom; he had found a filthy, naked madman.

The Cimmerian filled an empty tin with water and set it, with an opened tin of meat, near Al Wazir’s hand. An instant later he dodged, as the mad hermit hurled the tins at him with all his power. Shaking his head in despair, Conan went into the storeroom and broke his own fast. He had little heart to eat, with the ruin of that once-splendid personality before him, but the urgings of hunger would not be denied.

It was while thus employed that a sudden noise outside brought him to his feet, galvanized by the imminence of danger.

V—

Hawks At Bay

It was the rattling fall of the stone Conan had placed in the path that had alarmed him. Someone was climbing up the winding trail! Snatching up his bow he glided out on the ledge. One of his enemies had come at last.

Down at the pool a weary, dusty camel was drinking. On the path, a few feet below the ledge there stood a tall, wiry man in dust-stained boots and breeches, his torn shirt revealing his brown, muscular chest.

“Conan!” this man ejaculated, staring amazedly into the head of the drawn arrow on the Cimmerian’s bow. “By Mitra, how did you get here?” His hands were empty, resting on an outcropping of rock, just as he had halted in the act of climbing. His bow was slung to his back, weapon and scimitar in their scabbards at his belt.

“Put up your hands, Hawkston,” ordered Conan, and the Bossonian obeyed.

“What are you doing here?” he repeated. “I left you in el-Azem—”

“Salim lived long enough to tell me what he saw in the hut by Mekmet’s Pool. I came by a road you know nothing about. Where are the other jackals?”

Hawkston shook the sweat-beads from his sun-burnt forehead. He was above medium height, brown, hard as sole-leather, with a dark hawk-like face and a high-bridged predatory nose arching over a thin black mustache. A lawless adventurer, his scintillant grey eyes reflected a ruthless and reckless nature, and as a fighting man he was as notorious as was Conan—more notorious in Shemiteia, for Afghanistan had been the stage for most of Conan’s exploits.

“My men? Dead by now, I fancy. The Zuagir are on the war-path. Shalan ibn Mansour caught us at Sulaymen’s Well, with fifty men. We made a barricade of our saddles among the palms and stood them off all day. Van Brock and three of our camel-drivers were killed during the fighting, and Krakovitch was wounded. That night I took a camel and cleared out. I knew it was no use hanging on.”

“You swine,” said Conan without passion. He did not call Hawkston a coward. He knew that not cowardice, but a cynical determination to save his skin at all hazards had driven the Bossonian to desert his wounded and beleaguered companions.

“There wasn’t any use for us all to be killed,” retorted Hawkston. “I believed one man could sneak away in the dark and I did. They rushed the camp just as I got clear. I heard them killing the others. Ortelli howled like a lost soul when they cut his throat—I knew they’d run me down long before I could reach the Coast, so I headed for the Caves—northwest across the open desert, leaving the road and Khosru’s Well off to the south. It was a long, dry ride, and I made it more by luck than anything else. And now can I put my hands down?”

“You might as well,” replied Conan, the bow at his shoulder never wavering. “In a few seconds it won’t matter much to you where your hands are.”

Hawkston’s expression did not change. He lowered his hands, but kept them away from his belt.

“You mean to kill me?” he asked calmly.

“You murdered my friend Salim. You came here to torture and rob Al Wazir. You’d kill me if you got the chance. I’d be a fool to let you live.”

“Are you going to shoot me in cold blood?”

“No. Climb up on the ledge. I’ll give you any kind of an even break you want.”

Hawkston complied, and a few seconds later stood facing the Cimmerian. An observer would have been struck by a certain similarity between the two men. There was no facial resemblance, but both were burned dark by the sun, both were built with the hard economy of rawhide and spring steel, and both wore the keen, hawk-like aspect which is the common brand of men who live by their wits and guts out on the raw edges of the world.

Hawkston stood with his empty hands at his sides while Conan faced him with bow still drawn.

“Bows, weapons or swords?” asked the Cimmerian. “They say you can handle a blade.”

“Second to none in Shem,” answered Hawkston confidently. “But I’m not going to fight you, Conan.”

“You will!” A red flame began to smolder in the blue eyes. “I know you, Hawkston. You’ve got a slick tongue, and you’re treacherous as a snake. We’ll settle this thing here and now. Choose your weapons —or by God, I’ll shoot you down in your tracks!”

Hawkston shook his head calmly.

“You wouldn’t shoot a man in cold blood, Conan. I’m not going to fight you— yet. Listen, man, we’ll have plenty of fighting on our hands before long! Where’s Al Wazir?”

“That’s none of your business,” growled Conan.

“Well, no matter. You know why I’m here. And I know you came here to stop me if you could. But just now you and I are in the same boat. Shalan ibn Mansour’s on my trail. I slipped through his fingers, as I said, but he picked up my tracks and was after me within a matter of hours. His camels were faster and fresher than mine, and he’s been slowly overhauling me. When I topped the tallest of those ridges to the south there, I saw his dust. He’ll be here within the next hour! He hates you as much as he does me.”

“You need my help, and I need yours. With Al Wazir to help us, we can hold these Caves indefinitely.”

Conan frowned. Hawkston’s tale sounded plausible, and would explain why Shalan ibn Mansour had not come hot on the Cimmerian’s trail, and why the Bossonian had not arrived at the Caves sooner. But Hawkston was such a snake-tongued liar it was dangerous to trust him. The merciless creed of the desert said shoot him down without any more parley, and take his camel. Rested, it would carry Conan and Al Wazir out of the desert. But Hawkston had gauged Conan’s character correctly when he said the Cimmerian could not shoot a man in cold blood.

“Don’t move,” Conan warned him, as he disarmed Hawkston, and ran a hand over him to see that he had no concealed weapons. If his scruples prevented him shooting his enemy, he was determined not to give that enemy a chance to get the drop on him. For he knew Hawkston had no such scruples.

“How do I know you’re not lying?” he demanded.

“Would I have come here alone, on a worn-out camel, if I wasn’t telling the truth?” countered Hawkston. “We’d better hide that camel, if we can. If we should beat them off, we’ll need it to get to the Coast on. Damn it, Conan, your suspicion and hesitation will get our throats cut yet! Where’s Al Wazir?”

“Turn and look into that cave,” replied Conan grimly.

Hawkston, his face suddenly sharp with suspicion, obeyed. As his eyes rested on the figure crouched against the column at the back of the cavern, his breath sucked in sharply.

“Al Wazir! What in God’s name’s the matter with him?”

“Too much loneliness, I reckon,” growled Conan. “He’s stark mad. He couldn’t tell you where to find the Blood of the Gods if you tortured him all day.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter much just now,” muttered Hawkston callously. “Can’t think of treasure when life itself is at stake. Conan, you’d better believe me! We should be preparing for a siege, not standing here chinning. If Shalan ibn Mansour—look!” He started violently, his long arm stabbing toward the south.

Conan did not turn at the exclamation. He stepped back instead, out of the Bossonian’s reach, and still covering the man, shifted his position so he could watch both Hawkston and the point of the compass indicated. Southeastward the country was undulating, broken by barren ridges. Over the farthest ridge a string of white dots was pouring, and a faint dust-haze billowed up in the air. Men on camels! A regular horde of them.

“The Zuagir!” exclaimed Hawkston. “They’ll be here within the hour!”

“They may be men of yours,” answered Conan, too wary to accept anything not fully proven. Hawkston was as tricky as a fox, and to make a mistake on the desert meant death. “We’ll hide that camel, though, just on the chance you’re telling the truth. Go ahead of me down the trail.”

Paying no attention to the Bossonian’s profanity, Conan herded him down the path to the pool. Hawkston took the camel’s rope and went ahead leading it, under Conan’s guidance. A few hundred yards north of the pool there was a narrow canyon winding deep into a break of the hills, and a short distance up this ravine Conan showed Hawkston a narrow cleft in the wall, concealed behind a jutting boulder. Through this the camel was squeezed, into a natural pocket, open at the top, roughly round in shape, and about forty feet across.

“I don’t know whether the Shemites know about this place or not,” said Conan. “But we’ll have to take the chance that they won’t find the beast.”

Hawkston was nervous.

“For Mitra’s sake let’s get back to the Caves! They’re coming like the wind. If they catch us in the open they’ll shoot us like rabbits!”

He started back at a run, and Conan was close on his heels. But Hawkston’s nervousness was justified. The white men had not quite reached the foot of the trail that led up to the Caves when a low thunder of hoofs rose on their ears, and over the nearest ridge came a wild white-clad figure on a camel, waving a bow. At the sight of them he yelled stridently and flogged his beast into a more furious gallop, and threw his bow to his shoulder. Behind him man after man topped the ridge— Zuagirs on hejin— white racing-camels.

“Up the cliff, man!” yelled Hawkston, pale under his bronze. Conan was already racing up the path, and behind him Hawkston panted and cursed, urging greater haste, where more speed was impossible. Arrows began to snick against the cliff, and the foremost rider howled in blood-thirsty glee as he bore down swiftly upon them. He was many yards ahead of his companions, and he was a remarkable marksman. Firing from the rocking, swaying saddle, he was clipping his targets close.

Hawkston yelped as he was stung by a flying sliver of rock, flaked off by a smashing arrowhead.

“Damn you, Conan!” he panted. “This is your fault, —your bloody stubbornness—, he’ll pick us off like rabbits—”

The oncoming rider was not more than three hundred yards from the foot of the cliff, and the rim of the ledge was ten feet above the climbers. Conan wheeled suddenly, drew his bow back and released all in one motion, so quickly he did not even seem to take aim. But the Shemite went out of his saddle like a man hit by lightning. Without pausing to note the result of his shot, Conan raced on up the path, and an instant later he swarmed over the ledge, with Hawkston at his heels.

“You shoot like a Bossonian!” gasped the man.

“There’s your bows,” grunted Conan, throwing himself flat on the ledge. “Here they come!”

Hawkston snatched his bow from the rock where Conan had left it, and followed the Cimmerian’s example.

The Zuagirs had not paused. They greeted the fall of their reckless leader with yells of hate, but they flogged their mounts and came on in a headlong rush. They meant to spring off at the foot of the trail and charge up it on foot. There were at least fifty, of them.

The two men lying prone on the ledge above did not lose their heads. Veterans, both of them, of a thousand wild battles, they waited coolly until the first of the riders were within good range. Then they began firing, without haste and without error. And at each shot a man tumbled headlong from his saddle or slumped forward on his mount’s bobbing neck.

Not even Zuagirs could charge into such a blast of destruction. The rush wavered, split, turned on itself —and in an instant the white-clad riders were turning their backs on the Caves and flogging in the other direction as madly as they had come. Five of them would never charge again, and as they fled Hawkston drilled one of the rearmost men neatly between the shoulders.

They fell back beyond the first low, stone-littered ridge, and Hawkston shook his bow at them and cursed them with virile eloquence.

“Desert scum! Try it again, you bounders!”

Conan wasted no breath on words. Hawkston had told the truth, and Conan knew he was in no danger from treachery from that source, for the present. Hawkston would not attack him as long as they were confronted by a common enemy —but he knew that the instant that peril was removed, the Bossonian might stab him in the back, if he could. Their position was bad, but it might well have been worse. The Zuagirs were all seasoned desert-fighters, cruel as wolves. Their chief had a blood-feud with both white men, and would not fail to grasp the chance that had thrown them into his reach. But the defenders had the advantage of shelter, an inexhaustible water supply, and food enough to last for months. Their only weakness was the limited amount of ammunition.

Without consulting one another, they took their stations on the ledge, Hawkston to the north of the trailhead, Conan about an equal distance to the south of it.

There was no need for a conference; each man knew the other knew his business. They lay prone, gathering broken rocks in heaps before them to add to the protection offered by the ledge-rim.

Spurts of flame began to crown the ridge; arrows whined and splatted against the rock. Men crept from each end of the ridge into the clusters of boulders that littered the plain. The men on the ledge held their fire, unmoved by the slugs that whistled and spanged near at hand. Their minds worked so similarly in a situation like this that they understood each other without the necessity of conversation. There was no chance of them wasting two cartridges on the same man. An imaginary line, running from the foot of the trail to the ridge, divided their territories. When a turbaned head was poked from a rock north of that line, it was Hawkston’s shot that knocked the man dead and sprawling over the boulder. And when a Zuagir darted from behind a spur of rock south of that line in a weaving, dodging run for cover nearer the cliff, Hawkston held his fire. Conan’s bow unleashed an arrow and the runner took the earth in a rolling tumble that ended in a brief thrashing of limbs.

A voice rose from the ridge, edged with fury.

“That’s Shalan, damn him!” snarled Hawkston. “Can you make out what he says?”

“He’s telling his men to keep out of sight,” answered Conan. “He tells them to be patient—, they’ve got plenty of time.”

“And that’s the truth, too,” grunted Hawkston. “They’ve got time, food, water—they’ll be sneaking to the pool after dark to fill their water-skins. I wish one of us could get a clean shot at Shalan. But he’s too foxy to give us a chance at him. I saw him when they were charging us, standing back on the ridge, too far away to risk an arrow on him.”

“If we could drop him the rest of them wouldn’t hang around here a minute,” commented Conan. “They’re afraid of the man-eating djinn they think haunts these hills.”

“Well, if they could get a good look at Al Wazir now, they’d swear it was the djinn in person,” said Hawkston. “How many arrows have you?”

“I have about two dozen arrows left in the quiver.”

Hawkston swore.

“I haven’t many more than that, myself. We’d better toss a coin to see which one of us sneaks out tonight, while the other keeps up the fire to distract their attention. The one who stays gets all the arrows.”

“We will not,” growled Conan. “If we can’t all go, Al Wazir with us, nobody goes!”

“You’re crazy to think of a lunatic at a time like this!”

“Maybe. But if you try to sneak off I’ll drill you in the back as you run.”

Hawkston snarled wordlessly and fell silent. Both men lay motionless, watching the ridge and the rocks that shimmered in the heat waves. The firing had ceased, but they had glimpses of white garments from time to time among the gullies and stones, as the besiegers crept about among the boulders. Some distance to the south Conan saw a group creeping along a shallow gully that ran to the foot of the cliff. He did not waste lead on them. When they reached the cliff at that point they would be no better off. They were too far away for effective shooting, and the cliff could be climbed only at the point where the trail wound upward. Conan fell to studying the hill that was serving the white men as their fortress.

Some thirty caves formed the lower tier, extending across the curtain of rock that formed the face of the cliff. As he knew, each cave was connected by a narrow passage to the adjoining chamber. There were three tiers above this one, all the tiers connected by ladders of hand-holds nitched in the rock, mounting from the lower caves through holes in the stone ceiling to the ones above. The Eagle’s Nest, in which Al Wazir was tied, safe from flying arrows, was approximately in the middle of the lower tier, and the path hewn in the rock came upon the ledge directly before its opening. Hawkston was lying in front of the third cave to the north of it, and Conan lay before the third cave to the south.

The Shemites lay in a wide semi-circle, extending from the rocks at one end of the low ridge, along its crest, and into the rocks at the other end. Only those lying among the rocks were close enough to do any damage, save by accident. And looking up at the ledge from below, they could see only the gleaming muzzles of the white men’s bows, or catch fleeting glimpses of their heads occasionally. They seemed to be weary of wasting lead on such difficult targets. Not a shot had been fired for some time.

Conan found himself wondering if a man on the crest of the cliff above the caves could, looking down, see him and Hawkston lying on the ledge. He studied the wall above him; it was almost sheer, but other, narrower ledges ran along each tier of caves, obstructing the view from above, as it did from the lower ledge. Remembering the craggy sides of the hill, Conan did not believe these plains-dwellers would be able to scale it at any point.

He was just contemplating returning to The Eagle’s Nest to offer food and water again to Al Wazir, when a faint sound reached his ears that caused him to go tense with suspicion.

It seemed to come from the caves behind him. He glanced at Hawkston. The Bossonian was squinting along the sight of his bow, trying to get a bead on a kafieh that kept bobbing in and out among the boulders near the end of the ridge.

Conan wriggled back from the ledge-rim and rolled into the mouth of the nearest cave before he stood up, out of sight of the men below. He stood still, straining his ears.

There it was again—soft and furtive, like the rustle of cloth against stone, the shuffle of bare feet. It came from some point south of where he stood. Conan moved silently in that direction, passed through the adjoining chamber, entered the next—and came face to face with a tall bearded Zuagir who yelled and whirled up a scimitar. Another raider, a man with an evil, scarred face, was directly behind him, and three more were crawling out of a cleft in the floor.

Conan checked the downward stroke of the scimitar with his own and made short work of the man. The scar-faced Shemite let loose over the falling body and Conan felt a numbing shock run up his arms, tried to draw his knife and got no response. The arrow had smashed into his sword and momentarily paralyzed his arm. He heard Hawkston yell savagely, out on the ledge, heard the arrows whistling through the air from the Bossonian’s bow, and a storm of yells rising from the valley. They were storming the cliff! And Hawkston must meet them alone, for Conan had his hands full.

What takes long to relate, actually happened in split seconds. Before the scarred Zuagir could fire again Conan knocked him sprawling with a kick in the groin, and drawing his knife with his other hand, crushed it hilt deep into the skull of a man who lunged at him with a long knife. No time to retrieve his fallen scimitar. It was hand-to-hand slaughter with a vengeance in the narrow cave, two Zuagirs tearing at him like wolves, and others jamming the shaft in their eagerness to join the fray.

No quarter given or expected—, a whirlwind of furious motion, blades flashing and whickering, clanging on the cave wall and biting into his flesh as Conan parried —and the sent fists crushing home and men going down with their heads smashed. The scarred nomad had risen, but fearing to shoot because of the desperate closeness of the melee, rushed in, clubbing his bow, just as the last man dropped. Conan, bleeding from a gash across the breast muscles, ducked the swinging arms, shifted his grip on a purloined knife and drove the blood-smeared blade full in the bearded face. Teeth and bones crumpled and the man toppled backward into the shaft, carrying with him the men who were just clambering out.

Snatching the instant’s respite Conan sprang to the mouth of the shaft, grabbing a bow and quiver from the floor as he passed. Wild bearded faces crowding the shaft glared up at him, frozen with the recognition of doom—, then the cave reverberated deafeningly to the thundering of the big Cimmerian's roar as he loosed and loosed again, blasting those wild faces into red ruin before they could reach him. It was slaughter at that range, blood and brains spattered, nerveless hands released their holds, bodies went sliding down the shaft in a red welter, jamming and choking it.

Conan glared down it for an instant, all killer in that moment, then whirled and ran out on the ledge. Arrows sang past his head, and he saw Hawkston frantically restringing his bow. No living foe was in sight, but half a dozen new forms between the ridge and the foot of the trail told of a determined effort to storm the cliff, defeated only by the Bossonian’s deadly accuracy.

Hawkston shouted: “What in Mitra’s name has been going on in there?”

“They’ve found a shaft leading up from somewhere down below,” snapped Conan. “Watch for another rush while I try to jam it.”

Ignoring lead slapped at him from among the rocks, he found a sizable boulder and rolled it into the cave. He peered cautiously down the well. Hand and foot holds nitched in the rock formed precarious stair-steps in the slanting side. Some forty feet down the shaft made an angle, and it was there the bodies of the Shemites had jammed. But now only one corpse hung there, and as he looked it moved, as if imbued with life, and slid down out of sight. Men below the angle were pulling the bodies out, to clear the way for a fresh attack.

Conan rolled the boulder into the shaft and it rumbled downward and wedged hard at the angle. He did not believe it could be dislodged from below, and his belief was confirmed by a muffled chorus of maledictions swelling up from the depths.

Conan was sure this shaft had not been in existence when he first came to the Caves with Al Wazir, a year before. Exploring the caverns in search of the madman, the night before, it was not strange that he had failed to notice the narrow mouth in a dark corner of the cave. That it opened into some cleft at the foot of the cliff was obvious. He remembered the men he had seen stealing along the gully to the south. They had found that lower cleft, and the simultaneous attack from both sides had been well planned. But for Conan’s keen ears it might have succeeded. As it was it had left the Cimmerian with a broken bow.

Conan dragged the bodies of the four Shemites he had killed to the ledge and heaved them over, ignoring the ferocious yells and shots that emanated from the rocks. He did not bother to marvel that he had emerged the victor from that desperate melee. He knew that fighting was half speed and strength and wit, and half blind luck. His number was not up yet, that was all.

Then he set out on a thorough tour of investigation through the lower tiers, in search of other possible shafts. Passing through The Eagle’s Nest, he glanced at Al Wazir, sitting against the pillar. The man seemed to be asleep; his hairy head was sunk on his breast, his hands folded limply over the rope about his waist. Conan set food and water beside him.

His explorations revealed no more unexpected tunnels. Conan returned to the ledge with tins of food and a skin of water, procured from the stream which had its source in one of the caves. They ate lying flat on the shelf, for keen eyes were watching with murderous hate and eager trigger-finger from ridge and rock. The sun had passed its zenith.

Their frugal meal finished, the white men lay baking in the heat like lizards on a rock, watching the ridge. The afternoon waned.

“You’ve got another bow,” said Hawkston.

“Mine was broken in the fight in the cave. I took this one from one of the men I killed. It has a few arrows, but not enough.”

“I’ve got only enough for a few shots,” muttered Hawkston. “Looks like our number’s up. They’re just waiting for dark before they rush us again. One of us might get away in the dark, while the other held the fort, but since you won’t agree to that, there’s nothing to do but sit here and wait until they cut our throats.”

“We have one chance,” said Conan. “If we can kill Shalan, the others will run. He’s not afraid of man or devil, but his men fear djinn. They’ll be nervous as the devil after night falls.”

Hawkston laughed harshly. “Fool’s talk. Shalan won’t give us a chance at him. We’ll all die here. All but Al Wazir. The Shemites won’t harm him. But they won’t help him, either. Damn him! Why did he have to go mad?”

“It wasn’t very considerate,” Conan agreed with biting irony. “But then, you see he didn’t know you wanted to torture him into telling where he hid the Blood of the Gods.”

“It wouldn’t have been the first time a man has been tortured for them,” retorted Hawkston. “Man, you have no real idea of the value of those jewels. I saw them once, when Al Wazir was governor of Shem. The sight of them’s enough to drive a man mad. Their story sounds like a tale out of The Shemiteian Nights. Only God knows how many women have given up their souls or men their lives because of them. They’ve blazed a crimson path since then. Blood’s spilt wherever they go. I’d poison my own brother to get them—” The wild flame that rose in the Bossonian’s eyes made it easy for Conan to believe it, and he was swept by a revulsion toward the man.

“I’m going to feed Al Wazir,” he said abruptly, rising.

No shots had come from the rocks for some time, though they knew their foes were there, waiting with their ancient, terrible patience. The sun had sunk behind the hills, the ravines and ridges were veiled in great blue shadows. Away to the east a silver-bright star winked out and quivered in the deepening blue.

Conan strode into the square chamber—and was galvanized at the sight of the stone pillar standing empty. With a stride he reached it; bent over the frayed ends of the severed rope that told their own story. Al Wazir had found a way to free himself. Slowly, painfully, working with his claw-like fingernails through the long day, the madman had picked apart the tough strands of the heavy rope. And he was gone.

VI

The Devil of the Night

Conan stepped to the door of the Nest and said curtly: “Al Wazir’s gotten away. I’m going to search the Caves for him. Stay on the ledge and keep watch.”

“Why waste the last minutes of your life chasing a lunatic through a rat-run?” growled Hawkston. “It’ll be dark soon and the Shemites will be rushing us—”

“You wouldn’t understand,” snarled Conan, turning away.

The task ahead of him was distasteful. Searching for a homicidal maniac through the darkening caves was bad enough, but the thought of having forcibly to subdue his friend again was revolting. But it must be done. Left to run at large in the Caves Al Wazir might do harm either to himself or to them. A stray arrow might strike him down.

A swift search through the lower tier proved fruitless, and Conan mounted by the ladder into the second tier. As he climbed through the hole into the cave above he had an uncomfortable feeling that Al Wazir was crouching at the rim to break his head with a rock. But only silence and emptiness greeted him. Dusk was filling the caves so swiftly he began to despair of finding the madman. There were a hundred nooks and corners where Al Wazir could crouch unobserved, and Conan’s time was short.

The ladder that connected the second tier with the third was in the chamber into which he had come, and glancing up through it Conan was startled to see a circle of deepening blue set with a winking star. In an instant he was climbing toward it.

He had discovered another unsuspected exit from the Caves. The ladder of hand holds led through the ceiling, up the wall of the cave above, and up through a round shaft that opened in the ceiling of the highest cave. He went up, like a man climbing up a chimney, and a few moments later thrust his head over the rim.

He had come out on the summit of the cliffs. To the east the rock rim pitched up sharply, obstructing his view, but to the west he looked out over a jagged backbone that broke in gaunt crags outlined against the twilight. He stiffened as somewhere a pebble rattled down, as if dislodged by a groping foot. Had Al Wazir come this way? Was the madman somewhere out there, climbing among those shadowy crags? If he was, he was courting death by the slip of a hand or a foot.

As he strained his eyes in the deepening shadows, a call welled up from below: “Conan! They are getting ready to rush us! I see them massing among the rocks!”

With a curse Conan started back down the shaft. It was all he could do. With darkness gathering Hawkston would not be able to hold the ledge alone.

Conan went down swiftly, but before he reached the ledge darkness had fallen, lighted but little by the stars. The Bossonian crouched on the rim, staring down into the dim gulf of shadows below.

“They’re coming!” he muttered, cocking his bow. “Listen!”

There was no shooting, this time— only the swift purposeful slap of sandalled feet over the stones. In the faint starlight a shadowy mass detached itself from the outer darkness and rolled toward the foot of the cliff. Steel clinked on the rocks. The mass divided into individual figures. Men grew up out of the darkness below. No use to waste arrows on shadows. The white men held their fire. The Shemites were on the trail, and they came up with a rush, steel gleaming dully in their hands. The path was thronged with dim figures; the defenders caught the glitter of white eyeballs, rolling upward.

They began to work their bows. The dark was cut with incessant spurts of flame. Lead thudded home. Men cried out. Bodies rolled from the trail, to strike sickeningly on the rocks below. Somewhere back in the darkness, Shalan ibn Mansour’s voice was urging on his slayers. The crafty shaykh had no intentions of risking his hide within reach of those grim fighters holding the ledge.

Hawkston cursed him as he raised his bow.

“Thibhahum, bism er rassul!” sobbed the bloodlusting howl as the maddened Zuagirs fought their way upward, frothing like rabid dogs in their hate and eagerness to tear them limb from limb.

Conan’s quiver soon was empty. He discarded the bow and drew his scimitar, stepping to the head of the path. A white-clad form loomed before him, fighting for a foothold on the ledge. The swinging blade crushed his head like an egg-shell. A bow fired point-blank whistled an arrow past Conan’s brows and his bow-stock shattered the bowman’s shoulder.

Hawkston fired his last arrow, hurled the bow aside and leaped to Conan’s side, scimitar in hand. He cut down a Zuagir who was scrambling over the rim with a knife in his teeth. The Shemites massed in a milling clump below the rim, snarling like wolves, flinching from the blows that rained down from both scimitars.

Men began to slink back down the trail.

“Bel!” wailed a man. “They are devils! Flee, brothers!”

“Dogs!” yelled Shalan ibn Mansour, an eery voice out of the darkness. He stood on a low knoll near the ridge, but he was invisible to the men on the cliff, what of the thick shadows. “Stand to it! There are but two of them!”

“They have ceased firing, so their bows must be empty! If you do not bring me their heads I will flay you alive! Theyahhh! Ya allah—!” His voice rose to an incoherent scream, and then broke in a horrible gurgle. That was followed by a tense silence, in which the Shemites clinging to the trail and massed at its foot twisted their heads over their shoulders to glare in amazement in the direction whence the cry had come. The men on the ledge, glad of the respite, shook the sweat from their eyes and stood listening with equal surprise and interest.

Someone called: “Shalan ibn Mansour! Is all well with thee?”

There was no reply, and one of the Shemites left the foot of the cliff and ran toward the knoll, shouting the shaykh’s name. The men on the ledge could trace his progress by his strident voice.

“Why did the shaykh cry out and fall silent?” shouted a man on the path. “What has happened, Haditha?”

Haditha’s reply came back plainly.

“I have reached the knoll whereon he stood—, I do not see him —Wallah! He is dead! He lies here slain, with his throat torn out! Nergal! Help!” He screamed, fired, and then came sounds of his frantic flight. And as he howled like a lost soul, for the flash of the shot had showed him a face stooping above the dead man, a wild grinning visage rendered inhuman by a matted tangle of hair—the face of a devil to the terrified Shemite. And above his shrieks, as he ran, rose burst upon burst of maniacal laughter.

“Flee! Flee! I have seen it! It is the djinn of El Khour!”

Instant panic ensued. Men fell off the trail like ripe apples off a limb screaming: “The djinn has slain Shalan ibn Mansour! Flee, brothers, flee!” The night was filled with their clamor as they stampeded for the ridge, and presently the sounds of lusty whacking and the grunting of camels came back to the men on the ledge. There was no trick about this. The Zuagir, courageous in the face of human foes, but haunted by superstitious terrors, were in full flight, leaving behind them the bodies of their chief and their slain comrades.

“What is going on?” marveled Hawkston.

“It must have been Ivan,” muttered Conan. “Somehow he must have climbed down the crags on the other side of the hill-God, what a climb it must have been!”

They stood there listening, but the only sound that reached their ears was the diminishing noise of the horde’s wild flight. Presently they descended the path, past forms grotesquely huddled where they had fallen. More bodies dotted the floor at the foot of the cliff, and Conan picked up a bow dropped from a dead hand, and assured himself that it was loaded. With the Shemites in flight, the truce between him and Hawkston might well be at an end. Their future relations would depend entirely upon the Bossonian.

A few moments later they stood upon the low knoll on which Shalan ibn Mansour had stood. The Shemite chief was still there. He sprawled on his back in a dark crimson puddle, and his throat had been ripped open as if by the claws of a wild beast. He was a grisly sight in the dying light of the desert.

The Cimmerian straightened. He strained his eyes into the surrounding shadows and called: “Ivan!” There was no answer.

“Do you suppose it was really Al Wazir who killed him?” asked Hawkston uneasily.

“Who else could it have been? He must have sneaked on Shalan from behind. The other fellow caught a glimpse of him, and thought he was the devil of the caves, just as you said they would. ” What erratic whim had impelled Al Wazir to this deed, Conan could not say. Who can guess the vagaries of the insane? The primitive instincts of murder loosed by lunacy—a madman stealing through the night, attracted by a solitary figure shouting from a knoll— it was not so strange, after all.

“Well, let’s start looking for him,” growled Hawkston. “I know you won’t start back to the Coast until we’ve got him nicely tied up on that bally camel. So the sooner the better.”

“All right.” Conan’s voice betrayed none of the suspicion in his mind. He knew that Hawkston’s nature and purposes had been altered none by what they had passed through. The man was treacherous and unpredictable as a wolf. He turned and started toward the cliff, but he took good care not to let the Bossonian get behind him, and he carried his cocked bow ready.

“I want to find the lower end of that shaft the Shemites came up,” said Conan. “Ivan may be hiding there. It must be near the western end of that gully they were sneaking along when I first saw them.”

Not long later they were moving along the shallow gully, and where it ended against the foot of the cliff, they saw a narrow slit-like cleft in the stone, large enough to admit a man. Hoarding their matches carefully they entered and moved along the narrow tunnel into which it opened. This tunnel led straight back into the cliff for a short distance, then turned sharply to the right, running along until it ended in a small chamber cut out of solid rock, which Conan believed was directly under the room in which he had fought the Shemites. His belief was confirmed when they found the opening of the shaft leading upward. A match held up in the well showed the angle still blocked by the boulder.

“Well, we know how they got into the Caves,” growled Hawkston. “But we haven’t found Al Wazir. He’s not in here.”

“We’ll go up into the Caves,” answered Conan. “He’ll come back there for food. We’ll catch him then.”

“And then what?” demanded Hawkston.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? We hit out for the caravan road. Ivan rides. We walk. We can make it, all right. I don’t believe the Zuagirs will stop before they get back to the tents of their tribe. I’m hoping Ivan’s mind can be restored when we get him back to civilization.”

“And what about the Blood of the Gods?”

“Well, what about them? They’re his, to do what he pleases with them.”

Hawkston did not reply, nor did he seem aware of Conan’s suspicion of him. He had no bow, but Conan knew that he was still armed. The Cimmerian carried his knife openly, and he maneuvered so the Bossonian went ahead of him as they groped their way back down the tunnel and out into the starlight. Just what Hawkston’s intentions were, he did not know. Sooner or later, he believed, he would have to fight the Bossonian for his life. But somehow he felt that this would not be necessary until after Al Wazir had been found and secured.

He wondered about the tunnel and the shaft to the top of the cliff. They had not been there a year ago. Obviously the Shemites had found the tunnel purely by accident.

“No use searching the Caves tonight,” said Hawkston, when they had reached the ledge. “We’ll take turns watching and sleeping. Take the first watch, will you? I didn’t sleep last night, you know.”

Conan nodded. Hawkston dragged the sleeping-skins from the Nest and wrapping himself in them, fell asleep close to the wall. Conan sat down a short distance away, his bow across his knees. As he sat he dozed lightly, waking each time the sleeping Bossonian stirred.

He was still sitting there when the dawn reddened the eastern sky.

Hawkston rose, stretched and yawned.

“Why didn’t you wake me to watch my turn?” he asked.

“You know damned well why I didn’t,” grated Conan. “I don’t care to run the risk of being murdered in my sleep.”

“You don’t like me, do you, Conan?” laughed Hawkston. But only his lips smiled, and a red flame smoldered in his eyes. “Well, that makes the feeling mutual, don’t you know. After we’ve gotten Al Wazir back to el-Azem, I’m looking forward to a settling of our differences—just you and I— and a pair of swords.”

“Why wait until then?” Conan was on his feet, his nostrils quivering with the eagerness of hard-leashed hate.

Hawkston shook his head, smiling fiercely.

“Oh no, Conan. No fighting until we get out of the desert.”

“All right,” snarled the Cimmerian disgruntedly. “Let’s eat, and then start combing the Caves for Ivan.”

A slight sound brought them both wheeling toward the door of the Nest. Al Wazir stood there, plucking at his beard with his long black nails. His eyes lacked their former wild beast glare; they were clouded, plaintive. His attitude was one of bewilderment rather than menace.

“Ivan!” muttered Conan, setting down his bow and moving toward the wild man. Al Wazir did not retreat, nor did he make any hostile demonstration. He stood stolidly, uneasily tugging at his tangled beard.

“He’s in a milder mood,” murmured Conan. “Easy, Hawkston. Let me handle this. I don’t believe he’ll have to be overpowered this time.”

“In that case,” said Hawkston, “I don’t need you any longer.”

Conan whipped around; the Bossonian’s eyes were red with the killing lust, his hand gripped on the hilt of his fully drawn weapon. For an instant the two men stood tensely facing one another. Hawkston spoke, almost in a whisper: “You fool, did you think I’d give you an even break? I don’t need you to help me get Al Wazir back to el-Azem. I know a shaman who can restore his mind if anybody can —and then I’ll see that he tells me where to find the Blood of the Gods—”

Their right hands moved in a simultaneous blur of speed. Hawkston’s stabbed forward as Conan’s scimitar flashed free. And the blade struck blade, knocking it from the Bossonian’s hand. Conan felt the wind of the blade as it whipped past his head and behind him the madman in the door grunted and fell heavily. The bloodied weapon rang on the stone and bounced from the ledge, and Conan cut murderously at Hawkston’s head, his eyes red with fury. A swift backward leap carried the Bossonian out of range, and Hawkston tore out his knife as Conan came at him in savage silence. The Cimmerian had seen Al Wazir lying limp in the doorway, blood oozing from his head.

Conan and Hawkston came together with a dazzling flame and crack of steel, in an unleashing of hard-pent passions, two wild natures a-thirst for each other's lives. Here was the urge to kill, loosed at last, and backing every blow.

For a few minutes stroke followed stroke too fast for the eye to distinguish, had any eye witnessed that onslaught. They fought with a chilled-steel fury, a reckless abandon that was yet neither wild or careless. The clang of steel was deafening; miraculously, it seemed, the shimmer of steel played about their heads, yet neither edge cut home. The skill of the two fighters was too well matched.

After the first hurricane of attack, the play changed subtly; it grew, not less savage but more crafty. The desert sun, that had lighted the blades of a thousand generations of swordsmen, in a land sworn to the sword, had never shone on a more scintillating display of swordsmanship than this, where two aliens carved out the destinies of their tangled careers on a high-flung ledge between sun and desert.

Up and down the ledge—scruff and shift of quick-moving feet —gliding, not stamping—ring and clash of steel meeting steel —flame-lighted black eyes glaring into flinty grey eyes; flying blades turned crimson by the rising sun.

Hawkston had cut his teeth on the straight knife of his native land, and he was partial to the point and used it with devilish skill. Conan had learned sword fighting in the hard school of the Cimmerian mountain wars, more at home with straight blade too than with the curved tulwar, thus he fought with no set or orthodox style. His blade was a lethal, living thing that darted like a serpent’s tongue or lashed with devastating power.

Here was no ceremonious dueling with elegant rules and formalities. It was a fight for life, naked and desperate, and within the space of half a dozen minutes both men had attempted or foiled tricks that would have made an Ophirian fencing master blink. There was no pause or breathing spell; only the constant slither and rasp of blade on blade—Hawkston failing in his attempt to maneuver Conan about so the sun would dazzle his eyes; Conan almost rushing Hawkston over the rim of the ledge, the Bossonian saving himself by a sidewise leap.

The end came suddenly. Hawkston, with sweat pouring down his face, realized that the sheer strength in Conan’s arm and the extra reach of the scimitar was beginning to tell. Even his iron wrist was growing numb under the terrific blows the Cimmerian rained on his guard. Believing himself to be superior to Conan in pure knife-fighting skill, he began the preliminaries of an intricate maneuver, and meeting with apparent success, feinted a cut at Conan’s head. Conan knew it was a feint, but, pretending to be deceived by it, he lifted his sword as though to parry the cut. Instantly Hawkston’s point licked at his throat. Even as the Bossonian thrust he knew he had been tricked, but he could not check the motion. The blade passed over Conan’s shoulder as the Cimmerian evaded the thrust with a swaying twist of his torso, and his scimitar flashed like white steel lightning in the sun. Hawkston’s dark features were blotted out by a gush of blood and brains; his fallen knife rang loud on the rocky ledge; he swayed, tottered, and fell suddenly, his crown split to the hinges of the jawbone.

Conan shook the sweat from his eyes and glared down at the prostrate figure, too drunken with hate and battle to fully realize that his foe was dead. He started and whirled as a voice spoke weakly behind him: “The same swift blade as ever, Conan!”

Al Wazir was sitting with his back against the wall. His eyes, no longer murky nor bloodshot, met Conan’s levelly. In spite of his tangled hair and beard there was something ineffably tranquil and seer-like about him. Here, indeed, was the man Conan had known of old.

“Ivan! Alive! But Hawkston’s scimitar—”

“Was that what it was?” Al Wazir lifted a hand to his head; it came away smeared with blood. “Anyway, I’m very much alive, and my mind’s clear— for the first time in God knows how long. What happened?”

“You stopped a cut meant for me,” grunted Conan. “Let me see that wound.” After a brief investigation he announced: “Just a graze; ploughed through the scalp and knocked you out. I’ll wash it and bandage it.” While he worked he said tersely: “Hawkston was on your trail; after your rubies. I tried to beat him here, and Shalan ibn Mansour trapped us both. You were a bit out of your head and I had to tie you up. We had a tussle with the Shemites and finally beat them off.”

“What day is it?” asked Al Wazir. At Conan’s reply he ejaculated: “It’s more than a month since I got knocked on the head!”

“What’s that?” exclaimed Conan. “I thought the loneliness—”

Al Wazir laughed. “Not that, Conan. I was doing some excavation work —I discovered a shaft in one of the lower caves, leading down to the tunnel. The mouths of both were sealed with slabs of rock. I opened them up, just out of curiosity. Then I found another shaft leading from an upper cave to the summit of the cliff, like a chimney. It was while I was working out the slab that sealed it, that I dislodged a shower of rocks. One of them gave me an awful rap on the head. My mind’s been a blank ever since, except for brief intervals— and they weren’t very clear. I remember them like bits of dreams, now. I remember squatting in the Nest, tearing tins open and gobbling food, trying to remember who I was and why I was here. Then everything would fade out again.

“I have another vague recollection of being tied to a rock in the cave, and seeing you and Hawkston lying on the ledge, and firing. Of course I didn’t know either of you. I remember hearing you saying that if somebody was killed the others would go away. There was a lot of shooting and shouting and that frightened me and hurt my ears. I wanted you all to go away and leave me in peace.

“I don’t know how I got loose, but my next disjointed bit of memory is that of creeping up the shaft that leads to the top of the cliff, and then climbing, climbing, with the stars over me and the wind blowing in my face —heavens! I must have climbed over the summit of the hill and down the crags on the other side!

“Then I have a muddled remembrance of running and crawling through the dark—a confused impression of shooting and noise, and a man standing alone on a knoll and shouting—” he shuddered and shook his head. “When I try to remember what happened then, it’s all a blind whirl of fire and blood, like a nightmare. Somehow I seemed to feel that the man on the knoll was to blame for all the noise that was maddening me, and that if he quit shouting, they’d all go away and let me alone. But from that point it’s all a blind red mist.”

Conan held his peace. He realized that it was his remark, overheard by Al Wazir, that if Shalan ibn Mansour were slain, the Shemites would flee, which had taken root in the madman’s clouded brain and provided the impulse— probably subconsciously—which finally translated itself into action. Al Wazir did not remember having killed the shaykh, and there was no use distressing him with the truth.

“I remember running, then,” murmured Al Wazir, rubbing his head. “I was in a terrible fright, and trying to get back to the Caves. I remember climbing again—up this time. I must have climbed back over the crags and down the chimney again—I’ll wager I couldn’t make that climb clothed in my right mind. The next thing I remember is hearing voices, and they sounded somehow familiar. I started toward them—then something cracked and flashed in my head, and I knew nothing more until I came to myself a few moments ago, in possession of all my faculties, and saw you and Hawkston fighting with your swords.”

“You were evidently regaining your senses,” said Conan. “It took the extra cut of that blade to set your numb machinery going again. Such things have happened before.

“Ivan, I’ve got a camel hidden nearby, and the Shemites left some ropes of hay in their camp when they pulled out. I’m going to feed and water it, and then— I intended taking you back to the Coast with me, but since you’ve regained your wits, I suppose you’ll—”

“I’m going back with you,” said Al Wazir. “My meditations didn’t give me the gift of prophecy, but they convinced me— even before I got that rap on the head —that the best life a man can live is one of service to his fellow man. Just as you do, in your own way! I can’t help mankind by dreaming out here in the desert.” He glanced down at the prostrate figure on the ledge. “We’ll have to build a cairn, first. Poor devil, it was his destiny to be the last sacrifice to the Blood of the Gods.”

“What do you mean?”

“They were stained with men’s blood,” answered Al Wazir. “They have caused nothing but suffering and crime since they first appeared in history. Before I left el-Azem I threw them into the sea.”

The Slave Princess

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

Outside the clamor mounted deafeningly. The rasp of steel on steel mingled with yells of blood-lust and yells of wild triumph. The young slave girl hesitated and looked about the chamber in which she stood. There was resigned helplessness in her gaze. The city had fallen; the blood-drunk Turanians were riding through the streets, burning, looting, slaughtering. Any moment might see the victorious savages running red handed through the house of her owner.

From another part of the house a fat merchant came running. His eyes were distended with terror, his breath came in gasps. He bore gems and worthless gew-gaws in his hands – belongings snatched blindly and at random.

“Zuleika!” His voice was the screech of a trapped weasel, “Open the door quickly, then bar it from this side – I will escape through the rear. By Mitra! The Turanian fiends are slaying all in the streets – the gutters run red – ”

“What of me, master?” the girl asked humbly.

“What of you, hussy?” screamed the man, striking her heavily, “Open the door, open the door, I tell you – ahhhhhh!”

His voice snapped brittle as glass. Through an outer door came a wild and fearsome figure – a shaggy, ragged Turanian whose eyes were the eyes of a mad dog. Zuleika in frozen terror saw the wide glaring eyes, the lanky hair, the short boar-spear gripped in a hand that dripped crimson.

The merchant’s voice rose in a frenzied squeaking. He made a desperate dash across the chamber but the tribesman leaped like a cat on a mouse and one lean hand gripped the merchant’s garments. Zuleika watched in dumb horror. She had reason to hate the man – reasons of outrage, punishment and indignity, but from the depths of her heart she pitied the howling wretch as he writhed and shrank from his fate. The boar-spear ripped upward; the screams broke in a fearful gurgle. The Turanian stepped over the ghastly red thing on the floor and stalked toward the terrified girl. She shrank back, unspeaking. Long she had learned the cruelty of men and the uselessness of appeal. She did not beg for her life. The Turanian gripped her by the breast of the single scanty garment she wore and she felt his wild beast eyes burn into her’s. He was too far gone in the slaughter-lust for her to rouse another desire in his wild soul. In that red moment she was only a living thing, pulsing and quivering with life, for him to still forever in blood and agony.

She sought to close her eyes but she could not. In a clear white light of semi-detachment she welcomed death, to end a road that had been hard and cruel. But her flesh shrank from the doom her spirit accepted and only her attacker’s grasp held her erect. Grinning like a wolf he brought the keen point of the spear against her breast and a thin trickle of blood started from the tender skin. The tribesman sucked in his breath in fierce ecstacy; he would drive the blade home slowly, gradually, twisting it excruciatingly, glutting his cruelty with the agonized writhings and screamings of his fair victim.

A heavy step sounded behind them and a rough voice swore in an unfamiliar tongue. The Turanian wheeled, beard bristling in a ferocious snarl. The half fainting girl stumbled back against a divan, her hand to her breast. It was a mailed Cimmerian who had entered the chamber and to the girl’s dizzy gaze he loomed like an iron clad giant. Over six feet in height he stood, and his shoulders and steel clad limbs were mighty. From his heels to his heavy vizorless helmet he was heavily armored and his sun-darkened, scarred features added to the sinister import of his appearance. There was no stain of blood on his mail and his sword hung sheathed at his girdle. The girl knew that he could be but one man – Conan of Cimmeria, the Cimmerian mercenary who hunted at times with the Turanian pack.

Now he strode ponderously toward them, growling a warning at the warrior, whose eyes burned with a feral light. The Turanian spat a curse and leaped like a lean wolf, thrusting fiercely. A mail clad arm brushed the spear aside and almost with the same motion, Conan caught the Turanian’s throat with his left hand in a vice-like grip, and with his clenched right struck his victim a mallet-like blow on the temple. Beneath the mailed fist, the tribesman’s skull caved in like a gourd and Conan let the twitching corpse fall carelessly at his feet. Zuleika stood silent, head bowed in submission, as resigned to this new master as to the other, but the Cimmerian showed no signs of claiming his prey. He turned away, with a single casual glance at the girl, then stopped short as his brief gaze rested on her pale face. His eyes narrowed and he approached her. She stood before him, like a child before his overshadowing bulk.

He laid his mailed hand on her frail shoulder and her knees bent beneath the unconcious weight of it. She raised her head to look into his face. His blazing blue eyes seemed to her like those of a jungle beast.

“Girl, how are you named?” he rumbled in the Turanian tongue.

“Zuleika, master,” she answered in the same language.

He was silent, as if he pondered. His scarred face was inscrutable but she caught the new glint in his volcanic eyes. Without a word he picked her up in his left arm as a man might take up a baby. His captive voiced no protest as he carried her out into the street. Kismet. No woman knew what Fate held in store for her and Zuleika had learned submission in a bitter school.

Smoke was blown through the streets in fitful gusts; the Turanians were burning the city. Still rose the wails of terror and agony and the yells of gloating rage. Conan stepped over the body of a Zamoran that lay in a crimson pool. Zuleika noted with a shudder that his fingers had been cut away – even in death the Zamoran clung to his pitiful treasures. A wave of nausea surged over her and she pressed her face against her captor’s mailed shoulder, shutting out the sights of horror. A sudden fierce shout caused her to look up again.

Conan was striding toward a huge black stallion of savage mien that stood with reins hanging in the street, and a tall warrior in heron plumed helmet and gold-chased mail was running toward him, holding a dripping scimitar. Zuleika realized that the warrior desired her, and even in that moment felt that he was mad to dispute possession of a slave with the grim Cimmerian, when so many women could be had for the taking. Conan shifted her so his body shielded her, and drew his heavy sword. As the warrior leaped in the Cimmerian struck as a lion strikes and the Turanian’s head rolled in the bloody dust. Kicking aside the slumping body, Conan reached his steed which reared and snorted with flaring nostrils at the scent of blood. But neither his steed’s restiveness nor his captive hampered the Cimmerian who swung easily into the saddle and galloped toward the shattered gates.

The smoke, the blood and the clamor faded behind them and the upland desert closed in about them. Zuleika glanced up at the grim, inscrutable face of her new master and a strange whimsy crossed her mind. What girl has not dreamed of being borne away on the saddle bow of her prince of romance? So Zuleika had dreamed in other days. Long suffering had cleansed her of bitterness, but she wondered helplessly at the whim of chance. “On the saddle-bow she was borne away” but her garments were not the robes of a princess but the shift of a slave, not to the lilt of harps she rode, but the slavering howls of horror and slaughter, and her captor was not the prince of her childish dreams but a grim outlaw, stark and savage as the mountain land that bred him.

II

Castle Crimson was set in the midst of a wild land. Built originally by Kothians, it had fallen to the Shemites, from whom it had again been captured by the craft and desperate courage of its present owner. It was one of the few waste-land holds that remained to Shem, an outpost that rose boldly in hostile land. Leagues lay between Malthom’s keep and the nearest Shemite castle. South lay the desert. To the east, across the sands loomed the wild mountains wherein lurked savage foes.

Night had fallen and Malthom sat in an inner chamber listening attentively to his guest. Malthom was tall, rangy and handsome with keen grey eyes and golden locks. His garments had once been rich and costly but now they were worn and faded. The gems that had once adorned his sword hilt were gone. Poverty was reflected in his apparel as well as in the castle itself, which was barren beyond the wont of even the feudal castles of that rude day. Malthom lived by plunder, as a wolf lives, and like a desert wolf, his life was lean and hard.

He sat on the rude bench, chin on fist and gazed at his guests. His was one of the few castles open to Conan of Cimmeria. There was a price on the outlaw’s head and the slim holdings of elsewhere were barred to him, but here beyond the border none knew what went on in the isolated hold.

Conan had quenched his thirst and satisfied his hunger with gigantic draughts of wine and huge bits of meat torn by his strong teeth from a roasted joint, and Zuleika had likewise eaten and drunk. Now the girl sat patiently, knowing that the warriors discussed her, but not understanding their speech.

“And so,” Conan was saying, “when I heard the Turanians had laid seige to the city, I rode hard to come up to it, knowing that it would not long withstand them, what with that fat fool of a Yurzed Beg commanding the walls. Well, it fell before I could arrive and when I came into it, the desert men had stripped it bare – the lucky ones had all the loot in sight and the others were scorching the toes of the citizens to make them give up their hidden wealth – but I did find this girl.”

“What of her, then?” asked Malthom curiously, “She is pretty – dressed in costly apparel she might even be beautiful. But after all, she is only a half naked slave. No one will pay you much for her.”

Conan grinned bleakly and Malthom’s interest quickened. He had had much dealings with the Cimmerian warrior and he knew when Conan smiled, things were afoot.

“Did you ever hear of Zalda, the daughter of the Sheikh Abdullah bin Khor?”

Malthom nodded and the girl, catching the words, looked up with sudden interest.

“She was about to be married, three years ago,” said Conan, “To Khalru Shah, chief of Kizil-Bezzin, but a roving band kidnapped her, and since then no word has been heard of her. Doubtless they sold her far to the East – or cut her throat. You never saw her? I did – these women go unveiled. And this girl, Zuleika, is enough like the princess Zalda to be her sister, by Crom!”

“I begin to see what you mean,” said Malthom.

“Khelru Shah,” said Conan, “will pay a mighty ransom for his bride. Zalda was of royal blood – marrying her meant alliance with the Roualli – the Sheikh is more powerful than many princes – when he summons his war-men, the hoofs of three thousand steeds shake the desert. Though he dwells in the felt tents of the Bedouin, his power is great, his wealth is great. No dowry was to go with the princess Zalda, but Khelru Shah was to pay for the privilege of wedding her – of such pride are these wild Rouallas.

“Keep the Arab girl here with you. I will ride to Kizil-Bezzin and lay my terms before the Turanian. Keep her well concealed and let no Arab see her – she might be mistaken for Zalda, indeed, and if Abdullah bin Kheram gets wind of it, he might bring up against us such a force as to take the castle by storm.

“By continuous riding I can reach Kizil-Bezzin in three days; I will waste no more than a day in disputing with Khelru Shah. If I know the man, he will ride back with me, with several hundred men. We should reach this castle not later than four days after we depart from the hill-town. Keep the gates close barred while I am away, and ride not far afield. Khelru Shah is as subtle and treacherous as– ”

“Yourself,” finished Malthom with a grim smile.

Conan grunted. “When we come, we will ride up to the walls. Then bring you the Arab slave upon the walls of the tower – somewhere you must contrive to find clothing more suited to a captive princess. And impress upon her that she must bear herself, at least while on the wall, with less humility. The princess Zalda was proud and haughty as an empress and bore herself as if all lesser beings were dust beneath her white feet. And now I ride.”

“In the midst of the night?” asked Malthom, “Will you not sleep in my castle and ride forth at dawn?”

“My horse is rested,” answered Conan, “I never weary. Besides, I am a hawk that flies best by night.”

He rose, pulling his mail coif in place and donning his helmet. He took up his shield which bore the symbol of a grinning skull. Malthom looked at him curiously, and though he knew the man of old, he could not but wonder at the wild spirit and self-sufficiency that enabled him to ride by night across a savage and hostile land, into the very strong hold of his natural foes. Malthom knew that Conan of Cimmeria was outlawed by the Shemites for slaying a certain nobleman, that he was fiercely hated by the Kothians as a whole, and that he had half a dozen private feuds on his hands. He had few friends, no followers, no position of power. He was an outcast who must depend on his own wit and prowess to survive. But these things sat lightly on the soul of Conan of Cimmeria; to him they were but natural circumstances. His whole life had been one of incredible savagery and violence.

Malthom knew that conditions in Conan’s native land were wild and bloody, for the name of Nordheim was a term for violence all over southern Hyboria. But just how war-shaken and turbulent those conditions were, Malthom could not know. He had followed kings and won a red name for himself in the blind melees that followed. Returning again to Khoraja to pay a debt of gratitude, he had been caught in the blind whirlwind of plot and intrigue and had plunged into the dangerous game with a fierce zest. He rode alone, mostly, and time and again his many enemies thought him trapped, but each time he had won free, by craft and guile, or by the sheer power of his sword arm. For he was like a desert lion, this giant Cimmerian, who plotted like a Turanian, rode like a Hyrkanian, fought like a blood-mad tiger and preyed on the strongest and fiercest of the outland lords.

Full armed he rode into the night on his great black stallion, and Malthom turned his casual attention to the slave girl. Her hands were soiled and roughened with menial toil, but they were slender and shapely. Somewhere in her veins, decided the young lord, ran aristocratic blood, that showed in the delicate rose leaf texture of her skin, in the silkiness of her wavy black hair, in the deep softness of her dark eyes. All the warm heritage of the Southern desert was evident in her every motion,

“You were not born a slave?”

“What does it matter, master?” she asked, “Enough that I am a slave now. Better be born to the whips and chains than broken to them. Once I was free; now I am thrall. Is it not enough.”

“A slave,” muttered Malthom, “What are a slave’s thought? Strange – it never before occurred to me to wonder what passes in the mind of a slave – or a beast, either, for that matter.”

“Better a man’s steed, than a man’s slave, master,” said the girl.

“Aye,” he answered, “For there is nobility in a good horse.”

She bowed her head and folded her slender hands, unspeaking.

III

Dusk shadowed the hills when Conan of Cimmeria rode up to the great gate of Kizil-Bezzin, which gave its name to the town it guarded and dominated. The guardsmen, lean, bearded Turanians with the eyes of hawks, cursed in amazement.

“By Bel, and by Bab! The wolf has come to put his head in the trap! Run, Yusef, and tell our lord, Ali Bey, that the infidel dog, Conan, stands before the gates.”

“Ho there, you upon the walls!” shouted the Cimmerian. “Tell your chief that Conan of Cimmeria would have speech with him. And make haste, for I am not one to waste time in dallying.”

“Hold him in parley but a moment,” muttered a man, crouching behind a bastion, and winding his cross-bow – a ponderous affair captured from the Shemites, “I’ll send him to dress his shield with the damned.”

“Hold!” this from a bearded, lean old hawk whose eyes were fierce and wary, “When this chief rides boldly into the hands of his enemies, be sure he has secret powers. Wait until Ali comes.” To Conan he called curteously, “Be patient, mighty lord; the prince Ali Bey has been sent for and will soon be upon the walls.”

“Then let him come in haste,” growled Conan, who was in no more awe of a prince than he was of a peasant, “I will not await him long.”

Ali Bey came upon the great walls and looked down curiously and suspiciously upon his enemy.

“What want ye, Conan of Cimmeria?” he asked, “Are you mad, to ride alone to the gates of Kizil-Bezzin? Have you forgotten there is feud between us? That I have sworn to sever your neck with my sword?”

“Aye, so you have sworn,” grinned Conan, “And so has sworn Abdullah bin Kheram, and Ali Bahadur, and Abdallah Mirza. And so, in past years and in another land, swore many other men in their time, yet I still wear my head firmly on my shoulders.

“Harken till I tell you what I have to say. Then if you still wish my head, come out of your stone walls and see if ye be man enough to take it. This concerns the princess Zalda, daughter of Sheikh Abdullah bin Kheram – on whose name, damnation!”

Ali Bey stiffened with sudden interest; he was a tall, slender man, young, and handsome in a hawk-like way. His short black beard set off his aristocratic features and his eyes were fine and expressive, with shadows of cruelty lurking in their depths. His turban was scaled with silver coins and adorned with heron plumes, and his light mail was crusted with golden scales. The hilt of his slender, silver chased scimitar was set with gleaming gems. Young but powerful was Ali Bey, in the hill town upon which he had swooped with his hawks a few years before and made himself ruler. Six hundred men of war he could bring to battle, and he lusted for more power. For that reason he had wished to ally himself with the powerful Roualla tribe of Abdullah bin Kheram.

“What of the princess Zalda?” he asked.

“She is my captive,” answered Conan.

Ali Bey started violently, his hand gripped his hilt, then he laughed mockingly.

“You lie; the princess Zalda is dead.”

“So I thought,” answered Conan frankly, “But in the raid on the city, I found her captive to a merchant who knew not her real identity, she having concealed it, fearing lest worse evil come to her.”

Ali Bey stood in thought a moment, then raised his hand.

“Open the gates for him. Enter, Conan of Cimmeria, no harm shall come to you. Lay down your sword and ride in.”

“I wore my sword in the tent of Brian of Brythunia,” roared the Cimmerian, “When I unbuckle it in the walls of my foes, it will be when I am dead. Unbar those gates, fools, my steed is weary.”

Within an inner chamber of silk and crimson hangings, crystal and gold and teak-wood, Ali Bey sat listening to his guest. The young chief’s face was inscrutable but his dark eyes were absorbed. Behind him stood, like a dark image, Belek the Stygian, Ali’s right-hand man, a big, dark powerful man with a satanic face and evil eyes. Whence he came, who he was, why he followed the young Turanian none knew but Ali, but all feared and hated him, for the craft and cruelty of a black serpent was in the abysmal brain of the Stygian.

Conan of Cimmeria had laid aside his helmet and thrown back his mail coif, disclosing his thick, corded throat, and his black, square cut mane. His volcanic blue eyes blazed even more fiercely as he talked.

“Once the princess Zalda is in your hands you can bring the Sheikh to terms. Instead of paying him a great price for her, you can force him to pay you a dowery. He had rather see her your wife, even at the cost of much gold, than your slave. Once married to her, then, he will join forces with you. You will have all that you planned for three years ago, in addition to a rich dowery from the Sheikh.”

“Why did you not ride to him instead of to me?” abruptly asked Ali.

“Because you have such things as we desire, my friend and I. Abdullah is more powerful than you, but his treasure is less. Most of his belongings consist of cattle – horses – arms – tents – fields – the belongings of a nomad chief. Here in this castle you have chests of golden coins looted from caravans and taken as ransom for captive soldiers. You have gems – silver – silks – rare spices – jewelry. You have what we desire.”

“And what proof have I that you are not lying?”

“Ride with me tomorrow,” grunted Conan, “To the castle of my friend.”

Ali laughed like a wolf snarling.

“You would lead us into a trap,” said the Stygian.

“Bring three hundred men with you, bring as many as you like, the whole band of thieves,” said Conan, “Where do you think I would get enough warriors to trap your whole host?”

“Where is she being held?” asked the man.

“In Castle Crimson, three, four days ride to the west,” said Conan, “You could never take it by assault.”

“I am not sure,” muttered Ali, “The lord Malthom has only some forty men-at-arms.”

“But the castle is impregnable.”

“So I have heard.”

The Stygian’s eyes narrowed.

“We might seize you and hold you for ransom,” he suggested, “And force Malthom to return the girl.”

Conan laughed savagely and mockingly.

“Malthom would laugh at you and tell you to cut my throat and be damned, or he would cut the throat of the girl as it struck him. Besides, though I am in your castle, surrounded by your warriors, I am not entirely helpless. Seek to take me and I will flood these walls with blood before I die.”

It was no idle boast as they well knew.

“Enough!” Ali made an impatient gesture, “You were promised safety – what’s that?”

A commotion had arisen without; a scuffling, shouts, threats and maledictions in the Arab tongue. The outer door was thrust open and a bearded Turanian who had been guarding the door entered, dragging a struggling victim whose beard bristled with wrath. He clung to a pack from which spilled various trinkets and ornaments.

“I found this dog sneaking about in an adjoining chamber, master,” rumbled the guardsman, “Methinks he was eavesdropping. Shall I not strike off his head?”

“I am Ali bin Nasru, an honest merchant!” shouted the Shemite angrily and fearfully, “I am well known in Kizil-Bezzin! I sell wares to shahs and sheikhs and I was not evesdropping. Am I a dog to spy upon my patron? I was seeking the great chief Ali Bey to spread my goods before him!”

“Best cut out his tongue,” growled Belek, “He may have heard too much.”

“I heard nothing!” clamored Ali, “I have but just come into the castle!”

“Beat him forth,” snapped Ali Bey in irritation, “Shall I be pestered by a yapping cur? Lash him out and if he comes again with his trash, strip him and hang him up by his feet in the market-place for the children to pelt with stones. Conan, we ride at dawn, and if you have tricked me, make your peace with the gods!”

“And if you seek to trick me,” snarled Conan, “make your peace with yours, for you will swiftly meet them.”

It was past midnight when a form climbed warily down a rope let down from the outer wall of the town. Hurriedly making his way down the slopes, the man came soon upon a thicket where was securely hidden a swift camel and a bulky pack – for the man was not one to trust all his belongings in a town ruled by Turanians. Recklessly casting aside the pack, the man mounted the camel and fled southward.

IV

Malthom rested his chin on his fist and gazed broodingly at the Arab girl, Zuleika. In the past days he had found his eyes straying often to his slender captive. He wondered at her silence and submission, for he knew that at some time in her life, she had known a higher position than that of a slave. Her manners were not those of a born serf; she was neither impudent nor servile. He guessed faintly at the fierce and cruel school in which she had been broken – no, not broken, for there was a strange deep strength in her that had not been touched, or if touched, only made more pliable.

She was beautiful – not with the passionate, fierce beauty of the Turanian women who had lent him their wild love, but with a deep, tranquil beauty, of one who’s soul has been forged in fierce fires.

“Tell me how you came to be a slave,” the voice was one of command and Zuleika folded her hands in acquiescence.

“I was born among the black felt tents of the south, master, and my childhood was spent upon the desert. There all things are free – in my early girlhood I was proud, for men told me I was beautiful, and many suitors came to woo me. But there came others, too – men who wooed with naked steel and me they carried off.

“They sold me to a Turanian, who soon wearied of me and sold me again to an Iranistani slave-dealer. Thus I came into the house of the merchant of the city, and there I toiled, a slave among the lowest slaves. My master once offered me my freedom if I would return his love but I could not. My body was his; my love he could not shackle. So he made of me his drudge.”

“You have learned deep humilty,” commented Malthom.

“By scourge and shackle and torture and toil I have learned, master,” she said.

“Do you know what we mean to do with you?” he asked bluntly. She shook her head.

“Conan thinks you resemble the princess Zalda,” said Malthom, “And it is our intention to cheat Ali Bey with you. We will show you to him on the wall, and I think he will pay a high price for you. When we have delivered you to him, you will have your chance. Play your cards well and perchance you may bewitch him, so when he learns of the trickery, he will not put you aside.”

Again Malthom’s eyes swept over her slim form. A pulse began to thrum in his temple. For the time being, she was his; why should he not take her, before he gave her into the arms of Ali Bey? He had learned that what a man wants he must take. With a single long stride he reached her and swept her into his arms. She made no resistance, but she averted her face, drawing her head back from his fierce lips. Her dark eyes looked into his with a deep hurt and suddenly he felt ashamed. He released her and turned away.

“There are some garments I bought from a wandering band of gypsies,” he said abruptly, “Put them on; I hear a trumpet.”

Across the desert a distant trumpet was faintly sounding. Malthom had his men in full armor lining the walls, weapons in hand, when the horsemen rode up to the castle gate, which was flanked by a tower.

Malthom hailed them. He saw Ali Bey in heron plumed helmet and gold scaled mail, sitting his black mare. Close behind him sat Belek the Stygian on a bay horse, and beside the chief, Conan of Cimmeria on his great stallion. And Malthom grinned. Was it not strange to see the man riding in the company of those who had sworn to cut his throat? Some three hundred riders were ranked behind the chief.

“Ha, Malthom,” said Conan, “Fetch forth the princess – let her be shown upon the wall of the tower that Ali Bey be convinced; he thinks us liars!”

Malthom hesitated, as a sudden revulsion shook him, then with a shrug of his shoulders he made a gesture to his men-at-arms. Zuleika was escorted out upon the wall above the gate and Malthom gasped. Rich clothes had wrought a transformation in the slave girl; indeed she wore them as if she had never worn the flimsy rags of a serf. She did not carry herself with the haughty pride of a princess, thought Malthom, but there was a certain quiet dignity about her, a certain proud humility that many of royal blood might well copy.

Ali Bey gasped also; he gazed at her in bewilderment and reined closer.

“By Allah!” he said in amazement, “Zalda! Is it she? No – yes – by Bel, I cannot say! She does not carry her chin as she did, if it be she, and yet – yet – by the gods, it must be she!”

“Of a surety it is the princess Zalda,” rumbled Conan, “By Ymir, do you think there is no faith in Shemites? Well, chief, what say you? Is she worth ten thousand pieces of gold to you?”

“Wait,” answered the Turanian, “I must have time to consider. This girl is alike the princess Zalda as can be – yet her whole bearing is different – I must be convinced. Let her speak to me.”

Malthom nodded to Zuleika, who gave him a pitiful look, then raising her voice, said: “My lord, I am Zalda, daughter of Abdullah bin Kheram.”

Again the Turanian shook his hawk-like head.

“The voice is soft and musical like Zalda’s, but the tone is different – the princess was used to command and her tone was imperious.”

“She has been a captive,” grunted Conan, “Three years of captivity can change even a princess.”

“True – well, I will ride to the spring of Mechmet which lies something more than a mile away, and there camp. Tomorrow I will come to you again and we will talk on the matter. Ten thousand pieces of gold – a high price to pay, even for the princess Zalda.”

“Good enough,” grunted Conan. “I’ll remain at the castle – and mark you, Ali – no tricks. At the first hint of a night onset we cut Zalda’s throat and throw her head to you. Mark!”

Ali nodded absent mindedly and rode away at the head of his riders, in deep converse with the dark faced Belek. Conan rode in through the gate which was instantly barred and bolted behind him, and Zuleika turned to go into her chamber. Her head was bent, her hands folded; again she had assumed the manner of the slave. Yet she paused a moment before Malthom and in her dark eyes was a deep hurt as she said: “You will sell me to Ali, my lord?”

Malthom flushed darkly – not in years had the blood thus suffused his face. He sought to reply and groped for words. Unconciously his mailed hand sought her slim shoulder, half caressingly. Then he shook himself and spoke harshly because of the strange conflicting emotions within him: “Go to your chamber, wench; what affair of yours is it what I do?”

And as she went, head sunk on her breast, he stood looking after her, clenching his mailed fists until the fingers cracked, and cursing himself bewilderedly.

V

Conan of Cimmeria and Malthom sat in an inner chamber, though the hour was late. Conan was in full armor, except for his helmet, as was Malthom. The mail coifs of both men were drawn back upon their shoulders, disclosing Malthom’s yellow locks and Conan’s raven mane. Malthom was silent, moody; he drank little, talked less. Conan on the other hand, was in a mood of deep satisfaction. He drank deep and his gratification led him into a reminiscent mood.

“Wars and massed battles I have seen in plenty,” said he, lifting his great goblet, “Aye – I fought in the battle of Venarium when I was but a child, by Crom! We were men of iron in an iron age. Their leader, who had been driven into the north in disgrace, came marching up into our lands with thousands of men – against our joined forces, whose chief was the berserk Jorgun the Mad – and mad he was, by Ymir! So Hasculf came back to win this would-be city again, with his Cimmerian brothers, and his allies from the north and the Isles.

“Word of the war came into the west, where I was a boy running half naked on the moors, in the land of my father. We had a weapon-man whose name was Wulfgar and he was a Nordheimer. ‘I will strike one more blow for the sea-people,’ he said, and he went across the frozen fens as a wolf goes, and I went with him with my boy’s bow, for the urge of wandering and blood-letting was already upon me. So we came upon Venarium just as the battle was joined. By Crom, my people had been driven back by the Aquilonians, away from the city whose gates they fell upon but could not shatter, when Hasculf made a sortie from the postern gate and fell upon them from the rare. Whereupon Jorgun sallied from the main gates with his soldiers and the ravens fed deep! By Crom, there the axes drank and the swords failed not of glutting!

“So Wulfgar and I came into the battle and the first wounded man I saw was an Aquilonian man-at-arms who had once crushed my ear lobe to a pulp so that the blood flowed over his mailed fingers, to see if he could make me cry out – I did not cry out but spat in his face, so he struck me senseless. Now this man knew me and called me by name, gasping for water. ‘Water is it?’ said I, ‘Its in the icy rivers of the beyond you’ll quench your thirst!’ And I jerked back his head to cut his throat, but before I could lay dirk to gullet, he died. His legs were crushed by a great stone and a spear had broken in his ribs.

“Wulfgar was gone from me now and I advanced into the thick of the battle, loosing my arrows with all the might of my childish muscles, blindly and at random, so I do not know if I did scathe or not, or to whom, for the noise and shouting confused me and the smell of blood was in my nostrils, and the blindness and fury of my first massed battle upon me.

“So I came to the place where Jorgun the Mad was leagued with a few of his warriors by the Aquilonian soldiers – by Bel, I never saw a man strike such blows as this berserk struck! He fought half naked and without mail or shield, and neither buckler nor armour could stand before his axe. And I saw Wulfgar – on a heap of dead he lay, still gripping a hilt from which the blade had snapped in an Aquilonian soldier’s heart. He was passing swiftly, his life ebbing from him in thick crimson surges but he spoke to me, faintly and said: ‘Bend your bow, Conan, against the big man in chain mail armor.’ And so he died and I knew he meant their leader.

“But at that moment Jorgun, bleeding from a hundred wounds, struck a blow that hewed off a soldier’s leg at the hip, though cased in heavy mail, and the axe haft splintered in the man’s hand, andtheir leader gave him his death stroke. Now all the men were dead or fled, and the men-at-arms dragged Hasculf before rgwie leader, who had his head severed on the spot. Now that sight maddened me, for though I loved not the man, I hated the Aquilonians more, and running forward across the torn corpses, I bent my bow against him. It was my last arrow and it splintered on his breast plate. A man-at-arms caught me up and held me high for all to view, while I cursed him and broke my milk teeth on his mail-clad wrist.

“ ‘By the gods,’ said their leader, ‘It’s a Cimmerian wolf-cub!’

“ ‘Shall I crush him?’ asked the man, ‘He’s been killing our men.’

“ ‘Take him captive,’ said he, ‘He’ll make a good soldier one day.’

“Well, both were right, but that man came to curse the day he spared me. He lost Venarium eventually, when I met him again in battle, years later. When we took our country back.

“Barren fighting, in a barren land. It seems though that now we are to be rewarded for our zeal. Did you station all the men-at-arms on the walls? It’s a dark, star-less night and we must beware of Ali Bey. Ha, we’ve cozened him! We are as good as richer by ten thousand gold pieces! Then you can rebuild this castle – hire more men-at-arms – buy armor and weapons. As for me, I’ll gather together a band of cut-throat ruffians and fare east in quest of some fat city to loot.”

“Conan,” Malthom’s eyes were dull and troubled, “What think you that Ali Bey will do with the girl Zuleika when he finds we’ve tricked him? Will he not slay her in his anger?”

“Not he,” Conan drank deep, “He’ll use her to trick old Abdullah bin Kheram as we’ve tricked him. If the girl plays her cards right, she may be a queen yet.”

“Conan,” said Malthom abruptly, “I cannot do it.”

The Cimmerian glared at him in bewilderment.

“What are you talking about?”

Malthom spread his hands helplessly. “I am sorry. I realized it while she was on the wall – I cannot let this girl go – I love her – ”

“What!” exclaimed Conan, completely dumfounded, “You mean you will keep her – not give her up to Ali Bey – why – !”

“I love her,” said Malthom doggedly, “That is the only excuse I can give.”

Blue sparks of Hell’s fire began to flicker in Conan’s eyes. His mailed fingers closed on the goblet and crunched it into ruin.

“You’d trick me, eh?” he roared, “You’d cheat me! Its wolf bite wolf, is it, with your damned lust? You dog, I’ll send you to your grave!”

Malthom reached swiftly for his sword as Conan lunged from his seat, but the giant Cimmerianman plunged full at his throat, splintering the heavy table to match-wood. Before the young man could clear his blade, the impact of Conan’s hurtling mail-clad body knocked him staggering and he was fighting desperately to keep the Cimmerian’s iron fingers from his throat. One of Conan’s hands had locked like a vise in a fold of Malthom’s mail at his neck, barely missing the throat and the other hand snapped for a death-hold. Malthom’s face was pale for he had seen Conan tear out a giant Turanian’s throat with his naked fingers and he knew that once those iron hands closed on his gullet, no power on earth could loosen them before they tore out the life that pulsed beneath.

About the room they fought and wrestled, those two great, mailed fighting men, in a strange, silent battle. Conan made no attempt to draw steel and Malthom had no time to do so. With all his skill, swiftness and power, he was fighting a losing fight to keep clear of those terrible, clutching hands. Malthom struck with all his power, driving his clenched, iron guarded fist full into Conan’s face and blood spattered, but the terrific blow did not check the Cimmerian in the slightest – Malthom did not even think Conan blinked. They crashed headlong into the ruins of the table and as they fell, close-clinched, Conan roared short and thunderous, as his fingers locked at last in the hold he had sought. Instantly Malthom’s head began to swim and the candle-light went bloody to his distended gaze. Conan’s fingers were sunk in the loose folds of his coif which, thrown back from his head, lay loosely about his neck, and only this saved him from instant death, but even so he felt his senses going. He tore and ripped futiley at Conan’s wrists; his head was bent back at an excruciating angle – his neck was about to snap – there came a swift rush of feet in the corridor without – a wild eyed man-at-arms burst into the chamber.

“My lords – masters – the enemy – they are within the wall and the castle burns!”

VI

The sounds of the castle faded as the guardsmen took up their posts and the rest composed themselves for sleep. In the great hall the beggar stirred; from his rags eyes strangely unsuited to a beggar glinted; eyes like a basilisk’s. With a swift motion he rose, throwing off his filthy, tattered garments, revealing the evil countenance and pantherish form of Belek the Stygian. Clad only in a striped loin cloth and with a long dagger in his hand, he stole through the great hall and up the winding stair like a ghost.

Over all the castle silence reigned; before Zuleika’s door the sleepy man-at-arms yawned and leaned on his pike drowsily. What use for a guard before an inner chamber? What man could win through the walls without rousing the whole force of the defenders? The guard did not hear the naked feet that stole noiselessly along the flags. He did not see the dusky figure that glided behind him. But he felt suddenly an iron arm encircle his throat strangling the startled yell that sought to rise to his lips, he felt the momentary agony of a hard driven blade that pierced his heart, and then he felt no more.

Belek eased the limp body to the floor and swiftly detached the keys from the belt. He selected one and opened the door, working with speed but silence. He slipped inside, closing the door.

Zuleika wakened with the realization that some one was in her chamber, but in the utter darkness she could see no one. But Belek could see like a cat in the dark. Zuleika felt a sudden hand clapped over her mouth and as she instinctively lifted her hands to ward off that attack, her slim wrists were pinioned together.

“Keep still, princess,” hissed a voice in the gloom, “If you scream, you die.”

The hand was withdrawn from her lips and Zuleika felt her hands being bound; next a gag was placed in her mouth. Belek the Stygian had his own ideas about handling women. He had been sent to rescue Zuleika, yes; but he knew that women quite often prefer not to be rescued from their captors and he was taking no chances that the girl might prefer to remain with her present masters than to ride away with Ali Bey. Belek did not intend that a woman’s scream should bring him to his doom.

He lifted his slender captive and carrying her carefully over one shoulder, stole down the corridor cautiously, dagger ready. He descended the stair and stole through the great kitchin. He heard the cook snoring in the pantry. Ordinarily it would have been impossible for a man to steal through the castle of Malthom without detection, but tonight all the men were on the walls, or else sleeping soundly awaiting their call to guard-duty.

Belek warily unbolted a small door and slipped outside, keeping close to the walls. It was dark as pitch, low hanging clouds obscuring the stars, and there was no moon. Belek hesitated, for the moment uncertain; then he crossed the courtyard swiftly and entered the stables. He knew that Conan’s great black stallion was quartered here, and he trembled lest he rouse the full passion of the savage brute, which might make enough noise to wake the whole castle. But Belek’s stealthy entrance caused no commotion; the great beast had his stall in another part of the stables. The Stygian laid the girl in an empty stall, first tying her ankles, then stole swiftly back to the castle. Entering the kitchin he crossed to the small room where firewood was kept piled, and busied himself a few moments. Then he shut the door and hurriedly left the castle once more. A faint, grim smile played over his thin lips.

And now he was ready for the most dangerous part of his daring night’s work. Crouching like a panther he stole across the courtyard to the postern gate. A single man-at-arms stood there, leaning on his spear and half asleep; it was the hour of darkness before dawn when vitality is at a low ebb. Belek crouched and leaped, silent and deadly as a panther. His mighty hands locked about his victim’s throat and the man died without a cry.

Belek worked cautiously at the gate, felt it move beneath his hands and swing inward. He crouched silently, almost holding his breath, straining his eyes into the night. He could make out the dim somber reaches of the desert knifed with ravines and gulches; were men moving out there? Not even the keen eyed Stygian could tell for the clouds hung low and deep darkness rested over all. He thought of returning for the girl and slipping out with her, then abandoned the plan. The men on the wall above him were not asleep. Their low voiced snatches of conversation reached him from time to time. He had stolen to the postern gate and killed his man almost beneath their feet, but it was behind their back. Their gaze was turned outward; they would see anything that moved just without the wall and if he stole forth, arrows would fall like rain about him. Alone he would have taken the risk; but he dared not take the chance with the girl.

Out among the ravines a jackal yapped three times and ceased. Belek grinned fiercely; Ali Bey had not failed to carry out his part of the plan. Behind him he heard a cracking and snapping that grew and grew; a lurid light became apparent through the aperture of the castle and the men on the wall began to talk loudly and nastily as a sudden wild yell went up from inside the keep. As if in answer a clamor of ferocious shouts sounded from the desert outside and suddenly the darkness was alive with charging shadows.

Belek shouted once himself, in fierce triumph, and ran swiftly to the stable where he had left the girl.

VII

The old seer shut the book.

“Of this it is known: he concealed her in the stable, then slayed the soldier guarding the postern gate and opened it, then sets fire to the castle. Khelru Shah’s men, who had stolen up on foot in the darkness, rushed through the postern gate. Meanwhile, Conan and Malthom had quarrelled. Malthom declared he would not let the girl go, and while the two were fighting hand to hand, a soldier rushed in shouting that the courtyard swarmed with Turanians. The handful of men in the castle cut their way out of the blazing hold, but were surrounded in the court-yard and about to be cut to pieces, when Abdullah bin Kheram rode up with a thousand men. The trader Ali had told him his daughter was captive there. Fighting ceased as all learned in wonder that Zuleika was indeed the princess Zalda. Khelru Shah was slain by Conan who hacked his way through the Turanians and escaped, and Zalda made known her love to Malthom. The Sheikh gave his consent that they should marry and a powerful alliance was formed between the two peoples, for life.”

The Country of the Knife

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

A Cry Out Of The East

A cry from beyond the bolted door — a thick, desperate croaking that gaspingly repeated a name. Mellani paused in the act of filling a whisky glass, and shot a startled glance toward the door from beyond which that cry had come. It was his name that had been gasped out — and why should anyone call on him with such frantic urgency at midnight in the hall outside his apartment?

He stepped to the door, without stopping to set down the square amber bottle. Even as he turned the knob, he was electrified by the unmistakable sounds of a struggle outside — the quick fierce scuff of feet, the thud of blows, then the desperate voice lifted again. He threw the door open.

The richly appointed hallway outside was dimly lighted by bulbs concealed in the jaws of gilt dragons writhing across the ceiling. The costly red rugs and velvet tapestries seemed to drink in this soft light, heightening an effect of unreality. But the struggle going on before his eyes was as real as life and death.

There were splashes of a brighter crimson on the dark-red rug. A man was down on his back before the door, a slender man whose white face shone like a wax mask in the dim light. Another man crouched upon him, one knee grinding brutally into his breast, one hand twisting at the victim’s throat. The other hand lifted a red-smeared blade.

Mellani acted entirely through impulse. Everything happened simultaneously. The knife was swinging up for the downward drive even as he opened the door. At the height of its arc it hovered briefly as the wielder shot a venomous, slit-eyed glance at the man in the doorway. In that instant Mellani saw murder about to be done, saw that the victim was a white man, the killer a swarthy alien of some kind. Age-old implanted instincts acted through him, without his conscious volition. He dashed the heavy whisky bottle full into the dark face with all his power. The hard, stocky body toppled backward in a crash of broken glass and a shower of splattering liquor, and the knife rang on the floor several feet away. With a feline snarl the fellow bounced to his feet, red-eyed, blood and whisky streaming from his face and over his collar.

For an instant he crouched as if to leap at Mellani barehanded. Then the glare in his eyes wavered, turned to something like fear, and he wheeled and was gone, lunging down the stair with reckless haste. Mellani stared after him in amazement. The whole affair was fantastic, and Mellani was irritated. He had broken a self-imposed rule of long standing — which was never to butt into anything which was not his business.

“Mellani!” It was the wounded man, calling him weakly.

Mellani bent down to him.

“What is it? Darami!”

“Get me in, quick!” panted the other, staring fearfully at the stair. “He may come back — with others.”

Mellani stooped and lifted him bodily. Darami was not a bulky man, and Mellani’s trim frame concealed the muscles of an athlete. There was no sound throughout the building. Evidently no one had been aroused by the muffled sounds of the brief fight. Mellani carried the wounded man into the room and laid him carefully on a divan. There was blood on Mellani’s hands when she straightened.

“Lock the door!” gasped Darami.

Mellani obeyed, and then turned back, frowning concernedly down at the man. They offered a striking contrast — Darami, light-haired, of medium height, frail, with plain, commonplace features now twisted in a grimace of pain, his sober garments disheveled and smeared with blood; Mellani, tall, dark, immaculately tailored, beautiful and self-assured. But in Darami’s pale eyes there blazed a fire that burned away the difference between them, and gave the wounded man something that Mellani did not possess — something that dominated the scene.

“You’re hurt, !” Mellani caught up a fresh whisky bottle. “Why, man, you’re stabbed to pieces! I’ll call a doctor, and —”

“No!” A lean hand brushed aside the whisky glass and seized Mellani’s wrist. “It’s no use. I’m bleeding inside. I’d be dead now, but I can’t leave my job unfinished. Don’t interrupt — just listen!”

Mellani knew Darami spoke the truth. Blood was oozing thinly from the wounds in his breast, where a thin-bladed knife must have struck home at least half a dozen times. Mellani looked on, awed and appalled, as the small, bright-eyed man fought death to a standstill, gripping the last fading fringes of life and keeping himself conscious and lucid to the end by the sheer effort of an iron will.

“I stumbled on something big tonight, down in a water-front dive. I was looking for something else — uncovered this by accident. Then they got suspicious. I got away — came here because you were the only person I knew from here. But that devil was after me — caught me on the stair.”

Blood oozed from the livid lips, and Darami spat dryly. Mellani looked on helplessly. She knew the man was a secret agent, who had made a business of tracing sinister secrets to their source. He was dying as he had lived, in the harness.

“Something big!” whispered the man. “Something that balances the fate of Vendhya! I can’t tell you all now — I’m going fast. But there’s one man in the world who must know. You must find him, Mellani! He’s a Cimmerian; the Afghulis call him Conan. I’d have gone to him — but you must go. Promise me!”

Mellani did not hesitate. Her soothing hand on the dying man’s shoulder was even more convincing and reassuring than her quiet, level voice.

“I promise, old man. But where am I to find him?”

“Somewhere in Afghanistan. Go at once. Tell the guards nothing. Spies are all around. If they know I knew you, and spoke with you before I died, they’ll kill you before you can reach Conan. Tell the guards I was simply a drunken stranger, wounded by an unknown party, and staggered into your hall to die. You never saw me before. I said nothing before I died.

“Go to Khorshemish. The officials will make your way easy that far. Simply say to each one: ‘Remember the kites of Khoral Nulla.’ That’s your password. If Conan isn’t in Khorshemish, the ameer will give you an escort to hunt for him in the hills. You must find him! The peace of Vendhya depends on him, now!”

“But what shall I tell him?” Mellani was bewildered.

“Say to him,” gasped the dying man, fighting fiercely for a few more moments of life, “say: ‘The Black Tigers have a new prince; they call him Abd el Khafid, but his real name is Nikolav Yvonn.’”

“Is that all?” This affair was growing more and more bizarre.

“Conan will understand and act. The Black Tigers are your peril. They’re a secret society of Asiatic murderers. Therefore, be on your guard at every step of the way. But Conan will understand. He’ll know where to look for Yvonn — in Rub-El-Harim — the Abode of Thieves —”

A convulsive shudder, and the slim thread that had held the life in the tortured body snapped.

Mellani straightened and looked down at the dead man in wonder. She shook her head, marveling again at the inner unrest that sent men wandering in the waste places of the world, playing a game of life and death for a meager wage. Games that had gold for their stake Mellani could understand — none better. His strong, sure fingers could read the cards almost as a man reads books; but he could not read the souls of men like Richard Darami who stake their lives on the bare boards where Death is the dealer. What if the man won, how could he measure his winnings, where cash his chips? Mellani asked no odds of life; he lost without a wince; but in winning, he was a usurer, demanding the last least crumb of the wager, and content with nothing less than the glittering, solid materialities of life. The grim and barren game Darami had played held no promise for Mellani, and to her the man had always been a little mad.

But whatever Mellani’s faults or virtues, she had her code. She lived by it, and by it she meant to die. The foundation stone of that code was loyalty. Darami had never saved Mellani’s life, renounced a girl both loved, exonerated her from a false accusation, or anything so dramatic. They had simply been friends in a certain time, years ago, and years had passed between their occasional meetings since then. Darami had no claim on Mellani, except for their old friendship. But that was a tie as solid as a log chain, and the man had known it, when, in the desperation of knowing himself doomed, he had crawled to Mellani’s door. And Mellani had given her promise, and she intended making it good. It did not occur to her that there was any other alternative.

She turned her head and stared through a window, almost hidden by its satin curtains. She was comfortable here. Her luck had been phenomenal of late. Tomorrow evening there was a big poker game scheduled at her favorite club, with a fat old man who was ripe for a cleaning. The races began within a few days, and Mellani had her eye on a slim sorrel gelding that ran like the flame of a prairie fire.

Outside, the fog curled and drifted, beading the pane. Pictures formed for her there — prophetic pictures of an East different from the colorful civilized East she had touched in her roamings. Pictures not at all like the cities she remembered, exotic colors of veranda-shaded clubs, soft-footed servants laden with cooling drinks, languorous and beautiful women, white garments and sun helmets. Shiveringly she sensed a wilder, older East; it had blown a scent of itself to her out of the fog, over a knife stained with human blood. An East not soft and warm and exotic-colored, but bleak and grim and savage, where peace was not and law was a mockery, and life hung on the tilt of a balanced blade. The East known by Darami, and this mysterious Cimmerian they called “Conan.”

Mellani’s world was here, the world she had promised to abandon for a blind, quixotic mission; she knew nothing of that other leaner, fiercer world; but there was no hesitation in her manner as she turned toward the door.

II

The Road To Rub-El-Harim

A wind blew over the shoulders of the peaks where the snow lay drifted, a knife-edge wind that slashed through leather and wadded cloth in spite of the searing sun. Mellani blinked her eyes against the glare of that intolerable sun, shivered at the bite of the wind. She had no coat, and her shirt was tattered. For the thousandth futile, involuntary time, she wrenched at the fetters on her wrists. They jangled, and the man riding in front of her cursed, turned and struck her heavily in the mouth. Mellani reeled in her saddle, blood starting to his lips.

The saddle chafed her, and the stirrups were too short for her long legs. She was riding along a knife-edge trail, in the middle of a straggling line of some thirty men — ragged men on gaunt, ribby horses. They rode hunched in their high-peaked saddles, turbaned heads thrust forward and nodding in unison to the clop-clop of their horses’ hoofs, long-limbed bows swaying across the saddlebows. On one hand rose a towering cliff; on the other, a sheer precipice fell away into echoing depths. The skin was worn from Mellani’s wrists by the rusty, clumsy iron manacles that secured them; she was bruised from kicks and blows, faint with hunger and giddy with the enormousness of the altitude. Her nose bled at times without having been struck. Ahead of them loomed the backbone of the gigantic range that had risen like a rampart before them for so many days.

Dizzily she reviewed the events of the weeks that stretched between the time she had carried Darami, dying, into her flat, and this unbelievable, yet painfully real moment. The intervening period of time might have been an unfathomable and unbridgeable gulf stretching between and dividing two worlds that had nothing in common save consciousness.

She had come to Vendhya as fast as she could. Official doors had opened to her at the whispered password: “Remember the kites of Khoral Nulla!” Her path had been smoothed by impressive-looking documents with great red seals, by cryptic orders barked over telephones, or whispered into attentive ears. She had moved smoothly northward along hitherto unguessed channels. She had glimpsed, faintly, some of the shadowy, mountainous machinery grinding silently and ceaselessly behind the scenes — the unseen, half-suspected cogwheels of the empire that girdles the world.

Mustached men with medals on their breasts had conferred with her as to her needs, and quiet men in civilian clothes had guided her on her way. But no one had asked her why she sought Conan, or what message she bore. The password and the mention of Darami had sufficed. Her friend had been more important in the imperial scheme of things than Mellani had ever realized. The adventure had seemed more and more fantastic as she progressed as she blindly carried a dead man’s message, the significance of which she could not even guess, to a mysterious figure lost in the mists of the hills; while, at a whispered incantation, hidden doors swung wide and enigmatic figures bowed her on her way. But all this changed in the North.

Conan was not in Khorshemish. This Mellani learned from the lips of no less than the ameer himself — wearing his Western garments as if born to them, but with the sharp, restless eyes of a man who knows he is a pawn between powerful rivals, and whose nerves are worn thin by the constant struggle for survival. Mellani sensed that Conan was a staff on which the ameer leaned heavily. But neither king nor agents of empire could chain the Cimmerian’s roving foot, or direct the hawk flights of the man the Afghulis called “Conan,” the “Swift.”

And Conan was gone — wandering alone into those naked hills whose bleak mysteries had long ago claimed him from his own kind. He might be gone a month, he might be gone a year. He might — and the ameer shifted uneasily at the possibility — never return. The crag-set villages were full of his blood enemies.

Not even the long arm of empire reached beyond Khorshemish. The ameer ruled the tribes after a fashion — with a dominance that dared not presume too far. This was the Country of the Hills, where law was hinged on the strong arm wielding the long knife.

Conan had vanished into the Northwest. And Mellani, though flinching at the grim nakedness of the Himalayas, did not hesitate or visualize an alternative. She asked for and received an escort of soldiers. With them she pushed on, trying to follow Conan’s trail through the mountain villages.

A week out of Khorshemish they lost all trace of him. To all effects Conan had vanished into thin air. The wild, shaggy hillmen answered questions sullenly, or not at all, glaring at the nervous soldiery from under black brows. The farther they got away from Khorshemish, the more open the hostility. Only once did a question evoke a spontaneous response, and that was a suggestion that Conan had been murdered by hostile tribesmen. At that, sardonic laughter yelled up from the wild men — the fierce, mocking mirth of the hills. Conan trapped by his enemies? Is the gray wolf devoured by the fat-tailed sheep? And another gust of dry, ironic laughter, as hard as the black crags that burned under a sun of liquid flame.

Stubborn as her grandsire who had glimpsed a mirage of tree-fringed ocean shore across the scorching desolation of another desert, Mellani groped on, at a blind venture, trying to pick up the cold scent, far past the point of safety, as the gray-faced soldiers warned her again and again. They warned her that they were far from Khorshemish, in a sparsely settled, rebellious, little-explored region, whose wild people were rebels to the ameer, and enemies to Conan. They would have deserted Mellani long before and fled back to Khorshemish, had they not feared the ameer’s wrath.

Their forebodings were justified in the hurricane of bow fire that swept their camp in a chill gray dawn. Most of them fell at the first volley that ripped from the rocks about them. The rest fought futilely, ridden over and cut down by the wild riders that materialized out of the gray. Mellani knew the surprise had been the soldiers’ fault, but she did not have it in her heart to curse them, even now. They had been like children, sneaking in out of the cold as soon as her back was turned, sleeping on sentry duty, and lapsing into slovenly and unmilitary habits as soon as they were out of sight of Khorshemish. They had not wanted to come, in the first place; a foreboding of doom had haunted them; and now they were dead, and she was a captive, riding toward a fate she could not even guess.

Four days had passed since that slaughter, but she still turned sick when she remembered it — the smell of powder and blood, the screams, the rending chop of steel. She shuddered at the memory of the man she had killed in that last rush, with her knife almost in the bearded face that lunged at her beneath a lifted bow. She had never killed a man before. She sickened as she remembered the cries of the wounded soldiers when the conquerors cut their throats. And over and over she wondered why she had been spared — why they had overpowered and fettered her, instead of killing her. Her suffering had been so intense she often wished they had killed him outright.

She was allowed to ride, and she was fed grudgingly when the others ate. But the food was niggardly. She who had never known hunger was never without it now, a gnawing misery. Her coat had been taken from her, and the nights were a long agony in which she almost froze on the hard ground, in the icy winds. She wearied unto death of the day-long riding over incredible trails that wound up and up until she felt as if she could reach out a hand — if her hands were free — and touch the cold, pale sky. She was kicked and beaten until the first fiery resentment and humiliation had been dissolved in a dull hurt that was only aware of the physical pain, not of the injury to her self-respect.

She did not know who her captors were. They did not deign to speak to her in her own tongue, but she had picked up more than a smattering of their tongue on that long journey up the Zhaibar eventually to Khorshemish, and from Khorshemish westward. Like many who live by their wits, she had the knack of acquiring new languages. But all she learned from listening to their conversation was that their leader was called ez Zahir, and their destiny was Rub-El-Harim.

Rub-El-Harim! Mellani had heard it first as a meaningless phrase gasped from Darami’s blue lips. She had heard more of it as he came northward from the hot plains of the Punjab — a city of mystery and evil, which no white man had ever visited except as a captive, and from which none had ever escaped. A plague spot, sprawled in the high, bare hills, almost fabulous, beyond the reach of the ameer — an outlaw city, whence the winds blew whispered tales too fantastic and hideous for credence, even in this Country of the Knife.

At times Mellani’s escort mocked him, their burning eyes and grimly smiling lips lending a sinister meaning to their taunt: “The Feringi goes to Rub-El-Harim!”

For the pride of race she stiffened her spine and set her jaw; she plumbed unsuspected depths of endurance — legacy of a clean, athletic life, sharpened by the hard traveling of the past weeks.

They crossed a rocky crest and dropped down an incline between ridges that tilted up for a thousand feet. Far above and beyond them they occasionally glimpsed a notch in the rampart that was the pass over which they must cross the backbone of the range up which they were toiling. It was as they labored up a long slope that the solitary horseman appeared.

The sun was poised on the knife-edge crest of a ridge to the west, a blood-coloured ball, turning a streak of the sky to flame. Against that crimson ball a horseman appeared suddenly, a centaur image, black against the blinding curtain. Below him every rider turned in his saddle, and bow bolts clicked. It did not need the barked command of ez Zahir to halt the troop. There was something wild and arresting about that untamed figure in the sunset that held every eye. The rider’s head was thrown back, the horse’s long mane streaming in the wind.

Then the black silhouette detached itself from the crimson ball and moved down toward them, details springing into being as it emerged from the blinding background. It was a man on a rangy black stallion who came down the rocky, pathless slope with the smooth curving flight of an eagle, the sure hoofs spurning the ground. Mellani, herself a rider, felt her heart leap into her throat with admiration for the savage steed.

But she almost forgot the horse when the rider pulled up before them. He was both tall and bulky, with a barbaric strength that was evident in his shoulders, his deep chest, his corded wrists. There was strength, too, in the keen, dark face, and the eyes, the bluest Mellani had ever seen, gleamed with an inward fire such as the woman had seen burn in the eyes of wild things — an indomitable wildness and an unquenchable vitality. The stubble of his cheeks did not hide the hard set of the mouth.

The stranger looked like a desert dandy beside the ragged men of the troop, but it was a dandyism definitely masculine, from the silken turban to the silver-heeled boots. His bright-hued robe was belted with a gold-buckled girdle that supported a Turanian saber and a long dagger. A bow jutted its limbs from a sheath beneath his knee.

Thirty-odd pairs of hostile eyes centered on him, after suspiciously sweeping the empty ridges behind him as he galloped up before the troop and reined his steed back on its haunches with a flourish that set the gold ornaments jingling on curb chains and reins. An empty hand was flung up in an exaggerated gesture of peace. The rider, well poised and confident, carried himself with a definite swagger.

“What do you want?” growled ez Zahir, his cocked bow covering the stranger.

“A small thing, the gods is my witness!” declared the other, speaking their tongue with an accent Mellani had never heard before. “I am Shirkuh, of Jebel Jawur. I ride to Rub-El-Harim. I wish to accompany you.”

“Are you alone?” demanded ez Zahir.

“I set forth from Herat many days ago with a party of camel men who swore they would guide me to Rub-El-Harim. Last night they sought to slay and rob me. One of them died suddenly. The others ran away, leaving me without food or guides. I lost my way, and have been wandering in the mountains all last night and all this day. Just now, by the favor of the gods, I sighted your band.”

“How do you know we are bound for Rub-El-Harim?” demanded ez Zahir.

“Are you not ez Zahir, the prince of swordsmen?” countered Shirkuh.

The Afghuli’s beard bristled with satisfaction. He was not impervious to flattery. But he was still suspicious.

“You know me?”

“Who does not know ez Zahir? I saw you in the suk of Teheran, years ago. And now men say you are high in the ranks of the Black Tigers.”

“Beware how your tongue runs, dog!” responded ez Zahir. “Words are sometimes blades to cut men’s throats. Are you sure of a welcome in Rub-El-Harim?”

“What stranger can be sure of a welcome there?” Shirkuh laughed. “But there is blood on my sword, and a price on my head. I have heard that such men were welcome in Rub-El-Harim.”

“Ride with us if you will,” said ez Zahir. “I will get you through the Pass of Nadir Khan. But what may await you at the city gates is none of my affair. I have not invited you to Rub-El-Harim. I accept no responsibility for you.”

“I ask for no man to vouch for me,” retorted Shirkuh, with a glint of anger, brief and sharp, like the flash of hidden steel struck by a flint and momentarily revealed. He glanced curiously at Mellani.

“Has there been a raid over the border?” he asked.

“This fool came seeking someone,” scornfully answered ez Zahir. “She walked into a trap set for her.”

“What will be done with her in Rub-El-Harim?” pursued the newcomer, and Mellani’s interest in the conversation suddenly became painfully intense.

“She will be placed on the slave block,” answered ez Zahir, “according to the age-old custom of the city. Who bids highest will have her.”

And so Mellani learned the fate in store for her, and cold sweat broke out on her flesh as she contemplated a life spent as a tortured drudge to some turbaned ruffian. But she held up her head, feeling Shirkuh’s fierce eyes upon her.

The stranger said slowly: “It may be her destiny to serve Shirkuh, of the Jebel Jawur! I never owned a slave — but who knows? It strikes my fancy to buy this one!”

Mellani reflected that Shirkuh must know that she was in no danger of being murdered and robbed, or he would never so openly imply possession of money. That suggested that he knew these were picked men, carrying out someone’s instructions so implicitly that they could be depended on not to commit any crime not included in those orders. That implied organization and obedience beyond the conception of any ordinary hill chief. She was convinced that these men belonged to that mysterious cult against which Darami had warned her — the Black Tigers. Then had their capture of her been due merely to chance? It seemed improbable.

“There are rich men in Rub-El-Harim,” growled ez Zahir. “But it may be that none will want this woman and a wandering vagabond like you might buy her. Who knows?”

“Only in the gods is knowledge,” agreed Shirkuh, and swung his horse into line behind Mellani, crowding a man out of position and laughing when the Afghuli snarled at him.

The troop got into motion, and a man leaned over to strike Mellani with a knife pommel. Shirkuh checked the stroke. His lips laughed, but there was menace in his eyes.

“Nay! This infidel may belong to me before many days, and I will not have her looks marred!”

The man growled, but did not press the matter, and the troop rode on. They toiled up a ridge in a long shadow cast by the crag behind which the sun had sunk, and came into a valley and the sight of the sun again, just sinking behind a mountain. As they went down the slope, they spied white turbans moving among the crags to the west, and ez Zahir snarled in suspicion at Shirkuh.

“Are they friends of yours, you dog? You said you were alone!”

“I know them not!” declared Shirkuh. Then he dragged his bow from its boot. “The dogs fire on us!” For a bow had shot from among the boulders in the distance, and an arrow whined overhead.

“Hill-bred dogs who grudge us the use of the well ahead!” said ez Zahir. “Would we had time to teach them a lesson! Hold your fire, you dogs! The range is too long for either they or us to do damage.”

But Shirkuh wheeled out of the line of march and rode toward the foot of the ridge. Half a dozen men broke cover, high up on the slope, and dashed away over the crest, leaning low and spurring hard. Shirkuh fired once, then took steadier aim and fired three shots in swift succession.

“You missed!” shouted ez Zahir angrily. “Who could hit at such a range?”

“Nay!” yelled Shirkuh. “Look!”

One of the ragged white shapes had wavered and pitched forward on its pony’s neck. The beast vanished over the ridge, its rider lolling limply in the saddle.

“He will not ride far!” exulted Shirkuh, waving his bow over his head as he raced back to the troop. “I have eye like a mountain hawk!”

“Shooting a hill thief does not make a hero,” snapped ez Zahir, turning disgustedly away.

But Shirkuh merely laughed tolerantly, as one so sure of his fame that he could afford to overlook the jealousies of lesser souls.

They rode on down into the broad valley, seeing no more of the hill-men. Dusk was falling when they halted beside the well. Mellani, too stiff to dismount, was roughly jerked off her horse. Her legs were bound, and she was allowed to sit with her back against a boulder just far enough away from the fires they built to keep her from benefiting any from the heat. No guard was set over her at present.

Presently Shirkuh came striding over to where the prisoner gnawed at the wretched crusts they allowed her. Shirkuh walked with a horseman’s roll, setting his booted legs wide. He carried an iron bowl of stewed mutton, and some chupatties.

“Eat, woman!” he commanded roughly, but not harshly. “A slave whose ribs jut through her hide is no good to work or to fight. These niggardly captors would starve their grandfathers. But we Zuagirs are as generous as we are valiant!”

He offered the food with a gesture as of bestowing a province. Mellani accepted it without thanks, and ate voraciously. Shirkuh had dominated the drama ever since he had entered it — a swashbuckler who swaggered upon the stage and would not be ignored. Even ez Zahir was overshadowed by the overflowing vitality of the man. Shirkuh seemed a strange mixture of brutal barbarian and unsophisticated youth. There was a boyish exuberance in his swagger, and he displayed touches of naive simplicity at times. But there was nothing childish about his glittering blue eyes, and he moved with a tigerish suppleness that Mellani knew could be translated instantly into a blur of murderous action.

Shirkuh thrust his thumbs in his girdle now and stood looking down at the woman as she ate. The light from the nearest fire of dry tamarisk branches threw his dark face into shadowy half relief and gave it somehow an older, more austere look. The shadowy half light had erased the boyishness from his countenance, replacing it with a suggestion of somberness.

“Why did you come into the hills?” he demanded abruptly.

Mellani did not immediately answer; she chewed on, toying with an idea. She was in as desperate a plight as she could be in, and she saw no way out. She looked about, seeing that her captors were out of earshot. She did not see the dim shape that squirmed up behind the boulder against which she leaned. She reached a sudden decision and spoke.

“Do you know the man called Conan?”

Was there suspicion suddenly in the blue eyes?

“I have heard of him,” Shirkuh replied warily.

“I came into the hills looking for him. Can you find him? If you could get a message to him, I would pay you thirty thousand rupees.”

Shirkuh scowled, as if torn between suspicion and avarice.

“I am a stranger in these hills,” he said. “How could I find Conan?”

“Then help me to escape,” urged Mellani. “I will pay you an equal sum.”

Shirkuh scratched his stubble.

“I am one sword against thirty,” he growled. “How do I know I would be paid? Your kin are all liars. I am an outlaw with a price on my head. The Turanians would flay me, the Kothians would shoot me, the Shemites would hang me. There is nowhere I can go except to Rub-El-Harim. If I helped you to escape, that door would be barred against me, too.”

“I will speak to the Kothians for you,” urged Mellani. “Conan has power. He will secure a pardon for you.”

She believed what she said; besides, she was in that desperate state when a man is likely to promise anything.

Indecision flickered in the blue eyes, and Shirkuh started to speak, then changed his mind, turned on his heel, and strode away. A moment later the spy crouching behind the boulders glided away without having been discovered by Mellani, who sat staring in despair after Shirkuh.

Shirkuh went straight to ez Zahir, gnawing strips of dried mutton as he sat cross-legged on a dingy sheepskin near a small fire on the other side of the well. Shirkuh got there before the spy did.

“The woman has offered me money to take a word to Conan,” he said abruptly. “Also to aid her to escape. I rejected her, of course. In the Jebel Jawur I have heard of Conan, but I have never seen him. Who is he?”

“A devil,” growled ez Zahir. “A Cimmerian. The tribes about the Zhaibar are his friends, and he is an adviser of the ameer, and an ally of the rajah, though he was once an outlaw. He has never dared come to Rub-El-Harim. I saw him once, three years ago, in the fight by Kalat-i-Ghilzai, where he and his cursed Zuagirs broke the back of the revolt that had else unseated the ameer. If we could catch him, Abd el Khafid would fill our mouths with gold.”

“Perhaps this woman knows where to find him!” exclaimed Shirkuh, his eyes burning with a glitter that might have been avarice. “I will go to him and swear to deliver his message, and so trick him into telling me what he knows of Conan.”

“It is all one to me,” answered ez Zahir indifferently. “If I had wished to know why he came into the hills, I would have tortured it out of him before now. But my orders were merely to capture him and bring him alive to Rub-El-Harim. I could not turn aside, not even to capture Conan. But if you are admitted into the city, perhaps Abd el Khafid will give you a troop to go hunting Conan.”

“I will try!”

“The gods grant you luck,” said ez Zahir. “Conan is a dog. I would myself give a thousand rupees to see him hanging in the market place.”

“If it be the will of the gods, you shall meet Conan!” said Shirkuh, turning away.

Doubtless it was the play of the firelight on his face which caused his eyes to burn as they did, but ez Zahir felt a curious chill play down his spine, though he could not reason why.

Shirkuh’s booted feet crunched away through the shale, and a furtive, ragged shadow came out of the night and squatted at ez Zahir’s elbow.

“I spied on the stranger and the infidel as you ordered,” muttered the spy. “The woman offered Shirkuh thirty thousand rupees either to seek out Conan and deliver a message to him, or to aid him to escape us. Shirkuh lusted for the gold, but he has been outlawed by all, and he dares not close the one door open to him.”

“Good,” growled ez Zahir in his beard. “His race are dogs; it is well that this one is in no position to bite. I will speak for him at the pass. He does not guess the choice that awaits him at the gates of Rub-El-Harim.”

Mellani was sunk in the dreamless slumber of exhaustion, despite the hardness of the rocky ground and the chill of the night. An urgent hand shook her awake, an urgent whisper checked her startled exclamation. She saw a vague shape bending over her, and heard the snoring of her guard a few feet away. Guarding a man bound and fettered was more or less of a formality of routine. Shirkuh’s voice hissed in Mellani’s ear.

“Tell me the message you wished to send Conan! Be swift, before the guard awakes. I could not take the message when we talked before, for there was a cursed spy listening behind that rock. I told ez Zahir what passed between us, because I knew the spy would tell him anyway, and I wished to disarm suspicion before it took root. Tell me the word!”

Mellani accepted the desperate gamble.

“Tell him that Darami died, but before he died, he said this: ‘The Black Tigers have a new prince; they call him Abd el Khafid, but his real name is Nikolav Yvonn.’ This man dwells in Rub-El-Harim, Darami told me.”

“I understand,” muttered Shirkuh. “Conan shall know.”

“But what of me?” urged Mellani.

“I cannot help you escape now,” muttered Shirkuh. “There are too many of them. All the guards are not asleep. Armed men patrol the outskirts of the camp, and others watch the horses — my own among them.”

“I cannot pay you unless I get away!” argued Mellani.

“That is in the lap of the gods!” hissed Shirkuh. “I must slip back to my blankets now, before I am missed. Here is a cloak against the chill of the night.”

Mellani felt himself enveloped in a grateful warmth, and then Shirkuh was gone, gliding away in the night with boots that made no noise. Mellani lay wondering if she had done the right thing. There was no reason why he should trust Shirkuh. But if she had done no good, at least she could not see that she had done any harm, either to himself, Conan, or those interests menaced by the mysterious Black Tigers. She was a drowning man, clutching at straws. At last she went to sleep again, lulled by the delicious warmth of the cloak Shirkuh had thrown over her, and hoping that she would slip away in the night and ride to find Conan — wherever he might be wandering.

III

Shirkuh’s Jest

It was Shirkuh, however, who brought the woman’s breakfast to her the next morning. Shirkuh made no sign either of friendship or enmity, beyond a gruff admonition to eat heartily, as he did not wish to buy a skinny slave. But that might have been for the benefit of the guard yawning and stretching nearby. Mellani reflected that the cloak was sure evidence that Shirkuh had visited her in the night, but no one appeared to notice it.

As she ate, grateful at least for the good food, Mellani was torn between doubts and hopes. She swung between half-hearted trust and complete mistrust of the man. His kind were bred in deception and cut their teeth on treachery. Why should that offer of help not have been a trick to curry favor with ez Zahir? Yet Mellani realized that if ez Zahir had wished to learn the reason for her presence in the hills, the Afghuli would have been more likely to resort to torture than an elaborate deception. Then Shirkuh must be avaricious, and that was Mellani’s best chance. And if Shirkuh delivered the message, he must go further and help Mellani to escape, in order to get his reward, for Mellani, a slave in Rub-El-Harim, could not pay him thirty thousand rupees. One service necessitated the other, if Shirkuh hoped to profit by the deal. Then there was Conan; if he got the message, he would learn of Mellani’s plight, and he would hardly fail to aid her in adversity. It all depended now on Shirkuh.

Mellani stared intently at the supple rider, etched against the sharp dawn. There was nothing of the Turanian or the Semite in Shirkuh’s features. In the Iranian highlands there must be many clans who kept their ancient lineage pure. Shirkuh, in Western garments, would pass unnoticed in any Western crowd, but for that primordial blaze in his restless blue eyes. They reflected an untamable soul. How could he expect this barbarian to deal with him according to the standards of the Western world?

They were pressing on before sunup, and their trail always led up now, higher and higher, through knife cuts in solid masses of towering sandstone, and along narrow paths that wound up and up interminably, until Mellani was gasping again with the rarefied air of the high places. At high noon, when the wind was knife-edged with ice, and the sun was a splash of molten fire, they reached the Pass of Nadir Khan — a narrow cut winding tortuously for a mile between turrets of dull-colored rock. A squat mud-and-stone tower stood in the mouth, occupied by ragged warriors squatting on their aerie like vultures. The troop halted until ez Zahir was recognized. He vouched for the cavalcade, Shirkuh included, with a wave of his hand, and the bows on the tower were lowered. ez Zahir rode on into the pass, the others filing after him. Mellani felt despairingly as if one prison door had already slammed behind her.

They halted for the midday meal in the corridor of the pass, shaded from the sun and sheltered from the wind. Again Shirkuh brought food to Mellani, without comment or objection from the Afghulis. But when Mellani tried to catch his eye, he avoided the woman’s gaze.

After they left the pass, the road pitched down in long curving sweeps, through successively lower mountains that ran away and away like gigantic stairsteps from the crest of the range. The trail grew plainer, more traveled, but night found them still among the hills.

When Shirkuh brought food to Mellani that night as usual, she tried to engage him in conversation, under cover of casual talk for the benefit of the Afghuli detailed to guard her that night, who lolled near by.

“Is Rub-El-Harim a large city?” Mellani asked.

“I have never been there,” returned Shirkuh, rather shortly.

“Is Abd el Khafid the ruler?” persisted Mellani.

“He is emir of Rub-El-Harim,” said Shirkuh.

“And prince of the Black Tigers,” spoke up the Afghuli guard unexpectedly. He was in a garrulous mood, and he saw no reason for secrecy. One of his hearers would soon be a slave in Rub-El-Harim, the other, if accepted, a member of the clan.

“I am myself a Black Tiger,” the guard boasted. “All in this troop are Black Tigers, and picked men. We are the lords of Rub-El-Harim.”

“Then all in the city are not Black Tigers?” asked Mellani.

“All are thieves. Only thieves live in Rub-El-Harim. But not all are Black Tigers. But it is the headquarters of the clan, and the prince of the Black Tigers is always emir of Rub-El-Harim.”

“Who ordered my capture?” inquired Mellani. “ez Zahir?”

“ez Zahir only does as he is ordered,” returned the guard. “None gives orders in Rub-El-Harim save Abd el Khafid. He is absolute lord save where the customs of the city are involved. Not even the prince of the Black Tigers can change the customs of Rub-El-Harim. It was a city of thieves before the days of Genghis Khan. What its name was first, none knows; the Arabs call it Rub-El-Harim, the Abode of Thieves, and the name has stuck.”

“It is an outlaw city?”

“It has never owned a lord save the prince of the Black Tigers,” boasted the guard. “It pays no taxes to any save him — and to the devil.”

“What do you mean, to the devil?” demanded Shirkuh.

“It is an ancient custom,” answered the guard. “Each year a hundredweight of gold is given as an offering to the devil, so the city shall prosper. It is sealed in a secret cave somewhere near the city, but where no man knows, save the prince and the council of imams.”

“Devil worship!” snorted Shirkuh. “It is an offense to the gods!”

“It is an ancient custom,” defended the guard.

Shirkuh strode off, as if scandalized, and Mellani lapsed into disappointed silence. He wrapped himself in Shirkuh’s cloak as well as he could and slept.

They were up before dawn and pushing through the hills until they breasted a sweeping wall, down which the trail wound, and saw a rocky plain set in the midst of bare mountain chains, and the flat-topped towers of Rub-El-Harim rising before them.

They had not halted for the midday meal. As they neared the city, the trail became a well-traveled road. They overtook or met men on horses, men walking and driving laden mules. Mellani remembered that it had been said that only stolen goods entered Rub-El-Harim. Its inhabitants were the scum of the hills, and the men they encountered looked it. Mellani found herself comparing them with Shirkuh. The man was a wild outlaw, who boasted of his bloody crimes, but he was a clean-cut barbarian. He differed from these as a gray wolf differs from mangy alley curs.

He eyed all they met or passed with a gaze half naive, half challenging. He was boyishly interested; he was ready to fight at the flick of a turban end, and gave the road to no man. He was the youth of the world incarnated, credulous, merry, hot-headed, generous, cruel, and arrogant. And Mellani knew her life hung on the young savage’s changing whims.

Rub-El-Harim was a walled city standing in the narrow rock-strewn plain hemmed in by bare hills. A battery of field pieces could have knocked down its walls with a dozen volleys — but the army never marched that could have dragged field pieces over the road that led to it through the Pass of Nadir Khan. Its gray walls loomed bleakly above the gray dusty waste of the small plain. A chill wind from the northern peaks brought a tang of snow and started the dust spinning. Well curbs rose gauntly here and there on the plain, and near each well stood a cluster of squalid huts. Peasants in rags bent their backs over sterile patches that yielded grudging crops — mere smudges on the dusty expanse. The low-hanging sun turned the dust to a bloody haze in the air, as the troop with its prisoner trudged on weary horses across the plain to the gaunt city.

Beneath a lowering arch, flanked by squat watchtowers, an iron-bolted gate stood open, guarded by a dozen swashbucklers whose girdles bristled with daggers. They fingered the strings of their bows and stared arrogantly about them, as if itching to practice on some living target.

The troop halted, and the captain of the guard swaggered forth, a giant with bulging muscles and a henna-stained beard.

“Thy names and business!” he roared, glaring intolerantly at Mellani.

“My name you know as well as you know your own,” growled ez Zahir. “I am taking a prisoner into the city, by order of Abd el Khafid.”

“Pass, ez Zahir,” growled the captain. “But who is this?”

ez Zahir grinned wolfishly, as if at a secret jest.

“An adventurer who seeks admission — Shirkuh, of the Jebel Jawur.”

While they were speaking, a richly clad, powerfully built man on a white mare rode out of the gate and halted, unnoticed, behind the guardsmen. The henna-bearded captain turned toward Shirkuh who had dismounted to get a pebble out of his stallion’s hoof.

“Are you one of the clan?” he demanded. “Do you know the secret signs?”

“I have not yet been accepted,” answered Shirkuh, turning to face him. “Men tell me I must be passed upon by the council of imams.”

“Aye, if you reach them! Does any chief of the city speak for you?”

“I am a stranger,” replied Shirkuh shortly.

“We like not strangers in Rub-El-Harim,” said the captain. “There are but three ways a stranger may enter the city. As a captive, like that infidel dog yonder; as one vouched for and indorsed by some established chief of the city; or” — he showed yellow fangs in an evil grin — “as the slayer of some fighting man of the city!”

He shifted the bow to his right hand and slapped the pommel of his sword with his left palm. Sardonic laughter rose about them, the dry, strident, cruel cackling of the hills. Those who laughed knew that in any kind of fight between a stranger and a man of the city every foul advantage would be taken. For a stranger to be forced into a formal duel with a Black Tiger was tantamount to signing his death warrant. Mellani, rigid with sudden concern, guessed this from the vicious laughter.

But Shirkuh did not seem abashed.

“It is an ancient custom?” he asked naively, dropping a hand to his girdle.

“Ancient as Acheron!” assured the giant captain, towering above him. “A tried warrior, with weapons in his hands, thou must slay!”

“Why, then —”

Shirkuh laughed, and as he laughed, he struck. His motion was as quick as the blurring stroke of a cobra. In one movement he whipped the dagger from his girdle and struck upward under the captain’s bearded chin. The Afghuli had no opportunity to defend himself, no chance to lift bow or draw sword. Before he realized Shirkuh’s intention, he was down, his life gushing out of his sliced jugular.

An instant of stunned silence was broken by wild yells of laughter from the lookers-on and the men of the troop. It was just such a devilish jest as the bloodthirsty hill natures appreciated. There is humor in the hills, but it is a fiendish humor. The strange youth had shown a glint of the hard wolfish sophistication that underlay his apparent callowness.

But the other guardsmen cried out angrily and surged forward, with a sharp rattle of bow bolts. Shirkuh sprang back and tore his bow from its saddle scabbard. ez Zahir and his men looked on cynically. It was none of their affair. They had enjoyed Shirkuh’s grim and bitter jest; they would equally enjoy the sight of him being shot down by his victim’s comrades.

But before a finger could crook on a string, the man on the white mare rode forward, beating down the bows of the guards with a riding whip.

“Stop!” he commanded. “The stranger is in the right. He slew according to the law. The man’s weapons were in his hands, and he was a tried warrior.”

“But he was taken unaware!” they clamored.

“The more fool he!” was the callous retort. “The law makes no point of that. I speak for the man. And I am Alafdal Khan, once of Wazulistan.”

“Nay, we know you, my lord!” The guardsmen salaamed profoundly.

ez Zahir gathered up his reins and spoke to Shirkuh.

“Your luck still holds, stranger!”

“The gods love brave men!” Shirkuh laughed, swinging into the saddle.

ez Zahir rode under the arch, and the troop streamed after him, their captive in their midst. They traversed a short narrow street, winding between walls of mud and wood, where overhanging balconies almost touched each other over the crooked way. Mellani saw women staring at them through the lattices. The cavalcade emerged into a square much like that of any other hill town. Open shops and stalls lined it, and it was thronged by a colorful crowd. But there was a difference. The crowd was too heterogenous, for one thing; then there was too much wealth in sight. The town was prosperous, but with a sinister, unnatural prosperity. Gold and silk gleamed on barefooted ruffians whose proper garb was rags, and the goods displayed in the shops seemed mute evidence of murder and pillage. This was in truth a city of thieves.

The throng was lawless and turbulent, its temper set on a hair trigger. There were human skulls nailed above the gate, and in an iron cage made fast to the wall Mellani saw a human skeleton. Vultures perched on the bars. Mellani felt cold sweat bead her flesh. That might well be her own fate — to starve slowly in an iron cage hung above the heads of the jeering crowd. A sick abhorrence and a fierce hatred of this vile city swept over her.

As they rode into the city, Alafdal Khan drew his mare alongside Shirkuh’s stallion. The Wazuli was a bull-shouldered man with a bushy purple-stained beard and wide, ox-like eyes.

“I like you, stranger,” he announced. “You are in truth a mountain lion. Take service with me. A masterless man is a broken blade in Rub-El-Harim.”

“I thought Abd el Khafid was master of Rub-El-Harim,” said Shirkuh.

“Aye! But the city is divided into factions, and each man who is wise follows one chief or the other. Only picked men with long years of service behind them are chosen for Abd el Khafid’s house troops. The others follow various lords, who are each responsible to the emir.”

“I am my own man!” boasted Shirkuh. “But you spoke for me at the gate. What devil’s custom is this, when a stranger must kill a man to enter?”

“In old times it was meant to test a stranger’s valor, and make sure that each man who came into Rub-El-Harim was a tried warrior,” said Alafdal. “For generations, however, it has become merely an excuse to murder strangers. Few come uninvited. You should have secured the patronage of some chief of the clan before you came. Then you could have entered the city peacefully.”

“I knew no man in the clan,” muttered Shirkuh. “There are no Black Tigers in the Jebel Jawur. But men say the clan is coming to life, after slumbering in idleness for a hundred years, and —”

A disturbance in the crowd ahead of them interrupted him. The people in the square had massed thickly about the troop, slowing their progress, and growling ominously at the sight of Mellani. Curses were howled, and bits of offal and refuse thrown, and now a scarred Shinwari stooped and caught up a stone which he cast at the woman. The missile grazed Mellani’s ear, drawing blood, and with a curse Shirkuh drove his horse against the fellow, knocking him down. A deep roar rose from the mob, and it surged forward menacingly. Shirkuh dragged his sword from his scabbard, but Alafdal Khan caught his arm.

“Nay, brother! Do not attack. Leave these dogs to me.”

He lifted his voice in a bull’s bellow which carried across the square.

“Peace, my children! This is Shirkuh, of Jebel Jawur, who has come to be one of us. I speak for him — I, Alafdal Khan!”

A cheer rose from the crowd whose spirit was as vagrant and changeable as a leaf tossed in the wind. Obviously the Wazuli was popular in Rub-El-Harim, and Mellani guessed why as he saw Alafdal thrust a hand into a money pouch he carried at his girdle. But before the chief could completely mollify the mob by flinging a handful of coins among them, another figure entered the central drama. It was a Ghilzai who reined his horse through the crowd — a slim man, but tall and broad-shouldered, and one who looked as though his frame were of woven steel wires. He wore a rose-colored turban; a rich girdle clasped his supple waist, and his caftan was embroidered with gilt thread. A clump of ruffians on horseback followed him.

He drew rein in front of Alafdal Khan, whose beard instantly bristled while his wide eyes dilated truculently. Shirkuh quietly tightened the grip on his saber.

“That is my man your man rode down,” said the Ghilzai, indicating the groaning ruffian now dragging his bleeding hulk away. “Do you set your men on mine in the streets, Alafdal Khan?”

The people fell tensely silent, their own passions forgotten in the rivalry of the chiefs. Even Mellani could tell that this was no new antagonism, but the rankling of an old quarrel. The Ghilzai was alert, sneering, coldly provocative. Alafdal Khan was belligerent, angry, yet uneasy.

“Your man began it, Ali Shah,” he growled. “Stand aside. We take a prisoner to the Abode of the Damned.”

Mellani sensed that Alafdal Khan was avoiding the issue. Yet he did not lack followers. Hard-eyed men with weapons in their girdles, some on foot, some on horseback, pushed through the throng and ranged themselves behind the Wazuli. It was not physical courage Alafdal lacked, but some fiber of decision.

At Alafdal’s declaration, which placed him in the position of one engaged in the emir’s business, and therefore not to be interfered with — a statement at which ez Zahir smiled cynically — Ali Shah hesitated, and the tense instant might have smoldered out, had it not been for one of the Ghilzai’s men — a lean Orakzai, with hashish madness in his eyes. Standing in the edge of the crowd, he rested a bow over the shoulder of the man in front of him and fired point-blank at the Wazuli chief. Only the convulsive start of the owner of the shoulder saved Alafdal Khan. The arrow tore a piece out of his turban, and before the Orakzai could fire again, Shirkuh rode at him and cut him down with a stroke that split his head to the teeth.

It was like throwing fire upon oil. In an instant the square was a seething battle ground, where the adherents of the rival chiefs leaped at each others’ throats with all the zeal ordinary men generally display in fighting somebody else’s battle. ez Zahir, unable to force his way through the heaving mass, stolidly drew his troopers in a solid ring around his prisoner. He had not interfered when the stones were cast. Stones would not kill the woman, and he was concerned only in getting Mellani to her master alive and able to talk. He did not care how bloody and battered he might be. But in this melee a chance stroke might kill the infidel. His men faced outward, beating off attempts to get at their prisoner. Otherwise they took no part in the fighting. This brawl between rival chiefs, common enough in Rub-El-Harim, was none of ez Zahir’s affair.

Mellani watched fascinated. It might have been a riot in ancient times — the same old jealousies, same old passions, same old instinct of the common man fiercely to take up some lordling’s quarrel. He saw gaudily clad horsemen curvetting and caracoling as they slashed at each other with tulwars that were arcs of fire in the setting sun, and he saw ragged rascals belaboring each other with staves and cobblestones. No more shots were fired; it seemed an unwritten law that bows were not to be used in street fighting. Or perhaps their arrows were too precious for them to waste on each other.

But it was bloody enough while it lasted, and it littered the square with stunned and bleeding figures. Men with broken heads went down under the stamping hoofs, and some of them did not get up again. Ali Shah’s retainers outnumbered Alafdal Khan’s, but the majority of the crowd were for the Wazuli, as evidenced by the fragments of stone and wood that whizzed about the ears of his enemies. One of these well-meant missiles almost proved their champion’s undoing. It was a potsherd, hurled with more zeal than accuracy at Ali Shah. It missed him and crashed full against Alafdal’s bearded chin with an impact that filled the Wazuli’s eyes with tears and stars.

As he reeled in his saddle, his sword arm sinking, Ali Shah spurred at him, lifting his tulwar. There was murder in the air, while the blinded giant groped dazedly, sensing his peril. But Shirkuh was between them, lunging through the crowd like a driven bolt. He caught the swinging tulwar on his saber, and struck back, rising in his stirrups to add force to the blow. His blade struck flat, but it broke the left arm Ali Shah threw up in desperation, and beat down on the Ghilzai’s turban with a fury that stretched the chief bleeding and senseless on the trampled cobblestones.

A gratified yell went up from the crowd, and Ali Shah’s men fell back, confused and intimidated. Then there rose a thunder of hoofs, and a troop of men in compact formation swept the crowd to right and left as they plunged ruthlessly through. They were tall men in black chain armor and spired helmets, and their leader was a black-bearded Yusufzai, resplendent in gold-chased steel.

“Give way!” he ordered, with the hard arrogance of authority. “Clear the suk, in the name of Abd el Khafid, emir of Rub-El-Harim!”

“The Black Tigers!” muttered the people, giving back, but watching Alafdal Khan expectantly.

For an instant it seemed that the Wazuli would defy the riders. His beard bristled, his eyes dilated — then he wavered, shrugged his giant shoulders, and sheathed his tulwar.

“Obey the law, my children,” he advised them, and, not to be cheated out of the gesture he loved, he reached into his bulging pouch and sent a golden shower over their heads.

They went scrambling after the coins, shouting, and cheering, and laughing, and somebody yelled audaciously:

“Hail, Alafdal Khan, emir of Rub-El-Harim!”

Alafdal’s countenance was an almost comical mingling of vanity and apprehension. He eyed the Yusufzai captain sidewise half triumphantly, half uneasily, tugging at his purple beard. The captain said crisply:

“Let there be an end to this nonsense. Alafdal Khan, the emir will hold you to account if any more fighting occurs. He is weary of this quarrel.”

“Ali Shah started it!” roared the Wazuli heatedly.

The crowd rumbled menacingly behind him, stooping furtively for stones and sticks. Again that half-exultant, half-frightened look flitted across Alafdal’s broad face. The Yusufzai laughed sardonically.

“Too much popularity in the streets may cost a man his head in the palace!” said he, and turning away, he began clearing the square.

The mob fell back sullenly, growling in their beards, not exactly flinching from the prodding lances of the riders, but retiring grudgingly and with menace in their bearing. Mellani believed that all they needed to rise in bloody revolt was a determined leader. Ali Shah’s men picked up their senseless chief and lifted him into his saddle; they moved off across the suk with the leader lolling drunkenly in their midst. The fallen men who were able to stand were hustled to their feet by the Black Tigers.

Alafdal glared after them in a curiously helpless anger, his hand in his purple beard. Then he rumbled like a bear and rode off with his men, the wounded ones swaying on the saddles of their companions. Shirkuh rode with him, and as he reined away, he shot a glance at Mellani which the Cimmerian hoped meant that he was not deserting him.

ez Zahir led his men and captive out of the square and down a winding street, cackling sardonically in his beard as he went.

“Alafdal Khan is ambitious and fearful, which is a sorry combination. He hates Ali Shah, yet avoids bringing the feud to a climax. He would like to be emir of Rub-El-Harim, but he doubts his own strength. He will never do anything but guzzle wine and throw money to the multitude. The fool! Yet he fights like a hungry bear once he is roused.”

A trooper nudged Mellani and pointed ahead of them to a squat building with iron-barred windows.

“The Abode of the Damned, woman!” he said maliciously. “No prisoner ever escaped therefrom — and none ever spent more than one night there.”

At the door ez Zahir gave his captive in charge of a one-eyed Sudozai with a squad of brutal-looking blacks armed with whips and bludgeons. These led her up a dimly lighted corridor to a cell with a barred door. Into this they thrust her. They placed on the floor a vessel of scummy water and a flat loaf of moldy bread, and then filed out. The key turned in the lock with a chillingly final sound.

A few last rays of the sunset’s afterglow found their way through the tiny, high, thick-barred window. Mellani ate and drank mechanically, a prey to sick forebodings. All her future hinged now on Shirkuh, and Mellani felt it was a chance as thin as a sword edge. Stiffly she stretched herself on the musty straw heaped in one corner. As she sank to sleep, she wondered dimly if there had ever really been a trim, exquisitely tailored person named Mellani who slept in a soft bed and drank iced drinks out of slim-stemmed glasses, and danced with the grace of a pink-and-white visions of feminine loveliness under tinted candles. It was a far-off dream; this was reality — rotten straw that crawled with vermin, smelly water and stale bread, and the scent of spilled blood that still seemed to cling to her garments after the fight in the square.

IV

Crooked Paths

Mellani awoke with the light of a torch dazzling her eyes. This torch was placed in a socket in the wall, and when her eyes became accustomed to the wavering glare, she saw a tall, powerful man in a long satin caftan and a green turban with a gold brooch. From beneath this turban, wide gray eyes, as cold as a sword of ice, regarded him contemplatively.

“You are Mellani.”

It was a statement, not a question. The man spoke her tongue with only a hint of an accent; but that hint was unmistakable. Mellani made no reply. This was Abd el Khafid, of course, but it was like meeting a character of fable clothed in flesh. Abd el Khafid and Conan had begun to take on the appearance in Mellani’s worn brain of symbolic will-o’-the-wisps, nonexistent twin phantoms luring her to her doom. But here stood half of that phantasm, living and speaking. Perhaps Conan was equally real, after all.

Mellani studied the man almost impersonally. He looked Oriental enough in that garb, with his black pointed beard. But his hands were too big for a high-caste Moslem’s hands — sinewy, ruthless hands that looked as if they could grasp either a sword hilt or a scepter. The body under the caftan appeared hard and capable — not with the tigerish suppleness of Shirkuh, but strong and quick, nevertheless.

“My spies watched your journey all the way from its beginning,” said Abd el Khafid. “They knew that you plotted to make your way to Vendhya. Their reports also covered Khorshemish — I have my secret spies in every capital of Hyboria — and thence here. I have my spies hidden back in the hills, here. Inconvenient, but the people would not stand for it in the city. It was a violation of custom. Rub-El-Harim rests on a foundation of customs — irksome at times, but mostly useful.

“I knew you would not have immediately set out for Vendhya had not Darami told you something before he died, and I thought at first of having you killed as soon as you stepped off the ship. Then I decided to wait a bit and try to learn just how much you knew before I had you removed. Spies sent me word that you were coming — that apparently you had told people only that you wished to find Conan. I knew then that Darami had told you to find Conan and tell him my true identity. Darami was a human bloodhound, but it was only through the indiscretion of a servant that he learned the secret.

“Darami knew that the only man who could harm me was Conan. I am safe from the English here, safe from the ameer. Conan could cause me trouble, if he suspected my true identity. As it is, so long as he considers me merely Abd el Khafid, a Moslem fanatic from Samarkand, he will not interfere. But if he should learn who I really am, he would guess why I am here, and what I am doing.

“So I let you come up the Zhaibar unmolested. It was evident by this time that you intended giving the news directly to Conan, and my spies told me Conan had vanished in the hills. I knew when you left Khorshemish, searching for him, and I sent ez Zahir to capture and bring you here. You were easy to trace — wandering in the hills with a band of soldiery. So you entered Rub-El-Harim at last the only way an infidel may enter — as a captive, destined for the slave block.”

“You are an infidel,” retorted Mellani. “If I expose your true identity to these people —”

The strong shoulders under the caftan shrugged.

“The imams know I was born elsewhere. They know likewise that I am a true eastern man — that I foreswore the west and publicly acknowledged the power of the east, years ago. I cut all ties that bound me to the west. My name is Abd el Khafid. I have a right to wear this green turban. Tell the people of Rub-El-Harim that I am a westerner. They will laugh at you. To the masses I am like themselves; to the council of imams I am a true man of the east.”

Mellani said nothing; she was in a trap she could not break.

“You are but a fly in my web,” said Abd el Khafid contemptuously. “So unimportant that I intend to tell you my full purpose. It is good practice speaking in English. Sometimes I almost forget European tongues.

“The Black Tigers compose a very ancient society. It originally grew out of the bodyguard of a great conqueror. After his death they settled in Rub-El-Harim, even then an outlaw city, and became the ruling caste. It expanded into a secret society, always with its headquarters here in this city. It soon became a clan of fanatical haters of the west, and the emirs sold the swords of their followers to many leaders of the holy war.

“It flourished, then decayed. A hundred years ago the clan was nearly exterminated in a hill feud, and the organization became a shadow, limited to the rulers and officials of Rub-El-Harim alone. But they still held the city. Ten years ago I cut loose from my people and became what I am today, heart and soul. In my wanderings I discovered the Black Tigers, and saw their potentialities. I journeyed to Rub-El-Harim, and here I stumbled upon a secret that set my brain on fire.

“But I run ahead of my tale. It was only three years ago that I gained admittance into the clan. It was during the seven years preceding that, seven years of wandering, fighting, and plotting all over the East, that I clashed more than once with Conan, and learned how dangerous the man was — and that we must always be enemies, since our interests and ideals were so antithetical. So when I came to Rub-El-Harim, I simply dropped out of sight of Conan and all the other adventurers that like him and me rove the waste places of the East. Before I came to the city, I spent months in erasing my tracks. Nikolav Yvonn, known also as Akbar Shah, disappeared entirely. Not even Conan connected him with Abd el Khafid. I had stepped into a completely new role and personality. If Conan should see me, he might suspect — but he never shall, except as my captive.

“Without interference from him I began to build up the clan, first as a member of the ranks, from which I swiftly rose, then as prince of the clan, to which position I attained less than a year ago, by means and intrigues I shall not inflict upon you. I have reorganized the society, expanded it as of old, placed my spies in every country in the world. Of course Conan must have heard that the Black Tiger was stirring again; but to him it would mean only the spasmodic activity of a band of fanatics, without grander significance.

“But he would guess its true meaning if he knew that Abd el Khafid is the man he fought up and down the length and breadth of Hyboria, years ago!” The man’s eyes blazed, his voice vibrated. In his super-egotism he found intense satisfaction in even so small and hostile an audience as his prisoner. “Did you ever hear of the Golden Cave of the devil el Kabir?

“It lies within a day’s ride of the city, so carefully hidden that an army of men might search for it forever, in vain. But I have seen it! It is a sight to madden a man — heaped from floor to roof with blocks of gold! It is the offerings to the devil — custom dating from old heathen days. Each year a hundredweight of gold, levied on the people of the city, is melted and molded in small blocks, and carried and placed in the cave by the imams and the emir. And —”

“Do you mean to tell me that a treasure of that size exists near this city of thieves?” demanded Mellani incredulously.

“Why not? Have you not heard the city’s customs are unbending as iron? Only the imams know the secret of the cave; the knowledge is handed down from imam to imam, from emir to emir. The people do not know; they suppose the gold is taken by the devil to his infernal abode. If they knew, they would not touch it. Take gold dedicated to the devil the Damned? You little know the Oriental mind. Not a true man of the East in the world would touch a grain of it, even though he were starving.

“But I am free of such superstitions. Within a few days the gift to the devil will be placed in the cave. It will be another year then before the imams visit the cavern again. And before that time comes around, I will have accomplished my purpose. I will secretly remove the gold from the cave, working utterly alone, and will melt it down and recast it in different forms. Oh, I understand the art and have the proper equipment. When I have finished, none can recognize it as the accursed gold of the devil.

“With it I can feed and equip an army! I can buy an arsenal of weaponry, and mercenaries to use it. I can arm every cutthroat in the Himilaias! These hill tribes have the makings of the finest army in the world — all they need is equipment. And that equipment I will supply. There are plenty of sources ready to sell me whatever I want. And the gold of the devil will supply my needs!” The man was sweating, his eyes blazing as if madness like molten gold had entered his veins. “The world never dreamed of such a treasure-trove! The golden offerings of a thousand years heaped from floor to ceiling! And it is mine!”

“The imams will kill you!” whispered Mellani, appalled.

“They will not know for nearly a year. I will invent a lie to explain my great wealth. They will not suspect until they open the cave next year. Then it will be too late. Then I will be free from the Black Tigers. I will be an emperor!

“With my great new army I will sweep down into the plains of Vendhya. I will lead a horde of Afghulis, Iranistanis, Shemites and Turanians that will make up for discipline by numbers and ferocity. We will rise! I will sweep the foreigners out of the land! I will rule supreme!”

“Why do you tell me this?” asked Mellani. “What’s to prevent me from betraying you to the imams?”

“You will never see an imam,” was the grim reply. “I will see that you have no opportunity to talk. But enough of this: I allowed you to come alive to Rub-El-Harim only because I wanted to learn what secret password Darami gave you to use with the officials. I know you had one, by the speed and ease with which you were passed up to Khorshemish. I have long sought to get one of my spies into the very vitals of the secret service. This password will enable me to do so. Tell me what it is.”

Mellani laughed sardonically, then. “You’re going to kill me anyway. I certainly don’t intend to deprive myself of this one tiny crumb of retaliation. I’m not going to put another weapon in your filthy hands.”

“You’re a fool!” exclaimed Abd el Khafid, with a flash of anger too sudden, too easily aroused for complete self-confidence. The man was on edge, and not so sure of himself as he seemed.

“Doubtless,” agreed Mellani tranquilly. “And what about it?”

“Very well!” Abd el Khafid restrained himself by an obvious effort. “I cannot touch you tonight. You are the property of the city, according to age-old custom not even I can ignore. But tomorrow you will be sold on the block to the highest bidder. No one wants you as a slave, except for the pleasure of torturing. You are too soft for hard work. I will buy you for a few rupees, and then there will be nothing to prevent my making you talk. Before I fling your mangled carcass out on the garbage heap for the vultures, you will have told me everything I want to know.”

Abruptly he turned and stalked out of the dungeon. Mellani heard his footsteps reecho hollowly on the flags of the corridor. A wisp of conversation came back faintly. Then a door slammed and there was nothing but silence and a star blinking dimly through the barred window.

In another part of the city Shirkuh lounged on a silken divan, under the glow of bronze lamps that struck sparkling glints from the rich wine brimming in golden goblets. Shirkuh drank deep, smacking his lips, desert-fashion, as a matter of politeness to his host. He seemed to have no thought in the world except the quenching of his thirst, but Alafdal Khan, on another couch, knit his brows in perplexity. He was uncovering astonishing discoveries in this wild young warrior from the western mountains — unsuspected subtleties and hidden depths.

“Why do you wish to buy this woman?” he demanded.

“She is necessary to us,” asserted Shirkuh. With the bronze lamps throwing his face into half shadow, the boyishness was gone, replaced by a keen hawklike hardness and maturity.

“We must have her. I will buy her in the suk tomorrow, and she will aid us in making you emir of Rub-El-Harim.”

“But you have no money!” expostulated the Wazuli.

“You must lend it to me.”

“But Abd el Khafid desires her,” argued Alafdal Khan. “He sent ez Zahir out to capture her. It would be unwise to bid against the emir.”

Shirkuh emptied his cup before answering.

“From what you have told me of the city,” he said presently, “this is the situation. Only a certain amount of the citizens are Black Tigers. They constitute a ruling caste and a sort of guards force to support the emir. The emirs are complete despots, except when checked by customs whose roots are lost in the mists of antiquity. They rule with an iron rein over a turbulent and lawless population, composed of the dregs and scum of Eastern Hyboria.”

“That is true,” agreed Alafdal Khan.

“But in the past, the people have risen and deposed a ruler who trampled on tradition, forcing the Black Tigers to elevate another prince. Very well. You have told me that the number of Black Tigers in the city is comparatively small at present. Many have been sent as spies or emissaries to other regions. You yourself are high in the ranks of the clan.”

“An empty honor,” said Alafdal bitterly. “My advice is never asked in council. I have no authority except with my own personal retainers. And they are less than those of Abd el Khafid or Ali Shah.”

“It is upon the crowd in the streets we must rely,” replied Shirkuh. “You are popular with the masses. They are almost ready to rise under you, were you to declare yourself. But that will come later. They need a leader and a motive. We will supply both. But first we must secure the woman. With her safe in our hands, we will plan our next move in the game.”

Alafdal Khan scowled, his powerful fingers knotting about the slender stem of the wineglass. Conflicting emotions of vanity, ambition, and fear played across his broad face.

“You talk high!” he complained. “You ride into Rub-El-Harim, a penniless adventurer, and say you can make me emir of the city! How do I know you are not an empty bag of wind? How can you make me prince of Rub-El-Harim?”

Shirkuh set down his wineglass and rose, folding his arms. He looked somberly down at the astounded Wazuli, all naiveness and reckless humor gone out of his face. He spoke a single phrase, and Alafdal ejaculated stranglingly and lurched to his feet, spilling his wine. He reeled like a drunkard, clutching at the divan, his dilated eyes searching, with a fierce intensity, the dark, immobile face before him.

“Do you believe, now, that I can make you emir of Rub-El-Harim?” demanded Shirkuh.

“Who could doubt it?” panted Alafdal. “Have you not put kings on their thrones? But you are mad, to come here! One word to the mob and they would rend you limb from limb!”

“You will not speak that word,” said Shirkuh with conviction. “You will not throw away the lordship of Rub-El-Harim.”

And Alafdal nodded slowly, the fire of ambition surging redly in his eyes.

V

Swords In The Suk

Dawn streaming grayly through the barred window awakened Mellani. She reflected that it might be the last dawn she would see as a free woman. She laughed wryly at the thought. Free? Yet at least she was still a captive, not a slave. There was a vast difference between a captive and a slave — a revolting gulf, in which, crossing, a man or woman’s self-respect must be forever lost.

Presently black slaves came with a jug of cheap sour wine, and food — chupatties, rice cakes, dried dates. Royal fare compared with her supper the night before. A barber shaved her and trimmed her hair, and she was allowed the luxury of scrubbing himself pink in the prison bath.

She was grateful for the opportunity, but the whole proceeding was disgusting. She felt like a prize animal being curried and groomed for display. Some whim prompted her to ask the barber where the proceeds of his sale would go, and the man answered into the city treasury, to keep the walls repaired. A singularly unromantic usage for the price of a human being, but typical of the hard practicality of the East. Mellani thought fleetingly of Shirkuh, then shrugged her shoulders. Apparently the man had abandoned her to her fate.

Clad only in a loin cloth and sandals, she was led from the prison by the one-eyed Sudozai and a huge black slave. Horses were waiting for them at the gate, and she was ordered to mount. Between the slave masters she clattered up the street before the sun was up. But already the crowd was gathering in the square. The auctioning of a white woman was an event, and there was, furthermore, a feeling of expectancy in the air, sharpened by the fight of the day before.

In the midst of the square there stood a thick platform built solidly of stone blocks; it was perhaps four feet high and thirty feet across. On this platform the Sudozai took his stand, grasping a piece of rope which was tied loosely about Mellani’s neck. Behind them stood the stolid man of Darfar with a drawn scimitar on his shoulder.

Before, and to one side of the block the crowd had left a space clear, and there Abd el Khafid sat his horse, amid a troop of Black Tigers, bizarre in their ceremonial armor. Ceremonial it must be, reflected Mellani; it might turn a sword blade, but it would afford no protection against an arrow. But it was one of the many fantastic customs of the city, where tradition took the place of written law. The bodyguard of the emir had always worn black armor. Therefore, they would always wear it. ez Zahir commanded them. Mellani did not see Ali Shah.

Another custom was responsible for the presence of Abd el Khafid, instead of sending a servant to buy the woman for him; not even the emir could bid by proxy.

As she climbed upon the block, Mellani heard a cheer, and saw Alafdal Khan and Shirkuh pushing through the throng on their horses. Behind them came thirty-five warriors, well armed and well mounted. The Wazuli chief was plainly nervous, but Shirkuh strutted like a peacock, even on horseback, before the admiring gaze of the throng.

At the ringing ovation given them, annoyance flitted across Abd el Khafid’s broad, pale face, and that expression was followed by a more sinister darkening that boded ill for the Wazuli and his ally.

The auction began abruptly and undramatically. The Sudozai began in a singsong voice to narrate the desirable physical points of the prisoner, when Abd el Khafid cut him short and offered fifty rupees.

“A hundred!” instantly yelled Shirkuh.

Abd el Khafid turned an irritated and menacing glare on him. Shirkuh grinned insolently, and the crowd hugged itself, sensing a conflict of the sort it loved.

“Three hundred!” snarled the emir, meaning to squelch this irreverent vagabond without delay.

“Four hundred!” shouted Shirkuh.

“A thousand!” cried Adb el Khafid in a passion.

“Eleven hundred!”

And Shirkuh deliberately laughed in the emir’s face, and the crowd laughed with him. Abd el Khafid appeared at a disadvantage, for he was a bit confused at this unexpected opposition, and had lost his temper too easily. The fierce eyes of the crowd missed nothing of this, for it is on such points the wolf pack ceaselessly and pitilessly judges its leader. Their sympathies swung to the laughing, youthful stranger, sitting his horse with careless ease.

Mellani’s heart had leaped into his throat at the first sound of Shirkuh’s voice. If the man meant to aid him, this was the most obvious way to take. Then his heart sank again at the determination in Abd el Khafid’s angry face. The emir would never let his captive slip between his fingers. And though the Gift of the devil was not yet in the man’s possession, yet doubtless his private resources were too great for Shirkuh. In a contest of finances Shirkuh was foredoomed to lose.

Mellani’s conclusions were not those of Abd el Khafid. The emir shot a glance at Alafdal Khan, shifting uneasily in his saddle. He saw the beads of moisture gathered on the Wazuli’s broad brow, and realized a collusion between the men. New anger blazed in the emir’s eyes.

In his way Abd el Khafid was miserly. He was willing to squander gold like water on a main objective, but it irked him exceedingly to pay an exorbitant price to attain a minor goal. He knew — every man in the crowd knew now — that Alafdal Khan was backing Shirkuh. And all men knew that the Wazuli was one of the wealthiest men in the city, and a prodigal spender. Abd el Khafid’s nostrils pinched in with wrath as he realized the heights of extravagance to which he might be forced, did Shirkuh persist in this impertinent opposition to his wishes. The Gift of the devil was not yet in his hands, and his private funds were drained constantly by the expenses of his spy system and his various intrigues. He raised the bid in a harsh, anger-edged voice.

Mellani, studying the drama with the keen, understanding eyes of a gambler, realized that Abd el Khafid had got off on the wrong foot. Shirkuh’s bearing appealed to the crowd. They laughed at his sallies, which were salty and sparkling with all the age-old ribaldry of the East, and they hissed covertly at the emir, under cover of their neighbors.

The bidding mounted to unexpected heights. Abd el Khafid, white about the nostrils as he sensed the growing hostility of the crowd, did not speak except to snarl his offers. Shirkuh rolled in his saddle, slapped his thighs, yelled his bids, and defiantly brandished a leathern bag which gave out a musical tinkling.

The excitement of the crowd was at white heat. Ferocity began to edge their yells. Mellani, looking down at the heaving mass, had a confused impression of dark, convulsed faces, blazing eyes, and strident voices. Alafdal Khan was sweating, but he did not interfere, not even when the bidding rose above fifty thousand rupees.

It was more than a bidding contest; it was the subtle play of two opposing wills, as hard and supple as tempered steel. Abd el Khafid realized that if he withdrew now, his prestige would never recover from the blow. In his rage he made his first mistake.

He rose suddenly in his stirrups, clapping his hands.

“Let there be an end to this madness!” he roared. “No white slave is worth this much! I declare the auction closed! I buy this bitch for sixty thousand rupees! Take her to my house, slave master!”

A roar of protest rose from the throng, and Shirkuh drove his horse alongside the block and leaped off to it, tossing his rein to a Wazuli.

“Is this justice?” he shouted. “Is this done according to custom? Men of Rub-El-Harim, I demand justice! I bid sixty-one thousand rupees. I stand ready to bid more, if necessary! When has an emir been allowed to use his authority to rob a citizen, and cheat the people? Nay, we be thieves — but shall we rob one another? Who is Abd el Khafid, to trample the customs of the city! If the customs are broken, what shall hold you together? Rub-El-Harim lives only so long as the ancient traditions are observed. Will you let Abd el Khafid destroy them — and you?”

A cataract of straining human voices answered him. The crowd had become a myriad-fanged, flashing-eyed mass of hate.

“Obey the customs!” yelled Shirkuh, and the crowd took up the yell.

“Obey the customs!” It was the thunder of unreined seas, the roar of a storm wind ripping through icy passes. Blindly men seized the slogan, yowling it under a forest of lean arms and clenched fists. Men go mad on a slogan; conquerors have swept to empire, prophets to new world religions on a shouted phrase. All the men in the square were screaming it like a ritual now, rocking and tossing on their feet, fists clenched, froth on their lips. They no longer reasoned; they were a forest of blind human emotions, swayed by the storm wind of a shouted phrase that embodied passion and the urge to action.

Abd el Khafid lost his head. He drew his sword and cut a man who was clawing at his stirrup mouthing: “Obey the customs, emir!” and the spurt of blood edged the yells with murder lust. But as yet the mob was only a blind, raging monster without a head.

“Clear the suk!” shouted Abd el Khafid.

The lances dipped, and the Black Tigers moved forward uncertainly. A hail of stones greeted them.

Shirkuh leaped to the edge of the block, lifting his arms, shouting, cutting the volume of sound by the knifing intensity of his yell.

“Down with Abd el Khafid! Hail, Alafdal Khan, emir of Rub-El-Harim!”

“Hail, Alafdal Khan!” came back from the crowd like a thunderclap.

Abd el Khafid rose in his stirrups, livid.

“Fools! Are you utterly mad? Shall I call my riders to sweep the streets clear of you?”

Shirkuh threw back his head and laughed like a wolf howling.

“Call them!” he yelled. “Before you can gather them from the taverns and dens, we will stain the square with your blood! Prove your right to rule! You have violated one custom — redeem yourself by another! Men of Rub-El-Harim, is it not a tradition that an emir must be able to defend his title with the sword?”

“Aye!” roared back the mob.

“Then let Abd el Khafid fight Alafdal Khan!” shouted Shirkuh.

“Let them fight!” bellowed the mob.

Abd el Khafid’s eyes turned red. He was sure of his prowess with the sword, but this revolt against his authority enraged him to the point of insanity. This was the very center of his power; here like a spider he had spun his webs, expecting attack on the fringes, but never here. Now he was caught off-guard. Too many trusted henchmen were far afield. Others were scattered throughout the city, useless to him at the moment. His bodyguard was too small to defy the crowd. Mentally he promised himself a feast of hangings and beheadings when he could bring back a sufficient force of men to Rub-El-Harim. In the meantime he would settle Alafdal’s ambitions permanently.

“Kingmaker, eh?” he snarled in Shirkuh’s face, as he leaped off his horse to the block. He whipped out his tulwar and swung it around his head, a sheen of silver in the sun. “I’ll nail your head to the Herati Gate when I’ve finished with this ox-eyed fool!”

Shirkuh laughed at him and stepped back, herding the slave masters and their captive to the back of the block. Alafdal Khan was scrambling to the platform, his tulwar in his hand.

He was not fully straightened on the block when Abd el Khafid was on him with the fury of a tornado. The crowd cried out, fearing that the emir’s whirlwind speed would envelop the powerful but slower chief. But it was this very swiftness that undid the Russian. In his wild fury to kill, Abd el Khafid forgot judgment. The stroke he aimed at Alafdal’s head would have decapitated an ox; but he began it in mid-stride, and its violence threw his descending foot out of line. He stumbled, his blade cut thin air as Alafdal dodged — and then the Wazuli’s sword was through him.

It was over in a flash. Abd el Khafid had practically impaled himself on the Wazuli’s blade. The rush, the stroke, the counter-thrust, and the emir kicking his life out on the stone like a spitted rat — it all happened in a mere tick of time that left the mob speechless.

Shirkuh sprang forward like a panther in the instant of silence while the crowd held its breath and Alafdal gaped stupidly from the red tulwar in his hand to the dead man at his feet.

“Hail to Alafdal Khan, emir of Rub-El-Harim!” yelled Shirkuh, and the crowd thundered its response.

“On your horse, man, quick!” Shirkuh snarled in Alafdal’s ear, thrusting him toward his steed, while seeming to bow him toward it.

The crowd was going mad with the senseless joy of a mob that sees its favorite elevated above them. As Alafdal, still dazed by the rapidity of events, clambered on his horse, Shirkuh turned on the stunned Black Tiger riders.

“Dogs!” he thundered. “Form ranks! Escort your new master to the palace, for his title to be confirmed by the council of imams!”

They were moving unwillingly forward, afraid of the crowd, when a commotion interrupted the flow of events. Ali Shah and forty armed horsemen came pushing their way through the crowd and halted beside the armored riders. The crowd bared its teeth, remembering the Ghilzai’s feud with their new emir. Yet there was iron in Ali Shah. He did not flinch, but the old indecision wavered in Alafdal’s eyes at the sight of his foe.

Shirkuh turned on Ali Shah with the swift suspicion of a tiger, but before anyone could speak, a wild figure dashed from among the Ghilzais and leaped on the block. It was the Shinwari Shirkuh had ridden down the day before. The man threw a lean arm out toward Shirkuh.

“He is an impostor, brothers!” he screamed. “I thought I knew him yesterday! An hour ago I remembered! He is no mere stranger! He is —”

Shirkuh shot the man through the body. He staggered to a rolling fall that carried him to the edge of the block. There he lifted himself on an elbow, and pointed at Shirkuh. Blood spattered the Shinwari’s beard as he croaked in the sudden silence:

“I swear by the the gods! He is Conan!”

A shudder passed over the crowd.

“Obey the customs!” came Ali Shah’s sardonic voice in the unnatural stillness. “You killed your emir because of a small custom. There stands a man who has violated the greatest one — your enemy, Conan!”

There was conviction in his voice, yet no one had really doubted the accusation of the dying Shinwari. The amazing revelation had struck them all dumb, Mellani included. But only for an instant.

The blind reaction of the crowd was as instantaneous as it had been before. The tense stillness snapped like a banjo string to a flood of sound:

“Down with the infidels! Death to Conan! Death to Alafdal Khan!”

To Mellani it seemed that the crowd suddenly rose like a foaming torrent and flowed over the edge of the block. Above the deafening clamor he heard the crashing of the big automatic in Conan’s hand. Blood spattered, and in an instant the edge of the block was littered by writhing bodies over which the living tripped and stumbled.

Conan sprang to Mellani, knocked her guards sprawling with the limbs of the bow, and seized the dazed captive, dragging her toward the black stallion to which the Wazuli still clung. The mob was swarming like wolves about Alafdal and his warriors, and the Black Tigers and Ali Shah were trying to get at them through the press. Alafdal bawled something desperate and incoherent to Conan as he laid lustily about him with his tulwar. The Wazuli chief was almost crazed with bewilderment. A moment ago he had been emir of Rub-El-Harim, with the crowd applauding him. Now the same crowd was trying to tear him out of his saddle.

“Make for your house, Alafdal!” yelled Conan.

He leaped into the saddle just as the man holding the horse went down with his head shattered by a cobblestone. The wild figure who had killed him leaped forward, gibbering, clawing at the rider’s leg. Conan drove a sharp silver heel into his eye, stretching him bleeding and screaming on the ground. He ruthlessly slashed off a hand that grasped at his rein, and beat back a ring of snarling faces with another swing of his saber.

“Get on behind me, Mellani!” he ordered, holding the frantic horse close to the block.

It was only when he heard the words, with their northern accent, that Mellani realized that this was no dream, and she had at last actually encountered the man she had sought.

Men were grasping at Mellani. She beat them off with clenched fists, leaped on the stallion behind the saddle. She grasped the cantle, resisting the natural impulse to hold onto the man in front of her. Conan would need the free use of his body if they won through that seething mass of frantic humanity which packed the square from edge to edge. It was a frothing, dark-waved sea, swirling about islands of horsemen.

But the stallion gathered itself and lunged terribly, knocking over screaming figures. Bones snapped under its hoofs. Over the heads of the crowd Mellani saw Ali Shah and his riders beating savagely at the mob with their swords, trying to reach Alafdal Khan. Ali Shah was cool no longer; his dark face was convulsed.

The stallion waded through that sea of humanity, its rider slashing right and left, clearing a red road. Mellani felt hands clawing at them as they went by, felt the inexorable hoofs grinding over writhing bodies. Ahead of them the Wazulis, in a compact formation, were cutting their way toward the west side of the square. Already a dozen of them had been dragged from their saddles and torn to pieces.

Conan dragged his blade out in front of him, and it slashed redly in the snarling faces, cutting a lane through them. Along that lane the black stallion thundered, to smite with irresistible impact the mass hemming in Alafdal Khan. It burst asunder, and the black horse sped on, while its rider yelled:

“Fall in behind me! We’ll make a stand at your house!”

The Wazulis closed in behind him. They might have abandoned Conan if they had had the choice. But the people included them all in their blind rage against the breakers of tradition. As they broke through the press, behind them the Black Tigers brought their bows into play for the first time. A hail of arrows swept the square, emptying half the Wazuli saddles. The survivors dashed into a narrow street.

A mass of snarling figures blocked their way. Men swarmed from the houses to cut them off. Men were surging into the alley behind them. A thrown stone numbed Mellani’s shoulder. Conan was using the the pommel of his sword like a mace. In a rush they smote the men massed in the street.

The great black stallion reared and lashed down with malletlike hoofs, and its rider flailed with a bow stock now splintered and smeared with blood. But behind them Alafdal’s steed stumbled and fell. Alafdal’s disordered turban and his dripping tulwar appeared for an instant above a sea of heads and tossing arms. His men plunged madly in to rescue him and were hemmed in by a solid mass of humanity as more men surged down the street from the square. Hamstrung horses went down, screaming. Conan wheeled his stallion back toward the melee, and as he did so, a swarm of men burst from a narrow alleyway. One seized Mellani’s leg and dragged her from the horse. As they rolled in the dust, the Afghuli heaved Mellani below him, mouthing like an ape, and lifted a crooked knife. Mellani saw it glint in the sunlight, had an instant’s numb realization of doom — then Conan, reining the rearing stallion around, leaned from the saddle and smashed the Afghuli’s skull with his sword.

The man fell across Mellani, and then from an arched doorway an ancient siege weapon let fly, and the stallion reared and fell sprawling, half its head torn away. Conan leaped clear, hit on his feet like a cat, and hurled the broken bow in the faces of the swarm bearing down on him. He leaped back, waving his sabre at them. It flickered like lightning, and three men fell with cleft heads. But the mob was blood-mad, heedless of death. Brainlessly they rushed against him, flailing with staves and bludgeons, bearing him by their very weight back into an arched doorway. The panels splintered inward under the impact of the hurtling bodies, and Conan vanished from Mellani’s sight. The mob poured in after him.

Mellani cast off the limp body that lay across her and rose. She had a brief glimpse of a dark writhing mass where the fight swirled about the fallen chief, of Ali Shah and his riders beating at the crowd with their swords — then a bludgeon, wielded from behind, fell glancingly on her head, and she fell blind and senseless into the trampled dust.

Slowly consciousness returned to Mellani. Her head ached dully, and her hair was stiff with clotted blood. He struggled to his elbows, though the effort made his head swim sickeningly, and stared about him.

She was lying on a stone floor littered with moldy straw. Light came in from a high-barred window. There was a door with a broad barred wicket. Other figures lay near her, and one sat cross-legged, staring at her blankly. It was Alafdal Khan.

The Wazuli’s beard was torn, his turban gone. His features were swollen, and bruised, and skinned, one ear mangled. Three of his men lay near, one groaning. All had been frightfully beaten, and the man who groaned seemed to have a broken arm.

“They didn’t kill us!” marveled Mellani.

Alafdal Khan swung his great head like an ox in pain and groaned: “Cursed be the day I laid eyes on Conan!”

One of the men crept painfully to Mellani’s side.

“I am Achmet,” he said, spitting blood from a broken tooth. “There lie Hassan and Suleiman. Ali Shah and his men beat the dogs off us, but they had mauled us so that all were dead save these you see. Our lord is like one touched by the gods.”

“Are we in the Abode of the Damned?” asked Mellani.

“Nay. We are in the common jail which lies near the west wall.”

“Why did they save us from the mob?”

“For a more exquisite end!” Achmet shuddered. “Does this woman not know the death the Black Tigers reserve for traitors?”

“No!” Mellani’s lips were suddenly dry.

“We will be flayed tomorrow night in the square. It is an old custom. Rub-El-Harim is a city of customs.”

“So I have learned!” agreed Mellani grimly. “What of Conan?”

“I do not know. He vanished into a house, with many men in pursuit. They must have overtaken and slain him.”

VI

The Executioner

When the door in the archway burst inward under the impact of Conan’s iron-hard shoulders, he tumbled backward into a dim, carpeted hallway. His pursuers, crowding after him, jammed in the doorway in a sweating, cursing crush which his saber quickly turned into a shambles. Before they could clear the door of the dead, he was racing down the hall.

He made a turn to the left, ran across a chamber where veiled women squealed and scattered, emerged into a narrow alley, leaped a low wall, and found himself in a small garden. Behind him sounded the clamor of his hunters, momentarily baffled. He crossed the garden and through a partly open door came into a winding corridor. Somewhere a slave was singing in the weird chant of Darfar, apparently heedless of the dog-fight noises going on upon the other side of the wall. Conan moved down the corridor, careful to keep his silver heels from clinking.

Presently he came to a winding staircase and up it he went, making no noise on the richly carpeted steps. As he came out into an upper corridor, he saw a curtained door and heard beyond it a faint, musical clinking which he recognized. He glided to the partly open door and peered through the curtains. In a richly appointed room, lighted by a tinted skylight, a portly, gray-bearded man sat with his back to the door, counting coins out of a leather bag into an ebony chest. He was so intent on the business at hand that he did not seem aware of the growing clamor below. Or perhaps street riots were too common in Rub-El-Harim to attract the attention of a thrifty merchant, intent only on increasing his riches.

Pad of swift feet on the stair, and Conan slipped behind the partly open door. A richly clad young man, with a scimitar in his hand, ran up the steps and hurried to the door. He thrust the curtains aside and paused on the threshold, panting with haste and excitement.

“Father!” he shouted. “Conan is in the city! Do you not hear the din below? They are hunting him through the houses! He may be in our very house! Men are searching the lower rooms even now!”

“Let them hunt him,” replied the old man. “Remain here with me, Abdullah. Shut that door and lock it. Conan is a tiger.”

As the youth turned, instead of the yielding curtain behind him, he felt the contact of a hard, solid body, and simultaneously a corded arm locked about his neck, choking his startled cry. Then he felt the light prick of a knife and he went limp with fright, his scimitar sliding from his nerveless hand. The old man had turned at his son’s gasp, and now he froze, gray beneath his beard, his moneybag dangling.

Conan thrust the youth into the room, not releasing his grip, and let the curtains close behind them.

“Do not move,” he warned the old man softly.

He dragged his trembling captive across the room and into a tapestried alcove. Before he vanished into it, he spoke briefly to the merchant:

“They are coming up the stairs, looking for me. Meet them at the door and send them away. Do not play me false by even the flick of an eyelash, if you value your son’s life.”

The old man’s eyes were dilated with pure horror. Conan well knew the power of paternal affection. In a welter of hate, treachery, and cruelty, it was a real and vital passion, as strong as the throb of the human heart. The merchant might defy Conan were his own life alone at stake; but the Cimmerian knew he would not risk the life of his son.

Sandals stamped up the stair, and rough voices shouted. The old man hurried to the door, stumbling in his haste. He thrust his head through the curtains, in response to a bawled question. His reply came plainly to Conan.

“Conan? Dogs! Take your clamor from my walls! If Conan is in the house of Nureddin el Aziz, he is in the rooms below. Ye have searched them? Then look for him elsewhere, and a curse on you!”

The footsteps dwindled down the stair, the voices faded and ceased.

Conan pushed Abdullah out into the chamber.

“Shut the door!” the Cimmerian ordered.

Nureddin obeyed, with poisonous eyes but fear-twisted face.

“I will stay in this room a while,” said Conan. “If you play me false — if any man besides yourself crosses that threshold, the first stroke of the fight will plunge my blade in Abdullah’s heart.”

“What do you wish?” asked Nureddin nervously.

“Give me the key to that door. No, toss it on the table there. Now go forth into the streets and learn if the woman, or any of the Wazulis live. Then return to me. And if you love your son, keep my secret!”

The merchant left the room without a word, and Conan bound Abdullah’s wrists and ankles with strips torn from the curtains. The youth was gray with fear, incapable of resistance. Conan laid him on a divan, and cleaned his Zhaibar knife. He discarded the tattered remnants of his robe. The white silk shirt beneath was torn, revealing his muscular breast, his close-fitting breeches smeared with blood.

Nureddin returned presently, rapping at the door and naming himself.

Conan unlocked the door and stepped back, his blade a few inches from Abdullah’s ear. But the old man was alone when he hurried in. He closed the door and sighed with relief to see Abdullah uninjured.

“What is your news?” demanded Conan.

“Men comb the city for you, and Ali Shah has declared himself prince of the Black Tigers. The imams have confirmed his claim. The mob has looted Alafdal Khan’s house and slain every Wazuli they could find. But the woman lives, and so likewise does Alafdal Khan and three of his men. They lie in the common jail. Tomorrow night they die.”

“Do your slaves suspect my presence?”

“Nay. None saw you enter.”

“Good. Bring wine and food. Abdullah shall taste it before I eat.”

“My slaves will think it strange to see me bearing food!”

“Go to the stair and call your orders down to them. Bid them set the food outside the door and then return downstairs.”

This was done, and Conan ate and drank heartily, sitting cross-legged on the divan at Abdullah’s head, his pistol on his lap.

The day wore on. Conan sat motionless, his eternal vigilance never relaxing. The Afghulis watched him, hating and fearing him. As evening approached, he spoke to Nureddin after a silence that had endured for hours.

“Go and procure for me a robe and cloak of black silk, and a black helmet such as is worn by the Black Tigers. Bring me also boots with lower heels than these — and not silver — and a mask such as members of the clan wear on secret missions.”

The old man frowned. “The garments I can procure from my own shop. But how am I to secure the helmet and mask?”

“That is thy affair. Gold can open any door, they say. Go!”

As soon as Nureddin had departed, reluctantly, Conan kicked off his boots, and next removed his beard, using the keen-edged dagger for a razor. With its removal vanished the last trace of Shirkuh.

Twilight had come to Rub-El-Harim. The room seemed full of a blue mist, blurring objects. Conan had lighted a bronze lamp when Nureddin returned with the articles Conan had ordered.

“Lay them on the table and sit down on the divan with your hands behind you,” Conan commanded.

When the merchant had done so, the Cimmerian bound his wrists and ankles. Then Conan donned the boots and the robe, placed the black lacquered steel helmet on his head, and drew the black cloak about him; lastly he put on the mask which fell in folds of black silk to his breast, with two slits over his eyes. Turning to Nureddin, he asked:

“Is there a likeness between me and another?”

“The gods preserve us! You are one with Dhira Azrail, the executioner of the Black Tigers, when he goes forth to slay at the emir’s command.”

“Good. I have heard much of this man who slays secretly, who moves through the night like a black jinn of destruction. Few have seen his face, men say.”

“The gods defend me from ever seeing it!” said Nureddin fervently.

Conan glanced at the skylight. Stars twinkled beyond it.

“I go now from your house, Nureddin,” said he. “But lest you rouse the household in your zeal of hospitality, I must gag you and your son.”

“We will smother!” exclaimed Nureddin. “We will starve in this room!”

“You will do neither one nor the other,” Conan assured him. “No man I gagged ever smothered. Has not the gods given you nostrils through which to breathe? Your servants will find you and release you in the morning.”

This was deftly accomplished, and Conan advised:

“Observe that I have not touched your moneybags, and be grateful!”

He left the room, locking the door behind him. He hoped it would be several hours before either of his captives managed to work the gag out of his mouth and arouse the household with his yells.

Moving like a black-clad ghost through the dimly lighted corridors, Conan descended the winding stair and came into the lower hallway. A black slave sat cross-legged at the foot of the stair, but his head was sunk on his broad breast, and his snores resounded through the hall. He did not see or hear the velvet-footed shadow that glided past him. Conan slid back the bolt on the door and emerged into the garden, whose broad leaves and petals hung motionless in the still starlight. Outside, the city was silent. Men had gone early behind locked doors, and few roamed the streets, except those patrols searching ceaselessly for Conan.

He climbed the wall and dropped into the narrow alley. He knew where the common jail was, for in his role of Shirkuh he had familiarized himself with the general features of the town. He kept close to the wall, under the shadows of the overhanging balconies, but he did not slink. His movements were calculated to suggest a man who has no reason for concealment, but who chooses to shun conspicuousness.

The streets seemed empty. From some of the roof gardens came the wail of native citterns, or voices lifted in song. Somewhere a wretch screamed agonizingly to the impact of blows on naked flesh.

Once Conan heard the clink of steel ahead of him and turned quickly into a dark alley to let a patrol swing past. They were men in armor, on foot, but carrying cocked bows at the ready and peering in every direction. They kept close together, and their vigilance reflected their fear of the quarry they hunted. When they rounded the first corner, he emerged from his hiding place and hurried on.

But he had to depend on his disguise before he reached the prison. A squad of armed men rounded the corner ahead of him, and no concealment offered itself. At the sound of their footsteps he had slowed his pace to a stately stride. With his cloak folded close about him, his head slightly bent as if in somber meditation, he moved on, paying no heed to the soldiers. They shrank back, murmuring:

“The gods preserve us! It is Dhira Azrail — the Arm of the Angel of Death! An order has been given!”

They hurried on, without looking back. A few moments later Conan had reached the lowering arch of the prison door. A dozen guardsmen stood alertly under the arch, their drawn weapons gleaming in the glare of a torch thrust in a niche in the wall. These weapons were instantly leveled at the figure that moved out of the shadows. Then the men hesitated, staring wide-eyed at the somber black shape standing silently before them.

“Your pardon!” entreated the captain of the guard, saluting. “We could not recognize — in the shadow — We did not know an order had been given.”

A ghostly hand, half muffled in the black cloak, gestured toward the door, and the guardsmen opened it in stumbling haste, bowing deeply. As the black figure moved through, they closed the door and made fast the chain.

“The mob will see no show in the suk after all,” muttered one.

VII

In the Prison

In the cell where Mellani and her companions lay, time dragged on leaden feet. Hassan groaned with the pain of his broken arm. Suleiman cursed Ali Shah in a monotonous drone. Achmet was inclined to talk, but his comments cast no light of hope on their condition. Alafdal Khan sat like a man in a daze.

No food was given them, only scummy water that smelled. They used most of it to bathe their wounds. Mellani suggested trying to set Hassan’s arm, but the others showed no interest. Hassan had only another day to live. Why bother? Then there was nothing with which to make splints.

Mellani mostly lay on her back, watching the little square of dry blue sky through the barred window.

He watched the blue fade, turn pink with sunset and deep purple with twilight; it became a square of blue-black velvet, set with a cluster of white stars. Outside, in the corridor that ran between the cells, bronze lamps glowed, and she wondered vaguely how far, on the backs of groaning camels, had come the oil that filled them.

In their light a cloaked figure came down the corridor, and a scarred sardonic face was pressed to the bars. Achmet gasped, his eyes dilated.

“Do you know me, dog?” inquired the stranger.

Achmet nodded, moistening lips suddenly dry.

“Are we to die tonight, then?” he asked.

The head under the flowing headdress was shaken.

“Not unless you are fool enough to speak my name. Your companions do not know me. I have not come in my usual capacity, but to guard the prison tonight. Ali Shah fears Conan might seek to aid you.”

“Then Conan lives!” ejaculated Mellani, to whom everything else in the conversation had been unintelligible.

“He still lives.” The stranger laughed. “But he will be found, if he is still in the city. If he has fled — well, the passes have been closed by heavy guards, and horsemen are combing the plain and the hills. If he comes here tonight, he will be dealt with. Ali Shah chose to send me rather than a squad of riflemen. Not even the guards know who I am.”

As he turned away toward the rear end of the corridor, Mellani asked:

“Who is that man?”

But Achmet’s flow of conversation had been dried up by the sight of that lean, sardonic face. He shuddered, and drew away from his companions, sitting cross-legged with bowed head. From time to time his shoulders twitched, as if he had seen a reptile or a ghoul.

Mellani sighed and stretched herself on the straw. Her battered limbs ached, and she was hungry.

Presently she heard the outer door clang. Voices came faintly to her, and the door closed again. Idly she wondered if they were changing the guard. Then she heard the soft rustle of cloth. A man was coming down the corridor. An instant later he came into the range of their vision, and his appearance clutched Mellani with an icy dread. Clad in black from head to foot, a spired helmet gave him an appearance of unnatural height. He was enveloped in the folds of a black cloak. But the most sinister implication was in the black mask which fell in loose folds to his breast.

Mellani’s flesh crawled. Why was that silent, cowled figure coming to their dungeon in the blackness and stillness of the night hours?

The others glared wildly; even Alafdal was shaken out of his daze. Hassan whimpered:

“It is Dhira Azrail!”

But bewilderment mingled with the fear in Achmet’s eyes.

The scar-faced stranger came suddenly from the depths of the corridor and confronted the masked man just before the door. The lamplight fell on his face, upon which played a faint, cynical smile.

“What do you wish? I am in charge here.”

The masked man’s voice was muffled. It sounded cavernous and ghostly, fitting his appearance.

“I am Dhira Azrail. An order has been given. Open the door.”

The scarred one bowed deeply, and murmured: “Hearkening and obedience, my lord!”

He produced a key, turned it in the lock, pulled open the heavy door, and bowed again, humbly indicating for the other to enter. The masked man was moving past him when Achmet came to life startlingly.

“Conan!” he screamed. “Beware! He is Dhira Azrail!”

The masked man wheeled like a flash, and the knife the other had aimed at his back glanced from his helmet as he turned. The real Dhira Azrail snarled like a wild cat, but before he could strike again, Conan’s right fist met his jaw with a crushing impact. Flesh, and bone, and consciousness gave way together, and the executioner sagged senseless to the floor.

As Conan sprang into the cell, the prisoners stumbled dazedly to their feet. Except Achmet, who, knowing that the scarred man was Dhira Azrail, had realized that the man in the mask must be Conan — and had acted accordingly — they did not grasp the situation until Conan threw his mask back.

“Can you all walk?” rapped Conan. “Good! We’ll have to pull out afoot. I couldn’t arrange for horses.”

Alafdal Khan looked at him dully.

“Why should I go?” he muttered. “Yesterday I had wealth and power. Now I am a penniless vagabond. If I leave Rub-El-Harim, the ameer will cut off my head. It was an ill day I met you, Conan! You made a tool of me for your intrigues.”

“So I did, Alafdal Khan.” Conan faced him squarely. “But I would have made you emir in good truth. The dice have fallen against us, but our lives remain. And a bold man can rebuild his fortune. I promise you that if we escape, the ameer will pardon you and these men.”

“His word is not wind,” urged Achmet. “He has come to aid us, when he might have escaped alone. Take heart, my lord!”

Conan was stripping the weapons from the senseless executioner. The man wore two German automatics, a tulwar, and a curved knife. Conan gave a knife to Mellani, and one to Alafdal; Achmet received the tulwar, and Suleiman a third knife, and Conan gave his own knife to Hassan. The executioner’s garments were given to Mellani, who was practically naked. The oriental garments felt strange, but she was grateful for their warmth.

The brief struggle had not produced any noise likely to be overheard by the guard beyond the arched door. Conan led his band down the corridor, between rows of empty cells, until they came to the rear door. There was no guard outside, as it was deemed too strong to be forced by anything short of artillery. It was of massive metal, fastened by a huge bar set in gigantic iron brackets bolted powerfully into the stone. It took all Conan’s strength to lift it out of the brackets and lean it against the wall, but then the door swung silently open, revealing the blackness of a narrow alley into which they filed.

Conan pulled the door to behind them. How much leeway they had he did not know. The guard would eventually get suspicious when the supposed Dhira Azrail did not emerge, but he believed it would take them a good while to overcome their almost superstitious dread of the executioner enough to investigate. As for the real Dhira Azrail, he would not recover his senses for hours.

The prison was not far from the west wall. They met no one as they hurried through winding, ill-smelling alleys until they reached the wall at the place where a flight of narrow steps led up to the parapets. Men were patrolling the wall. They crouched in the shadows below the stair and heard the tread of two sentries who met on the firing ledge, exchanged muffled greetings, and passed on. As the footsteps dwindled, they glided up the steps. Conan had secured a rope from an unguarded camel stall. He made it fast by a loose loop to a merlon. One by one they slid swiftly down. Conan was last, and he flipped the rope loose and coiled it. They might need it again.

They crouched an instant beneath the wall. A wind stole across the plain and stirred Mellani’s hair. They were free, armed, and outside the devil city. But they were afoot, and the passes were closed against them. Without a word they filed after Conan across the shadowed plain.

At a safe distance their leader halted, and the men grouped around him, a vague cluster in the starlight.

“All the roads that lead from Rub-El-Harim are barred against us,” he said abruptly. “They’ve filled the passes with soldiers. We’ll have to make our way through the mountains the best way we can. And the only direction in which we can hope to eventually find safety is the east.”

“The Great Range bars our path to the east,” muttered Alafdal Khan. “Only through the Pass of Nadir Khan may we cross it.”

“There is another way,” answered Conan. “It is a pass which lies far to the north of Nadir Khan. There isn’t any road leading to it, and it hasn’t been used for many generations. But it has a name — the Afridis call it the Pass of Swords — and I’ve seen it from the east. I’ve never been west of it before, but maybe I can lead you to it. It lies many days’ march from here, through wild mountains which none of us has ever traversed. But it’s our only chance. We must have horses and food. Do any of you know where horses can be procured outside the city?”

“Yonder on the north side of the plain,” said Achmet, “where a gorge opens from the hills, there dwells a peasant who owns seven horses — wretched, flea-bitten beasts they are, though.”

“They must suffice. Lead us to them.”

The going was not easy, for the plain was littered with rocks and cut with shallow gullies. All except Conan were stiff and sore from their beatings, and Hassan’s broken arm was a knifing agony to him. It was after more than an hour and a half of tortuous travel that the low mud-and-rock pen loomed before them and they heard the beasts stamping and snorting within it, alarmed by the sounds of their approach. The cluster of buildings squatted in the widening mouth of a shallow canyon, with a shadowy background of bare hills.

Conan went ahead of the rest, and when the peasant came yawning out of his hut, looking for the wolves he thought were frightening his property, he never saw the tigerish shadow behind him until Conan’s iron fingers shut off his wind. A threat hissed in his ear reduced him to quaking quiescence, though he ventured a wail of protest as he saw other shadowy figures saddling and leading out his beasts.

“I am a poor man! These beasts are not fit for great lords to ride, but they are all of my property! The gods be my witness!”

“Break his head,” advised Hassan, whom pain made bloodthirsty.

But Conan stilled their captive’s weeping with a handful of gold which represented at least three times the value of his whole herd. Dazzled by this rich reward, the peasant ceased his complaints, cursed his whimpering wives and children into silence, and at Conan’s order brought forth all the food there was in his hut — leathery loaves of bread, jerked mutton, salt, and eggs. It was little enough with which to start a hard journey. Feed for the horses was slung in a bag behind each saddle, and loaded on the spare horse.

While the beasts were being saddled, Conan, by the light of a torch held inside a shed by a disheveled woman, whittled splints, tore up a shirt for bandages, and set Hassan’s arm — a sickening task, because of the swollen condition of the member. It left Hassan green-faced and gagging, yet he was able to mount with the others.

In the darkness of the small hours they rode up the pathless gorge which led into the trackless hills. Hassan was insistent on cutting the throats of the entire peasant family, but Conan vetoed this.

“Yes, I know he’ll head for the city to betray us, as soon as we get out of sight. But he’ll have to go on foot, and we’ll lose ourselves in the hills before he gets there.”

“There are men trained like bloodhounds in Rub-El-Harim,” said Achmet. “They can track a wolf over bare rock.”

Sunrise found them high up in the hills, out of sight of the plain, picking their way up treacherous shale-littered slopes, following dry watercourses, always careful to keep below the sky line as much as possible. Mellani was already confused. They seemed lost in a labyrinth of bare hills, in which he was able to recognize general directions only by glimpses of the snow-capped peaks of the Great Range ahead.

As they rode, he studied their leader. There was nothing in Conan’s manner by which he could recognize Shirkuh. Gone was the accent, the boyish, reckless merry-mad swagger, the peacock vanity of dress, even the wide-legged horseman’s stride. The real Conan was almost the direct antithesis of the role he had assumed. In place of the strutting, gaudily clad, braggart youth, there was a direct, hard-eyed man, who wasted no words and about whom there was no trace of egotism or braggadocio. There was nothing of the East about his countenance now, and Mellani knew that the stubbly beard alone had not accounted for the perfection of his disguise. That disguise had not depended on any mechanical device; it had been a perfection of mimicry. By no artificial means, but by completely entering into the spirit of the role he had assumed, Conan had altered the expression of his face, his bearing, his whole personality. He had so marvelously portrayed a personality so utterly different from his own, that it seemed impossible that the two were one. Only the eyes were unchanged — the gleaming, untamed blue eyes, reflecting a barbarism of vitality and character.

But if not garrulous, Conan did not prove taciturn, when Mellani began to ask questions.

“I was on another trail when I left Khorshemish,” he said. “No need to take up your time with that now. I knew the Black Tigers had a new emir, but didn’t know it was Yvonn, of course. I’d never bothered to investigate the Black Tigers; didn’t consider them important. I left Khorshemish alone and picked up half a dozen Afridi friends on the way. I became a Kurd after I was well on my road. That’s why you lost my trail. None knew me except my Afridis.

“But before I completed my mission, word came through the hills that a Feringi with an escort of Kabuli was looking for me. News travels fast and far through the tribes. I rode back looking for you, and finally sighted you, as a prisoner. I didn’t know who’d captured you, but I saw there were too many for us to fight, so I went down to parley. As soon as I saw ez Zahir, I guessed who they were, and told them that lie about being lost in the hills and wanting to get to Rub-El-Harim. I signaled my men — you saw them. They were the men who fired on us as we were coming into the valley where the well was.”

“But you shot one of them!”

“I shot over their heads. Just as they purposely missed us. My shots — one, pause, and then three in succession — were a signal that I was going on with the troop, and for them to return to our rendezvous on Kalat el Jehungir and wait for me. When one fell forward on his horse, it was a signal that they understood. We have an elaborate code of signals, of all kinds.

“I intended trying to get you away that night, but when you gave me Darami’s message, it changed the situation. If the new emir was Yvonn, I knew what it meant. Imagine Vendhya under the rule of a swine like Yvonn!

“I knew that Yvonn was after the gold in the devil’s Cave. It couldn’t be anything else. Oh, yes, I knew the custom of offering gold each year to the Devil. Darami and I had discussed the peril to the peace of the East if a white adventurer ever got his hands on it.

“So I knew I’d have to go to Rub-El-Harim. I didn’t dare tell you who I was — too many men spying around all the time. When we got to the city, Fate put Alafdal Khan in my hands. A true emir is no peril to the Vendhyan Empire. A real Easterner wouldn’t touch the devil’s gold to save his life. I meant to make Alafdal emir. I had to tell him who I was before he’d believe I had a chance of doing it.

“I didn’t premeditatedly precipitate that riot in the suk. I simply took advantage of it. I wanted to get you safely out of Yvonn’s hands before I started anything, so I persuaded Alafdal Kahn that we needed you in our plot, and he put up the money to buy you. Then during the auction Yvonn lost his head and played into my hands. Everything would have worked out perfectly, if it hadn’t been for Ali Shah and his man, that Shinwari! It was inevitable that somebody would recognize me sooner or later, but I hoped to destroy Yvonn, set Alafdal solidly in power, and have an avenue of escape open for you and me before that happened.”

“At least Yvonn is dead,” said Mellani.

“We didn’t fail there,” agreed Conan. “Ali Shah is no menace to the world. He won’t touch the gold. The organization Yvonn built up will fall apart, leaving only the comparatively harmless core of the Black Tigers as it was before his coming. We’ve drawn their fangs, as far as the safety of Vendhya is concerned. All that’s at stake now are our own lives — but I’ll admit I’m selfish enough to want to preserve them.”

VIII

The Pass of Swords

Mellani beat her numbed hands together for warmth. For days they had been struggling through the trackless hills. The lean horses stumbled against the blast that roared between intervals of breathless sun blaze. The riders clung to the saddles when they could, or stumbled on afoot, leading their mounts, continually gnawed by hunger. At night they huddled together for warmth, men and beasts, in the lee of some rock or cliff, only occasionally finding wood enough to build a tiny fire.

Conan’s endurance was amazing. It was he who led the way, finding water, erasing their too obvious tracks, caring for the mounts when the others were too exhausted to move. He gave his cloak and robe to the ragged Wazulis, himself seeming impervious to the chill winds as to the blazing sun.

The pack horse died. There was little food left for the horses, less for the men. They had left the hills now and were in the higher reaches, with the peaks of the Great Range looming through the mists ahead of them. Life became a pain-tinged dream to Mellani in which one scene stood out vividly. They sat their gaunt horses at the head of a long valley and saw, far back, white dots moving in the morning mists.

“They have found our trail,” muttered Alafdal Khan. “They will not quit it while we live. They have good horses and plenty of food.”

And thereafter from time to time they glimpsed, far away and below and behind them, those sinister moving dots, that slowly, slowly cut down the long lead. Conan ceased his attempts to hide their trail, and they headed straight for the backbone of the range which rose like a rampart before them — scarecrow men on phantom horses, following a grim-faced chief.

On a midday when the sky was as clear as chilled steel, they struggled over a lofty mountain shoulder and sighted a notch that broke the chain of snow-clad summits, and beyond it, the pinnacle of a lesser, more distant peak.

“The Pass of Swords,” said Conan. “The peak beyond it is Kalat el Jehungir, where my men are waiting for me. There will be a man sweeping the surrounding country all the time with powerful field glasses. I don’t know whether they can see smoke this far or not, but I’m going to send up a signal for them to meet us at the pass.”

Achmet climbed the mountainside with him. The others were too weak for the attempt. High up on the giddy slope they found enough green wood to make a fire that smoked. Presently, manipulated with ragged cloak, balls of thick black smoke rolled upward against the blue. It was the old technique of Conan’s native plains, and Mellani knew it was a thousand-to-one shot. Yet hillmen had eyes like hawks.

They descended the shoulder and lost sight of the pass. Then they started climbing once more, over slopes and crags and along the rims of gigantic precipices. It was on one of those ledges that Suleiman’s horse stumbled and screamed and went over the edge, to smash to a pulp with its rider a thousand feet below, while the others stared helplessly.

It was at the foot of the long canyon that pitched upward toward the pass that the starving horses reached the limit of their endurance. The fugitives killed one and haggled off chunks of gristly flesh with their knives. They scorched the meat over a tiny fire, scarcely tasting it as they bolted it. Bodies and nerves were numb for rest and sleep. Mellani clung to one thought — if the Afridis had seen the signal, they would be waiting at the pass, with fresh horses. On fresh horses they could escape, for the mounts of their pursuers must be nearly exhausted, too.

On foot they struggled up the steep canyon. Night fell while they struggled, but they did not halt. All through the night they drove their agonized bodies on, and at dawn they emerged from the mouth of the canyon to a broad slope that tilted up to the gap of clear sky cut in the mountain wall. It was empty. The Afridis were not there. Behind them white dots were moving inexorably up the canyon.

“We’ll make our last stand at the mouth of the pass,” said Conan.

His eyes swept his phantom crew with a strange remorse. They looked like dead men. They reeled on their feet, their heads swimming with exhaustion and dizziness.

“Sorry about it all,” he said. “Sorry, Mellani.”

“Darami was my friend,” said Mellani, and then could have cursed herself, had she had the strength. It sounded so trite, so melodramatic.

“Alafdal, I’m sorry,” said Conan. “Sorry for all you men.”

Alafdal lifted his head like a lion throwing back his mane.

“Nay, Conan! You made a king of me. I was but a glutton and a sot, dreaming dreams I was too timid and too lazy to attempt. You gave me a moment of glory. It is worth all the rest of my life.”

Painfully they struggled up to the head of the pass. Mellani crawled the last few yards, till Conan lifted him to his feet. There in the mouth of the great corridor that ran between echoing cliffs, their hair blowing in the icy wind, they looked back the way they had come and saw their pursuers, dots no longer, but men on horses. There was a group of them within a mile, a larger cluster far back down the canyon. The toughest and best-mounted riders had drawn away from the others.

The fugitives lay behind boulders in the mouth of the pass. They had three pistols, a saber, a tulwar, and a knife between them. The riders had seen their quarry turn at bay; their bows glinted in the early-morning light as they flogged their reeling horses up the slope. Mellani recognized Ali Shah himself, his arm in a sling; ez Zahir; the black-bearded Yusufzai captain. A group of grim warriors were at their heels. All were gaunt-faced from the long grind. They came on recklessly, firing as they came. Yet the men at bay drew first blood.

Alafdal Khan, a poor shot and knowing it, had exchanged his bow for Achmet’s tulwar. Now Achmet sighted and fired and knocked a rider out of his saddle almost at the limit of the weapon's range. In his exultation he yelled and incautiously lifted his head above the boulder. A volley of bow fire spattered the rock with arrows, and one hit Achmet between the eyes. Alafdal snatched the bow as it fell and began firing in return. His eyes were bloodshot, his aim wild. But a horse fell, pinning its rider.

Above the shouts came the doomlike crash of Conan’s war cry. Only the toss of his horse’s head saved Ali Shah. The horse caught the arrow meant for him, and Ali Shah sprang clear as it fell, rolling to cover. The others abandoned their horses and followed suit. They came wriggling up the slope, firing as they came, keeping to cover.

Mellani realized that she was taking aim only when he heard a man scream and saw him fall across a boulder. Vaguely, then, she realized that she had killed another man. Alafdal Khan had emptied his quiver without doing much harm. Mellani fired and missed, scored a hit, and missed again. Her hands shook with weakness, and her eyes played him tricks. But Conan was not missing. It seemed to Mellani that every time his bow twanged, a man screamed and fell. The slope was littered with white-clad figures. They had not worn their black armor on that chase.

Perhaps the madness of the high places had entered Ali Shah’s brain on that long pursuit. At any rate he would not wait for the rest of his men, plodding far behind him. Like a madman he drove his warriors to the assault. They came on, firing and dying in the teeth of Conan’s arrows till the slope was a shambles. But the survivors came grimly on, nearer and nearer, and then suddenly they had broken cover and were charging like a gust of hill wind.

Conan missed Ali Shah with his last arrow and killed the man behind him, and then like ghosts rising from the ground the fugitives rose and grappled with their pursuers.

Mellani fired his last shot full into the face of a savage who rushed at her. Death halted the man’s charge, but his blow fell, numbing Mellani’s shoulder and hurling her to the ground, and there, as she writhed vainly, she saw the brief madness of the fight that raged about him.

She saw the crippled Hassan, snarling like a wounded wolf, beaten down by a Ghilzai who stood with one foot on his neck and repeatedly drove a broken lance through his body. Squirming under the merciless heel, Hassan slashed blindly upward with Conan’s knife in his death agony, and the Ghilzai staggered drunkenly away, blood gushing from the great vein which had been severed behind his knee. He fell dying a few feet from his victim.

Mellani saw Ali Shah shoot Alafdal Khan through the body as they came face to face, and Alafdal Khan, dying on his feet, split his enemy’s head with one tremendous swing of his tulwar, so they fell together.

Mellani saw Conan cut down the black-bearded Yusufzai captain, and spring at ez Zahir with a hate too primitive to accord his foe an honorable death. He parried ez Zahir’s tulwar and dashed his saber guard into the Afghuli’s face. Killing his man was not enough for his berserk rage; all his roused passion called for a dog’s death for his enemy. And like a raging fury he battered the Afghuli back and down with blows of the guard and hilt, refusing to honor him by striking with the blade, until ez Zahir fell and lay with broken skull.

Conan lurched about to face down the slope, the only man on his feet. He stood swaying on wide-braced feet among the dead, and shook the blood from his eyes. They were as red as flame burning on black water. He took a fresh grip on the bloody hilt of his saber, and glared at the horsemen spurring up the canyon — at bay at last, drunken with slaughter, and conscious only of the blind lust to slay and slay before he himself sank in the red welter of his last, grim fight.

Then hoofs rang loud on the rock behind him, and he wheeled, blade lifted — to check suddenly, a wild, blood-stained figure against the sunrise.

“Conan!”

The pass was filled with shouting. Dimly Mellani saw half a dozen horsemen sweep into view. He heard Conan yell:

“Yar Ali Khan! You saw my signal after all! Give them a volley!”

The twanging of their bows filled the pass with a whine of fletching cutting through the air. Mellani, twisting her head painfully, saw the demoralization of the Black Tigers. She saw men falling from their saddles, others spurring back down the canyon. Wearied from the long chase, disheartened by the fall of their emir, fearful of a trap, the tired men on tired horses fell back out of range.

Mellani was aware of Conan bending over her, heard him tell the tall Afridi he called Yar Ali Khan to see to the others; heard Yar Ali Khan say they were all dead. Then, as in a dream, Mellani felt herself lifted into a saddle, with a man behind to hold her on. Wind blew her hair, and she realized they were galloping. The walls gave back the ring of the flying hoofs, and then they were through the pass, and galloping down the long slope beyond. She saw Conan riding behind her. And before Mellani fainted from sheer exhaustion, she heard Conan say:

“Let them follow us now if they will; they’ll never catch us on their worn-out nags, not in a thousand years!”

And Mellani sank into the grateful oblivion of senselessness in his arms, with his laughter ringing in her ears — the iron, elemental, indomitable laughter of Conan.

Lions of Corinthia

(Originally The Lion of Corinthia)

Robert E. Howard & J.R Karlsson

I

The battle in the meadowlands of Corinthia was over, but not the slaughter. On that bloody field where the Athros and his allies had broken the onrushing power of Polopponi and Lonika, the steel-clad bodies lay strewn like the drift of a storm. The great canal men called the Nile, which connected the Corinthia with the distant Tigris, was choked with the bodies of the tribesmen, and the survivors were panting in flight toward the white walls of Hilla which shimmered in the distance above the placid waters of the nearer river. Behind them the mailed hawks, the Shemites, rode down the fleeing, cutting the fugitives from their saddles. The glittering dream of the Shemite king had ended in a storm of blood and steel, and his spurs struck blood as he rode for the distant river.

Yet at one spot in the littered field the fight still swirled and eddied, where the king’s favorite son, Achmar, a slender lad of seventeen or eighteen, stood at bay with one companion. The mailed riders swooped in, struck and reined back, yelling in baffled rage before the lashing of the great sword in this man’s hands. His was a figure alien and incongruous, his dark mane contrasting with those about him no less than his dusty gray mail contrasted with the plumed burnished headpieces and silvered hauberks of the slayers. He was tall and powerful, with a wolfish hardness of limbs and frame that his mail could not conceal. His dark, scarred face was moody, his blue eyes cold and hard as the blue steel of forged swords for heroes in northern forests.

Little of softness had there been in Conan of Cimmeria’s life. Son of a house ruined by the Aquilonian conquest, this descendant of a blacksmith had only memories of wattle-thatched huts and the hard life of a wandering soldier, serving for poor hire barons he hated. Born in the north, the ancient land of the Picts, long settled by blue-eyed barbarians that drove them forth, his blood was neither of Corinthia nor Aquilonia, but Cimmerian, and the grim unbreakable strength of the blue North was his. From each stroke of life that felled him, he rose fiercer and more unrelenting. He had not found existence easier in his long drift East which led him into the service of Turan.

In all his thirty years, Conan of Cimmeria remembered many a thing that had come to pass; but now faced a whole host, desperate fury nerving his iron arms.

It had been Achmar’s first raid, whereby his riders had trapped Sadaka and a handful of retainers. The boy had not shrunk from the sword-play, but the savagery that butchers fallen foes was not his. Writhing in the bloody dust, stunned and half-dead, Conan of Cimmeria had dimly seen the lifted scimitar thrust aside by a slender arm, and the face of the youth bending above him, the dark eyes filled with tears of pity.

Too gentle for the age and his manner of life, Achmar had made his astounded warriors take up the wounded Cimmerian and bring him with them. And in the weeks that passed while Conan’s wounds healed, he lay in Achmar’s tent by an oasis of the Polopponi people, tended by the lad’s own servants. When he could ride again, Achmar had brought him to Hilla. King Kerbogha always tried to humor his son’s whims, and now, though muttering pious horror in his beard, he granted Conan his life. Nor did he regret it, for in the grim Cimmerian he found a fighting-man worth any three of his own hawks.

Conan felt no tugging of loyalty toward Sadaka, who had fled out of the ambush leaving him in the hands of these people, nor toward the race at whose hands he had had only hard knocks all his life. Among the people of Polopponi he found an environment congenial to his moody, ferocious nature, and he plunged into the turmoil of feuds, forays and border wars as if he had been born under a black felt tent instead of a wattle hut. Now, with the failure of Sadaka’s thrust at the meadowlands and sovereignty, the Cimmerian found himself once more hemmed in by chanting foes, mad with the tang of blood. About him and his youthful comrade swirled the wild riders of Mosul; the mailed hawks of Athros and Bassorah, whose lord, Zenkri, had that day outmaneuvered Sadaka and slashed his shining host to pieces.

On foot among the bodies of their warriors, their backs to a wall of dead horses and men, Achmar and Conan beat back the onslaught. A heron-feathered king reined in his Turanian steed, yelling his war-cry, his house-troops swirling in behind him.

“Back, boy; leave him to me!” grunted the Cimmerian, thrusting Achmar behind him. The slashing scimitar struck blue sparks from his basinet and his great sword dashed the Seljuk dead from his saddle. Bestriding the chieftain’s body, the giant Cimmerian lashed up at the shrieking swordsmen who spurred in, leaning from their saddles to swing their blades. The curved sabers shivered on his shield and armor, and his long sword crashed through bucklers, breastplates and helmets, cleaving flesh and splintering bones, littering corpses at his iron-sheathed feet. Panting and howling the survivors reined back.

Then a roaring voice made them glance quickly about, and they fell back as a tall, strongly built horseman rode through them and drew rein before the grim Cimmerian and his slender companion. Conan of Cimmeria for the first time stood face to face with Zhenrki, king of Athros, whom men called the Lion of Corinthia, because of his exploits at the siege of Corinthia.

The Cimmerian noted the breadth of the mighty steel-clad shoulders, the grip of the powerful hands on rein and sword-hilt; the blazing magnetic blue eyes, setting off the ruthless lines of the dark face. Under the thin black lines of the mustaches the wide lips smiled, but it was the merciless grin of the hunting panther.

Zenkri spoke and there was at the back of his powerful voice a hint of mockery or gargantuan mirth that rose above wrath and slaughter.

“Who are these soldiers that they stand among their prey like tigers in their den, and none is found to go against them? Is it Rustem whose heel is on the necks of my commanders – or only a renegade? And the other – by the gods, unless I am mad, it is the cub of the desert wolf! Are you not Achmar?”

It was Achmar who answered; for Conan maintained a grim silence, watching the king through slit eyes, fingers locked on his bloody hilt.

“It is so, Zenkri,” answered the youth proudly, “and this is my brother at arms, Conan of Cimmeria. Bid your wolves ride on, oh prince. Many of them have fallen. More shall fall before their steel tastes our hearts.”

Zenkri shrugged his mighty shoulders, in the grip of the mocking devil that lurks at the heart of all the sons of eastern Hyboria.

“Lay down your weapons, wolf-cub and Cimmerian. I swear by the honor of my clan, no sword shall touch you.”

“I trust him not,” growled Conan of Cimmeria. “Let him come a pace nearer and I’ll take him to hell with us.”

“Nay,” answered Achmar. “The king of Athros keeps his word. Lay down your sword, my brother. We have done all men might do. My father the king will ransom us.”

He tossed down his scimitar with a boyish sigh of unashamed relief, and Conan grudgingly laid down his broadsword.

“I had rather sheathe it in his body,” he growled.

Achmar turned to the conqueror and spread his hands.

“Oh, Zenkri – ” he began, when the man made a quick gesture, and the two prisoners found themselves seized and their hands bound behind them with thongs that cut the flesh.

“There is no need of that, king,” protested Achmar. “We have given ourselves into your hands. Bid your men loose us. We will not seek to escape.”

“Be silent, cub!” snapped Zenkri. The man’s eyes still danced with dangerous laughter, but his face was dark with passion. He reined nearer. “No sword shall touch you, young dog,” he said deliberately. “Such was my word, and I keep my oaths. No blade shall come near you, yet the vultures shall pluck your bones tonight. Your dog-sire escaped me, but you shall not escape, and when men tell him of your end, he will tear his locks in anguish.”

Achmar, held in the grip of the powerful soldiers, looked up, paling, but answered without a quaver of fear.

“Are you then a breaker of oaths, man?”

“I break no oath,” answered the lord of Athros. “A whip is not a sword.”

His hand came up, gripping a terrible manoman scourge, to the seven rawhide thongs of which bits of lead were fastened. Leaning from his saddle as he struck, he brought those metal-weighted thongs down across the boy’s face with terrible force. Blood spurted and one of Achmar’s eyes was half torn from its socket. Held helpless, the boy could not evade the blows Zenkri rained upon him. But not a whimper escaped him, though his features turned to a bloody, raw, ghastly and eyeless ruin beneath the ripping strokes that shredded the flesh and splintered the bones beneath. Only at last a low animal-like moaning drooled from his mangled lips as he hung senseless and dying in the hands of his captors.

Without a cry or a word Conan of Cimmeria watched, while the heart in his breast shrivelled and froze and turned to ice that naught could touch or thaw or break. Something died in his soul and in its place rose an elemental spirit unquenchable as frozen fire and bitter as hoar-frost.

The deed was done. The mangled broken horror that had been Prince Achmar ibn Doubeys was cast carelessly on a heap of dead, a touch of life still pulsing feebly through the tortured limbs. On the crimson mask of his features fell the shadow of vulture wings in the sunset. Zenkri threw aside the dripping scourge and turned to the silent Cimmerian. But when he met the burning eyes of his captive, the smile faded from the prince’s lips and the taunts died unspoken. In those cold terrible eyes the man read hate beyond common conception – a monstrous, burning, almost tangible thing, drawn up from the lower pits of hell, not to be dimmed by time or suffering.

The man shivered as from a cold unseen wind. Then he regained his composure. “I give you life, infidel,” said Zenkri, “because of my oath. You have seen something of my power. Remember it in the long dreary years when you shall regret my mercy, and howl for death. And know that as I serve you, I will serve all who oppose me. I have come into Corinthia and left their castles desolate; I have ridden eastward with the heads of their chiefs swinging at my saddle. I will come again, not as a raider but a conqueror. I will sweep their hosts into the sea. Polopponi shall howl for her dead, and my horses stamp in the citadels of the infidel; for on this field I set my feet on the glittering stairs that lead to empire.”

“This is my only word to you, Zenkri, dog of Corinthia,” answered the Cimmerian in a voice he did not himself recognize. “In a year, or ten years, or twenty years, I will come again to you, to pay this debt.”

“Thus spake the trapped wolf to the hunter,” answered Zenkri, and turning to the soldiers who held Conan, he said, “Place him among the unransomed captives. Take him to Bassorah and see that he is sold as a galley-slave. He is strong and may live for four or five years.”

The sun was setting in crimson, gloomy and sinister for the fugitives who staggered toward the distant towers of Hilla that the setting sun tinted in blood. But the land was as one flooded with the scarlet glory of imperial pageantry to the Athros who stood on a hillock, lifting his voice to the gods who had once more vindicated the dominance of his chosen viceroy, and saved the sacred City of Peace from violation.

“Verily, verily, a young lion has risen, to be as a sword and shield to the Faithful, to revive the power, and to confound the infidels!”

II

King Zenkri was the son of a slave, which was no great handicap in that day, when the emperors of the day, like those after them, ruled through slave generals and satraps. His father, Ak Sunkur, had held high posts under the sultan Melik Shah, and as a young boy Zenkri had been taken under the special guidance of that war-hawk Kerbogha. The young eagle was not of Turan; his sires were men from beyond. Men of this blood were rapidly becoming the dominant factor in eastern Hyboria, as the old empire who had enslaved and trained them in the art of ruling, began to crumble. Emirs were stirring restlessly under the relaxing yoke of the sultans. The Shemites were reaping the yield of the seeds of the feudal system they had sown, and among the jealous sons of Melik Shah there was none strong enough to rebuild the crumbling lines.

So far the fiefs, held by feudal vassals of the sultans, were at least nominally loyal to the royal masters, but already there was beginning the slow swirling upheaval that ultimately reared kingdoms on the ruins of the old empire. The driving impetus of one man advanced this movement more than anything else – the vital dynamic power of Zenkri esh Sham.

In the dim and misty pageantry of phantoms that move shadow-like through those crimson years, one figure stands out clear and bold-etched – a figure on a rearing black stallion, the black silken cloak flowing from his mailed shoulders, the dripping scimitar in his hand. He is Zenkri, son of the pagan nomads, the first of a glittering line of magnificent conquerors before whom the iron men of the west reeled.

In Zenkri such a leader was found. When he broke Sadaka he was thirty-eight years of age, and had held his fief of Athros but a year. Thirty-six was the minimum age at which the sultans allowed a man to hold a governorship, and most notables were much older when they were so honored than was Zenkri. But the honor only whetted his ambition.

The same sun that shone mercilessly on Conan of Cimmeria, stumbling along in his chains on the road that led to the galley’s bench, gleamed on Zenkri’s gilded mail as he rode north to enter the service of the sultan at Hamadhan. His boast that his feet were set on the stairs of fame was no idle one. All vied in honouring him.

To the Kothians who had felt his talons in Shem, came faint tidings of that battle in Corinthia, and they heard other word of his growing power. There came tidings of a dispute between sultan and Athros, and of Zenkri turning against his former master. Honors rained like stars on his turban, sang the minstrels. King of Athros, governor of Irak, prince of el Jezira – on up the glittering stairs of power rode Zenkri, while the likes of the Aquilonians ignored the tidings from the East with the perverse blindness of their race – until hell burst along their borders and the roar of the Lion shook their towers.

Outposts and castles went up in flames, and throats felt the knife-edge, necks the yoke of slavery. Outside the walls of doomed cities, kings saw their picked chivalry swept broken and flying into the desert. Again the Lion drove them headlong in flight, and when the Emperor of Aquilonia himself, Numedides, moved against the victorious man, he found himself chasing a desert wind that turned unexpectedly and slaughtered his stragglers, and harried his lines until life was a burden and a stone about his royal neck. He decided that his eastern neighbors were no more to be despised than his barbaric allies, and before he rode away from the slaughter he held secret parleys with Zenkri that bore crimson fruit in later years. His going left the man free to move against his eternal enemies, the Corinthians. His objective was Polopponi, stronghold of Corthinia, and one of the most powerful of their cities. But like a crafty swordsman he blinded his foes by feints and gestures.

The realm reeled before his blows. The land was filled with the chanting of the riders, the twang of bows, and the whine of swords. Zenkri’s hawks swept through the land and their horses’ hoofs spattered blood on the standards of kings. Walled castles toppled in flame, sword-hacked corpses strewed the valleys, dark hands knotted in the yellow tresses of screaming women, and the lords of the Franks cried out in wrath and pain. Up the glittering stairs of empire rode Zenkri on his black stallion, his scimitar dripping in his hand, stars jeweling his turban.

And while he swept the land like a storm, and hurled down barons to make drinking-cups of their skulls and stables of their palaces, the galley-slaves, whispering to one another in their eternal darkness where the oars clacked everlastingly and the lap of the waves was a symphony of slow madness, spoke of a dark-haired giant who never spoke, and whom neither labor, nor starvation, nor the dripping lash, nor the drag of the bitter years could break.

Time passed, glittering, star-strewn, gilt-spangled to the rider in the shining saddle, to the lord in the golden-domed palace; black, silent, bitter weeks in the creaking, reeking, rat-haunted darkness of the galleys.

III

“He rides on the wind with the stars in his hair;
Like Death falls his shadow on castles and towns;
And the kings of the Caphars cry out in despair,
For the hoofs of his stallion have trampled their crowns.”

Thus sang a wandering Shemite minstrel in the tavern of a little outpost village which stood on the ancient Road of Kings. The village was a cluster of mud huts huddling about a castle-crowned hill. The population was mongrel – Khauranians, Shemites, mixed breeds with Corinthian blood in their veins. Tonight a representative group was gathered in the inn – native laborers from the fields; a lean Shemite herdsman or two; Corinthian men-at-arms in worn leather and rusty mail, from the castle on the hill; a pilgrim wandered off his route to the holy places of the south; the ragged minstrel. Two figures held the attention of casual lookers-on. They sat on opposite sides of a rudely carved table, eating meat and drinking wine, and they were evidently strangers to each other, since no word passed between them, though each glanced surreptitiously at the other from time to time.

Both were tall, hard-limbed and broad-shouldered, but there the resemblance ended. One was clean-shaven, with a hawk-like predatory face from which keen grey eyes gleamed coldly. His burnished helmet lay on the bench beside him with the kite-shaped shield, and his mail coif was pushed back, revealing a mass of red hair. His armor gleamed with gilt-work and silver chasing, and the hilt of his broadsword sparkled with jewels.

The man opposite him seemed drab by comparison, with his dusty gray chain-mail and worn sword-hilt untouched by any gleam of gem or gold. His square-cut dark mane was matched by a short beard which masked the strong lines of jaw and chin.

The minstrel finished his song with an exultant clash of the strings, and eyed his audience half in insolence, half in uneasiness.

“And thus, masters,” he intoned, one eye on possible alms, the other on the door, “Zenkri, King of Athros, brought his men up the river on boats to aid the sultan who lay encamped about the walls of the city. Then, when the Athros saw the banners of Zenkri, he said, ‘Lo, now is come up against me the young lion who overthrew Sadaka for me; open the gates, friends, and throw yourselves on his mercy, for there is none found to stand before him.’ And it was done, and the sultan gave to Zenkri all of the land.

“Gold and power flowed through his fingers. Mosul, his capital, which he found a waste of ruins, he made to bloom as roses blossom by an oasis. Kings trembled before him but the poor rejoiced, for he shielded them from the sword. His servants looked on him as upon the gods. Of him it is told that he gave a slave a rusk to hold, and not for a year did he ask for it. Then when he demanded it, lo, the man gave it into his hands, wrapped in a napkin, and for his diligence Zenkri gave him command of a castle. For though the king is a hard master, yet he is just to True Believers.”

The knight in the gleaming mail flung the minstrel a coin.

“Well sung, pagan!” he cried in a harsh voice that sounded the words strangely. “Know you the song of the sack of Edessa?”

“Aye, my lord,” smirked the minstrel, “and with the favor of your lordships I will essay it.”

“Your head shall roll on the floor first,” spoke the other knight suddenly in a voice deep and somber with menace. “It is enough that you praise the dog Zenkri in our teeth. No man sings of his butcheries at Edessa, beneath a roof in my presence.”

The minstrel blenched and gave back, for the cold blue eyes of the man were grim. The knight in the ornate mail looked at the speaker curiously, no resentment in his reckless dancing eyes.

“You speak as one to whom the subject is a sore one, friend,” said he.

The other fixed his sombre stare on his questioner, but made no reply save a slight shrug of his mighty mailed shoulders as he continued his meal.

“Come,” persisted the stranger, “I meant no offense. I am newly come to these parts – I am Kratis, vassal to the king. I have fought Zenkri in the south, when we made alliance against him, and I only wished to hear the details of the taking of Edessa. By the gods, there were few who escaped to bear the tale.”

“I crave pardon for my seeming discourtesy,” returned the other. “I am in the service of the prince. I was in Edessa when it fell.

“Zenkri came up from Mosul and laid waste the Diyar Bekr, taking town after town. The count was dead, and the rule was in the hands of that sluggard, Joscelin. In the late fall of the year Zenkri laid siege to Amid, and the count bestirred himself – but only to march away to Turbessel with all his household.

“We were left at Edessa with the town in charge of fat Zamoran merchants who gripped their money-bags and trembled in fear of Zenkri, unable to overcome their swinish avarice enough to pay the mongrel mercenaries Joscelin had left to defend the city.

“Well, as anyone might know, Zenkri left Amid and marched against us as soon as word reached him that the poor fool Joscelin had departed. He reared his siege engines over against the walls, and day and night hurled assaults against the gates and towers, which had never fallen had we had the proper force to man them.

“But to give them their due, our wretched mercenaries did well. There was no rest or ease for any of us; day and night the ballistas creaked, stones and beams crashed against the towers, arrows blinded the sky in their whistling clouds, and Zenkri’s chanting devils swarmed up the walls. We beat them back until our swords were broken, our mail hung in bloody tatters, and our arms were dead with weariness. For a month we kept Zenkri at bay, waiting for Count Joscelin, but he never came.

“It was on the morning that the rams and engines made a great breach in the outer wall, and the men came through like a river bursting through a dam. The defenders died like flies along the broken ramparts, but human power could not stem that tide. They rode into the streets and the battle became a massacre. Their swords knew no mercy. Priests died at their altars, women in their courtyards, children at their play. Bodies choked the streets, the gutters ran crimson, and through it all rode Zenkri on his black stallion like a phantom of Death.”

“Yet you escaped?”

The cold eyes became more somber.

“I had a small band of men-at-arms. When I was dashed senseless from my saddle by a mace, they took me up and rode for the western gate. Most of them died in the winding streets, but the survivors brought me to safety. When I recovered my senses the city lay far behind me.

“But I rode back.” The speaker seemed to have forgotten his audience. His eyes were distant, withdrawn; his bearded chin rested on his mailed fist; he seemed to be speaking to himself. “Aye, I had ridden into the teeth of hell itself. But I met a servant, fallen death-stricken among the straggling fugitives, and ere he died he told me that she whom I sought was dead – struck down by a memluk’s scimitar.”

Shaking his iron-clad shoulders he roused himself as from a bitter revery. His eyes grew cold and hard again; the harsh timbre re-entered his voice.

“The years have seen a great change in Edessa, I hear. Zenkri rebuilt the walls and has made it one of his strongest holds. Our hold on the land is crumbling and tearing away. With a little aid, Zenkri will surge over and obliterate all vestiges of opposition.”

“That aid may come from the north,” muttered a bearded man-at-arms. “I was in the train of the barons who marched with this opposition when Zenkri outmaneuvered him. The emperor has no love for us.”

“Bah! He is at least a man of his word,” laughed the man who called himself Kratis, running his restless fingers through his clustering locks.

The man's cold eyes narrowed suddenly as they rested on a heavy golden ring of curious design on the other’s finger, but he said nothing.

Heedless of the intensity of the man’s stare, Kratis rose and tossed a coin on the table to pay his reckoning. With a careless word of farewell to the idlers he rose and strode out of the inn with a clanking of armor. The men inside heard him shouting impatiently for his horse. And the other rose, took up shield and helmet, and followed.

The man known as Kratis had covered perhaps a half-mile, and the castle on the hill was but a faint bulk behind him, gemmed by a few points of light, when a drum of hoofs made him wheel with a guttural oath that was not of this land. In the dim starlight he made out the form of his recent inn companion, and he laid hand on his jewelled hilt. The soldier drew up beside him and spoke to the grimly silent figure.

“Your destination lies the other way. Perhaps you have taken the wrong road by mischance. Three hours’ ride in this direction will bring you into enemy territory.”

“Friend,” retorted the other, “I have not asked your advice concerning my road. Whether I go east or west is scarcely your affair.”

“It is my affair to inquire into suspicious actions within this domain. When I see a man travelling under false pretences, with an enemy ring on his finger, riding by night toward the border, it seems suspicious enough for me to make inquiries.”

“I can explain my actions if I see fit,” brusquely answered Kratis, “but these insulting accusations I will answer at the sword’s point. What mean you by false pretensions?”

“You are not Kratis. You are not even of Corinthia.”

“No?” A sneer rasped in the other’s voice as he slipped his sword from its sheath.

“No. I have seen the northern mercenaries who serve the emperor. I can not forget your hawk face. You are a spy.”

A wild beast snarl burst from the masquerader’s lips and his horse screamed and leaped convulsively as he struck in the spurs, throwing all his frame behind his sword arm as the beast plunged. But the soldier was too seasoned a fighter to be caught so easily. With a wrench of his rein he brought his steed round, rearing. The man's frantic horse plunged past, and the whistling sword struck fire from the man’s lifted shield. With a furious yell the fierce man wheeled again to the assault, and the horses reared together while the swords of their riders hissed, circled in flashing arcs, and fell with ringing clash on mail-links or shield.

The men fought in grim silence, save for the panting of straining effort, but the clangor of their swords awoke the still night and sparks flew as from a blacksmith’s anvil. Then with a deafening crash a broadsword shattered a helmet and splintered the skull within. There followed a loud clash of armor as the loser fell heavily from his saddle. A riderless horse galloped away, and the conqueror, shaking the sweat from his eyes, dismounted and bent above the motionless steel-clad figure.

IV

On the road that leads south from Edessa to Rakka, the host lay encamped, the lines of gay-colored pavilions spread out in the plains. It was a leisurely march, with wagons, luxurious equipment, and whole households with women and slaves. After two years in Edessa the king of Mosul was returning to his capital by the way of Rakka. Fires glimmered in the gathering dusk where the first stars were peeping; lutes twanged and voices were lifted in song and laughter about the cooking-pots.

Before Zenkri, playing at chess with his friend and chronicler, the Shemite Ousama of Sheyzar, came the eunuch Yaruktash, who bowed low and in his squeaky voice intoned, “Oh, Lion of Corinthia, a king of the infidels desires audience with thee – the captain called Wulfgar Edric’s son. The chief Il-Ghazi and his men came upon him, riding alone, and would have slain him but he threw up his arm and on his hand they saw the ring thou gavest the emperor as a secret sign for his messengers.”

Zenkri tugged his gray-shot black beard and grinned, well pleased.

“Let him be brought before me.” The slave bowed and withdrew.

To Ousama, Zenkri said, “the gods, what dogs are these men, who betray and cut one another’s throats for the promise of gold or land!”

“Is it well to trust such a man?” queried Ousama. “If he will betray his kind, he will surely betray you if he may.”

“May I be burned alive if I trust him,” retorted Zenkri, moving a chessman with a jewelled finger. “As I move this pawn I will move the dog-emperor of the Corinthians. With his aid I will crack the kings of the west like nutshells. I have promised him a fair chunk of their lands, and he will keep his promises until he thinks his prizes are in his hands. Ha! Not towns but the sword-edge I will give him. What we take together shall be mine, nor will that suffice me. By the gods, not all the west is enough! I will cross the Black River! I will ride my stallion through the palaces on the Golden Horn! All shall tremble before me!”

The impact of his voice was like that of a harsh-throated trumpet, almost stunning the hearers with its dynamic intensity. His eyes blazed, his fingers knotted like iron on the chessboard.

“You are old, Zenkri,” warned the cautious Shemite. “You have done much. Is there no limit to your ambitions?”

“Aye!” laughed the man. “The horn of the moon and the points of the stars! Old? Eleven years older than thyself, and younger in spirit than thou wert ever. My thews are steel, my heart is fire, my wits keener even than on the day I broke Sadaka and set my feet on the shining stairs of glory! Peace, here comes the spy.”

A small boy of about eight years of age, sitting cross-legged on a cushion near the edge of the dais whereon lay Zenkri’s divan, had been staring up in rapt adoration. His fine brown eyes sparkled as Zenkri spoke of his ambition, and his small frame quivered with excitement, as if his soul had taken fire from the man’s wild words. Now he looked at the entrance of the pavilion with the others, as the soldiers entered with the visitor between them, his scabbard empty. They had taken his weapons outside the royal tent.

The soldiers fell back and ranged themselves on either side of the dais, leaving the man in an open space before their master. Zenkri’s keen eyes swept over the tall form in its glittering gold-worked mail, took in the clean-shaven face with its cold eyes, and rested on the inscribed ring on the man’s finger.

“My master, the emperor,” said the man, “sends thee greeting, oh Zenkri, Lion of Corinthia.”

As he spoke he took in the details of the impressive figure, clad in steel, silk and gold, before him; the strong dark face, the powerful frame which, despite the years, betokened steel-spring muscles and unquenchable vitality; above all the king’s eyes, gleaming with unperishable youth and innate fierceness.

“And what said thy master, oh Wulfgar?” asked the man.

“He sends thee this letter,” answered the man, drawing forth a packet and proffering it to Yaruktash, who in turn, and on his knees, delivered it to Zenkri. The king perused the parchment, signed in the Emperor’s unmistakable hand and sealed with the royal Byzantine seal. Zenkri never dealt with underlings, but always with the highest power of friends or foes.

“The seals have been broken,” said the man, fixing his piercing eyes on the inscrutable countenance of the man. “Thou hast read?”

“Aye. I was pursued by men of the prince, and fearing lest I be seized and searched, I opened the missive and read it, so that if I were forced to destroy it lest it fall into enemy hands, I could repeat the message to thee by word of mouth.”

“Let me hear, then, if thy memory be equal to thy discretion,” commanded the king.

“As thou wilt. My master says to thee, ‘Concerning that which hath passed between us, I must have better proof of thy good faith. Wherefore do thou send me by this messenger, who, though unknown to thee, is a man to be trusted, full details of thy desires and good proof of the aid thou hast promised us in the proposed movement against the north. Before I put to sea I must know that thou art ready to move by land, and there must be binding oaths between us.’ And the missive is signed with the emperor’s own hand.”

The man nodded; a mirthful devil danced in his blue eyes.

“They are his very words. Blessed is the monarch who boasts such a vassal. Sit ye upon that heap of cushions; meat and drink shall be brought to you.”

Calling Yaruktash, Zenkri whispered in his ear. The eunuch started, stared, and then salaamed and hastened from the pavilion. Slaves brought food and the forbidden wine in golden vessels, and the spy broke his fast with unfeigned relish. Zenkri watched him inscrutably and the glittering soldiers stood like statues of burnished steel.

“You came first to Edessa?” asked the king.

“Nay. When I left I set forth for Edessa, but I had scarce crossed the border when a band of wandering Shemites, recognizing your ring, told me you were on the march for Rakka, thence to Mosul. So I turned aside and rode to cut your line of march, and my way being made clear for me by virtue of the ring which all your subjects know, I was at last met by the chief Il-Ghazi who escorted me thither.”

Zenkri nodded his leonine head slowly.

“Mosul calls me. I go back to my capital to gather my hawks, to brace my lines. When I return I will sweep all before me with the aid of – thy master.

“But I forget the courtesy due a guest. This is the prince Ousama of Sheyzar, and this child is the son of my friend Nejm-ed-din, who saved my army and my life when I fled from Karaja the Cup-bearer – one of the few foes who ever saw my back. His father dwells at Baalbekk, which I gave him to rule, but I have taken Yusef with me to look on Mosul. Verily, he is more to me than my own sons. I have named him Salah-ed-din, and he shall be a thorn in the flesh of my enemies.”

At this instant Yaruktash entered and whispered in Zenkri’s ear, and the king nodded.

As the eunuch withdrew, Zenkri turned to the man. His manner had changed subtly. His lids drooped over his glittering eyes and a faint hint of mockery curled his bearded lips.

“I would show you one whose countenance you know of old,” said he.

The man looked up in surprize.

“Have I a friend in the hosts of Mosul?”

“You shall see!” Zenkri clapped his hands, and Yaruktash, appearing at the door of the pavilion grasping a slender white wrist, dragged the owner into view and cast her from him so that she fell to the carpet almost at the man’s feet. With a terrible cry he started up, his face deathly.

“Princess Kassa! By Crom! Alive!”

“Conan!” she echoed his cry, struggling to her knees. In a mist of stupefaction he saw her white arms outstretched, her pale face framed in the golden hair which fell over the white shoulders the scanty harim garb left bare. Forgetting all else he fell to his knees beside her, gathering her into his arms.

“Kassa! I had hacked a path through the legions of hell itself – but they said you were dead. Musa, before he died at my feet, swore he saw you lying in your blood among the corpses of your servants in your courtyard.”

“Would the gods it had been so!” she sobbed, her golden head against his steel-clad breast. “But when they cut down my servants I fell among the bodies in a swoon, and their blood stained my garments; so men thought me dead. It was Zenkri himself who found me alive, and took me – ” She hid her face in her hands.
“And so, Conan,” broke in the sardonic voice of the man, “you have found a friend among my forces! Fool! My senses are keener than a whetted sword. Think you I did not know you, despite your clean-shaven face? I saw you too often on the ramparts of Edessa, hewing down my soldiers. I knew you as soon as you entered. What have you done with the real messenger?”

Grimly Conan disengaged himself from the girl’s clinging arms and rose, facing the king. Zenkri likewise rose, quick and lithe as a great panther, and drew his scimitar, while from all sides the heron-feathered soldiers began to edge in silently. Conan’ hand fell away from his empty scabbard and his eyes rested for an instant on something close to his feet – a curved knife, used for carving fruit, and lying there forgotten, half hidden under a cushion.

“Wulfgar Edric’s son lies dead among the trees on the road,” said Conan grimly. “I shaved off my beard and took his armor and the ring the dog bore.”

“The better to spy on me,” quoth Zenkri.

“Aye.” There was no fear in Conan. “I wished to learn the details of the plot you hatched, and to obtain proofs of his treachery and your ambitions to show to the lords of the west.”

“I deduced as much,” smiled Zenkri. “I knew you, as I said. But I wished you to betray yourself fully; hence the girl, who has spoken your name with weeping many times in the years of her captivity.”

“It was an unworthy gesture and one in keeping with your character,” said Conan sombrely. “Yet I thank you for allowing me to see her once more, and to know that she is alive whom I thought long dead.”

“I have done her great honour,” answered Zenkri laughing. “She has been in my harim for two years.”

Conan’ grim eyes only grew more somber, but the great veins swelled almost to bursting along his temples. At his feet the girl covered her face with her white hands and wept silently. The boy on the cushion looked about uncertainly, not understanding. Ousama’s fine eyes were touched with pity. But Zenkri grinned broadly. Such scenes were like wine to the man, shaking inwardly with the gargantuan laughter of his breed.

“You shall bless me for my bounty, Conan,” said Zenkri. “For my kingly generosity you shall give praise. Lo, the girl is yours! When I tear you between four wild horses tomorrow, she shall accompany you to hell on a pointed stake – ha!”

Like a striking cobra Conan had moved. Snatching the knife from beneath the cushion he leaped – not at the guarded king on the divan, but at the child on the edge of the dais. Before any could stop him, he caught up the boy with one hand, and with the other pressed the curved edge to his throat.

“Back, dogs!” His voice cracked with mad triumph. “Back, or I send this spawn to hell!”

Zenkri, his face livid, yelled a frenzied order, and the soldiers fell back. Then while the king stood trembling and uncertain, at a loss for the first and only time of his whole wild career, he backed toward the door, holding his captive, who neither cried out nor struggled. The contemplative brown eyes showed no fear, only a fatalistic resignation of a philosophy beyond the owner’s years.

“To me, Kassa!” snapped the man, his somber despair changed to dynamic action. “Out of the door behind me – back, dogs, I say!”

Out of the pavilion he backed, and the soldiers who ran up, sword in hand, stopped short as they saw the imminent peril of their lord’s favorite. Conan knew that the success of his action depended on speed. The surprize and boldness of his move had taken Zenkri off guard, that was all. A group of horses stood near by, saddled and bridled, always ready for the king’s whim, and Conan reached them with a single long stride, the grooms falling back from his threat.

“Into a saddle, Kassa!” he snapped, and the girl, who had followed him like one in a daze, reacting mechanically to his orders, swung herself up on the nearest mount. Quickly he followed suit and cut the tethers that held their mounts. A bellow from inside the tent told him Zenkri’s momentarily scattered wits were working again, and he dropped the child unhurt into the sand. His usefulness was past, as a hostage. Zenkri, taken by surprise, had instinctively followed the promptings of his unusual affection for the child, but Conan knew that with his ruthless reason dominating him again, the king would not allow even that affection to stand in the way of their recapture.

The man wheeled away, drawing Kassa’s steed with him, trying to shield her with his own body from the arrows which were already whistling about them. Shoulder to shoulder they raced across the wide open space in front of the royal pavilion, burst through a ring of fires, floundered for an instant among tent-pegs, cords and scurrying yelling figures, then struck the open desert flying and heard the clamor die out behind them.

It was dark, clouds flying across the sky and drowning the stars. With the clatter of hoofs behind them, Conan reined aside from the road that led westward, and turned into the trackless desert. Behind them the hoof-beats faded westward. The pursuers had taken the old caravan road, supposing the fugitives to be ahead of them.

“What now, Conan?” Kassa was riding alongside, and clinging to his iron-sheathed arm as if she feared he might fade suddenly from her sight.

“If we ride straight for the border they will have us before dawn,” he answered. “But I know this land as well as they – I have ridden all over it of old in foray and war with the counts of Edessa; so I know that Jabar Kal’at lies within our reach to the southwest. The commander of Jabar is a nephew of Muin-ed-din Anar, who is the real ruler there, and who, as perhaps you know, has made a pact with our allies against Zenkri, his old rival. If we can reach Jabar, the commander will give us shelter and food, and fresh horses and an escort to the border.”

The girl bowed her head in acquiescence. She was still like one dazed. The light of hope burned too feebly in her soul to sting her with new pangs. Perhaps in her captivity she had absorbed some of the fatalism of her masters. Conan looked at her, drooping in the saddle, humble and silent, and thought of the picture he retained of a saucy, laughing beauty, vibrant with vitality and mirth. And he cursed Zenkri and his works with sick fury. So through the night they rode, the broken woman and the embittered man, handiworks of the Lion who dealt in swords and souls and human hearts, and whose victims, living and dead, filled the land like a blight of sorrow, agony and despair.

All night they pressed forward as fast as they dared, listening for sounds that would tell them the pursuers had found their trail, and in the dawn, which lit the helmets of swift-following horsemen, they saw the towers of Jabar rising above the mirroring waters of the Corinthia. It was a strong keep, guarded with a moat that encircled it, connecting with the river at either end. At their hail the commander of the castle appeared on the wall, and a few words sufficed to cause the drawbridge to be lowered. It was not a moment too soon. As they clattered across the bridge, the drum of hoofs was in their ears, and as they passed through the gates, arrows fell in a shower about them.

The leader of the pursuers reined his rearing steed and called arrogantly to the commander on the tower, “Oh man, give up these fugitives, lest thy blood quench the embers of thy keep!”

“Am I then a dog that you speak to me thus?” queried the soldier, clutching his beard in passion. “Begone, or my archers will feather thy carcass with fifty shafts.”

For answer the man laughed jeeringly and pointed to the desert. The commander paled. Far away the sun glinted on a moving ocean of steel. His practiced eye told him that a whole army was on the march. “Zenkri has turned aside from his march to Mosul to hunt down a pair of fleeing jackals,” called the man mockingly. “Great honor he has done them, marching hard on their spoor all night. Send them out, oh fool, and my master will ride on in peace.”

“Let it be as the gods wills,” said the other, recovering his poise. “But the friends of my uncle have thrown themselves into my hands, and may shame rest on me and mine if I give them to the butcher.”

Nor did he alter his resolution when Zenkri himself, his face dark with passion as the cloak that flowed from his steel-clad shoulders, sat his stallion beneath the towers and called to him: “By receiving mine enemy thou hast forfeited thy castle and thy life. Yet I will be merciful. Send out those who fled and I will allow thee to march out unharmed with thy retainers and women. Persist in this madness and I will burn thee like a rat in thy castle.”

“Let it be as the gods wills,” repeated the man philosophically, and in an undertone spoke quietly to a crouching archer, “Drive me quickly a shaft through yon dog.”

The arrow glanced harmlessly from Zenkri’s breastplate and the king galloped out of range with a shout of mocking laughter. Now began the siege of Jabar Kal’at, unsung and unglorified, yet in the course of which the dice of Fate were cast.

Zenkri’s riders laid waste the surrounding countryside and drew a cordon about the castle through which no courier could steal to ride for aid. While the king and the lords of remained in ignorance of what was taking place beyond Corinthia, their ally waged his unequal battle.

By nightfall the wagons and siege engines came up, and Zenkri set to his task with the skill of long practice. The manish sappers dammed up the moat at the upper end, despite the arrows of the defenders, and filled up the drained ditch with earth and stone. Under cover of darkness they sank mines beneath the towers. Zenkri’s ballistas creaked and crashed, and huge rocks knocked men off the walls like ten-pins or smashed through the roofs of the towers. His rams gnawed and pounded at the walls, his archers plied the turrets with their arrows everlastingly, and on scaling-ladders and storming-towers his soldiers moved unceasingly to the onset. Food waned in the castle’s larders; the heaps of dead grew larger, the rooms became full of wounded men, groaning and writhing.

But the commander did not falter on the path his feet had taken. He knew that he could not now buy safety from Zenkri, even by giving up his guests; to his credit, he never even considered giving them up. Conan knew this, and though no word of the matter was spoken between them, the commander had evidence of the man’s fierce gratitude. Conan showed his appreciation in actions, not words – in the fighting on the walls, in the slaughter in the gates, in the long night-watches on the towers; with whirring sword-strokes that clove bucklers and peaked helmets, that cleft spines and severed necks and limbs and shattered skulls; by the casting down of scaling-ladders when the clinging mans howled as they crashed to their death, and their comrades cried out at the terrible strength in the man’s naked hands. But the rams crunched, the arrows sang, the steel tides surged on again and again, and the haggard defenders dropped one by one until only a skeleton force held the crumbling walls of Jabar Kal’at.

V

In his pavilion little more than a bowshot from the beleaguered walls, Zenkri played chess with Ousama. The madness of the day had given way to the brooding silence of night, broken only by the distant cries of wounded men in delirium.

“Men are my pawns, friend,” said the king. “I turn adversity into triumph. I had long sought an excuse to attack Jabar Kal’at, which will make a strong outpost against the Corinthians once I have taken it and repaired the dents I have made, and filled it with my soldiers. I knew my captives would ride hither; that is why I broke camp and took up the march before my scouts found their tracks. It was their logical refuge. I will have the castle and all of Corinthia, which last is most vital. Were they to learn now of my intrigue with the emperor, my plans might well come to naught. But they will not know until I strike. Conan will never bear news to them. If he does not fall with the castle, I will tear him between wild horses as I promised, and the infidel girl shall watch, sitting on a pointed stake.”

“Is there no mercy in your soul, Zenkri?” protested the Shemite.

“Has life shown mercy to me save what I wrung forth by the sword?” exclaimed Zenkri, his eyes blazing in a momentary upheaval of his passionate spirit. “A man must smite or be smitten – slay or be slain. Men are wolves, and I am but the strongest wolf of the pack. Because they fear me, men crawl and kiss my sandals. Fear is the only emotion by which they may be touched.”

“You are godless at heart, Zenkri,” sighed Ousama.

“It may be,” answered the man with a shrug of his shoulders. “Had I been born beyond the rivers to the east and bowed to yellow Erlik as did my grandsire, I had been no less Zenkri the Lion. I have spilled rivers of gore for the glory of the gods, but I have never asked mercy or favor of Him. What care the gods if a man lives or dies? Let me live deep, let me know the sting of wine in my palate, the wind in my face, the glitter of royal pageantry, the bright madness of slaughter – let me burn and sting and tingle with the madness of life and living, and I quest not whether paradise, or Erlik’s frozen hell, or the blackness of empty oblivion lies beyond.”

As if to give point to his words, he poured himself a goblet of wine and looked interrogatively at Ousama. The Shemite, who had shuddered at Zenkri’s blasphemous words, drew back in pious horror. The king emptied the goblet, smacking his lips loudly in relish.

“I think Jabar Kal’at will fall tomorrow,” he said. “Who has stood against me? Count them, Ousama – there was Sadaka, and the Athros, and Timurtash, and the sultan Dawud, and the king, and the count of Edessa. Man after man, city after city, army after army, I broke them and brushed them from my path.”

“You have waded through a sea of blood,” said Ousama. “You have filled the slave-markets with girls, and the deserts with the bones of warriors. Nor have you spared your rivals.”

“They stood in the way of my destiny,” laughed the man, “and that destiny is to be Emperor of Hyboria! As I will be. I have welded the swords of many into a single blade. Now with the aid of the Corthinians, all Hell can not save the west. Slaughter? Men have seen naught; wait until I ride into Aquilonia and Nemedia, sword in hand!”

“Your heart is steel,” said the Shemite. “Yet I have seen one touch of tenderness in you – your affection for Nejm-ed-din’s son Yusef. Is there a like touch of repentance in you? Of all your deeds, is there none you regret?”

Zenkri played with a pawn in silence, and his face darkened.

“Aye,” he said slowly. “It was long ago, when I broke Sadaka beside the lower reaches of this very river. He had a son, Achmar, a girl-faced boy. I beat him to death with my riding-scourge. It is the one deed I could wish undone. Sometimes I dream of it.”

Then with an abrupt “Enough!” he thrust aside the board, scattering the chessmen. “I would sleep,” said he, and throwing himself on his cushion-heaped divan, he was instantly locked in slumber. Ousama went quietly from the tent, passing between the four giant soldiers in gilded mail who stood with wide-tipped scimitars at the pavilion door.

In the castle of Jabar, the commander held counsel with Conan. “My brother, for us the end of the road has come. The walls are crumbling, the towers leaning to their fall. Shall we not fire the castle, cut the throats of our women and children, and go forth to die like men in the dawn?”

Conan shook his head. “Let us hold the walls for one more day. In a dream I saw the banners of our allies marching to our aid.”

He lied in a desperate attempt to bolster up the fatalistic commander. Each followed the instinct of his kind, and Conan’ was to cling with teeth and nails to the last vestige of life until the bitter end. The man bowed his head.

“If the gods will it, we will hold the walls for another day.”

Conan thought of Kassa, into whose manner something of the old vibrant spirit was beginning to steal faintly again, and in the blackness of his despair no light gleamed from earth or heaven. The finding of her had stung to life a heart long frozen; now in death he must lose her again. With the taste of bitter ashes in his mouth he bent his shoulders anew to the burden of life.

Ashes.

“Think me not a coward, Commander. For I must ask for your leave. I have found a way to make their forces retreat.”

In his tent Zenkri moved restlessly. Alert as a panther, even in sleep, his instinct told him that someone was moving stealthily near him. He woke and sat up glaring. The fat eunuch Yaruktash halted suddenly, the wine jug half-way to his lips. He had thought Zenkri lay helplessly drunk when he stole into the tent to filch the liquor he loved. Zenkri snarled like a wolf, his familiar devil rising in his brain.

“Dog! Am I a fat merchant that you steal into my tent to guzzle my wine? Begone! Tomorrow I will see to you!”

Cold sweat beaded Yaruktash’s sleek hide as he fled from the royal pavilion. His fat flesh quivered with agonized anticipation of the sharp stake which would undoubtedly be his portion. In a day of cruel masters, Zenkri’s name was a byword of horror among slaves and servitors.

One of the soldiers outside the tent caught Yaruktash’s arm and growled, “Why flee you, gelding?”

A great flare of light rose in the eunuch’s brain, so that he gasped at its grandeur and audacity. Why remain here to be impaled, when the whole desert was open before him, and here were men who would protect him in his flight?

“Our lord discovered me drinking his wine,” he gasped. “He threatens me with torture and death.”

The soldiers laughed appreciatively, their crude humor touched by the eunuch’s fright. Then they started convulsively as Yaruktash added, “You too are doomed. I heard him curse you for not keeping better watch, and allowing his slaves to steal his wine.”

The fact that they had never been told to bar the eunuch from the royal pavilion meant nothing to the soldiers, their wits frozen with sudden fear. They stood dumbly, incapable of coherent thought, their minds like empty jugs ready to be filled with the eunuch’s guile. A few whispered words and they slunk away like shadows on Yaruktash’s heels, leaving the pavilion unguarded.

The night waned. Midnight hovered and was gone. The moon sank below the desert hills in a welter of blood. From dreams of imperial pageantry Zenkri again awoke, to stare bewilderedly about the dim-lit pavilion. Without, all was silence that seemed suddenly tense and sinister. The prince lay in the midst of ten thousand armed men; yet he felt suddenly apart and alone, as if he were the last man left alive on a dead world. Then he saw that he was not alone. Looking somberly down on him stood a strange and alien figure. It was a man, whose rags did not hide his gaunt limbs, at which Zenkri stared appalled. They were gnarled like the twisted branches of ancient oaks, knotted with masses of muscle and thews, each of which stood out distinct, like iron cables. There was no soft flesh to lend symmetry or to mask the raw savagery of sheer power. Only years of incredible labor could have produced this terrible monument of muscular over-development. Black hair hung about the great shoulders, ashes were streaked upon the mighty dark breast. His terrible arms were folded, and he stood motionless as a black statue looking down upon the stupefied man. His features were gaunt and deep-lined, as if cut by some mad artist’s chisel from bitter, frozen rock.

“Avaunt!” gasped Zenkri, momentarily a pagan of the steppes. “Spirit of evil – ghost of the desert – demon of the hills – I fear you not!”

“Well may you speak of ghosts, man!” The deep hollow voice woke dim memories in Zenkri’s brain. “I am the ghost of a man you thought dead, come up from darkness deeper than the darkness of hell. Have you forgotten my promise, King Zenkri?”

“Who are you?” demanded the man.

“I am Conan of Cimmeria.”

“Impossible!” ejaculated the king. “How could you escape the clutches of my forces and then force yourself back in a single day?”

“I managed,” retorted the other. “In places where others would die like flies, I live. The lash that scarred my back in a thousand overlying patterns could not kill me, nor starvation, nor storm, nor pestilence, nor battle. Escaping your camp did not kill me nor did finding this tent. The years have been long, Zenkri, and the darkness deep and full of mocking voices and haunting faces. Look at these monstrous talons that were hands, these knotted limbs – they have driven the weighted oars for many a thousand leagues through storm and calm. Yet I lived, Zenkri, even when my flesh cried out to end the long agony. When I fainted on the oar, it was not the ripping lash that roused me to life anew, but the hate that would not let me die. That hate has kept the soul in my tortured body for three years, dog of Corinthia. In the galleys I lost my hope, my manhood, my soul, my faith and my the gods. But my hate burned on, a flame that nothing could quench.

“Years at the oars, Zenkri! Three weeks ago the galley in which I then toiled crashed on the reefs off the coast of Vendhya. All died but me, who, knowing my hour had come, burst my chains with the strength and madness of a giant, and gained the shore. My feet are yet unsteady from the shackles and the galley-bench, Zenkri, though my arms are strong beyond the belief of man. I have been on the road from there for three years. But the road ends here.”

For the first time in his life Zenkri knew fear that froze his tongue to his palate and turned the marrow in his bones to ice.

“Ho, guards!” he roared. “To me, dogs!”

“Call louder, Zenkri!” said Conan in his hollow resounding voice. “They hear thee not. Through thy sleeping host I passed like the Angel of Death, and none saw me. Thy tent stood unguarded. Lo, mine enemy, thou art delivered into my hand, and thine hour has come!”

With the ferocity of desperation Zenkri leaped from his cushions, whipping out a dagger, but like a great gaunt tiger the Cimmerian was upon him, crushing him back on the divan. The man struck blindly, felt the blade sink deep into the other’s side; then as he wrenched the weapon free to strike again, he felt an iron grip on his wrist, and the Cimmerian’s right hand locked on his throat, choking his cry.

As he felt the inhuman strength of his attacker, blind panic swept the king. The fingers on his wrist did not feel like human bone and flesh and sinew. They were like the steel jaws of a vise that crushed through flesh and muscle. Over the inexorable fingers that sank into his bull-throat, blood trickled from skin torn like rotten cloth. Mad with the torture of strangulation, Zenkri tore at the wrist with his free hand, but he might have been wrenching at a steel bar welded to his throat. The massed muscles of Conan’s left arm knotted with effort, and with a sickening snap Zenkri’s wrist-bones gave way. The dagger fell from his nerveless hand, and instantly Conan caught it up and sank the point into the king’s breast.

The man released the arm that prisoned his throat, and caught the knife-wrist, but all his desperate strength could not stay the inexorable thrust. Slowly, slowly, Conan drove home the keen point, while the man writhed in soundless agony. Approaching through the mists which veiled his glazing sight, Zenkri saw a face, raw, torn and bleeding. And then the dagger-point found his heart and visions and life ended together.

Ousama, unable to sleep, approached the king’s tent, wondering at the absence of the guardsmen. He stopped short, an uncanny fear prickling the short hairs at the back of his neck, as a form came from the pavilion. He made out a tall white-bearded man, clad in rags. The Shemite stretched forth a hand timidly, but dared not touch the apparition. He saw that the figure’s hand was pressed against its left side, and blood oozed darkly from between the fingers.

“Where go you, man?” stammered the Shemite, involuntarily stepping back as the white-bearded stranger fixed weird blazing eyes upon him.

“I go back to the void which gave me birth,” answered the figure in a deep ghostly voice, and as the Shemite stared in bewilderment, the stranger passed on with slow, certain, unwavering steps, to vanish in the darkness.

Ousama ran into Zenkri’s tent – to halt aghast at sight of the king’s body lying stark among the torn silks and bloodstained cushions of the royal divan.

“Alas for kingly ambitions and high visions!” exclaimed the Shemite. “Death is a black horse that may halt in the night by any tent, and life is more unstable than the foam on the sea! The Lion that roared against all of Hyboria lies lifeless!”

Like wildfire ran through the camp the word of the king’s death, and like chaff blown on the winds his followers scattered, looting the camp as they fled. The power that had welded them together was broken, and it was every man for himself, and the plunder to the strong.

The haggard defenders on the walls, lifting their notched stumps of blades for the last death-grapple, gaped as they saw the confusion in the camp, the running to and fro, the brawling, the looting and shouting, and at last the scattering over the plain of kings and retainers alike. These hawks lived by the sword, and they had no time for the dead, however regal. They turned their steeds aside to seek a new lord, in a race for the strongest.

The following morning, Conan stood and smiled with Kassa and their friend, staring down on a silent and abandoned camp, where the torn deserted tent flapped idly in the morning breeze above the blood-stained body that had been the Lion of Corinthia.

Sons of the White Wolf

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I —

The Battle Standard

The commander of the Turanian outpost of El Ashraf was awakened before dawn by the stamp of horses and jingle of accoutrements. He sat up and shouted for his orderly. There was no response, so he rose, hurriedly jerked on his garments, and strode out of the mud but that served as his headquarters. What he saw rendered him momentarily speechless.

His command was mounted, in full marching formation, drawn up near the road that it was their duty to guard. The plain to the left of the track where the tents of the troopers had stood now lay bare. The tents had been loaded on the baggage camels which stood fully packed and ready to move out. The commandant glared wildly, doubting his own senses, until his eyes rested on a flag borne by a trooper. The waving pennant did not display the familiar crescent. The commandant turned pale.

“What does this mean?” he shouted, striding forward. His lieutenant, Osman, glanced at him inscrutably. Osman was a tall man, hard and supple as steel, with a dark keen face.

“Mutiny, effendi,” he replied calmly. “We are sick of this war we fight for the Turanians. We are sick of Djemal Pasha and those other fools of the Council of Unity and Progress, and, incidentally, of you. So we are going into the hills to build a tribe of our own.”

“Madness!” gasped the officer, tugging at his revolver. Even as he drew it, Osman stabbed him through the head.

The lieutenant sheathed the bloodied knife and turned to the troopers. The ranks were his to a man, won to his wild ambition under the very nose of the officer who now lay there with his brains oozing.

“Listen!” he commanded.

In the tense silence they all heard the low, deep reverberation in the west.

“Swords!” said Osman. “Slicing the Turanian Empire to bits! The Empire has failed. What Hyboria needs is not a new party, but a new race! There are thousands of fighting men between the Shemite coast and the Iranistani highlands, ready to be roused by a new word, a new prophet! The East is moving in her sleep. Ours is the duty to awaken her!

“You have all sworn to follow me into the hills. Let us return to the ways of our pagan ancestors who worshipped the White Wolf on the steppes of Hyrkania before they bowed to the creed of these dogs!

“We have reached the end of the Turanian Age. We abjure Yildiz's power as a superstition fostered by an epileptic camel driver. Our people have copied his own ways too long. But we hundred men are true Turan! We have burned our way to freedom. We bow not toward the king, nor swear by their false gods. And now follow me as we plan —to establish ourselves in a strong position in the hills and to seize their women for our wives.”

“Our sons will be half Turanian,” someone protested.

“A man is the son of his father,” retorted Osman. “We Turanians have always looted the harims of the world for our women, but our sons are always Turanians.

“Come! We have arms, horses, supplies. If we linger we shall be crushed with the rest of the army on the coast and the reinforcements they are bringing up from the south. Onto El Awad! The sword for the men—captivity, for the women!”

His voice cracked like a whip as he snapped the orders that set the lines in motion. In perfect order they moved off through the lightening dawn toward the range of saw-edged hills in the distance. Behind them the air still vibrated with the distant rumble of the Brythunian forces. Over them waved a banner that bore the head of a white wolf - —the battle-standard of most ancient Turan.

II

Massacre

When Olga von Bruckmann, known as a famous German secret agent, arrived at the tiny Shemite hill-village of El Awad, it was in a drizzling rain, that made the dusk a blinding curtain over the muddy town.

With her companion, a Shemite named Ahmed, she rode into the muddy street, and the villagers crept from their hovels to stare in awe at the first white woman most of them had ever seen.

A few words from Ahmed and the shaykh salaamed and showed her to the best mud hut in the village. The horses were led away to feed and shelter, and Ahmed paused long enough to whisper to his companion:

“El Awad is friendly to the Turanians. Have no fear. I shall be near, in any event.”

“Try and get fresh horses,” she urged. “I must push on as soon as possible.”

“The shaykh swears there isn’t a horse in the village in fit condition to be ridden. He may be lying. But at any rate our own horses will be rested enough to go on by dawn. Even with fresh horses it would be useless to try to go any farther tonight. We’d lose our way among the hills, and in this region there’s always the risk of running into Zuagir raiders.”

Olga knew that Ahmed knew she carried important secret documents, and she knew from experience that she could trust his loyalty. Removing only her dripping cloak and riding boots, she stretched herself on the dingy blankets that served as a bed. She was worn out from the strain of the journey.

She was the first white woman ever to attempt to ride. Only the protection accorded a trusted secret agent by the long arm of the Turanian government, and her guide’s zeal and craft, had brought her thus far in safety.

She fell asleep, thinking of the long weary miles still to be traveled, and even greater dangers, now that she had come into the region where the Shemites were fighting their Turanian masters. The Turanians still held the country, that summer, but lightning-like raids flashed across the desert, blowing up trains, cutting tracks and butchering the inhabitants of isolated posts. Someone was leading the tribes northward, and rumour had it that it was the mysterious Cimmerian, Conan, whose name was one to hush children.

She never knew how long she slept, but she awoke suddenly and sat up, in fright and bewilderment. The rain still beat on the roof, but there mingled with it shrieks of pain or fear, yells and the staccato crackling of weapons. She sprang up, lighted a candle and was just pulling on her boots when the door was hurled open violently.

Ahmed reeled in, his dark face livid, blood oozing through the fingers that clutched his breast.

“The village is attacked!” he cried chokingly. “Men in Turanian uniform! There must be some mistake! They know El Awad is friendly! I tried to tell their officer we are friends, but he shot me! We must get away, quick!”

A shot cracked in the open door behind him and a firey arrow spurted from the blackness. Ahmed groaned and crumpled. Olga cried out in horror, staring wide-eyed at the figure who stood before her. A tall, wiry man in Turanian uniform blocked the door. He was handsome in a dark, hawklike way, and he eyed her in a manner that brought the blood to her cheeks.

“Why did you kill that man?” she demanded. “He was a trusted servant of your country.”

“I have no country,” he answered, moving toward her. Outside the firing was dying away and women’s voices were lifted piteously. “I go to build one, as my ancestor Osman did.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she retorted. “But unless you provide me with an escort to the nearest post, I shall report you to your superiors, and—”

He laughed wildly at her. “I have no superiors, you little fool! I am an empire builder, I tell you! I have a hundred armed men at my disposal. I’ll build a new race in these hills.” His eyes blazed as he spoke.

“You’re mad!” she exclaimed.

“Mad? It’s you who are mad not to recognize the possibilities as I have! This war is bleeding the life out of the East. When it’s over, no matter who wins, the nations will lie prostrate. Then it will be the rest of Hyboria’s turn!

“If Conan can build up a Shemite army to fight for him, then certainly I, a true Turanian, can build up a kingdom among my own peoples! Thousands of Turanian soldiers have deserted to the Brythunians. They and more will desert again to me, when they hear that a true son of Turan is building anew the empire of ancient Turan.”

“Do what you like,” she answered, believing he had been seized by the madness that often grips men in time of war when the world seems crumbling and any wild dream looks possible. “But at least don’t interfere with my mission. If you won’t give me an escort, I’ll go on alone.”

“You’ll go with me!” he retorted, looking down at her with hot admiration.

Olga was a handsome girl, tall, slender but supple, with a wealth of unruly golden hair. She was so completely feminine that no disguise would make her look like a man, not even the voluminous robes of a Shemite, so she had attempted none. She trusted instead to Ahmed’s skill to bring her safely through the desert.

“Do you hear those screams? My men are supplying themselves with wives to bear soldiers for the new empire. Yours shall be the signal honor of being the first to go into Sultan Osman’s seraglio!”

“You do not dare!” She snatched a knife from her blouse.

Before she could level it he wrenched it from her with brutal strength.

“Dare!” He laughed at her vain struggles. “What do I not dare? I tell you a new empire is being born tonight! Come with me! There’s no time for love-making now. Before dawn we must be on the march for Sulaiman’s Walls. The star of the White Wolf rises!”

III

The Call of Blood

The sun was not long risen over the saw-edged mountains to the east, but already the heat was glazing the cloudless sky to the hue of white-hot steel. Along the dim road that split the immensity of the desert a single shape moved. The shape grew out of the heat-hazes of the south and resolved itself into a man on a camel.

The man was no Shemite. His boots and khakis, as well as the rifle-butt jutting from beneath his knee, spoke of the West. But with his dark face and hard frame he did not look out of place, even in that fierce land. He was Conan of Cimmeria, whom men loved, feared or hated, according to their political complexion, from the northern reaches of Vanaheim to the isles of the Barachans.

He had ridden most of the night, but his iron frame had not yet approached the fringes of weariness. Another mile, and he sighted a yet dimmer trail straggling down from a range of hills to the east. Something was coming along this trail—, a crawling something that left a broad dark smear on the hot flints.

Conan swung his camel into the trail and a moment later bent over the man who lay there gasping stertorously. It was a young Shemite, and the breast of his abba was soaked in blood.

“Yusef!” Conan drew back the wet abba, glanced at the bared breast, then covered it again. Blood oozed steadily from an arrow wound. There was nothing he could do. Already the Shemite’s eyes were glazing. Conan stared up the trail, seeing neither horse nor camel anywhere. But the dark smear stained the stones as far as he could see.

“Crom, man, how far have you crawled in this condition?”

“An hour, —many hours, —I do not know!” panted Yusef. “I fainted and fell from the saddle. When I came to I was lying in the trail and my horse was gone. But I knew you would be coming up from the south, so I crawled—crawled! Allah, how hard are thy stones!”

Conan set a canteen to his lips and Yusef drank noisily, then clutched Conan’s sleeve with clawing fingers.

“Conan, I am dying and that is no great matter, but there is the matter of vengeance—, not for me, ya sidi, but for innocent ones. You know I was on furlough to my village, El Awad. I am the only man of El Awad who fights for Shem. The elders are friendly to the Turanians. But last night the Turanians burned El Awad! They marched in before midnight and the people welcomed them—while I hid in a shed.

“Then without warning they began slaying! The men of El Awad were unarmed and helpless. I slew one soldier myself. Then they shot me and I dragged myself away—found my horse and rode to tell the tale before I died. Ah, I have tasted of perdition this night!”

“Did you recognize their officer?” asked Conan.

“I never saw him before. They called this leader of theirs Osman Pasha. Their flag bore the head of a white wolf. I saw it by the light of the burning huts. My people cried out in vain that they were friends.

“There was a woman and a man who came to El Awad from the east, just at nightfall. I think they were spies. The Turanians killed him and took her captive. It was all blood and madness.”

“Mad indeed!” muttered Conan. Yusef lifted himself on an elbow and groped for him, a desperate urgency in his weakening voice.

“Conan, I fought well for the Emir Feisal, and for you! I was at Yenbo, and Wejh, and Akaba. Never have I asked a reward! I ask now: justice and vengeance! Grant me this plea: Slay the Turanian dogs who butchered my people!”

Conan did not hesitate.

“They shall die,” he answered.

Yusef smiled fiercely, gasped: “Allaho akbat!” then sank back dead.

Within the hour Conan rode eastward. The vultures had already gathered in the sky with their grisly foreknowledge of death, then flapped sullenly away from the cairn of stones he had piled over the dead man, Yusef.

Conan’s business in the north could wait. One reason for his dominance over the desert men was the fact that in some ways his nature closely resembled theirs. He not only understood the cry for vengeance, but he sympathized with it. And he always kept his promise.

But he was puzzled. The destruction of a friendly village was not customary, even by the Turanians, and certainly they would not ordinarily have mishandled their own spies. If they were deserters they were acting in an unusual manner, for most deserters made their way to Feisal. And that wolf’s head banner?

Conan knew that certain fanatics in the New Turanians party were trying to erase all signs of Shemite culture from their civilization. This was an impossible task, since that civilization itself was based on Shemitic culture; but he had heard that the radicals even advocated reverting to the paganism of their ancestors. But he had never believed the tale.

The sun was sinking over the mountains of Edom when Conan came to ruined El Awad, in a fold of the bare hills. For hours before he had marked its location by black dots dropping in the blue. That they did not rise again told him that the village was deserted except for the dead.

As he rode into the dusty street several vultures flapped heavily away. The hot sun had dried the mud, curdled the red pools in the dust. He sat in his saddle a while, staring silently.

He was no stranger to the handiwork of the Turanian. He had seen much of it in the long fighting up from Jeddah on the Red Sea. But even so, he felt sick. The bodies lay in the street, headless, disemboweled, hewn asunder— bodies of children, old women and men. A red mist floated before his eyes, so that for a moment the landscape seemed to swim in blood. The slayers were gone; but they had left a plain road for him to follow.

What the signs they had left did not show him, he guessed. The slayers had loaded their female captives on baggage camels, and had gone eastward, deeper into the hills. Why they were following that road he could not guess, but he knew where it led—to the long-abandoned Walls of Sulaiman, by way of the Well of Achmet.

Without hesitation he followed. He had not gone many miles before he passed more of their work—a baby, its brains oozing from its broken head. Some kidnapped woman had hidden her child in her robes until it had been wrenched from her and brained on the rocks, before her eyes.

The country became wilder as he went. He did not halt to eat, but munched dried dates from his pouch as he rode. He did not waste time worrying over the recklessness of his action—one lone Cimmerian dogging the crimson trail of a Turanian raiding party.

He had no plan; his future actions would depend on the circumstances that arose. But he had taken the death-trail and he would not turn back while he lived. He was no more foolhardy than his grandfather who single-handedly trailed an Apache war-party for days through the Guadalupes and returned to the settlement on the Pecos with scalps hanging from his belt.

The sun had set and dusk was closing in when Conan topped a ridge and looked down on the plain whereon stands the Well of Achmet with its straggling palm grove. To the right of that cluster stood the tents, horse lines and camel lines of a well-ordered force. To the left stood a hut used by travelers as a khan. The door was shut and a sentry stood before it. While he watched, a man came from the tents with a bowl of food which he handed in at the door.

Conan could not see the occupant, but he believed it was the girl of whom Yusef had spoken, though why they should imprison one of their own spies was one of the mysteries of this strange affair. He saw their flag, and could make out a splotch of white that must be the wolf’s head. He saw, too, the Shemite women, thirty-five or forty of them herded into a pen improvised from bales and pack-saddles. They crouched together dumbly, dazed by their misfortunes.

He had hidden his camel below the ridge, on the western slope, and he lay concealed behind a clump of stunted bushes until night had fallen. Then he slipped down the slope, circling wide to avoid the mounted patrol, which rode leisurely about the camp. He lay prone behind a boulder till it had passed, then rose and stole toward the hut. Fires twinkled in the darkness beneath the palms and he heard the wailing of the captive women.

The sentry before the door of the hut did not see the cat-footed shadow that glided up to the rear wall. As Conan drew close he heard voices within. They spoke in Turanian.

One window was in the back wall. Strips of wood had been fastened over it, to serve as both pane and bars. Peering between them, Conan saw a slender girl in a travel-worn riding habit standing before a dark-faced man in a Turanian uniform. There was no insignia to show what his rank had been. The Turanian played with a riding whip and his eyes gleamed with cruelty in the light of a candle on a camp table.

“What do I care for the information you bring from there?” he was demanding. “Neither country means anything to me. But it seems you fail to realize your own position. It is mine to command, you to obey! You are my prisoner, my captive, my slave! It’s time you learned what that means. And the best teacher I know is the whip!”

He fairly spat the last word at her and she paled.

“You dare not subject me to this indignity!” she whispered weakly.

Conan knew this man must be Osman Pasha. He drew his heavy knife from its scabbard under his armpit and aimed at the Turanian’s breast through the crack in the window. But even as his hands gripped the hilt for a thrust, he changed his mind. There was the sentry at the door, and a hundred other armed men, within hearing, whom the sound of a shot would bring on the run. He grasped the window bars and braced his legs.

“I see I must dispel your illusions,” muttered Osman, moving toward the girl who cowered back until the wall stopped her. Her face was white. She had dealt with many dangerous men in her hazardous career, and she was not easily frightened. But she had never met a man like Osman. His face was a terrifying mask of cruelty; the ferocity that gloats over the agony of a weaker thing shone in his eyes.

Suddenly he had her by the hair, dragging her to him, laughing at her scream of pain. Just then Conan ripped the strips off the window. The snapping of the wood sounded loud as a gun-shot and Osman wheeled, drawing his pistol, as Conan came through the window.

The Cimmerian hit on his feet, leveled knife checking Osman’s move. The Turanian froze, his pown knife lifted shoulder high, pointing at the roof. Outside the sentry called anxiously.

“Answer him!” grated Conan below his breath. “Tell him everything is all right. And drop that gun!”

The knife fell to the floor and the girl snatched it up.

“Come here, woman!”

She ran to him, but in her haste she crossed the line of fire. In that fleeting moment when her body shielded his, Osman acted. He kicked the table and the candle toppled and went out, and simultaneously he dived for the floor. Conan’s knife arced out just as the hut was plunged into darkness. The next instant the door crashed inward and the sentry bulked against the starlight, to crumple as Conan hit him face first with a meaty fist.

With a sweep of his arm Conan found the girl and drew her toward the window. He lifted her through as if she had been a child, and climbed through after her. He did not know whether his blind throw had struck Osman or not. The man was crouching silently in the darkness, but there was no time to see whether he was living or dead. But as they ran across the shadowy plain, they heard Osman’s voice lifted in passion.

By the time they reached the crest of the ridge the girl was winded. Only Conan’s arm about her waist, half dragging, half carrying her, enabled her to make the last few yards of the steep incline. The plain below them was alive with torches and shouting men. Osman was yelling for them to run down the fugitives, and his voice came faintly to them on the ridge.

“Take them alive, curse you! Scatter and find them! It’s Conan!” An instant later he was yelling with an edge of panic in his voice: “Wait. Come back! Take cover and make ready to repel an attack! He may have a horde of Shemites with him!”

“He thinks first of his own desires, and only later of the safety of his men,” muttered Conan. “I don’t think he’ll ever get very far. Come on.”

He led the way to the camel, helped the girl into the saddle, then leaped up himself. A word, a tap of the camel wand, and the beast ambled silently off down the slope.

“I know Osman caught you at El Awad,” said Conan. “But what’s he up to? What’s his game?”

“He was a lieutenant stationed at El Ashraf,” she answered. “He persuaded his company to mutiny, kill their commander and desert. He plans to fortify the Walls of Sulaiman, and build a new empire. I thought at first he was mad, but he isn’t. He’s a devil.”

“The Walls of Sulaiman?” Conan checked his mount and sat for a moment motionless in the starlight.

“Are you game for an all-night ride?” he asked presently.

“Anywhere! As long as it is far away from Osman!” There was a hint of hysteria in her voice.

“I doubt if your escape will change his plans. He’ll probably lie about Achmet all night under arms expecting an attack. In the morning he will decide that I was alone, and pull out for the Walls.

“Well, I happen to know that a Shemite force is there, waiting for an order from me to move on to Ageyli. Three hundred Juheina camel-riders, sworn to Feisal. Enough to eat Osman’s gang. My messenger should reach them some time between dawn and noon. There is a chance we can get there before the Juheina pull out. If we can, we’ll turn them on Osman and wipe him out, with his whole pack.

“It won’t upset my plans for the Juheina to get to Ageyli a day late, and Osman must be destroyed. He’s a mad dog running loose.”

“His ambition sounds mad,” she murmured. “But when he speaks of it, with his eyes blazing, it’s easy to believe he might even succeed.”

“You forget that crazier things have happened in the desert,” he answered, as he swung the camel eastward. “The world is being made over here. There’s no telling what damage this Osman might do, if left to himself. The Turanian Empire is falling to pieces, and new empires have risen out of the ruins of old ones.

“But if we can get to Sulaiman before the Juheina march, we’ll check him. If we find them gone, we’ll be in a pickle ourselves. It’s a gamble, our lives against his. Are you game?”

“Till the last card falls!” she retorted. His face was a blur in the starlight, but she sensed rather than saw his grim smile of approval.

The camel’s hoofs made no sound as they dropped down the slope and circled far wide of the Turanian camp. Like ghosts on a ghost-camel they moved across the plain under the stars. A faint breeze stirred the girl’s hair. Not until the fires were dim behind them and they were again climbing a hill-road did she speak.

“I know you. You’re the Cimmerian they call Conan, the lion. You came down from Afghulistan when the war began. You were with King Hussein even before forces came over from Stygia. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes.”

“Then what’s my status?” she asked. “Have you rescued me or captured me? Am I a prisoner?”

“Let us say companion, for the time being,” he suggested. “We’re up against a common enemy. No reason why we shouldn’t make common cause, is there?”

“None!” she agreed, and leaning her blond head against his hard shoulder, she went soundly to sleep.

A gaunt moon rose, pushing back the horizons, flooding craggy slopes and dusty plains with leprous silver. The vastness of the desert seemed to mock the tiny figures on their tiring camel, as they rode blindly on toward what Fate they could not guess.

IV

Wolves of the Desert

Olga awoke as dawn was breaking. She was cold and stiff, in spite of the cloak Conan had wrapped about her, and she was hungry. They were riding through a dry gorge with rock-strewn slopes rising on either hand, and the camel’s gait had become a lurching walk. Conan halted it, slid off without making it kneel, and took its rope.

“It’s about done, but the Walls aren’t far ahead. Plenty of water there —food, too, if the Juheina are still there. There are dates in that pouch.”

If he felt the strain of fatigue he did not show it as he strode along at the camel’s head. Olga rubbed her chill hands and wished for sunrise.

“The Well of Harith,” Conan indicated a walled enclosure ahead of them. “The Turanians built that wall, years ago, when the Walls of Sulaiman were an army post. Later they abandoned both positions.”

The wall, built of rocks and dried mud, was in good shape, and inside the enclosure there was a partly ruined hut. The well was shallow, with a mere trickle of water at the bottom.

“I’d better get off and walk too,” Olga suggested.

“These flints would cut your boots and feet to pieces. It’s not far now. Then the camel can rest all it needs.”

“And if the Juheina aren’t there?—” She left the sentence unfinished.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Maybe Osman won’t come up before the camel’s rested.”

“I believe he’ll make a forced march,” she said, not fearfully, but calmly stating an opinion. “His beasts are good. If he drives them hard, he can get here before midnight. Our camel won’t be rested enough to carry us, by that time. And we couldn’t get away on foot, in this desert.”

He laughed, and respecting her courage, did not try to make light of their position.

“Well,” he said quietly, “let’s hope the Juheina are still there!”

If they were not, she and Conan were caught in a trap of hostile, waterless desert, fanged with the long guns of predatory tribesmen.

Three miles further east the valley narrowed and the floor pitched upward, dotted by dry shrubs and boulders. Conan pointed suddenly to a faint ribbon of smoke feathering up into the sky.

“Look! The Juheina are there!”

Olga gave a deep sigh of relief. Only then did she realize how desperately she had been hoping for some such sign. She felt like shaking a triumphant fist at the rocky waste about her, as if at a sentient enemy, sullen and cheated of its prey.

Another mile and they topped a ridge and saw a large enclosure surrounding a cluster of wells. There were Shemites squatting about their tiny cooking fires. As the travelers came suddenly into view within a few hundred yards of them, the Zuagirs sprang up, shouting. Conan drew his breath suddenly between clenched teeth.

“They’re not Juheina! They’re Rualla! Allies of the Turanians!”

Too late to retreat. A hundred and fifty wild men were on their feet, glaring, bows strung.

Conan did the next best thing and went leisurely toward them. To look at him one would have thought that he had expected to meet these men here, and anticipated nothing but a friendly greeting. Olga tried to imitate his tranquility, but she knew their lives hung on the twitching of a string. These men were supposed to be her allies, but her recent experience made her distrust them. The sight of these hundreds of wolfish faces filled her with sick dread.

They were hesitating, weapons lifted, nervous and uncertain as surprised wolves, then:

“It is Conan!” howled a tall, scarred warrior.

Olga caught her breath as she saw the man’s finger quiver on his bow string. Only a racial urge to gloat over his victim kept him from shooting the Cimmerian then and there.

“Conan!” The shout was a wave that swept the throng.

Ignoring the clamor, the menacing weapons, Conan made the camel kneel and lifted Olga off. She tried, with fair success, to conceal her fear of the wild figures that crowded about them, but her flesh crawled at the bloodlust burning redly in each wolfish eye.

Conan’s rifle was in its boot on the saddle, and his pistol was out of sight, under his shirt. He was careful not to reach for the rifle—a move which would have brought a hail of arrows—but having helped the girl down, he turned and faced the crowd casually, his hands empty. Running his glance over the fierce faces, he singled out a tall stately man in the rich garb of a shaykh, who was standing somewhat apart.

“You keep poor watch, Mitkhal ion Ali,” said Conan. “If I had been a raider your men would be lying in their blood by this time.”

Before the shaykh could answer, the man who had first recognized Conan thrust himself violently forward, his face convulsed with hate.

“You expected to find friends here, Conan!” he exulted. “But you come too late! Three hundred Juheina dogs rode north an hour before dawn! We saw them go, and came up after they had gone. Had they known of your coming, perhaps they would have stayed to welcome you!”

“It’s not to you I speak, Zangi Khan, you dog,” retorted Conan contemptuously, “but to the Rualla, —honorable men and fair foes!”

Zangi Khan snarled like a wolf and threw up his rifle, but a lean Zuagir caught his arm.

“Wait!” he growled. “Let Conan speak. His words are not wind.”

A rumble of approval came from the Shemites. Conan had touched their fierce pride and vanity. That would not save his life, but they were willing to listen to him before they killed him.

“If you listen he will trick you with cunning words!” shouted the angered Zangi Khan furiously. “Slay him now, before he can do us harm!”

“Is Zangi Khan shaykh of the Rualla that he gives commands while Mitkhal stands silent?” asked Conan with biting irony.

Mitkhal reacted to his taunt exactly as Conan knew he would.

“Let Conan speak!” he ordered. “I command here, Zangi Khan! Do not forget that.”

“I do not forget, ya sidi,” the man assured him, but his eyes burned red at the rebuke. “I but spoke in zeal for your safety.”

Mitkhal gave him a slow, searching glance which told Conan that there was no love lost between the two men. Zangi Khan’s reputation as a fighting man meant much to the younger warriors. Mitkhal was more fox than wolf, and he evidently feared the Afghuli’s influence over his men. As an agent of the Turanian government Zangi’s authority was theoretically equal to Mitkhal’s.

Actually this amounted to little, but Mitkhal’s tribesmen took orders from their shaykh only. But it put Zangi in a position to use his personal talents to gain an ascendency—an ascendency Mitkhal feared would relegate him to a minor position.

“Speak, Conan,” ordered Mitkhal. “But speak swiftly. It may be,” he added, “Allah’s will that the moments of your life are few.”

“Death marches from the west,” said Conan abruptly. “Last night a hundred Turanian deserters butchered the people of El Awad.”

“Erlik!” swore a tribesman. “El Awad was friendly to the Turanians!”

“A lie!” cried Zangi Khan. “Or if true, the dogs of deserters slew the people to curry favor with Feisal.”

“When did men come to Feisal with the blood of children on their hands?” retorted Conan. “They have foresworn Islam and worship the White Wolf. They carried off the young women and the old women, the men and the children they slew like dogs.”

A murmur of anger rose from the Shemites. The Zuagirs had a rigid code of warfare, and they did not kill women or children. It was the unwritten law of the desert, old when Atlantis sank into the sea.

But Zangi Khan cried out in angry derision, blind to the resentful looks cast at him. He did not understand that particular phase of the Zuagir's code, for his people had no such inhibition. When in war he killed women as well as men.

“What are the women of El Awad to us?” he sneered.

“Your heart I know already,” answered Conan with icy contempt. “It is to the Rualla that I speak.”

“A trick!” howled the man. “A lie to trick us!”

“It is no lie!” Olga stepped forward boldly. “Zangi Khan, you know that I am an agent of the Turanian government. Osman Pasha, leader of these renegades burned El Awad last night, as Conan has said. Osman murdered Ahmed ibn Shalaan, my guide, among others. He is as much our enemy as he is an enemy of the Brythunian.”

She looked to Mitkhal for help, but the shaykh stood apart, like an actor watching a play in which he had not yet received his cue.

“What if it is the truth?” Zangi Khan snarled, muddled by his hate and fear of Conan’s cunning. “What is El Awad to us?”

Conan caught him up instantly.

“This Afghuli asks what is the destruction of a friendly village! Doubtless, naught to him! But what does it mean to you, who have left your herds and families unguarded? If you let this pack of mad dogs range the land, how can you be sure of the safety of your wives and children?”

“What would you have, Conan?” demanded a grey-bearded raider.

“Trap these Turanians and destroy them. I’ll show you how.”

It was then that Zangi Khan lost his head completely.

“Heed him not!” he screamed. “Within the hour we must ride northward! The Turanians will give us ten thousand coins for his head!”

Avarice burned briefly in the men’s eyes, to be dimmed by the reflection that the reward, offered for Conan’s head, would be claimed by the shaykh and Zangi. They made no move and Mitkhal stood aside with an air of watching a contest that did not concern himself.

“Take his head!” screamed Zangi, sensing hostility at last, and thrown into a panic by it.

His demoralization was completed by Conan’s taunting laugh.

“You seem to be the only one who wants my head, Zangi! Perhaps you can take it!”

Zangi howled incoherently, his eyes glaring red, then threw up his knife. Just as the blade came up, Conan’s scimitar crashed thunderously. He had drawn so swiftly not a man there had followed his motion. Zangi Khan reeled back under the impact of hot steel, toppled sideways and lay still.

In an instant a hundred arrows were aimed squarely at Conan.

Confused by varying emotions, the men hesitated for the fleeting instant it took Mitkhal to shout:

“Hold! Do not shoot!”

He strode forward with the air of a man ready to take the center of the stage at last, but he could not disguise the gleam of satisfaction in his shrewd eyes.

“No man here is kin to Zangi Khan,” he said offhandedly. “There is no cause for blood feud. He had eaten the salt, but he attacked our prisoner whom he thought unarmed.”

He held out his hand for the sword, but Conan did not surrender it.

“I’m not your prisoner,” said he. “I could kill you before your men could lift a finger. But I didn’t come here to fight you. I came asking aid to avenge the children and women of my enemies. I risk my life for your families. Are you dogs, to do less?”

The question hung in the air unanswered, but he had struck the right chord in their barbaric bosoms, that were always ready to respond to some wild deed of reckless chivalry. Their eyes glowed and they looked at their shaykh expectantly.

Mitkhal was a shrewd politician. The butchery at El Awad meant much less to him than it meant to his younger warriors. He had associated with so-called civilized men long enough to lose much of his primitive integrity. But he always followed the side of public opinion, and was shrewd enough to lead a movement he could not check. Yet, he was not to be stampeded into a hazardous adventure.

“These Turanians may be too strong for us,” he objected.

“I’ll show you how to destroy them with little risk,” answered Conan. “But there must be covenants between us, Mitkhal.”

“These Turanians must be destroyed,” said Mitkhal, and he spoke sincerely there, at least. “But there are too many blood feuds between us, Conan, for us to let you get out of our hands.”

Conan laughed.

“You can’t beat the Turanians without my help and you know it. Ask your young men what they desire!”

“Let Conan lead us!” shouted a young warrior instantly. A murmur of approval paid tribute to Conan’s widespread reputation as a strategist.

“Very well!” Mitkhal took the tide. “Let there be truce between us —with conditions! Lead us against the Turanians. If you win, you and the woman shall go free. If we lose, we take your head!”

Conan nodded, and the warriors yelled in glee. It was just the sort of a bargain that appealed to their minds, and Conan knew it was the best he could make.

“Bring bread and salt!” ordered Mitkhal, and a giant black slave moved to do his bidding. “Until the battle is lost or won there is truce between us, and no Rualla shall harm you, unless you spill Rualla blood.”

Then he thought of something else and his brow darkened as he thundered:

“Where is the man who watched from the ridge?”

A terrified youth was pushed forward. He was a member of a small tribe tributary to the more important Rualla.

“Oh, shaykh,” he faltered, “I was hungry and stole away to a fire for meat—”

“Dog!” Mitkhal struck him in the face. “Death is thy portion for failing in thy duty.”

“Wait!” Conan interposed. “Would you question the will of the gods? If the boy had not deserted his post he would have seen us coming up the valley, and your men would have fired on us and killed us. Then you would not have been warned of the Turanians, and would have fallen prey to them before discovering they were enemies. Let him go and give thanks to the gods who saw all!”

It was the sort of sophistry that appeals to the Shemite mind. Even Mitkhal was impressed.

“Who knows the mind of the gods?” he conceded. “Live, Musa, but next time perform the will of your master with vigilance and a mind to orders. And now, Conan, let us discuss battle-plans while food is prepared.”

V

Treachery

It was not yet noon when Conan halted the Rualla beside the Well of Harith. Scouts sent westward reported no sign of the Turanians, and the Shemites went forward with the plans made before leaving the Walls—plans outlined by Conan and agreed to by Mitkhal. First the tribesmen began gathering rocks and hurling them into the well.

“The water’s still beneath,” Conan remarked to Olga. “But it’ll take hours of hard work to clean out the well so that anybody can get to it. The Turanians can’t do it under our weapons. If we win, we’ll clean it out ourselves, so the next travelers won’t suffer.”

“Why not take refuge in the sangar ourselves?” she asked.

“Too much of a trap. That’s what we’re using it for. We’d have no chance with them in open fight, and if we laid an ambush out in the valley, they’d simply fight their way through us. But when a man’s shot at in the open, his first instinct is to make for the nearest cover. So I’m hoping to trick them into going into the sangar. Then we’ll bottle them up and pick them off at our leisure. Without water they can’t hold out long. We shouldn’t lose a dozen men, if any.”

“It seems strange to see you solicitous about the lives of these Rualla, who are your enemies, after all,” she laughed.

“Instinct, maybe. No man fit to lead wants to lose any more of them then he can help. Just now these men are my allies, and it’s up to me to protect them as well as I can. I’ll admit I’d rather be fighting with the Juheina. Feisal’s messenger must have started for the Walls hours before I supposed he would.”

“And if the Turanians surrender, what then?”

“I may spare them, all but Osman Pasha.” Conan’s face darkened. “That man hangs if he falls into my hands.”

“How will you get them to the Juheina? The Rualla won’t take them.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. But let’s catch our hare before we start broiling him. Osman may whip the daylights out of us.”

“It means your head if he does,” she warned with a shudder.

“Well, it’s worth ten thousand coins to the Turanians,” he laughed, and moved to inspect the partly ruined hut. Olga followed him.

Mitkhal, directing the blocking of the well, glanced sharply at them, then noted that a number of men were between them and the gate, and turned back to his overseeing.

“Hsss, Conan!” It was a tense whisper, just as Conan and Olga turned to leave the hut. An instant later they located a tousled head thrust up from behind a heap of rubble. It was the boy Musa who obviously had slipped into the hut through a crevice in the back wall.

“Watch from the door and warn me if you see anybody coming,” Conan muttered to Olga. “This lad may have something to tell.”

“I have, effendi!” The boy was trembling with excitement. “I overheard the shaykh talking secretly to his black slave, Hassan. I saw them walk away among the palms while you and the woman were eating, at the Walls, and I crept after them, for I feared they meant you mischief— and you saved my life.

“Conan, listen! Mitkah means to slay you, whether you win this battle for him or not! He was glad you slew the Afghuli, and he is glad to have your aid in wiping out these Turanians. But he lusts for the gold the other Turanians will pay for your head. Yet he dares not break his word and the covenant of the salt openly. So, if we win the battle, Hassan is to shoot you, and swear you fell by a Turanian arrow!”

The boy rushed on with his story:

“Then Mitkhal will say to the people: “Conan was our guest and ate our salt. But now he is dead, through no fault of ours, and there is no use wasting the reward. So we will take off his head and take it to Damascus and the Turanians will give us ten thousand pounds.” ‘

Conan smiled grimly at Olga’s horror. That was typical Shemite logic.

“It didn’t occur to Mitkhal that Hassan might miss his first shot and not get a chance to shoot again, I suppose?” he suggested.

“Oh, yes, effendi, Mitkhal thinks of everything. If you kill Hassan, Mitkhal will swear you broke the covenant yourself, by spilling the blood of a Rualla, or a Rualla’s servant, which is the same thing, and will feel free to order you beheaded.”

There was genuine humor in Conan’s laugh.

“Thanks, Musa! If I saved your life, you’ve paid me back. Better get out now, before somebody sees you talking to us.”

“What shall we do?” exclaimed Olga, pale to the lips.

“You’re in no danger,” he assured her.

She colored angrily.

“I wasn’t thinking of that! Do you think I have less gratitude than that Shemite boy? That shaykh means to murder you, don’t you understand? Let’s steal camels and run for it!”

“Run where? If we did, they’d be on our heels in no time, deciding I’d lied to them about everything. Anyway, we wouldn’t have a chance. They’re watching us too closely. Besides, I wouldn’t run if I could. I started to wipe out Osman Pasha, and this is the best chance I see to do it. Come on. Let’s get out in the sangar before Mitkhal gets suspicious.”

As soon as the well was blocked the men retired to the hillsides. Their camels were hidden behind the ridges, and the men crouched behind rocks and among the stunted shrubs along the slopes. Olga refused Conan’s offer to send her with an escort back to the Walls, and stayed with him taking up a position behind a rock, Osman’s pistol in her belt. They lay flat on the ground and the heat of the sun-baked flints seeped through their garments.

Once she turned her head, and shuddered to see the blank black countenance of Hassan regarding them from some bushes a few yards behind them: The black slave, who knew no law but his master’s command, was determined not to let Conan out of his sight.

She spoke of this in a low whisper to the Cimmerian.

“Sure,” he murmured. “I saw him. But he won’t shoot till he knows which way the fight’s going, and is sure none of the men are looking.”

Olga’s flesh crawled in anticipation of more horrors. If they lost the fight the enraged Ruallas would tear Conan to pieces, supposing he survived the encounter. If they won, his reward would be a treacherous arrow in the back.

The hours dragged slowly by. Not a flutter of cloth, no lifting of an impudent head betrayed the presence of the wild men on the slopes. Olga began to feel her nerves quiver. Doubts and forebodings gnawed maddeningly at her.

“We took position too soon! The men will lose patience. Osman can’t get here before midnight. It took us all night to reach the Well.”

“Zuagirs never lose patience when they smell loot,” he answered. “I believe Osman will get here before sundown. We made poor time on a tiring camel for the last few hours of that ride. I believe Osman broke camp before dawn and pushed hard.”

Another thought came to torture her.

“Suppose he doesn’t come at all? Suppose he has changed his plans and gone somewhere else? The Rualla will believe you lied to them!”

“Look!”

The sun hung low in the west, a fiery, dazzling ball. She blinked, shading her eyes.

Then the head of a marching column grew out of the dancing heat-waves: lines of horsemen, grey with dust, files of heavily laden baggage camels, with the captive women riding them. The standard hung loose in the breathless air; but once, when a vagrant gust of wind, hot as the breath of perdition, lifted the folds, the white wolf’s head was displayed.

Crushing proof of idolatry and heresy! In their agitation the Rualla almost betrayed themselves. Even Mitkhal turned pale.

“Sacrilege! Forgotten of God. Hell shall be thy portion!”

“Easy!” hissed Conan, feeling the semi-hysteria that ran down the lurking lines. “Wait for my signal. They may halt to water their camels at the Well.”

Osman must have driven his people like a fiend all day. The women drooped on the loaded camels; the dust-caked faces of the soldiers were drawn. The horses reeled with weariness. But it was soon evident that they did not intend halting at the Well with their goal, the Walls of Sulaiman, so near. The head of the column was even with the sangar when Conan took his shot. He was aiming at Osman, but the range was long, the sun-glare on the rocks dazzling. The man behind Osman fell, and at the signal the slopes came alive with arrows.

The column staggered. Horses and men went down and stunned soldiers gave back a ragged fire that did no harm. They did not even see their assailants save as bits of white cloth bobbing among the boulders.

Perhaps discipline had grown lax during the grind of that merciless march. Perhaps panic seized the tired Turanians. At any rate the column broke and men fled toward the sangar without waiting for orders. They would have abandoned the baggage camels had no Osman ridden among them. Cursing and striking with the flat of his saber, he made them drive the beasts in with them.

“I hoped they’d leave the camels and women outside,” grunted Conan. “Maybe they’ll drive them out when they find there’s no water.”

The Turanians took their positions in good order, dismounting and ranging along the wall. Some dragged the Shemite women off the camels and drove them into the hut. Others improvised a pen for the animals with stakes and ropes between the back of the hut and the wall. Saddles were piled in the gate to complete the barricade.

The Shemites yelled taunts as they poured in a hail of lead, and a few leaped up and danced derisively, waving their weapons. But they stopped that when a Turanian shot one of them cleanly through the head. When the demonstrations ceased, the besiegers offered scanty targets to shoot at.

However, the Turanians fired back frugally and with no indication of panic, now that they were under cover and fighting the sort of a fight they understood. They were well protected by the wall from the men directly in front of them, but those facing north could be seen by the men on the south ridge, and vice versa. But the distance was too great for consistently effective shooting at these marks by the Shemites.

“We don’t seem to be doing much damage,” remarked Olga presently.

“Thirst will win for us,” Conan answered. “All we’ve got to do is to keep them bottled up. They probably have enough water in their canteens to last through the rest of the day. Certainly no longer. Look, they’re going to the well now.”

The well stood in the middle of the enclosure, in a comparatively exposed area, as seen from above. Olga saw men approaching it with canteens in their hands, and the Shemites, with sardonic enjoyment, refrained from firing at them. They reached the well, and then the girl saw the change come over them. It ran through their band like an electric shock. The men along the walls reacted by firing wildly. A furious yelling rose, edged with hysteria, and men began to run madly about the enclosure. Some toppled, hit by shots dropping from the ridges.

“What are they doing?” Olga started to her knees, and was instantly jerked down again by Conan. The Turanians were running into the hut. If she had been watching Conan she would have sensed the meaning of it, for his dark face grew suddenly grim.

“They’re dragging the women out!” she exclaimed. “I see Osman waving his saber. What? Oh! They’re butchering the women!”

Above the crackle of shots rose terrible shrieks and the sickening chack of savagely driven blows. Olga turned sick and hid her face. Osman had realized the trap into which he had been driven, and his reaction was that of a mad dog. Recognizing defeat in the blocked well, facing the ruin of his crazy ambitions by thirst and Zuagir arrows, he was taking this vengeance on the whole Shemite race.

On all sides the Shemites rose howling, driven to frenzy by the sight of that slaughter. That these women were of another tribe made no difference. A stern chivalry was the foundation of their society. There was no sentimentalism about it. It was real and vital as life itself.

The Rualla went berserk when they saw women of their race falling under the swords of the Turanians. A wild yell shattered the brazen sky, and recklessly breaking cover, the Shemites pelted down the slopes, howling like fiends. Conan could not check them, nor could Mitkhal. Their shouts fell on deaf ears. The walls vomited projectiles as withering volleys raked the oncoming hordes. Dozens fell, but enough were left to reach the wall and sweep over it in a wave that neither arrows nor steel could halt.

And Conan was among them. When he saw he could not stop the storm he joined it. Mitkhal was not far behind him, cursing his men as he ran. The shaykh had no stomach for this kind of fighting, but his leadership was at stake. No man who hung back in this charge would ever be able to command the Rualla again.

Conan was among the first to reach the wall, leaping over the writhing bodies of half a dozen Shemites. He had not charged wildly, hacking at foes as he ran like the Zuagirs, to reach the wall exhausted. He sheathed his sword until the arrows from the barrier were a scant distance from his face, and then swept it out in a flurry that left a bloody gap where there had been a line of fierce dark faces an instant before. Before the gap could be closed he had swarmed over and in, and the Rualla poured after him.

As his feet hit the ground a rush of men knocked him against the wall and a blade, thrusting for his life, broke against the rocks. He drove his hilt into a snarling face, splintering teeth and bones, and the next instant a surge of his own men over the wall cleared a space about him.

The Turanians had been forced back from the wall in a dozen places now, and men were fighting all over the sangar. No quarter was asked—, none given. The pitiful headless bodies sprawled before the blood-stained land had turned the Zuagirs into hot-eyed demons. Their quivers were empty now and their own swords were out. The yells had died down to grunts, punctuated by death-howls. Above these sounds rose the chopping impact of flailing blades, the crunch of fiercely driven fists. So grimly had the Zuagirs suffered in that brainless rush, that now they were outnumbered, and the Turanians fought with the fury of desperation.

It was Conan’s blade, perhaps, that tipped the balance. He cut through the ranks without haste and without hesitation, and at this range he could not miss. He was aware of a dark shadow forever behind him, and turned once to see black Hassan following him, smiting methodically right and left with a heavy scimitar already dripping crimson. Even in the fury of the strife, Conan grinned. The literal-minded Kushite was obeying instructions to keep at Conan’s heels. As long as the battle hung in doubt, he was Conan’s protect, or, —ready to become his executioner the instant the tide turned in their favor.

“Faithful servant,” called Conan sardonically. “Have a care lest these Turanians cheat you of my head!”

Hassan grinned, speechless. Suddenly blood burst from his thick lips and he buckled at the knees. Somewhere in that rush down the hill his black body had stopped an arrow. As he struggled on all fours a Turanian ran in from the side and brained him with a blow. Conan killed the Turanian with his last arrow. He felt no grudge against Hassan. The man had been a good soldier, and had obeyed orders given him.

The sangar was a shambles. The men on their feet were less than those on the ground, and all were streaming blood. The white wolf standard had been torn from its staff and lay trampled under vengeful feet. Conan bent, picked up a saber and looked about for Osman. He saw Mitkhal, running toward the horse-pen, and then he yelled a warning, for he saw Osman.

The man broke away from a group of struggling figures and ran for the pen. He tore away the ropes and the horses, frantic from the noise and smell of blood, stampeded into the sangar, knocking men down and trampling them. As they thundered past, Osman, with a magnificent display of agility, caught a handful of flying mane and leaped on the back of the racing steed.

Mitkhal ran toward him, yelling furiously, and snapping a pistol at him. The shaykh, in the confusion of the fighting, did not seem to be aware that the gun was empty, for he pulled the trigger again and again as he stood in the path of the oncoming rider. Only at the last moment did he realize his peril and leap back. Even so, he would have sprung clear had not his sandal heel caught in a dead man’s abba.

Mitkhal stumbled, avoided the lashing hoofs, but not the down-flailing saber in Osman’s hand. A wild cry went up from the Rualla as Mitkhal fell, his turban suddenly crimson. The next instant Osman was out of the gate and riding like the wind—straight up the hillside to where he saw the slim figure of the girl to whom he now attributed his overthrow.

Olga had come out from behind the rocks and was standing in stunned horror watching the fight below. Now she awoke suddenly to her own peril at the sight of the madman charging up the slope. She drew a bow and let fly. She was not a very good shot. Three arrows missed, the fourth killed the horse, and then the quiver was empy. Conan was running up the slope, and behind him streamed a swarm of Rualla. There was not a fresh arrow amongst the whole horde.

Osman took a shocking fall when his horse turned a somersault under him, but rose, bruised and bloody, with Conan still some distance away. But the Turanian had to play hide-and-seek for a few moments among the rocks with his prey before he was able to grasp her hair and twist her screaming to her knees and then he paused an instant to enjoy her despair and terror. That pause was his undoing.

As he lifted his saber to strike off her head, steel clanged loud on steel. A numbing shock ran through his arm and his blade was knocked from his hand. His weapon rang on the hot flints. He whirled to face the blazing slits that were Conan’s eyes. The muscles stood out in cords and ridges on Conan’s sunburnt forearm in the intensity of his passion.

“Pick it up, you filthy dog,” he said between his teeth.

Osman hesitated, stooped, caught up the saber and slashed at Conan’s legs without straightening. Conan leaped back, then sprang in again the instant his toes touched the earth. His return was as paralyzingly quick as the death-leap of a wolf. It caught Osman off balance, his sword extended. Conan’s blade hissed as it cut the air, slicing through flesh, gritting through bone.

The Turanian’s head toppled from the severed neck and fell at Conan’s feet, the headless body collapsing in a heap. With an excess spasm of hate, Conan kicked the head savagely down the slope.

“Oh!” Olga turned away and hid her face. But the girl knew that Osman deserved any fate that could have overtaken him. Presently she was aware of Conan’s hand resting lightly on her shoulder and she looked up, ashamed of her weakness. The sun was just dipping below the western ridges. Musa came limping up the slope, blood-stained but radiant.

“The dogs are all dead, effendi!” he cried, industriously shaking a plundered watch, in an effort to make it run. “Such of our warriors as still live are faint from strife, and many sorely wounded. There is none to command now but thou.”

“Sometimes problems settle themselves,” mused Conan. “But at a ghastly price. If the Rualla hadn’t made that rush, which was the death of Hassan and Mitkhal—oh, well, such things are in the hands of Allah, as the Shemites say. A hundred better men than I have died today, but by the decree of some blind Fate, I live.”

Conan looked down on the wounded men. He turned to Musa.

“We must load the wounded on camels,” he said, “and take them to the camp at the Walls where there’s water and shade. Come.”

As they started down the slope he said to Olga, “I’ll have to stay with them till they’re settled at the Walls, then I must start for the coast. Some of the Rualla will be able to ride, though, and you need have no fear of them. They’ll escort you to the nearest Turanian outpost.”

She looked at him in surprise.

“Then I’m not your prisoner?”

He laughed.

“I think you can help Feisal more by carrying out your original instructions of supplying misleading information to the Turanians! I don’t blame you for not confiding even in me. You have my deepest admiration, for you’re playing the most dangerous game a woman can.”

“Oh!” She felt a sudden warm flood of relief and gladness that he should know she was not really an enemy. Musa was well out of ear-shot. “I might have known you were high enough in Feisal’s councils to know that I really am—”

“You're the cleverest, most daring secret agent the Brythunians employ,” he murmured. The girl impulsively placed her slender fingers in his, and hand in hand they went down the slope together.

The Treasure of Khawarism

(Originally The Treasure of Tartary)

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

Key to the Treasure

It was not mere impulsiveness that sent Conan into the welter of writhing limbs and whickering blades that loomed so suddenly in the semidarkness ahead of him. In that dark alley of Forbidden Khawarism it was no light act to plunge headlong into a nameless brawl; and Conan, for all his Cimmerian love of a fight, was not disposed thoughtlessly to jeopardize his secret mission.

But the glimpse of a scarred, bearded face swept from his mind all thought and emotion save a crimson wave of fury. He acted instinctively.

Full into the midst of the flailing group, half-seen by the light of a distant cresset, Conan leaped, kindhjal in hand. He was dimly aware that one man was fighting three or four others, but all his attention was fixed on a single tall gaunt form, dim in the shadows. His long, narrow, curved blade licked venomously at this figure, ploughing through cloth, bringing a yelp as the edge sliced skin. Something crashed down on Conan’s head, bludgeoning him, and he reeled, and closed with someone he could not see.

His groping hand locked on a chain that encircled a bull neck, and with a straining gasp he ripped upward and felt his keen kindhjal slice through cloth, skin and belly muscles. An agonized groan burst from his victim’s lips, and blood gushed sickeningly over Conan’s hand.

Through a blur of clearing sight, the Cimmerian saw a broad bearded face falling away from him—not the face he had seen before. The next instant he had leaped clear of the dying man, and was slashing at the shadowy forms about him. An instant of flickering steel, and then the figures were running fleetly up the alley. Conan, springing in pursuit, his hot blood lashed to murderous fury, tripped over a writhing form and fell headlong. He rose, cursing, and was aware of a man near him, panting heavily. A tall man, with a long curved blade in hand. Three forms lay in the mud of the alley.

“Come, my friend, whoever you are!” the tall man panted in Turanian. “They have fled, but they will return with others. Let us go!”

Conan made no reply. Temporarily accepting the alliance into which chance had cast him, he followed the tall stranger who ran down the winding alley with the sure foot of familiarity. Silence held them until they emerged from a low dark arch, where a tangle of alleys debouched upon a broad square, vaguely lighted by small fires about which groups of turbaned men squabbled and brewed tea. A reek of unwashed bodies mingled with the odors of horses and camels. None noticed the two men standing in the shadow made by the angle of the mud wall.

Conan looked at the stranger, seeing a tall slim man with thin dark features. Under his khalat which was draggled and darkly splashed, showed the silver-heeled boots of a horseman. His turban was awry, and though he had sheathed his scimitar, blood clotted the hilt and the scabbard mouth.

The keen black eyes took in every detail of the Cimmerian’s appearance, but Conan did not flinch. His disguise had stood the test too many times for him to doubt its effectiveness.

The Cimmerian towered above all but the tallest of men, heavily built with broad shoulders and corded sinews which gave him a strength out of all proportion to his weight. He was a hard-woven mass of wiry muscles and steel string nerves, combining the wolf-trap coordination of a natural fighter with a berserk fury resulting from an overflowing nervous energy. The kindhjal in his girdle and the scimitar at his hip were as much a part of him as his hands.

He wore the Iranistani boots, vest and girdled khalat like a man born to them. His keen features, bummed to bronze by desert suns, were almost as dark as those of his companion.

“Tell me thy name,” requested the other. “I owe my life to thee.”

“I am Ali el Ghazi, an Iranistani,” answered Conan.

No hint of suspicion shadowed the other’s countenance. Under the coiffed Arab kafiyeh Conan’s eyes blazed lambent blue, but blue eyes were not at all unknown among the warriors of the Iranian lands.

The Turanian lightly and swiftly touched the hawk-headed pommel of Conan’s scimitar.

“I will not forget,” he promised. “I will know thee wherever we meet again. Now it were best we separated and went far from this spot, for men with knives will be seeking me—and thou too, for aiding me.” And like a shadow he glided among the camels and bales and was gone.

Conan stood silently for an instant, one ear cocked back toward the alley, the other absently taking in the sounds of the night. Somewhere a thin wailing voice sang to a twanging native lute. Somewhere else a feline-like burst of profanity marked the progress of a quarrel. Conan breathed deep with contentment, despite the grim Hooded Figure that stalked forever at his shoulder, and the recent rage that still seethed in his veins. This was the real heart of the East, the East which had long ago stolen his heart and led him to wander afar from his own people.

He realized that he still gripped something in his left hand, and he lifted it to the flickering light of a nearby fire. It was a length of gold chain, one of its massy links twisted and broken. From it depended a curious plaque of beaten gold, somewhat larger than a silver coin, but oval rather than round. There was no ornament, only a boldly carven inscription which Conan, with all his Eastern lore, could not decipher.

He knew that he had torn the chain from the neck of the man he had killed in that black alley, but he had no idea as to its meaning. Slipping it into his broad girdle, he strode across the square, walking with the swagger of a nomadic horseman that was so natural to him.

Leaving the square he strode down a narrow street, the overhanging balconies of which almost touched one another. It was not late. Merchants in flowing silk robes sat cross-legged before their booths, extolling the quality of their goods—Mosul silk, matchlocks from Herat, edged weapons from Vendhya, and seed pearls from Baluchistan, hawk-like Afghans and weapon-girdled Kosalans jostled him. Lights streamed through silk-covered windows overhead, and the light silvery laughter of women rose above the noise of barter and dispute.

There was a tingle in the realization that he, Conan, was the first Westerner ever to set foot in forbidden Khawarism, tucked away in a nameless valley not many days’ journey from where the Afghul mountains swept down into the steppes of the Turanians. Posing as a wandering Iranistani, traveling with a caravan from central Afghulistan he had come, staking his life against the golden lure of a treasure beyond men’s dreams.

In the bazaars and serais he had heard a tale: To Shaibar Khan, the Kosalan chief who had made himself master of Khawarism, the city had given up its ancient secret. The Kosalan had found the treasure hidden there so long ago by Mechmed Shah, king of Khawarism, the Land of the Throne of Gold, when his empire fell before the Hyrkanian invaders.

Conan was in Khawarism to steal that treasure; and he did not change his plans because of the bearded face he had recognized in the alley—the face of an old and hated enemy. Yar Akbar the Afghuli, traitor and murderer.

Conan turned from the street and entered a narrow arched gate which stood open as if in invitation. A narrow stair went up from a small court to a balcony. This he mounted, guided by the tinkle of a guitar and a plaintive voice singing in a language unknown to him.

He entered a room whose latticed casement overhung the street, and the singer ceased her song to greet him and make half-mocking salaam with a lithe flexing of supple limbs. He replied, and deposited himself on a divan. The furnishings of the room were not elaborate, but they were costly. The garments of the woman who watched interestedly were of silk, her satin vest sewn with seed pearls. Her dark eyes, over the filmy yasmaq, were lustrous and expressive, the eyes of a Iranistani.

“Would my lord have food—and wine?” she inquired; and Conan signified assent with the lordly gesture of a Iranistani swashbuckler who is careful not to seem too courteous to any woman, however famed in intrigue she may be. He had come there not for food and drink, but because he had heard in the bazaars that news of many kinds blew on the winds through the house of Ayisha, where men from far and near came to drink her wine and listen to her songs.

She served him, and, sinking down on cushions near him, watched him eat and drink. Conan’s appetite was not feigned. Many lean days had taught him to eat when and where he could. Ayisha seemed to him more like a curious child than an intriguing woman, evincing so much interest over a wandering Iranistani, but he knew that she was weighing him carefully behind her guileless stare, as she weighed all men who came into her house.

In that hotbed of plot and ambitions, the wandering stranger today might be the Amir of Afghulistan or the Shah of Iranistan tomorrow—or the morrow might see his headless body dangling as a feast for the birds.

“You have a good sword,” said she. He involuntarily touched the hilt. It was an Arab blade, long, lean, curved like the crescent moon, with a brass hawk’s head for a pommel.

“It has cut many a Turanian out of the saddle,” he boasted, with his mouth full, carrying out his character. Yet it was no empty boast.

“Hai!” She believed him and was impressed. She rested her chin on her small fists and gazed up at him, as if his dark, hawk-like face had caught her fancy.

“The Khan needs swords like yours,” she said.

“The Khan has many swords,” he retorted, gulping wine loudly.

“No more than he will need if Orkhan Bahadur comes against him,” she prophesied.

“I have heard of this Orkhan,” he replied. And so he had; who in Hyboria had not heard of the daring and valorous Turanian chief who defied the power of the north and had cut to pieces a Hyborean expedition sent to subdue him? “In the bazaars they say the Khan fears him.”

That was a blind venture. Men did not speak of Shaibar Khan’s fears openly.

Ayisha laughed. “Who does the Khan fear? Once the Amir sent troops to take Khawarism, and those who lived were glad to flee! Yet if any man lives who could storm the city, Orkhan Bahadur is that man. Only tonight the Kosalans were hunting his spies through the alleys.”

Conan remembered the Turanian accent of the stranger he had unwittingly aided. It was quite possible that the man was a Turanian spy.

As he pondered this, Ayisha’s sharp eyes discovered the broken end of the gold chain dangling from his girdle, and with a gurgle of delight she snatched it forth before he could stop her. Then with a squeal she dropped it as if it were hot, and prostrated herself in wriggling abasement among the cushions.

He scowled and picked up the trinket.

“Woman, what are you about?” he demanded.

“Your pardon, lord!” She clasped her hands, but her fear seemed more feigned than real; her eyes sparkled. “I did not know it was the token. Aie, you have been making game of me—asking me things none could know better than yourself. Which of the Twelve are you?”

“You babble as bees hum!” He scowled, dangling the pendant before her eyes. “You speak as one of knowledge, when, by Erlik, you know not the meaning of this thing.”

“Nay, but I do!” she protested. “I have seen such emblems before on the breasts of the emirs of the Inner Chamber. I know that it is a talisman greater than the seal of the Amir, and the wearer comes and goes at will in or out of the Shining Palace.”

“But why, wench, why?” he growled impatiently.

“Nay, I will whisper what you know so well,” she answered, kneeling beside him. Her breath came soft as the sighing of the distant night wind. “It is the symbol of a Guardian of the Treasure!”

She fell away from him laughing. “Have I not spoken truly?”

He did not at once reply. His brain was dizzy, the blood pounding madly in his veins.

“Say nothing of this,” he said at last, rising. “Your life upon it.” And casting her a handful of coins at random, he hurried down the stair and into the street. He realized that his departure was too abrupt, but he was too dizzy, with the realization of what had fallen into his hands, for an entirely placid course of action.

The treasure! In his hand he held what well might be the key to it—at least a key into the palace, to gain entrance into which he had racked his brain in vain ever since coming to Khawarism. His visit to Ayisha had borne fruit beyond his wildest dreams.

II

The Unholy Plan

Doubtless in Mechmed Shah’s day the Shining Palace deserved its name; even now it preserved some of its former splendor. It was separated from the rest of the city by a thick wall, and at the great gate there always stood a guard of Kosalans with bows, and girdles bristling with knives and pistols.

Shaibar Khan had an almost superstitious terror of accidental projectiles, and would allow only edged weapons to be brought into the palace. But his warriors were armed with the best bows that could be smuggled into the hills.

There was a limit to Conan’s audacity. There might be men on guard at the main gates who knew by sight all the emirs of the symbol. He made his way to a small side gate, through a loophole in which, at his imperious call, there peered a black man with the wizened features of a mute. Conan had fastened the broken finks together and the chain now looped his corded neck. He indicated the plaque which rested on the silk of his khalat; and with a deep salaam, the black man opened the gate.

Conan drew a deep breath. He was in the heart of the lion’s lair now, and he dared not hesitate or pause to deliberate. He found himself in a garden which gave onto an open court surrounded by arches supported on marble pillars. He crossed the court, meeting no one. On the opposite side a grim-looking Kosalan, leaning on a spear, scanned him narrowly but said nothing. Conan’s skin crawled as he strode past the somber warrior, but the man merely stared curiously at the gold oval gleaming against the Iranistani vest.

Conan found himself in a corridor whose walls were decorated by a gold frieze, and he went boldly on, seeing only soft-footed slaves who took no heed of him. As he passed into another corridor, broader and hung with velvet tapestries, his heart leaped into his mouth.

It was a tall slender man in long fur-trimmed robes and a silk turban who glided from an arched doorway and halted him. The man had the pale oval face of a Iranistani, with a black pointed beard, and dark shadowed eyes. As with the others his gaze sought first the talisman on Conan’s breast—the token, undoubtedly, of a servitor beyond suspicion.

“Come with me!” snapped the Iranistani. “I have work for you.” And vouchsafing no further enlightenment, he stalked down the corridor as if expecting Conan to follow without question; which, indeed, the Cimmerian did, believing that such would have been the action of the genuine Guardian of the Treasure. He knew this Iranistani was Ahmed Pasha, Shaibar Khan’s vizir; he had seen him riding along the streets with the royal house troops.

The Iranistani led the way into a small domed chamber, without windows, the walls hung with thick tapestries. A small bronze lamp lighted it dimly. Ahmed Pasha drew aside the hangings, directly behind a heap of cushions, and disclosed a hidden alcove.

“Stand there with drawn sword,” he directed. Then he hesitated. “Can you speak or understand any northern tongue?” he demanded. The false Iranistani shook his head.

“Good!” snapped Ahmed Pasha. “You are here to watch, not to listen. Our lord does not trust the man he is to meet here—alone. You are stationed behind the spot where this man will sit. Watch him like a hawk. If he makes a move against the Khan, cleave his skull. If harm comes to our prince, you shall be flayed alive.” He paused, glared an instant, then snarled:

“And hide that emblem, fool! Shall the whole world know you are an emir of the Treasure?”

“Hearkening and obedience, ya khawand,” mumbled Conan, thrusting the symbol inside his garments. Ahmed jerked the tapestries together, and left the chamber. Conan glanced through a tiny opening, waiting for the soft pad of the vizir’s steps to fade away before he should glide out and take up again his hunt for the treasure.

But before he could move, there was a low mutter of voices, and two men entered the chamber from opposite sides. One bowed low and did not venture to seat himself until the other had deposited his fat body on the cushions, and indicated permission.

Conan knew that he looked on Shaibar Khan, once the terror of Mount Yimsha, and now lord of Khawarism. The Kosalan had the broad powerful build of his race, but his thick limbs were soft from easy living. His eyes held some of their old restless fire, but the muscles of his face seemed flabby, and his features were lined and purpled with debauchery. And there seemed something else—a worried, haunted look, strange in that son of reckless nomads. Conan wondered if the possession of the treasure was weighing on his mind.

The other man was slender, dark, his garments plain beside the gorgeous ermine-trimmed kaftan, pearl-sewn girdle and green, emerald-crested turban of the Khan.

This stranger plunged at once into conversation, low voiced but animated and urgent. He did most of the talking, while Shaibar Khan listened, occasionally interjecting a question, or a grunt of gratification. The Khan’s weary eyes began to blaze, and his pudgy hands knotted as if they gripped again the hilt of the blade which had carved his way to power.

And Conan forgot to curse the luck which held him prisoner while precious time drifted by. Both men spoke a tongue the Cimmerian had not heard in years—a northern language. And scanning closely the slim dark stranger, Conan admitted himself baffled. If the man were, as he suspected, a northern man disguised as an easterner, then Conan knew he had met his equal in masquerade.

For it was northern politics he talked, northern politics that lay behind the intrigues of the East. He spoke of war and conquest, and vast hordes rolling down the Zhaibar Pass into Vendhya; to complete the overthrow, said the dark slender man, of a rule outworn.

He promised power and honors to Shaibar Khan, and Conan, listening, realized that the Kosalan was but a pawn in his game, no less than those others he mentioned. The Khan, narrow of vision, saw only a mountain kingdom for himself, reaching down into the plains of Iranistan and Vendhya, and backed by northern arms—not realizing those same arms could just as easily overwhelm him when the time was ripe.

But Conan, with his western wisdom, read behind the dark stranger’s words, and recognized there a plan of imperial dimensions, and the plot of a northern power to seize half of easten Hyboria. And the first move in that game was to be the gathering of warriors by Shaibar Khan. How? With the treasure of Khawarism! With it he could buy all the swords of Central Hyboria.

So the dark man talked and the Kosalan listened like an old wolf who harks to the trampling of the musk oxen in the snow. Conan listened, his blood freezing as the dark man casually spoke of invasions and massacres; and as the plot progressed and became more plain in detail, more monstrous and ruthless in conception, he trembled with a mad urge to leap from his cover and slash and hack both these bloody devils into pieces with the scimitar that quivered in his grasp. Only a sense of self-preservation stayed him from this madness; and presently Shaibar Khan concluded the audience and left the chamber, followed by the dark stranger. Conan saw this one smile furtively, like a man who has victory in his grasp.

Conan started to draw aside the curtain, when Ahmed Pasha came padding into the chamber. It occurred to the Cimmerian that it would be better to let the vizir find him at his post. But before Ahmed could speak, or draw aside the curtain, there sounded a rapid pattering of bare feet in the corridor outside, and a man burst into the room, wild eyed and panting. At the sight of him a red mist wavered across Conan’s sight. It was Yar Akbar!

III

Wolf Pack

The Afghuli fell on his knees before Ahmed Pasha. His garments were tattered; blood seeped from a broken tooth and clotted his straggly beard.

“Oh, master,” he panted, “the dog has escaped!”

“Escaped!” The vizir rose to his full height, his face convulsed with passion. Conan thought that he would strike down the Afghuli, but his arm quivered, fell by his side.

“Speak!” The Iranistani’s voice was dangerous as the hiss of a cobra.

“We hedged him in a dark alley,” Yar Akbar babbled. “He fought like Yog. Then others came to his aid—a whole nest of Turanians, we thought, but mayhap it was but one man. He too was a devil! He slashed my side—see the blood! For hours since we have hunted them, but found no trace. He is over the wall and gone!” In his agitation Yar Akbar plucked at a chain about his neck; from it depended an oval like that held by Conan. The Cimmerian realized that Yar Akbar, too, was an emir of the Treasure. The Afghuli’s eyes burned like a wolf’s in the gloom, and his voice sank.

“He who wounded me slew Othman,” he whispered fearfully, “and despoiled him of the talisman!”

“Dog!” The vizir’s blow knocked the Afghuli sprawling. Ahmed Pasha was livid. “Call the other emirs of the Inner Chamber, swiftly!”

Yar Akbar hastened into the corridor, and Ahmed Pasha called:

“Ohe! You who hide behind the hangings—come forth!” There was no reply, and pale with sudden suspicion, Ahmed drew a curved dagger and with a pantherish spring tore the tapestry aside. The alcove was empty.

As he glared in bewilderment, Yar Akbar ushered into the chamber as unsavory a troop of ruffians as a man might meet, even in the hills: Kosalans, Afghulis, scarred with crime and old in wickedness. Ahmed Pasha counted them swiftly. With Yar Akbar there were eleven.

“Eleven,” he muttered. “And dead Othman makes twelve. All these men are known to you, Yar Akbar?”

“My head on it!” swore the Afghuli. “These be all true men.”

Ahmed clutched his beard.

“Then, by God, the One True God,” he groaned, “that Iranistani I set to guard the Khan was a spy and a traitor.” And at that moment a shriek and a clash of steel re-echoed through the palace.

When Conan heard Yar Akbar gasping out his tale to the vizir, he knew the game was up. He did not believe that the alcove was a blind niche in the wall; and, running swift and practiced hands over the panels, he found and pressed a hidden catch. An instant before Ahmed Pasha tore aside the tapestry, the Cimmerian wriggled his lean body through the opening and found himself in a dimly lighted chamber on the other side of the wall. A black slave dozed on his haunches, unmindful of the blade that hovered over his ebony neck, as Conan glided across the room, and through a curtained doorway.

He found himself back in the corridor into which one door of the audience chamber opened, and crouching among the curtains, he saw Yar Akbar come up the hallway with his villainous crew. He saw, too, that they had come up a marble stair at the end of the hall.

His heart leaped. In that direction, undoubtedly, lay the treasure—now supposedly unguarded. As soon as the emirs vanished into the audience chamber where the vizir waited, Conan ran swiftly and recklessly down the corridor.

But even as he reached the stairs, a man sitting on them sprang up, brandishing a tulwar. A black slave, evidently left there with definite orders, for the sight of the symbol on Conan’s breast did not halt him. Conan took a desperate chance, gambling his speed against the cry that rose in the thick black throat.

He lost. His scimitar licked through the massive neck and the Soudani rolled down the stairs, spurting blood. But his yell had rung to the roof.

And at that yell the emirs of the gold came headlong out of the audience chamber, giving tongue like a pack of wolves. They did not need Ahmed’s infuriated shriek of recognition and command. They were men picked for celerity of action as well as courage, and it seemed to Conan that they were upon him before the Negro’s death yell had ceased to echo.

He met the first attacker, a hairy Pathan, with a long lunge that sent his scimitar point through the thick throat even as the man’s broad tulwar went up for a stroke. Then a tall Kosalan swung his heavy blade like a butcher’s cleaver. No time to parry; Conan caught the stroke near his own hilt, and his knees bent under the impact.

But the next instant the kindhjal in his left hand ripped through the Kosalan’s entrails, and with a powerful heave of his whole body, Conan hurled the dying man against those behind him, bearing them back with him. Then Conan wheeled and ran, his eyes blazing defiance of the death that whickered at his back.

Ahead of him another stair led up. Conan reached it one long bound ahead of his pursuers, gained the steps and wheeled, all in one motion, slashing down at the heads of the pack that came clamoring after him.

Shaibar Khan’s broad pale face peered up at the melee from the curtains of an archway, and Conan was grateful to the Khan’s obsessional fear that had barred firearms from the palace. Otherwise, he would already have been shot down like a dog. He himself had no gun; the pistol with which he had started the adventure had slipped from its holster somewhere on that long journey, and lay lost among the snows of the Himelias.

No matter; he had never yet met his match with cold steel. But no blade could long have held off the ever-increasing horde that swarmed up the stair at him.

He had the advantage of position, and they could not crowd past him on the narrow stair; their very numbers hindered them. His flesh crawled with the fear that others would come down the stair and take him from behind, but none came. He retreated slowly, plying his dripping blades with berserk frenzy. A steady stream of taunts and curses flowed from his lips, but even in his fury he spoke in the tongues of the East, and not one of his assailants realized that the madman who opposed them was anything but a Iranistani.

He was bleeding from a dozen flesh cuts, when he reached the head of the stairs which ended in an open trap. Simultaneously the wolves below him came clambering up to drag him down. One gripped his knees, another was hewing madly at his head. The others howled below them, unable to get at their prey.

Conan stooped beneath the sweep of a tulwar and his scimitar split the skull of the wielder. His kindhjal he drove through the breast of the man who clung to his knees, and kicking the clinging body away from him, he reeled up through the trap. With frantic energy, he gripped the heavy iron-bound door and slammed it down, falling across it in semicollapse.

The splintering of wood beneath him warned him and he rolled clear just as a steel point crunched up through the door and quivered in the starlight. He found and shot the bolt, and then lay prostrate, panting for breath. How long the heavy wood would resist the attacks from below he did not know.

He was on a flat-topped roof, the highest part of the palace. Rising, he stumbled over to the nearest parapet, and looked down, onto lower roofs. He saw no way to get down. He was trapped.

It was the darkness just before dawn. He was on a higher level than the walls or any of the other houses in Khawarism. He could dimly make out the sheer of the great cliffs which flanked the valley in which Khawarism stood, and he saw the starlight’s pale glimmer on the slim river which trickled past the massive walls. The valley ran southeast and northwest.

And suddenly the wind, whispering down from the north, brought a burst of crackling reports. Shots? He stared northwestward, toward where, he knew, the valley pitched upward, narrowing to a sheer gut, and a mud-walled village dominated the pass. He saw a dull red glow against the sky. Again came reverberations.

Somewhere in the streets below sounded a frantic clatter of flying hoofs that halted before the palace gate. There was silence then, in which Conan heard the splintering blows on the trap door, and the heavy breathing of the men who struck them. Then suddenly they ceased as if the attackers had dropped dead; utter silence attended a shrilling voice, indistinct through distance and muffling walls. A wild clamor burst forth in the streets below; men shouted, women screamed.

No more blows fell on the trap. Instead there were noises below—the rattle of arms, tramp of men, and a voice that held a note of hysteria shouting orders.

Conan heard the clatter of galloping horses, and saw torches moving through the streets, toward the northwestern gate. In the darkness up the valley he heard the whistle of arrows and heard the unmistakable screams of death.

Shrugging his shoulders, he sat down in an angle of the parapet, his scimitar across his knees. And there weary Nature asserted itself, and in spite of the clamor below him, and the riot in his blood, he slept.

IV

Furious Battle

He did not sleep long, for dawn was just stealing whitely over the mountains when he awoke. Weapons were clanging all around, and crouching at the parapet, he saw the reason. Khawarism was besieged by warriors in sheepskin coats and fur kalpaks. Herds of their horses grazed just beyond bow shot, and the warriors themselves were firing from every rock and tree. Numbers of them were squirming along the half-dry river bed, among the willows, sniping at the men on the walls, who gave back their fire.

The Turanians of Orkhan Bahadur! That blaze in the darkness told of the fate of the village that guarded the pass. Turanians seldom made night raids; but Orkhan was nothing if not original.

The Kosalans manned the walls, and Conan believed he could make out the bulky shape and crested turban of Shaibar Khan among a cluster of peacock-clad nobles. And as he gazed at the turmoil in the streets below, the belief grew that every available Kosalan in the city was on the walls. This was no mere raid; it was a tribal war of extermination.

Conan’s Cimmerian audacity rose like heady wine in his veins, and he tore aside the splintered door and gazed down the stairs. The bodies still lay on the steps, stiff and unseeing. No living human met his gaze as he stole down the stairs, scimitar in hand. He gained the broad corridor, and still he saw no one. He hurried down the stair whereon he had slain the black slave, and reached a broad chamber with a single tapestried door.

There was the sudden twang of a bow string; the hiss of air stabbed by him. The bolt whined past him and he covered the space with a long leap, grappled a snarling, biting figure behind the tapestry and dragged it into the open. It was Ahmed Pasha.

“Accursed one!” The vizir fought like a mad dog. “I guessed you would come skulking here—Yog’s curse on the hashish that has made my hand unsteady—”

His dagger girded through Conan’s garments, drawing blood. Under his silks the Iranistani’s muscles were like taut wires. Employing his superior weight, the Cimmerian hurled himself hard against the other, driving the vizir’s head back against the stone wall with a stunning crack. As the Iranistani relaxed with a groan, Conan’s left hand wrenched from his grasp and lurched upward, and the keen kindhjal encountered flesh and bone.

The Cimmerian lifted the still twitching corpse and thrust it behind the tapestry, hiding it as best he could. A bunch of keys at the dead man’s girdle caught his attention, and they were in his hand as he approached the curtained door.

The heavy teakwood portal, bound in arabesqued copper, would have resisted any onslaught short of artillery. A moment’s fumbling with the massive keys, and Conan found the right one. He passed into a narrow corridor dimly lighted by some obscure means. The walls were of marble, the floor of mosaics. It ended at what seemed to be a blank carven wall, until Conan saw a thin crack in the marble.

Through carelessness or haste, the secret door had been left partly open. Conan heard no sound, and was inclined to believe that Ahmed Pasha had remained to guard the treasure alone. He gave the vizir credit for wit and courage.

Conan pulled open the door—a wide block of marble revolving on a pivot—and halted short, a low cry escaping his lips. He had come full upon the treasure of Khawarism, and the sight stunned him!

The dim light must have come through hidden interstices in the colored dome of the circular chamber in which he stood. It illumined a shining pyramidal heap upon a dais in the center of the floor, a platform that was a great round slab of pure jade. And on that jade gleamed tokens of wealth beyond the dreams of madness. The foundations of the pile consisted of blocks of virgin gold and upon them lay, rising to a pinnacle of blazing splendor, ingots of hammered silver, ornaments of golden enamel, wedges of jade, pearls of incredible perfection, inlaid ivory, diamonds that dazzled the sight, rubies like clotted blood, emeralds like drops of green fire, pulsing sapphires—Conan’s senses refused to accept the wonder of what he saw. Here, indeed, was wealth sufficient to buy every sword in Asia. A sudden sound brought him about. Someone was coming down the corridor outside, someone who labored for breath and ran staggeringly. A quick glance around, and Conan slipped behind the rich gilt-worked arras which masked the walls. A niche where, perhaps, had stood an idol in the old pagan days, admitted his lean body, and he gazed through a slit cut in the velvet.

It was Shaibar Khan who came into the chamber. The Khan’s garments were torn and splashed darkly. He stared at his treasure with haunted eyes, and he groaned. Then he called for Ahmed Pasha.

One man came, but it was not the vizir who lay dead in the outer corridor. It was Yar Akbar, crouching like a great gray wolf, beard bristling in his perpetual snarl.

“Why was the treasure left unguarded?” demanded Shaibar Khan petulantly. “Where is Ahmed Pasha?”

“He sent us on the wall,” answered Yar Akbar, hunching his shoulders in servile abasement. “He said he would guard the treasure himself.”

“No matter!” Shaibar Khan was shaking like a man with an ague. “We are lost. The people have risen against me and opened the gates to that devil Orkhan Bahadur. His Turanians are cutting down my Kosalans in the streets. But he shall not have the treasure. See ye that golden bar that juts from the wall, like a sword hilt from the scabbard? I have but to pull that, and the treasure falls into the subterranean river which runs below this palace, to be lost forever to the sight of men. Yar Akbar, I give you a last command—pull that bar!”

Yar Akbar moaned and wrung his beard, but his eyes were red as a wolf’s, and he turned his ear continually toward the outer door.

“Nay, lord, ask of me anything but that!”

“Then I will do it!” Shaibar Khan moved toward the bar, reached out his hand to grasp it. With a snarl of a wild beast, Yar Akbar sprang on his back, grunting as he struck. Conan saw the point of the Khyber knife spring out of Shaibar Khan’s silk-clad breast, as the Kosalan chief threw wide his arms, cried out chokingly, and tumbled forward to the floor. Yar Akbar spurned the dying body with a vicious foot.

“Fool!” he croaked. “I will buy my life from Orkhan Bahadur. Aye, this treasure shall gain me much honor with him, now the other emirs are dead—”

He halted, crouching and glaring, the reddened knife quivering in his hairy fist. Conan had swept aside the tapestry and stepped into the open. “Yajur!” ejaculated the Afghuli. “The dog-Iranistani!”

“Look more closely, Yar Akbar,” answered Conan grimly, throwing back his kafiyeh and speaking in the common tongue. “Do you not remember the Gorge of Izz ed din and the scout trapped there by your treachery? One man escaped, you dog of the Zhaibar.”

Slowly a red flame grew in Yar Akbar’s eyes.

“El Shirkuh!” he muttered, giving Conan his Afghuli name—the Mountain Lion. Then, with a howl that rang to the domed roof, he launched himself through the air, his three-foot knife gleaming.

Conan did not move his feet. A supple twist of his torso avoided the thrust, and the furiously driven knife hissed between left arm and body, tearing his khalat. At the same instant Conan’s left forearm bent up and under the lunging arm that guided the knife. Yar Akbar screamed, spat on the kindhjal’s narrow blade. Unable to halt his headlong rush, he caromed bodily against Conan, bearing him down.

They struck the floor together, and Yar Akbar, with a foot of trenchant steel in his vitals, yet reared up, caught Conan’s hair in a fierce grasp, gasped a curse, lifted his knife—and then his wild beast vitality failed him, and with a convulsive shudder he rolled clear and lay still in a spreading pool of blood.

Conan rose and stared down at the bodies upon the floor, then at the glittering heap on the jade slab. His soul yearned to it with the fierce yearning that had haunted him for years. Dared he take the desperate chance of hiding it under the very noses of the invading Turanians? If he could, he might escape, to return later, and bear it away. He had taken more desperate chances before.

Across his mental vision flashed a picture of a slim dark stranger who spoke a northern tongue. It was lure of the treasure which had led Orkhan Bahadur out of his steppes; and the treasure in his hands would be as dangerous as it was in the hands of Shaibar Khan. The Power represented by the dark stranger could deal with the Turanian as easily as with the Kosalan.

No; one eastern adventurer with that treasure was as dangerous to the peace of the east as another. He dared not run the risk of Orkhan Bahadur finding that pile of gleaming wealth—sweat suddenly broke out on Conan’s body as he realized, for once in his life, a driving power mightier than his own desire. The helpless millions of Vendhya were in his mind as, cursing sickly, he gripped the gold bar and heaved it!

With a grinding boom something gave way, the jade slab moved, turned, tilted, and disappeared, and with it vanished, in a final iridescent burst of dazzling splendor, the treasure of Khawarism. Far below came a sullen splash, and the sound of waters roaring in the darkness; then silence, and where a black hole had gaped there showed a circular slab of the same substance as the rest of the floor.

Conan hurried from the chamber. He did not wish to be found where the Turanians might connect him with the vanishing of the treasure they had battled to win. Let them think, if they would, that Shaibar Khan and Yar Akbar had disposed of it somehow, and slain one another. As he emerged from the palace into an outer court, lean warriors in sheepskin kaftans and high fur caps were swarming in. Quivers crossed on their breasts, and yataghans hung at their girdles. One of them lifted a bow and took deliberate aim at Conan.

Then it was struck aside, and a voice shouted:

“By Bel, it is my friend Ali el Ghazi!” There strode forward a tall man whose kalpak was of white lambskin, and whose kaftan was trimmed with ermine. Conan recognized the man he had aided in the alley.

“I am Orkhan Bahadur!” exclaimed the chief with a ringing laugh. “Put up your sword, friend; Khawarism is mine! The heads of the Kosalans are heaped in the market square! When I fled from their swords last night, they little guessed my warriors awaited my coming in the mountains beyond the pass! Now I am prince of Khawarism, and thou art my cup-companion. Ask what thou wilt, yea, even a share of the treasure of Khawarism—when we find it.”

“When you find it!” Conan mentally echoed, sheathing his scimitar with an Iranistani swagger. The Cimmerian was something of a fatalist. He had come out of this adventure with his life at least, and the rest was in the hands of Crom.

“Alhamdolillah!” said Conan, joining arms with his new cup-companion.

Swords of Khawarism

(Originally titled Swords of Khawarism)

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

Conan of Cimmeria opened his chamber door and gazed out, his long keen-bladed kindhjal in his hand. Somewhere a cresset glowed fitfully, dimly lighting the broad hallway, flanked by thick columns. The spaces between these columns were black arched wells of darkness, where anything might be lurking.

Nothing moved within his range of vision. The great hall seemed deserted. But he knew that he had not merely dreamed that he heard the stealthy pad of bare feet outside his door, the stealthy sound of unseen hands trying the portal.

Conan felt the peril that crawled unseen about him, the first white man ever to set foot in forgotten Khawarism, the forbidden, age-old city brooding high among the Afghuli mountains. He believed his disguise was perfect; as Ali el Ghazi, a wandering Wazuli, he had entered Khawarism, and as such he was a guest in the palace of its prince. But the furtive footfalls that had awakened him were a sinister portent.

He stepped out into the hall cautiously, closing the door behind him. A single step he took — it was the swish of a garment that warned him. He whirled, quick as a cat, and saw, all in a split second, a great black body hurtling at him from the shadows, the gleam of a plunging knife. And simultaneously he himself moved in a blinding blur of speed. A shift of his whole body avoided the stroke, and as the blade licked past, splitting only thin air, his kindhjal, driven with desperate energy, sank its full length in the black torso.

An agonized groan was choked by a rush of blood in the dusky throat. The Negro’s knife rang on the marble floor, and the great black figure, checked in its headlong rush, swayed drunkenly and pitched forward. Conan watched with his eyes as hard as flint as the would-be murderer shuddered convulsively and then lay still in a widening crimson pool.

He recognized the man, and as he stood staring down at his victim, a train of associations passed swiftly through his mind, recollections of past events crowding on a realization of his present situation.

Lure of treasure had brought Conan in his disguise to forbidden Khawarism. Since the days of the great Khans, Khawarism had sheltered the treasure of the long-dead shahs. Many an adventurer had sought that fabled hoard, and many had died. But Conan had found it — only to lose it.

Hardly had he arrived in Khawarism when a band of marauding Turanians, under their chief, Orkhan Bahadur, had stormed the city and captured it, slaying its prince, Shaibar Khan. And while the battle raged in the streets, Conan had found the hidden treasure in a secret chamber, and his brain had reeled at its splendor. But he had been unable to bear it away, and he dared not leave it for Orkhan. The emissary of an intriguing northern power was in Khawarism, plotting to use that treasure to conquer Vendhya. Conan had done away with it forever. The victorious Turanians had searched for it in vain.

Conan, as Ali el Ghazi, had once saved Orkhan Bahadur’s life, and the prince made the supposed Wazuli welcome in the palace. None dreamed of his connection with the disappearance of the hoard, unless — Conan stared somberly down at the figure on the marble floor.

That man was Baber, a Kushite servant of Suleiman Pasha, the emissary.

Conan lifted his head and swept his gaze over the black arches, the shadowy columns. Had he only imagined that he heard movement back in the darkness? Bending over quickly, he grasped the limp body and heaved it on his shoulder — an act impossible for a man with less steely thews — and started down the hall. A corpse found before his door meant questions, and the fewer questions Conan had to answer the better.

He went down the broad, silent hall and descended a wide marble stair into swallowing gloom, like an oriental demon carrying a corpse to hell; groped through a tapestried door and down a short, black corridor to a blank marble wall.

When he thrust against this with his foot, a section swung inward, working on a pivot, and he entered a circular, domed chamber with a marble floor and walls hung with heavy gilt-worked tapestries, between which showed broad golden frieze-work. A bronze lamp cast a soft light, making the dome seem lofty and full of shadows, while the tapestries were clinging squares of velvet darkness.

This had been the treasure vault of Shaibar Khan, and why it was empty now, only Conan could tell.

Lowering the black body with a gasp of relief, for the burden had taxed even his wiry thews to the utmost, he deposited it exactly on the great disk that formed the center of the marble floor. Then he crossed the chamber, seized a gold bar that seemed merely part of the ornamentation, and jerked it strongly. Instantly the great central disk revolved silently, revealing a glimpse of a black opening, into which the corpse tumbled. The sound of rushing water welled up from the darkness, and then the slab, swinging on its pivot, completed its revolution and the floor showed again a smooth unbroken surface.

But Conan wheeled suddenly. The lamp burned low, filling the chamber with a lurid unreal light. In that light he saw the door open silently and a slim dark figure glide in.

It was a slender man with long nervous hands and an ivory oval of a face, pointed with a short black beard. His eyes were long and oblique, his garments dark, even his turban. In his hand a blue, snub-nosed revolver glinted dully.

“Suleiman Pasha!” muttered Conan tensely.

He had never been able to decide whether this man was the easterner he seemed, or a northerner in masquerade. Had the man penetrated his own disguise? The emissary’s first words assured him that such was not the case.

“Ali el Ghazi,” said Suleiman, “you have lost me a valuable servant, but you have told me a secret. None other knows the secret of that revolving slab. I did not, until I followed you, after you killed Baber, and watched you through the door, though I have suspected that this chamber was the treasure vault.

“I have suspected you — now I am certain. I know why the treasure has never been found. You disposed of it as you have disposed of Baber. You are cup-companion to Prince Orkhan Bahadur. But if I told him you cast away the treasure forever, do you suppose his friendship would prevail over his wrath?

“Keep back!” he warned. “I did not say that I would tell Orkhan. Why you threw away the treasure I cannot guess, unless it was because of fanatical loyalty to Shaibar Kahn.”

He looked him over closely. “Face like a hawk, body of coiled steel springs,” he murmured. “I can use you, my dearest swaggerer.”

“How use me?” demanded Conan.

“You can help me in the game I play with Orkhan Bahadur. The treasure is gone, but I can still use him, I and the white men who employ me. I will make him amir of Afghulistan and, after that, sultan of Vendhya.”

“And the puppet of these white men,” grunted Conan.

“What is that to thee?” Suleiman laughed. “Thine is not to think. I will do the thinking; see thou to the enacting of my commands.”

“I have not said that I would serve you,” growled Conan doggedly.

“You have no other choice,” answered Suleiman calmly. “If you refuse, I will reveal to Orkhan that which I learned tonight, and he will have you flayed alive.”

Conan bent his head moodily. He was caught in a vise of circumstances. It had not been loyalty to Shaibar Khan, as Suleiman thought, which had caused him to dump an emperor’s ransom in gold and jewels into the subterranean river. He knew Suleiman plotted the overthrow of British rule in Vendhya and the massacre of the helpless millions. He knew that Orkhan Bahadur, a ruthless adventurer despite his friendship for the false Wazuli, was a pliant tool in the emissary’s hands. The treasure had been too potent a weapon to leave within their reach.

Suleiman was either a northerner or the eastern tool of someone from the north. Perhaps he, too, had secret ambitions. The Khawarism treasure had been a pawn in his game but, even without it, a tool of the emissary’s sitting on the throne of Khawarism, was a living menace to the peace of Vendhya. So Conan had remained in the city, seeking in every way to thwart Suleiman’s efforts to dominate Orkhan Bahadur. And now he himself was trapped.

He lifted his head and stared murderously at the slim eastern. “What do you wish me to do?” he muttered.

“I have a task for you,” answered Suleiman. “An hour ago word came to me, by one of my secret agents, that the tribesmen of Khuruk have found a white man dying in the hills, with valuable papers upon him. I must have those papers. I sent the man on to Orkhan, while I dealt with you.

“But I have changed my plans in regard to you; you are more valuable to me alive than dead, since there is no danger of your opposing me in the future. Orkhan will desire those papers that the white man carried, for the man was undoubtedly an agent, and I will persuade the prince to send you with a troop of horsemen to secure them. And remember you are taking your real orders from me, not from Orkhan.”

He stepped aside and motioned Conan to precede him.

They traversed the short corridor, an electric torch in Suleiman’s left hand playing its beam on his sullen, watchful companion, climbed the stair and went through the wide hall, thence along a winding corridor and into a chamber where Orkhan Bahadur stood near a gold-barred window which opened onto an arcaded court, which was just being whitened by dawn. The prince of Khawarism was resplendent in satin and pearl-sewn velvet which did not mask the hard lines of his lean body.

His thin dark features lighted at the sight of his cup-companion, but Conan reflected on the wolf that lurked ever below the surface of this barbaric chieftain, and how suddenly it could be unmasked, snarling and flame-eyed.

“Welcome, friends!” said the Turkoman, pacing the chamber restlessly. “I have heard a tale! Three days’ ride to the southwest are the villages of Ahmed Shah, in the valley of Khuruk. Four days ago his men came upon a man dying in the mountains. He wore the garments of an Afghuli, but in his delirium he revealed himself as a spy. When he was dead they searched him for loot and found certain papers which none of the dogs could read.

“But in his ravings he spoke of having been to Bokhara. It is in my mind that this white man was a spy, returning to Vendhya with papers valuable to the sirkar. Perhaps his people would pay well for these papers, if they knew of them. It is my wish to possess them. Yet I dare not ride forth myself, nor send many men. Suppose the treasure was found in my absence? My own men would bar the gates against me.”

“This is a matter for diplomacy rather than force,” put in Suleiman Pasha smoothly. “Ali el Ghazi is crafty as well as bold. Send him with fifty men.”

“Can thou do it, brother?” demanded Orkhan eagerly.

Suleiman’s gaze burned into Conan’s soul. There was but one answer, if he wished to escape flaying steel and searing fire.

“Only in the gods is power,” he muttered. “Yet I can attempt the thing.”

“Mashallah!” exclaimed Orkhan. “Be ready to start within the hour. There is a Khurukzai in the suk, one Dost Shah, who is of Ahmed’s clan, and will guide you. There is friendship between me and the men of Khuruk. Approach Ahmed Shah in peace and offer him gold for the papers, but not too much, lest his cupidity be roused. But I leave it to your own judgment. With fifty men there is no fear of the smaller clans between Khawarism and Khuruk. I go now to choose the men to ride with you.”

As soon as Orkhan left the chamber, Suleiman bent close to Conan and whispered: “Secure the papers, but do not bring them to Orkhan! Pretend that you have lost them in the hills — anything — but bring them to me.”

“Orkhan will be angry and suspicious,” objected Conan.

“Not half as angry as he would be if he knew what became of the Khawarism treasure,” retorted Suleiman. “Your only chance is to obey me. If your men return without you, saying you have fled away, be sure a hundred men will quickly be upon your trail — nor can you hope to win alone through these hostile, devil-haunted hills, anyway. Do not dare to return without the papers, if you do not wish to be denounced to Orkhan. Your life depends on your playing my game, Wazuli!”

II

Playing Suleiman’s “game” seemed to be the only thing to do, even three days later as Conan, in his guise of the Wazuli swashbuckler, Ali el Ghazi, was riding along a trail that followed a ledgelike fold of rock ribbing a mile-wide cliff.

Just ahead of him on a bony crow-bait rode the Khurukzai guide, a hairy savage with a dirty white turban, and behind him strung out in single file fifty of Orkhan Bahadur’s picked warriors. Conan felt the pride of a good leader of fighting men as he glanced back at them. These were no stunted peasants, but tall, sinewy men with the pride and temper of hawks; nomads and sons of nomads, born to the saddle. They rode horses that were distinctive in that land of horsemen, and their bows were modern repeaters.

“Listen!” It was the Khurukzai who halted suddenly, lifting a hand in warning.

Conan leaned forward, rising in the wide silver stirrups, turning his head slightly sidewise. A gust of wind whipped along the ledge, bearing with it the echoes of a series of sputtering reports.

The men behind Conan heard it, too, and there was a creaking of saddles as they instinctively unslung bows and hitched yataghan hilts forward.

“Bows!” exclaimed Dost Shah. “Men are fighting in the hills.”

“How far are we from Khuruk?” asked Conan.

“An hour’s ride,” answered the Khurukzai, glancing at the mid-afternoon sun. “Beyond the corner of the cliff we can see the Pass of Akbar, which is the boundary of Ahmed Shah’s territory. Khuruk is some miles beyond.”

“Push on, then,” said Conan.

They moved on around the crag which jutted out like the prow of a ship, shutting off all view to the south. The path narrowed and sloped there, so the men dismounted and edged their way, leading the animals which grew half frantic with fear.

Ahead of them the trail broadened and sloped up to a fan-shaped plateau, flanked by rugged ridges. This plateau narrowed to a pass in a solid wall of rock hundreds of feet high; the pass was a triangular gash, and a stone tower in its mouth commanded the approach. There were men in the tower, and they were firing at other men who lay out on the plateau in a wide ragged crescent, concealed behind boulders and rocky ledges. But these were not all firing at the tower, as it presently became apparent.

Off to the left of the pass, skirting the foot of the cliffs, a ravine meandered. Men were hiding in this ravine, and Conan quickly saw that they were trapped there. The men out on the plateau had cast a cordon around it and were working their way closer, shooting as they came. The men in the ravine fired back, and a few corpses were strewn among the rocks. But from the sound of the firing, there were only a few men in the gully, and the men in the tower could not come to their aid. It would have been suicide to try to cross that arrow-swept open space between the ravine and the pass mouth.

Conan had halted his men at an angle of the cliff where the trail wound up toward the plateau, and had advanced with the Khurukzai guide part way up the incline.

“What does this mean?” he asked.

Dost Shah shook his head like one puzzled. “That is the Pass of Akbar,” he said. “That tower is Ahmed Shah’s. Sometimes the tribes come to fight us, and we shoot them from the tower. It can only be Ahmed’s bowmen in the tower and in the ravine. But —”

He shook his head again, and having tied his horse to a straggling tamarisk, he went up the slope, craning his neck and hugging his bow, while he muttered in his beard as if in uncertainty.

Conan followed him to the crest where the trail bent over the rim of the plateau, but with more caution than the Khurukzai was showing. They were now within bow range of the combatants, and arrows were whistling like hornets across the plateau.

Conan could plainly make out the forms of the besiegers lying among the rocks that littered the narrow plain. Evidently they had not noticed him and the guide, and he did not believe they saw his men where he had stationed them in the shade of an overhanging crag. All their attention was fixed on the ravine, and they yelled with fierce exultation as a turban thrust above its rim fell back splashed with crimson. The men in the tower yelled with helpless fury.

“Keep your head down, you fool!” Conan swore at Dost Shah, who was carelessly craning his long neck above a cluster of rocks.

“The men in the tower must be Ahmed’s men,” muttered Dost Shah uneasily. “Yes; it could not be otherwise, yet — the gods!” The last was an explosive yelp, and he sprang up like a madman, as if forgetting all caution in some other overwhelming emotion.

Conan cursed and grabbed at him to pull him down, but he stood brandishing his bow, his tattered garments whipping in the wind like a demon of the hills.

“What devil’s work is this?” he yelled. “That is not — those are not —”

His voice changed to a gasp as an arrow drilled him through the temple. He tumbled back to the ground and lay without motion.

“Now what was he going to say?” muttered Conan, peering out over the rocks. “Was that a stray shot, or did somebody see him?”

He could not tell whether the shot came from the boulders or the tower. It was typical of hill warfare, the yells and shooting keeping up an incessant devil’s din. One thing was certain: the cordon was gradually closing about the men trapped in the ravine. They were well hidden from the arrows, but the attackers were working so close that presently they could finish the job with a short swift rush and knife work at close quarters.

Conan fell back down the incline, and coming to the eager Turanians, spoke hurriedly: “Dost Shah is dead, but he has brought us to the borders of Ahmed Shah’s territory. Those in the tower are Khurukzai, and these men attacking them have cut off some chief — probably Ahmed Shah himself — in that ravine. I judge that from the noise both sides are making. Then, they’d scarcely be taking such chances to slaughter a few common warriors. If we rescue him we shall have a claim on his friendship, and our task will be made easy, as the gods makes all things for brave men.

“The men attacking seem to me not to number more than a hundred men — twice our number, true, but there are circumstances in our favor, surprise, and the fact that the men in the pass will undoubtedly sally out if we create a diversion in the enemy’s rear. At present the Khurukzai are bottled in the pass. They cannot emerge, any more than the raiders can enter in the teeth of their arrows.”

“We await orders,” the men answered.

Turanians have no love for Kurds, but the horsemen knew that Ali el Ghazi was cup-companion to their prince.

“Ten men to hold the horses!” he snapped. “The rest follow me.”

A few minutes later they were crawling after him up the short slope. He lined them along the crest, seeing that each man was sheltered among the boulders.

This took but a few minutes, but in that interim the men crawling toward the ravine sprang to their feet and tore madly across the intervening space, yelling like blood-crazed wolves, their curved blades glittering in the sun. Bows spat from the gully and three of the attackers dropped, and the men in the tower sent up an awful howl and turned their guns desperately on the charging mob. But the range at that angle was too great.

Then Conan snapped an order, and a withering line of flame ran along the crest of the ridge. His men were picked marksmen and understood the value of volleys. Some thirty men were in the open, charging the ravine. A full half of them went down struck from behind, as if by some giant invisible fist. The others halted, realizing that something was wrong; they cringed dazedly, turning here and there, grasping their long knives, while the arrows of the Turanians took further toll.

Then, suddenly, realizing that they were being attacked from the rear, they dived screaming for cover. The men in the tower, sensing reinforcements, sent up a wild shout and redoubled their fire.

The Turanians, veterans of a hundred wild battles, hugged their boulders and kept aiming and firing without the slightest confusion. The men on the plateau were kicking up the devil’s own din. They were caught in the jaws of the vise, with arrows coming from both ways, and no way of knowing the exact numbers of their new assailants.

The break came with hurricane suddenness, as is nearly always the case in hill fighting. The men on the plain broke and fled westward, a disorderly mob, scrambling over boulders and leaping gullies, their tattered garments flapping in the wind.

The Turanians sent a last volley into their backs, toppling over distant figures like tenpins, and the men in the tower gave tongue and began scrambling down into the pass.

Conan cast a practiced eye at the fleeing marauders, knew that the rout was final, and called for the ten men below him to bring up the horses swiftly. He had an eye for dramatics, and he knew the effect they would make filing over the ridge and out across the boulder-strewn plain on their Turanian steeds.

A few minutes later he enjoyed that effect and the surprised yells of the men they had aided as they saw the kalpaks of the riders top the ridge. The pass was crowded with men in ragged garments, grasping bows, and in evident doubt as to the status of the newcomers.

Conan headed straight for the ravine, which was nearer the ridge than it was to the pass, believing the Khurukzai chief was among those trapped there.

His bow was slung on his back, and his open right hand raised as a sign of peace; seeing which the men in the pass dubiously lowered their bows and came streaming across the plateau toward him, instead of pursuing the vanquished, who were already disappearing among the distant crags and gullies.

A dozen steps from the ridge of the ravine Conan drew rein, glimpsing turbans among the rocks, and called out a greeting in Pashtu. A deep bellowing voice answered him, and a vast figure heaved up into full view, followed by half a dozen lesser shapes.

“the gods be with thee!” roared the first man.

He was tall, broad, and powerful; his beard was stained with henna, and his eyes blazed like fires burning under gray ice. One massive fist gripped a bow, the thumb of the other was hooked into the broad silken girdle which banded his capacious belly, as he tilted back on his heels and thrust his beard out truculently. That girdle likewise supported a broad tulwar and three or four knives.

“Mashallah!” roared this individual. “I had thought it was my own men who had taken the dogs in the rear, until I saw those fur caps. Ye are from Khawarism, no doubt?”

“Aye; I am Ali el Ghazi, a Wazuli, brother-in-arms to Orkhan Bahadur. You are Ahmed Shah, lord of Khuruk?”

There was a hyenalike cackle of laughter from the lean, evil-eyed men who had followed the big man out of the gully.

“Ahmed Shah has been in hell these four days,” rumbled the giant. “I am Afzal Khan, whom men name the Butcher.”

Conan sensed rather than heard a slight stir among the men behind him. Most of them understood Pashtu, and the deeds of Afzal Khan had found echo in the serais of Turkestan. The man was an outlaw, even in that lawless land, a savage plunderer whose wild road was lurid with the smoke and blood of slaughter.

“But that pass is the gateway to Khuruk,” said Conan, slightly bewildered.

“Aye!” agreed Afzal Khan affably. “Four days ago I came down into the valley from the east and drove out the Khurukzai dogs. Ahmed Shah I slew with my own hands — so!”

A flicker of red akin to madness flamed up momentarily in his eyes as he smashed the butt of his bow down on a dead tamarisk branch, shattering it from the trunk. It was as if the mere mention of murder roused the sleeping devil in him. Then his beard bristled in a fierce grin.

“The villages of Khuruk I burned,” he said calmly. “My men need no roofs between them and the sky. The village dogs — such as still lived — fled into the hills. This day I was hunting some from among the rocks, not deeming them wise enough to plant an ambush, when they cut me off from the pass, and the rest you know. I took refuge in the ravine. When I heard your firing I thought it was my own men.”

Conan did not at once answer, but sat his horse, gazing inscrutably at the fierce, scarred countenance of the Afghuli. A sidelong glance showed him the men from the tower straggling up — some seventy of them, a wild, dissolute band, ragged and hairy, with wolfish countenances and bows in their hands. These bows were, in most cases, inferior to those carried by his own men.

In a battle begun then and there, the advantage was still with the mounted Turanians. Then another glance showed him more men swarming out of the pass — a hundred at least.

“The dogs come at last!” grunted Afzal Khan. “They have been gorging back in the valley. I would have been vulture bait if I had been forced to await their coming. Brother!” He strode forward to lay his hand on Conan’s stirrup strap, while envy of and admiration for the magnificent Turanian stallion burned in his fierce eyes. “Brother, come with me to Khuruk! You have saved my life this day, and I would reward you fittingly.”

Conan did not look at his Turanians. He knew they were waiting for his orders and would obey him. He could draw his pistol and shoot Afzal Khan dead, and they could cut their way back across the plateau in the teeth of the volleys that were sure to rake their line of flight. Many would escape. But why escape? Afzal Khan had every reason to show them the face of a friend, and, besides, if he had killed Ahmed Shah, it was logical to suppose that he had the papers without which Conan dared not return to Khawarism.

“We will ride with you to Khuruk, Afzal Khan,” decided Conan.

The Afghuli combed his crimson beard with his fingers and boomed his gratification.

The ragged ruffians closed in about them as they rode toward the pass, a swarm of sheepskin coats and soiled turbans that hemmed in the clean-cut riders in their fur caps and girdled kaftans.

Conan did not miss the envy in the glances cast at the bows and cartridge belts and horses of the Turanians. Orkhan Bahadur was generous with his men to the point of extravagance; he had sent them out with enough ammunition to fight a small war.

Afzal Khan strode by Conan’s stirrup, booming his comments and apparently oblivious to everything except the sound of his own voice.

Conan glanced from him to his followers. Afzal Khan was a Yusufzai, a pure-bred Afghuli, but his men were a motley mob — Afghulis, mostly, Orakzai, Ummer Khels, Sudozai, Afghulis, Ghilzai — outcasts and nameless men from many tribes.

They went through the pass — a knife-cut gash between sheer rock walls, forty feet wide and three hundred yards long — and beyond the tower were a score of gaunt horses which Afzal Khan and some of his favored henchmen mounted. Then the chief gave pungent orders to his men; fifty of them climbed into the tower and resumed the ceaseless vigilance that is the price of life in the hills, and the rest followed him and his guests out of the pass and along the knife-edge trail that wound amid savage crags and jutting spurs.

Afzal Khan fell silent, and indeed there was scant opportunity for conversation, each man being occupied in keeping his horse or his own feet on the wavering path. The surrounding crags were so rugged and lofty that the strategic importance of the Pass of Akbar impressed itself still more strongly on Conan.

Only through that pass could any body of men make their way safely. He felt uncomfortably like a man who sees a door shut behind him, blocking his escape, and he glanced furtively at Afzal Khan, riding with stirrups so short that he squatted like a huge toad in his saddle. The chief seemed preoccupied; he gnawed a wisp of his red beard and there was a blank stare in his eyes.

The sun was swinging low when they came to a second pass. This was not exactly a pass at all, in the usual sense. It was an opening in a cluster of rocky spurs that rose like fangs along the lip of a rim beyond which the land fell away in a long gradual sweep. Threading among these stony teeth, Conan looked down into the valley of Khuruk.

It was not a deep valley, but it was flanked by cliffs that looked unscalable. It ran east and west, roughly, and they were entering it at the eastern end. At the western end it seemed to be blocked by a mass of crags.

There were no cultivated patches, or houses to be seen in the valley — only stretches of charred ground. Evidently the destruction of the Khurukzai villages had been thorough. In the midst of the valley stood a square stone inclosure, with a tower at one corner, such as are common in the hills, and serve as forts in times of strife.

Divining his thought, Afzal Khan pointed to this and said: “I struck like a thunderbolt. They had not time to take refuge in the sangar. Their watchmen on the heights were careless. We stole upon them and knifed them; then in the dawn we swept down on the villages. Nay, some escaped. We could not slay them all. They will keep coming back to harass me — as they have done this day — until I hunt them down and wipe them all out.”

Conan had not mentioned the papers; to have done so would have been foolish; he could think of no way to question Afzal Khan without waking the Afghuli’s suspicions; he must await his opportunity.

That opportunity came unexpectedly.

“Can you read Urdu?” asked Afzal Khan abruptly.

“Aye!” Conan made no further comment but waited with concealed tenseness.

“I cannot; nor Pashtu, either, for that matter,” rumbled the Afghuli. “There were papers on Ahmed Shah’s body, which I believe are written in Urdu.”

“I might be able to read them for you.”

Conan tried to speak casually, but perhaps he was not able to keep his eagerness altogether out of his voice. Afzal Khan tugged his beard, glanced at him sidewise, and changed the subject. He spoke no more of the papers and made no move to show them to his guest. Conan silently cursed his own impatience; but at least he had learned that the documents he sought were in the bandit’s possession, and that Afzal Khan was ignorant of their nature — if he was not lying.

At a growled order all but sixty of the chief’s men halted among the spurs overlooking the valley. The rest trailed after him.

“They watch for the Khurukzai dogs,” he explained. “There are trails by which a few men might get through the hills, avoiding the Pass of Akbar, and reach the head of the valley.”

“Is this the only entrance to Khuruk?”

“The only one that horses can travel. There are footpaths leading through the crags from the north and the south, but I have men posted there as well. One bowman can hold any one of them forever. My forces are scattered about the valley. I am not to be taken by surprise as I took Ahmed Shah.”

The sun was sinking behind the western hills as they rode down the valley, tailed by the men on foot. All were strangely silent, as if oppressed by the silence of the plundered valley. Their destination evidently was the inclosure, which stood perhaps a mile from the head of the valley. The valley floor was unusually free of boulders and stones, except a broken ledge like a reef that ran across the valley several hundred yards east of the fortalice. Halfway between these rocks and the inclosure, Afzal Khan halted.

“Camp here!” he said abruptly, with a tone more of command than invitation. “My men and I occupy the sangar, and it is well to keep our wolves somewhat apart. There is a place where your horses can be stabled, where there is plenty of fodder stored.” He pointed out a stone-walled pen of considerable dimensions a few hundred yards away, near the southern cliffs. “Hungry wolves come down from the gorges and attack the horses.”

“We will camp beside the pen,” said Conan, preferring to be closer to their mounts.

Afzal Khan showed a flash of irritation. “Do you wish to be shot in the dark for an enemy?” he growled. “Pitch your tents where I bid you. I have told my men at the pass where you will camp, and if any of them come down the valley in the dark, and hear men where no men are supposed to be, they will shoot first and investigate later. Beside, the Khurukzai dogs, if they creep upon the crags and see men sleeping beneath them, will roll down boulders and crush you like insects.”

This seemed reasonable enough, and Conan had no wish to antagonize Afzal Khan. The Afghuli’s attitude seemed a mixture of his natural domineering arrogance and an effort at geniality. This was what might be expected, considering both the man’s nature and his present obligation. Conan believed that Afzal Khan begrudged the obligation, but recognized it.

“We have no tents,” answered the Cimmerian. “We need none. We sleep in our cloaks.” And he ordered his men to dismount at the spot designated by the chief. They at once unsaddled and led their horses to the pen, where, as the Afghuli had declared, there was an abundance of fodder.

Conan told off five men to guard them. Not, he hastened to explain to the frowning chief, that they feared human thieves, but there were the wolves to be considered. Afzal Khan grunted and turned his own sorry steeds into the pen, growling in his beard at the contrast they made alongside the Turanian horses.

His men showed no disposition to fraternize with the Turanians; they entered the inclosure and presently the smoke of cooking fires arose. Conan’s own men set about preparing their scanty meal, and Afzal Khan came and stood over them, combing his crimson beard that the firelight turned to blood. The jeweled hilts of his knives gleamed in the glow, and his eyes burned red like the eyes of a hawk.

“Our fare is poor,” he said abruptly. “Those Khurukzai dogs burned their own huts and food stores when they fled before us. We are half starved. I can offer you no food, though you are my guests. But there is a well in the sangar, and I have sent some of my men to fetch some steers we have in a pen outside the valley. Tomorrow we shall all feast full, inshallah!”

Conan murmured a polite response, but he was conscious of a vague uneasiness. Afzal Khan was acting in a most curious manner, even for a bandit who trampled all laws and customs of conventional conduct. He gave them orders one instant and almost apologized for them in the next.

The matter of designating the camp site sounded almost as if they were prisoners, yet he had made no attempt to disarm them. His men were sullen and silent, even for bandits. But he had no reason to be hostile toward his guests, and, even if he had, why had he brought them to Khuruk when he could have wiped them out up in the hills just as easily?

“Ali el Ghazi,” Afzal Khan suddenly repeated the name. “Wherefore Ghazi? What infidel didst thou slay to earn the name?”

“A Nemedian, Karmanan.” Conan spoke no lie there. As Ali el Ghazi, a Wazuli, he was known as the slayer of Karmanan; the duel had occurred in one of the myriad nameless skirmishes along the border.

Afzal Khan meditated this matter for a few minutes. The firelight cast part of his features in shadow, making his expression seem even more sinister than usual. He loomed in the firelit shadows like a somber monster weighing the doom of men. Then with a grunt he turned and strode away toward the sangar.

III

Night had fallen. Wind moaned among the crags. Cloud masses moved across the dark vault of the night, obscuring the stars which blinked here and there, were blotted out and then reappeared, like chill points of frosty silver. The Turanians squatted silently about their tiny fires, casting furtive glances over their shoulders.

Men of the deserts, the brooding grimness of the dark mountains daunted them; the night pressing down in the bowl of the valley dwarfed them in its immensity. They shivered at the wailing of the wind, and peered fearfully into the darkness, where, according to their superstitions, the ghosts of murdered men roamed ghoulishly. They stared bleakly at Conan, in the grip of fear and paralyzing fatalism.

The grimness and desolation of the night had its effect on the Cimmerian. A foreboding of disaster oppressed him. There was something about Afzal Khan he could not fathom — something unpredictable.

The man had lived too long outside the bounds of ordinary humanity to be judged by the standards of common men. In his present state of mind the bandit chief assumed monstrous proportions, like an ogre out of a fable.

Conan shook himself angrily. Afzal Khan was only a man, who would die if bitten by lead or steel, like any other man. As for treachery, what would be the motive? Yet the foreboding remained.

“Tomorrow we will feast,” he told his men. “Afzal Khan has said it.”

They stared at him somberly, with the instincts of the black forests and the haunted steppes in their eyes which gleamed wolfishly in the firelight.

“The dead feast not,” muttered one of them.

“What talk is this?” rebuked Conan. “We are living men, not dead.”

“We have not eaten salt with Afzal Khan,” replied the man. “We camp here in the open, hemmed in by his slayers on either hand. Aie, we are already dead men. We are sheep led to the butcher.”

Conan stared hard at his men, startled at their voicing the vague fears that troubled him. There was no accusation of his leadership in their voices. They merely spoke their beliefs in a detached way that belied the fear in their eyes. They believed they were to die, and he was beginning to believe they were right. The fires were dying down, and there was no more fuel to build them up. Some of the men wrapped themselves in their cloaks and lay down on the hard ground. Others remained sitting cross-legged on their saddle cloths, their heads bent on their breasts.

Conan rose and walked toward the first outcropping of the rocks, where he turned and stared back at the inclosure. The fires had died down there to a glow. No sound came from the sullen walls. A mental picture formed itself in his mind, resultant from his visit to the redoubt for water.

It was a bare wall inclosing a square space. At the northwest corner rose a tower. At the southwest corner there was a well. Once a tower had protected the well, but now it was fallen into ruins, so that only a hint of it remained. There was nothing else in the inclosure except a small stone hut with a thatched roof. What was in the hut he had no way of knowing. Afzal Khan had remarked that he slept alone in the tower. The chief did not trust his own men too far.

What was Afzal Khan’s game? He was not dealing straight with Conan; that was obvious. Some of his evasions and pretenses were transparent; the man was not as clever as one might suppose; he was more like a bull that wins by ferocious charges.

But why should he practice deception? What had he to gain? Conan had smelled meat cooking in the fortalice. There was food in the valley, then, but for some reason the Afghuli had denied it. The Turanians knew that; to them it logically suggested but one thing — he would not share the salt with men he intended to murder. But again, why?

“Ohai, Ali el Ghazi!”

At that hiss out of the darkness, Conan wheeled, his big knife jumping into his hand, his skin prickling. He strained his eyes, but saw nothing; heard only the muttering of the night wind.

“Who is it?” he demanded guardedly. “Who calls?”

“A friend! Stay your weapon!”

Conan saw a more solid shadow detach itself from the rocks and move toward him. He shoved the point of the blade against the man’s belly and leaned forward to glare into the hairy face in the dim, uncertain starlight. Even so the darkness was so thick the fellow’s features were only a blur.

“Do you not know me?” whispered the man, and by his accent Conan knew him for a Waziri. “I am Yar Akbar!”

“Yar Akbar!” Instantly the gun went out of sight and Conan’s hand fell on the other’s bull-like shoulder. “What do you in this den of thieves?”

The man’s teeth glimmered in the tangle of his beard as he grinned. “Mashallah! Am I not a thief, El Shirkuh?” he asked, giving Conan the name by which the Cimmerian, in his rightful person, was known to the easterners. “Hast thou forgotten the old days? Even now they would hang me, if they could catch me. But no matter. I was one of those who watch the paths in the hills.

“An hour ago I was relieved, and when I returned to the sangar I heard men talking of the Turanians who camped in the valley outside, and it was said their chief was the Wazuli who slew the infidel. So I knew it was El Shirkuh playing with doom again. Art thou mad, sahib? Death spreads his wings above thee and all thy men. Afzal Khan plots that thou seest no other sunrise.”

“I was suspicious of him,” muttered the Cimmerian. “In the matter of food —”

“The hut in the enclosure is full of food. Why waste beef and bread on dead men? Food is scarce enough in these hills — and at dawn you die.”

“But why? We saved Afzal Khan’s life, and there is no feud —”

“The Jhelum will flow backward when Afzal Khan spares a man because of gratitude,” muttered Yar Akbar.

“But for what reason?”

“By the gods, sahib, are you blind? Reason? Are not fifty Turanian steeds reason enough? Are not fifty bows with cartridges reason enough? In these hills firearms and cartridges are worth their weight in silver, and a man will murder his brother for a matchlock. Afzal Khan is a robber, and he covets what you possess.

“These weapons and these horses would lend him great strength. He is ambitious. He would draw to him many more men, make himself strong enough at last to dispute the rule of these hills with Orkhan Bahadur. Nay, he plots some day to take Khawarism from the man as he in his turn took it from their previous owners. What is the goal of every bandit in these hills, rich or poor? Mashallah! The treasure of Khawarism!”

Conan was silent, visualizing that accursed hoard as a monstrous loadstone drawing all the evil passions of men from near lands and far. Now it was but an empty shadow men coveted, but they could not know it, and its evil power was as great as ever. He felt an insane desire to laugh.

The wind moaned in the dark, and Yar Akbar’s muttering voice merged eerily with it, unintelligible a yard away.

“Afzal Khan feels no obligation toward you, because you thought it was Ahmed Shah you were aiding. He did not attack you at the Pass because he knew you would slay many of his men, and he feared lest the horses take harm in the battle. Now he has you in a trap as he planned. Sixty men inside the sangar; a hundred more at the head of the valley. A short time before moonrise, the men among the spurs will creep down the valley and take position among these rocks. Then when the moon is well risen, so that a man may aim, they will rake you with bow fire.

“Most of the Turanians will die in their sleep, and such as live and seek to flee in the other direction will be shot by the men in the enclosure. These sleep now, but sentries keep watch. I slipped out over the western side and have been lying here wondering how to approach your camp without being shot for a prowler.

“Afzal Khan has plotted well. He has you in the perfect trap, with the horses well out of the range of the arrows that will slay their riders.”

“So,” murmured Conan. “And what is your plan?”

“Plan? the gods, when did I ever have a plan? Nay, that is for you! I know these hills, and I can shoot straight and strike a good blow.” His yard-long Zhaibar knife thrummed as he swung it through the air. “But I only follow where wiser men lead. I heard the men talk, and I came to warn you, because once you turned an Afghuli blade from my breast, and again you broke the lock on the Peshawar jail where I lay moaning for the hills!”

Conan did not express his gratitude; that was not necessary. But he was conscious of a warm glow toward the hairy ruffian. Man’s treachery is balanced by man’s loyalty, at least in the barbaric hills where civilized sophistry has not crept in with its cult of time-serving.

“Can you guide us through the mountains?” asked Conan.

“Nay, sahib; the horses cannot follow these paths; and these booted Turks would die on foot.”

“It is nearly two hours yet until moonrise,” Conan muttered. “To saddle horses now would be to betray us. Some of us might get away in the darkness, but —”

He was thinking of the papers that were the price of his life; but it was not altogether that. Flight in the darkness would mean scattered forces, even though they cut their way out of the valley. Without his guidance the Turanians would be hopelessly lost; such as were separated from the main command would perish miserably.

“Come with me,” he said at last, and hurried back to the men who lay about the charring embers.

At his whisper they rose like ghouls out of the blackness and clustered about him, muttering like suspicious dogs at the Waziri. Conan could scarcely make out the hawklike faces that pressed close about him. All the stars were hidden by dank clouds. The fortalice was but a shapeless bulk in the darkness, and the flanking mountains were masses of solid blackness. The whining wind drowned voices a few yards away.

“Hearken and speak not,” Conan ordered. “This is Yar Akbar, a friend and a true man. We are betrayed. Afzal Khan is a dog, who will slay us for our horses. Nay, listen! In the sangar there is a thatched hut. I am going into the inclosure and fire that thatch. When you see the blaze, and hear my pistol speak, rush the wall. Some of you will die, but the surprise will be on our side. We must take the sangar and hold it against the men who will come down the valley at moonrise. It is a desperate plan, but the best that offers itself.”

“Bismillah!” they murmured softly, and he heard the rasp of blades clearing their scabbards.

“This is work indeed for cold steel,” he said. “You must rush the wall and swarm it while the Afghulis are dazed with surprise. Send one man for the warriors at the horse pen. Be of good heart; the rest is on the gods’s lap.”

As he crept away in the darkness, with Yar Akbar following him like a bent shadow, Conan was aware that the attitude of the Turanians had changed; they had wakened out of their fatalistic lethargy into fierce tension.

“If I fall,” Conan murmured, “will you guide these men back to Khawarism? Orkhan Bahadur will reward you.”

“Bel eat Orkhan Bahadur,” answered Yar Akbar. “What care I for these dogs? It is you, not they, for whom I risk my skin.”

Conan had given the man his bow. They swung around the south side of the inclosure, almost crawling on their bellies. No sound came from the breastwork, no light showed. Conan knew that they were invisible to whatever eyes were straining into the darkness along the wall. Circling wide, they approached the unguarded western wall.

“Afzal Khan sleeps in the tower,” muttered Yar Akbar, his lips close to Conan’s ear. “Sleeps or pretends to sleep. The men slumber beneath the eastern wall. All the sentries lurk on that side, trying to watch the Turanians. They have allowed the fires to die, to lull suspicion.”

“Over the wall, then,” whispered Conan, rising and gripping the coping. He glided over with no more noise than the wind in the dry tamarisk, and Yar Akbar followed him as silently. He stood in the thicker shadow of the wall, placing everything in his mind before he moved.

The hut was before him, a blob of blackness. It looked eastward and was closer to the west wall than to the other. Near it a cluster of dying coals glowed redly. There was no light in the tower, in the northwest angle of the wall.

Bidding Yar Akbar remain near the wall, Conan stole toward the embers. When he reached them he could make out the forms of the men sleeping between the hut and the east wall. It was like these hardened killers to sleep at such a time. Why not? At the word of their master they would rise and slay. Until the time came it was good to sleep. Conan himself had slept, and eaten, too, among the corpses of a battlefield.

Dim figures along the wall were sentinels. They did not turn; motionless as statues they leaned on the wall staring into the darkness out of which, in the hills, anything might come.

There was a half-burned fagot lying in the embers, one end a charring stump which glowed redly. Conan reached out and secured it. Yar Akbar, watching from the wall, shivered though he knew what it was. It was as if a detached hand had appeared for an instant in the dim glow and then disappeared, and then a red point moved toward him.

“By the gods!” swore the Afghuli. “This blackness is that of Set!”

“Softly!” Conan whispered at him from the pit darkness. “Be ready; now is the beginning of happenings.”

The ember glowed and smoked as he blew cautiously upon it. A tiny tongue of flame grew, licking at the wood.

“Commend thyself to the gods!” said Conan, and whirling the brand in a flaming wheel about his head, he cast it into the thatch of the hut.

There was a tense instant in which a tongue of flame flickered and crackled, and then in one hungry combustion the dry stuff leaped ablaze, and the figures of men started out of blank blackness with startling clarity. The guards wheeled, their stupid astonishment etched in the glare, and men sat up in their cloaks on the ground, gaping bewilderedly.

And Conan yelled like a hungry wolf and began jerking the trigger of his pistol.

A sentinel spun on his heel and crumpled, discharging his bow wildly in the air. Others were howling and staggering like drunken men, reeling and falling in the lurid glare. Yar Akbar was firing away with Conan’s bow, shooting down his former companions as cheerfully as if they were ancient enemies.

A matter of seconds elapsed between the time the fight sprang up and the time when the men were scurrying about wildly, etched in the merciless light and unable to see the two men who crouched in the shadow of the far wall, raining them with lead. But in that scant instant there came another sound — a swift thudding of feet, the daunting sound of men rushing through the darkness in desperate haste and desperate silence.

Some of the Afghulis heard it and turned to glare into the night. The fire behind them rendered the outer darkness more impenetrable. They could not see the death that was racing fleetly toward them, until the charge reached the wall.

Then a yell of terror went up as the men along the wall caught a glimpse of glittering eyes and flickering steel rushing out of the blackness. They fired one wild, ragged volley, and then the Turanians surged up over the wall in an irresistible wave and were slashing and hacking like madmen among the defenders.

Scarcely wakened, demoralized by the surprise, and by the arrows that cut them down from behind, the Afghulis were beaten almost before the fight began. Some of them fled over the wall without any attempt at defense, but some fought, snarling and stabbing like wolves. The blazing thatch etched the scene in a lurid glare. Kalpaks mingled with turbans, and steel flickered over the seething mob. Yataghans grated against tulwars, and blood spurted.

Conan ran toward the tower. He had momentarily expected Afzal Khan to appear. But in such moments it is impossible to retain a proper estimate of time. A minute may seem like an hour, an hour like a minute. In reality, the Afghuli chief came storming out of the tower just as the Turanians came surging over the wall. Perhaps he had really been asleep, or perhaps caution kept him from rushing out sooner. Gunfire might mean rebellion against his authority.

At any rate he came roaring like a wounded bull, a bow in his hands. Conan rushed toward him, but the Afghuli glared beyond him to where his swordsmen were falling like wheat under the blades of the maddened Turanians. He saw the fight was already lost, as far as the men in the inclosure were concerned, and he sprang for the nearest wall.

Conan raced to pull him down, but Afzal Khan, wheeling, fired a crossbow from the hip. The Cimmerian felt a heavy blow in his belly, and then he was down on the ground, with all the breath gone from him. Afzal Khan yelled in triumph, brandished his bow, and was gone over the wall, heedless of the vengeful arrow Yar Akbar sped after him.

The Waziri had followed Conan across the enclosure and now he knelt beside him, yammering as he fumbled to find the Cimmerian’s wound.

“Aie!” he bawled. “He is slain! My friend and brother! Where will his like be found again? Slain by the arrow of a hillman! Aie! Aie! Aie!”

“Cease thy bellowing, you great ox,” gasped Conan, sitting up and shaking off the frantic hands. “I am unhurt.”

Yar Akbar yelled with surprise and relief. “But the bolt, brother? He fired at point-blank range!”

“It hit my belt buckle,” grunted Conan, feeling the heavy gold buckle, which was bent and dented. “By the gods, the shot drove it into my belly. It was like being hit with a sledge hammer. Where is Afzal Khan?”

“Fled away in the darkness.”

Conan rose and turned his attention to the fighting. It was practically over. The remnants of the Afghulis were fleeing over the wall, harried by the triumphant Turanians, who in victory were no more merciful than the average eastern. The sangar looked like a shambles.

The hut still blazed brightly, and Conan knew that the contents had been ignited. What had been an advantage was now a danger, for the men at the head of the valley would be coming at full run, and in the light of the fire they could pick off the Turanians from the darkness. He ran forward shouting orders, and setting an example of action.

Men began filling vessels — cooking pots, gourds, even kalpaks from the well and casting the water on the fire. Conan burst in the door and began to drag out the contents of the huts, foods mostly, some of it brightly ablaze, to be doused.

Working as only men in danger of death can work, they extinguished the flame and darkness fell again over the fortress. But over the eastern crags a faint glow announced the rising of the moon through the breaking clouds.

Then followed a tense period of waiting, in which the Turanians hugged their bows and crouched along the wall, staring into the darkness as the Afghulis had done only a short time before. Seven of them had been killed in the fighting and lay with the wounded beside the well. The bodies of the slain Afghulis had been unceremoniously heaved over the wall.

The men at the valley head could not have been on their way down the valley when the fighting broke out, and they must have hesitated before starting, uncertain as to what the racket meant. But they were on their way at last, and Afzal Khan was trying to establish a contact with them.

The wind brought snatches of shouts down the valley, and a rattle of shots that hinted at hysteria. These were followed by a furious bellowing which indicated that Afzal Khan’s demoralized warriors had nearly shot their chief in the dark. The moon broke through the clouds and disclosed a straggling mob of men gesticulating wildly this side of the rocks to the east.

Conan even made out Afzal Khan’s bulk and, snatching a bow from a warrior’s hand, tried a long shot. He missed in the uncertain light, but his warriors poured a blast of arrows into the thick of their enemies which accounted for a man or so and sent the others leaping for cover. From the reeflike rocks they began firing at the wall, knocking off chips of stone but otherwise doing no damage.

With his enemies definitely located, Conan felt more at ease. Taking a torch he went to the tower, with Yar Akbar hanging at his heels like a faithful ghoul. In the tower were heaped odds and ends of plunder — saddles, bridles, garments, blankets, food, weapons — but Conan did not find what he sought, though he tore the place to pieces. Yar Akbar squatted in the doorway, with his bow across his knees, and watched him, it never occurring to the Waziri to inquire what his friend was searching for.

At length Conan paused, sweating from the vigor of his efforts — for he had concentrated much exertion in a few minutes — and swore.

“Where does the dog keep those papers?”

“The papers he took from Ahmed Shah?” inquired Yar Akbar. “Those he always carries in his girdle. He cannot read them, but he believes they are valuable. Men say Ahmed Shah had them from a white man who died.”

IV

Dawn was lifting over the valley of Khuruk. The sun that was not yet visible above the rim of the hills turned the white peaks to pulsing fire. But down in the valley there was none who found time to wonder at the changeless miracle of the mountain dawn. The cliffs rang with the flat echoes of bow shots, and wisps of smoke drifted bluely into the air. Lead spanged on stone and whined venomously off into space, or thudded sickeningly into quivering flesh. Men howled blasphemously and fouled the morning with their frantic curses.

Conan crouched at a loophole, staring at the rocks whence came puffs of white smoke and singing harbingers of death. His bow barrel was hot to his hand, and a dozen yards from the wall lay a huddle of white-clad figures.

Since the first hint of light the wolves of Afzal Khan had poured lead into the fortalice from the reeflike ledge that broke the valley floor. Three times they had broken cover and charged, only to fall back beneath the merciless fire that raked them. Hopelessly outnumbered, the advantage of weapons and position counted heavily for the Turanians.

Conan had stationed five of the best marksmen in the tower and the rest held the walls. To reach the inclosure meant charging across several hundred yards of open space, devoid of cover. All the outlaws were still among the rocks east of the sangar, where, indeed, the broken ledge offered the only cover within bow range of the redoubt.

The Afghulis had suffered savagely in the charges, and they had had the worst of the long-range exchanges, both their marksmanship and their weapons being inferior to the Turanians’. But some of their arrows did find their way through the loopholes. A few yards from Conan a kaftaned rider lay in a grotesque huddle, his feet turned so the growing light glinted on his silver boot heels, his head a smear of blood and brains.

Another lay sprawled near the charred hut, his ghastly face frozen in a grin of agony as he chewed spasmodically. He had been shot in the belly and was taking a long time in dying, but not a whimper escaped his livid lips.

A fellow with an arrow hole in his forearm was making more racket; his curses, as a comrade probed for a way to dig it out with a dagger point, would have curdled the blood of a devil.

Conan glanced up at the tower, whence wisps of smoke drifting told him that his five snipers were alert. Their range was greater than that of the men at the wall, and they did more damage proportionately and were better protected. Again and again they had broken up attempts to get at the horses in the stone pen. This pen was nearer the enclosure than it was to the rocks, and crumpled shapes on the ground showed of vain attempts to reach it.

But Conan shook his head. They had salvaged a large quantity of food from the burning hut; there was a well of good water; they had better weapons and more ammunition than the men outside. But a long siege meant annihilation.

One of the men wounded in the night fighting had died. There remained alive forty-one men of the fifty with which he had left Khawarism. One of these was dying, and half a dozen were wounded — one probably fatally. There were at least a hundred and fifty men outside.

Afzal Khan could not storm the walls yet. But under the constant toll of the arrows, the small force of the defenders would melt away. If any of them lived and escaped, Conan knew it could be only by a swift, bold stroke. But he had no plan at all.

The firing from the valley ceased suddenly, and a white turban cloth was waved above the rock on a bow muzzle.

“Ohai, Ali el Ghazi!” came a hail in a bull’s roar that could only have issued from Afzal Khan.

Yar Akbar, squatting beside Conan, sneered. “A trick! Keep thy head below the parapet, sahib. Trust Afzal Khan when wolves knock out their own teeth.”

“Hold your fire, Ali el Ghazi!” boomed the distant voice. “I would parley with you!”

“Show yourself!” Conan yelled back.

And without hesitation a huge bulk loomed up among the rocks. Whatever his own perfidy, Afzal Khan trusted the honor of the man he thought a Wazuli. He lifted his hands to show they were empty.

“Advance, alone!” yelled Conan, straining to make himself heard.

Someone thrust the butt of a bow into a crevice of the rocks so it stood muzzle upward, with the white cloth blowing out in the morning breeze, and Afzal Khan came striding over the stones with the arrogance of a sultan. Behind him turbans were poked up above the boulders.

Conan halted him within good earshot, and instantly he was covered by a score of bows. Afzal Khan did not seem to be disturbed by that, or by the blood lust in the dark hawklike faces glaring along the barrels. Then Conan rose into view, and the two leaders faced one another in the full dawn.

Conan expected accusations of treachery — for, after all, he had struck the first blow — but Afzal Khan was too brutally candid for such hypocrisy.

“I have you in a vise, Ali el Ghazi,” he announced without preamble. “But for that Afghuli dog who crouches behind you, I would have cut your throat at moonrise last night. You are all dead men, but this siege work grows tiresome, and I am willing to forgo half my advantage. I am generous. As reward of victory I demand either your guns or your horses. Your horses I have already, but you shall have them back, if you wish. Throw down your weapons and you may ride out of Khuruk. Or, if you wish, I will keep the horses, and you may march out on foot with your bows. What is your answer?”

Conan spat toward him with a typically Wazuli gesture. “Are we fools, to be hoodwinked by a dog with scarlet whiskers?” he snarled. “When Afzal Khan keeps his sworn word, the rivers will flow backward. Shall we ride out, unarmed, for you to cut us down in the passes, or shall we march forth on foot, for you to shoot us from ambush in the hills?

“You lie when you say you have our horses. Ten of your men have died trying to take them for you. You lie when you say you have us in the vise. It is you who are in the vise! You have neither food nor water; there is no other well in the valley but this. You have few arrows, because most of your supply is stored in the tower, and we hold that.”

The fury in Afzal Khan’s countenance told Conan that he had scored with that shot.

“If you had us helpless you would not be offering terms,” Conan sneered. “You would be cutting our throats, instead of trying to gull us into the open.”

“Sons of sixty dogs!” swore Afzal Khan, plucking at his beard. “I will flay you all alive! I will keep you hemmed here until you die!”

“If we cannot leave the fortress, you cannot enter it,” Conan retorted. “Moreover you have drawn all your men but a handful from the passes, and the Khurukzai will steal upon you and cut off your heads. They are waiting, up in the hills.”

Afzal Khan’s involuntarily wry face told Conan that the Afghuli’s plight was more desperate than he had hoped.

“It is a deadlock, Afzal Khan,” said Conan suddenly. “There is but one way to break it.” He lifted his voice, seeing that the Afghulis under the protection of the truce were leaving their coverts and drawing within earshot. “Meet me there in the open space, man to man, and decide the feud between us two, with cold steel. If I win, we ride out of Khuruk unmolested. If you win, my warriors are at your mercy.”

“The mercy of a wolf!” muttered Yar Akbar.

Conan did not reply. It was a desperate chance, but the only one. Afzal Khan hesitated and cast a searching glance at his men; that scowling hairy horde was muttering among itself. The warriors seemed ill-content, and they stared meaningfully at their leader.

The inference was plain; they were weary of the fighting at which they were at a disadvantage, and they wished Afzal Khan to accept Conan’s challenge. They feared a return of the Khurukzai might catch them in the open with empty quivers. After all, if their chief lost to the Wazuli, they would only lose the loot they had expected to win. Afzal Khan understood this attitude, and his beard bristled to the upsurging of his ready passion.

“Agreed!” he roared, tearing out his tulwar and throwing away the scabbard. He made the bright broad steel thrum about his head. “Come over the wall and die, thou slayer of infidels!”

“Hold your men where they are!” Conan ordered and vaulted the parapet.

At a bellowed order the Afghulis had halted, and the wall was lined with kalpaks as the Turanians watched tensely. Yar Akbar followed Conan over the wall, but did not advance from it; he crouched against it like a bearded ghoul, fingering his knife.

Conan wasted no time. Scimitar in one hand and kindhjal in the other, he ran lightly toward the burly figure advancing to meet him. Conan was a tall man, but Afzal Khan towered half a head above him. The Afghuli’s bull-like shoulders and muscular bulk was akin to the barbarian's own; but Conan’s sinews were like steel wires. His scimitar, though neither so broad nor so heavy as the tulwar, was fully as long, and the blade was of unbreakable steel.

The men seemed scarcely within arm’s reach when the fight opened with a dazzling crackle and flash of steel. Blow followed blow so swiftly that the men watching, trained to arms since birth, could scarcely follow the strokes. Afzal Khan roared, his eyes blazing, his beard bristling, and wielding the heavy tulwar as one might wield a camel wand, he flailed away in a frenzy.

But always the scimitar flickered before him, turning the furious blows, or the slim figure of the false Wazuli avoided death by the slightest margins, with supple twists and swayings. The scimitar bent beneath the weight of the tulwar, but it did not break; like a serpent’s tongue it always snapped straight again, and like a serpent’s tongue it flickered at Afzal Khan’s breast, his throat, his groin, a constant threat of death that reddened the Afghuli’s eyes with a tinge akin to madness.

Afzal Khan was a famed swordsman, and his sheer brute strength was more than a man’s. But Conan’s balance and economy of motion was a marvel to witness. He never set a foot wrong or made a false motion; he was always poised, always a threat, even in retreat, beaten backward by the bull-like rushes of his foe. Blood trickled down his face where a furious stroke, beating down his blade, had bitten through his silk turban and into the scalp, but the flame in his blue eyes never altered.

Afzal Khan was bleeding, too. Conan’s point, barely missing his jugular, had plowed through his beard and along his jaw. Blood dripping from his beard made his aspect more fearsome than ever. He roared and flailed, until it seemed that the fury of his onslaught would overbalance Conan’s perfect mastery of himself and his blade.

Few noticed, however, that Conan had been working his way in closer and closer under the sweep of the tulwar. Now he caught a furious swipe near the hilt and the kindhjal in his left hand licked in and out. Afzal Khan’s bellow caught in a gasp. There was but that fleeting instant of contact, so brief it was like blur of movement, and then Conan, at arm’s length again, was slashing and parrying, but now there was a thread of crimson on the narrow kindhjal blade, and blood was seeping in a steady stream through Afzal Khan’s broad girdle.

There was the pain and desperation of the damned in the Afghuli’s eyes, in his roaring voice. He began to weave drunkenly, but he attacked more madly than ever, like a man fighting against time.

His strokes ribboned the air with bright steel and thrummed past Conan’s ears like a wind of death, until the tulwar rang full against the scimitar’s guard with hurricane force and Conan went to his knee under the impact. “Wazuli dog!” It was a gasp of frenzied triumph. Up flashed the tulwar and the watching hordes gave tongue. But again the kindhjal licked out like a serpent’s tongue — outward and upward.

The stroke was meant for the Afghuli’s groin, but a shift of his legs at the instant caused the keen blade to plow through his thigh instead, slicing veins and tendons. He lurched sidewise, throwing out his arm to balance himself. And even before men knew whether he would fall or not, Conan was on his feet and slashed with the scimitar at his head.

Afzal Khan fell as a tree falls, blood gushing from his head. Even so, the terrible vitality of the man clung to life and hate. The tulwar fell from his hand, but, catching himself on his knees, he plucked a knife from his girdle; his hand went back for the throw — then the knife slipped from his nerveless fingers and he crumpled to the earth and lay still.

There was silence, broken by a strident yell from the Turanians. Conan sheathed his scimitar, sprang swiftly to the fallen giant and thrust a hand into his blood-soaked girdle. His fingers closed on what had hoped to find, and he drew forth an oilskin-bound packet of papers. A low cry of satisfaction escaped his lips.

In the tense excitement of the fight, neither he nor the Turanians had noticed that the Afghulis had drawn nearer and nearer, until they stood in a ragged semicircle only a few yards away. Now, as Conan stood staring at the packet, a hairy ruffian ran at his back, knife lifted.

A frantic yell from Yar Akbar warned Conan. There was no time to turn; sensing rather than seeing his assailant, the Cimmerian ducked deeply and the knife flashed past his ear, the muscular forearm falling on his shoulder with such force that again he was knocked to his knees.

Before the man could strike again Yar Akbar’s yard-long knife was driven into his breast with such fury that the point sprang out between his shoulder blades. Wrenching his blade free as the wretch fell, the Waziri grabbed a handful of Conan’s garments and began to drag him toward the wall, yelling like a madman.

It had all happened in a dizzying instant, the charge of the Afghuli, Yar Akbar’s leap and retreat. The other Afghulis rushed in, howling like wolves, and the man’s blade made a fan of steel about him and Conan. Blades were flashing on all sides; Conan was cursing like a madman as he strove to halt Yar Akbar’s headlong progress long enough to get to his feet, which was impossible at the rate he was being yanked along.

All he could see was hairy legs, and all he could hear was a devil’s din of yells and clanging knives. He hewed sidewise at the legs and men howled, and then there was a deafening reverberation, and a blast of lead at close range smote the attackers and mowed them down like wheat. The Turanians had waked up and gone into action.

Yar Akbar was berserk. With his knife dripping red and his eyes blazing madly he swarmed over the wall and down on the other side, all asprawl, lugging Conan like a sack of grain, and still unaware that his friend was not fatally wounded.

The Afghulis were at his heels, not to be halted so easily this time. The Turanians fired point-blank into their faces, but they came on, snarling, snatching at the bow barrels poked over the wall, stabbing upward.

Yar Akbar, heedless of the battle raging along the wall, was crouching over Conan, mouthing, so crazy with blood lust and fighting frenzy that he was hardly aware of what he was doing, tearing at Conan’s clothing in his efforts to discover the wound he was convinced his friend had received.

He could hardly be convinced otherwise by Conan’s lurid blasphemy, and then he nearly strangled the Cimmerian in a frantic embrace of relief and joy. Conan threw him off and leaped to the wall, where the situation was getting desperate for the Turanians. The Afghulis, fighting without leadership, were massed in the middle of the east wall, and the men in the tower were pouring a devastating fire into them, but the havoc was being wreaked in the rear of the horde. The men in the tower feared to shoot at the attackers along the wall for fear of hitting their own comrades.

As Conan reached the wall, the Turkoman nearest him thrust his knife into a snarling, bearded face, slicing the hillman’s head into a red ruin. Then before he could stab again a second knife licked over the wall and disemboweled him. Conan caught the man's knife, smashed the hilt down on the head of a hillman climbing over the parapet, and left him hanging dead across the wall.

It was all confusion and smoke and spurting blood and insanity. No time to look right or left to see if the Turanians still held the wall on either hand. He had his hands full with the snarling bestial faces which rose like a wave before him. Crouching on the firing step, he drove the blood-clotted butt into these wolfish faces until a rabid-eyed giant grappled him and bore him back and over.

They struck the ground on the inside, and Conan’s head hit a fallen gun stock with a stunning crack. In the moment that his brain swam dizzily the Afghuli heaved him underneath, yelled stridently and lifted a knife — then the straining body went suddenly limp, and Conan’s face was spattered with blood and brains, as Yar Akbar split the man’s head to the teeth with his Zhaibar knife.

The Afghuli pulled the corpse off and Conan staggered up, slightly sick, and presenting a ghastly spectacle with his red-dabbled face, hands, and garments. The firing, which had lulled while the fighting locked along the wall, now began again. The disorganized Afghulis were falling back, were slinking away, breaking and fleeing toward the rocks.

The Turanians had held the wall, but Conan swore sickly as he saw the gaps in their ranks. One lay dead in a huddle of dead Afghulis outside the wall, and five more hung motionless across the wall, or were sprawled on the ground inside. With these latter were the corpses of four Afghulis, to show how desperate the brief fight had been. The number of the dead outside was appalling.

Conan shook his dizzy head, shuddering slightly at the thought of how close to destruction his band had been; if the hillmen had had a leader, had kept their wits about them enough to have divided forces and attacked in several places at once — but it takes a keen mind to think in the madness of such a battle. It had been blind, bloody, and furious, and the random-cast dice of fate had decided for the smaller horde.

The Afghulis had taken to the rocks again and were firing in a half-hearted manner. Sounds of loud argument drifted down the wind. He set about dressing the wounded as best he could, and while he was so employed, the Afghulis tried to get at the horses again. But the effort was without enthusiasm, and a fusillade from the tower drove them back.

As quickly as he could, Conan retired to a corner of the wall and investigated the oilskin-wrapped packet he had taken from Afzal Khan. It was a letter, several sheets of high-grade paper covered with a fine scrawl. The writing was not Urdu, and there were margin notes in a different, readable hand. These notes made clear points suggested in the letter, and Conan’s face grew grim as he read.

How the unknown spy who had added those notes had got possession of the letter there was no way of knowing; but it had been intended for the man called Suleiman Pasha, and it revealed what Conan had suspected — a plot within a plot; a red and sinister conspiracy concealing itself in a guise of policy.

Suleiman Pasha was not only a foreign spy; he was a traitor to the men he served. And the tentacles of the plot which revolved about him stretched incredibly southward into high places. Conan swore softly as he read there the names of men trusted by the government they pretended to serve. And slowly a realization crystallized — this letter must never reach Suleiman Pasha. Somehow, in some way, he, Conan of Cimmeria, must carry on the work of that unknown white man who had died with his task uncompleted. That letter must go southward, to lay bare black treachery spawning under the heedless feet of government. He hastily concealed the packet as the Afghuli approached.

Yar Akbar grinned. He had lost a tooth, and his black beard was streaked and clotted with blood which did not make him look any less savage.

“The dogs wrangle with one another,” he said. “It is always thus; only the hand of Afzal Khan kept them together. Now men who followed him will refuse to follow one of their own number. They fear the Khurukzai. We also have reason to beware of them. They will be waiting in the hills beyond the Pass of Akbar.”

Conan realized the truth of this statement. He believed a handful of Afghulis yet held the tower in the pass, but there was no reason to suppose they would not desert their post now that Afzal Khan was dead. Men trooping down out of the hills told him that the footpaths were no longer guarded. At any time Khurukzai scouts might venture back, learn what was going on, and launch an attack in force.

The day wore on, hot, and full of suffering for the wounded in the in closure. Only a desultory firing came from the rocks, where continual squabbling seemed to be going on. No further attack was made, and presently Yar Akbar grunted with gratification.

From the movement among the rocks and beyond them, it was evident that the leaderless outlaw band was breaking up. Men slunk away up the valley, singly or in small bands. Others fought over horses, and one group turned and fired a volley at their former companions before they disappeared among the spurs at the head of the valley. Without a chieftain they trusted, demoralized by losses, short of water and food and ammunition, and in fear of reprisals, the outlaw band melted away, and within an hour from the time the first bolted, the valley of Khuruk was empty except for Conan’s men.

To make sure the retreat was real, Conan secured his horse from the pen and, with Yar Akbar, rode cautiously to the valley head. The spurs were empty. From the tracks the Cimmerian believed that the bandits had headed southward, preferring to make their way through the pathless hills rather than fight their way through the vengeful Khurukzai who in all probability still lurked among the crags beyond the Pass of Akbar.

He had to consider these men himself, and he grinned wryly at the twist of fate which had made enemies of the very men he had sought in friendship. But life ran that way in the hills.

“Go back to the Turanians,” he requested Yar Akbar. “Bid them saddle their horses. Tie the wounded into the saddles, and load the spare horses with food and skins of water. We have plenty of spare horses now, because of the men who were slain. It is dusk now, and time we were on our way.

“We shall take our chance on the trails in the dark, for now that the hill paths are unguarded, assuredly the Khurukzai will be stealing back, and I expect an attack on the valley by moonrise, at the latest. Let them find it empty. Perhaps we can make our way through the Pass and be gone while they are stealing through the hills to the attack. At least we will make the attempt and leave the rest to the gods.”

Yar Akbar grinned widely — the prospect of any sort of action seemed to gratify him immensely — and reined his horse down the valley, evidencing all the pride that becomes a man who rides a blooded Turanian steed. Conan knew he could leave the preparations for the journey with him and the Turanians.

The Cimmerian dismounted, tied his horse and strode through the rocky spurs to the point where the trail wound out of them and along a boulder-littered narrow level between two slopes. Dusk was gathering, but he could see any body of men that tried to come along that trail.

But he was not expecting attack by that route. Not knowing just what had taken place in the valley, the Khurukzai, even if the men in the tower had deserted it, would be too suspicious to follow the obvious road. And it was not attack of any sort that was worrying him.

He took the packet of papers from his girdle and stared at it. He was torn by indecision. There were documents that needed desperately to get to the British outposts. It was almost sheer suicide for one man to start through the hills, but two men, with food and water, might make it.

He could take Yar Akbar, load an extra horse or two with provisions, and slip away southward. Then let Suleiman Pasha do his worst with Orkhan Bahadur. Long before the emissary could learn of his flight, he and his companion would be far out of the vengeful man’s reach. But, then, what of the warriors back there in the sangar, making ready for their homeward flight, with implicit trust in Ali el Ghazi?

They had followed him blindly, obeyed his every order, demonstrated their courage and faithfulness beyond question. If he deserted them now, they were doomed. They could never make their way back through the hills without him. Such as were not lost to die of starvation would be slaughtered by the vengeful Khurukzai who would not forget their defeat by these dark-skinned riders.

Sweat started out on Conan’s skin in the agony of his mental struggle. Not even for the peace of all Vendhya could he desert these men who trusted him. He was their leader. His first duty was to them.

But, then, what of that damning letter? It supplied the key to Suleiman Pasha’s plot. It told of hell brewing in the Zhaibar Hills, of revolt seething on the plains, of a plot which might be nipped in the bud were the right officials to learn of it in time. But if he returned to Khawarism with the Turanians, he must give the letter to Suleiman Pasha or be denounced to Orkhan — and that meant torture and death. He was in the fangs of the vise; he must either sacrifice himself, his men, or the helpless people of Vendhya.

“Ohai, Ali el Ghazi!” It was a soft hiss behind him, from the shadow of a jutting rock. Even as he started about, a blade was pressed against his back.

“Nay, do not move. I do not trust you yet.”

Twisting his head about, Conan stared into the dark features of Suleiman Pasha.

“You! How in Crom’s name —”

“No matter. Give me the papers which you hold in your hand. Give them to me, or, by the gods, I will send you to hell, Wazuli!”

With the blade boring into his back, there was nothing else Conan could do, his heart almost bursting with rage.

Suleiman Pasha stepped back and tucked the papers into his girdle. He allowed Conan to turn and face him, but still kept him covered with the point of the knife.

“After you had departed,” he said, “secret word came to me from the North that the papers for which I sent you were more important then I had dreamed. I dared not wait in Khawarism for your return, lest something go awry. I rode for Khuruk with some Zuagirs who knew the road. Beyond the Pass of Akbar we were ambushed by the very people we sought. They slew my men, but they spared me, for I was known to one of their headmen. They told me they had been driven forth by Afzal Khan, and I guessed what else had occurred. They said there had been fighting beyond the Pass, for they had heard the sound of firing, but they did not know its nature. There are no men in the tower in the Pass, but the Khurukzai fear a trap. They do not know the outlaws have fled from the valley.

“I wished to get word with you as soon as possible, so I volunteered to go spying for them alone, so they showed me the footpaths. I reached the valley head in time to see the last of the Afghulis depart, and I have been hiding here awaiting a chance to catch you alone. Listen! The Turanians are doomed. The Khurukzai mean to kill them all. But I can save you. We shall dress you in the clothing of a dead Afghuli, and I shall say you are a servant of mine who has escaped from the Turanians.

“I shall not return to Khawarism. I have business in the Zhaibar region. I can use a man like you. We shall return to the Khurukzai and show them how to attack and destroy the Turanians. Then they will lend us an escort southward. Will you come with me and serve me, Wazuli?”

“No, you damned swine!” In the stress of the moment Conan spat his fury in northern tongue. Suleiman Pasha’s jaw dropped, in the staggering unexpectedness of such strange words from a man he thought to be a Wazuli. And in the instant his wits were disrupted by the discovery, Conan, nerved to desperate quickness, was at his throat like a striking cobra.

The knife stabbed once and then was wrenched from the numbed fingers. Suleiman Pasha was fighting in frenzied silence, and he was all steel strings and catlike thews. But Conan’s kindhjal was out and ripping murderously into him again and again. They went to the earth together in the shadow of the big rock, Conan stabbing in a berserk frenzy; and then he realized that he was driving his blade into a dead man.

He shook himself free and rose, staggering like a drunken man with the red maze of his murder lust. The oilskin packet was in his left hand, torn from his enemy’s garments during the struggle. Dusk had given way to blue, star-flecked darkness. To Conan’s ears came the clink of hoofs on stone, the creak of leather. His warriors were approaching, still hidden by the towering ledges. He heard a low laugh that identified Yar Akbar.

Conan breathed deeply in vast content. Now he could guide his men back through the passes to Khawarism without fear of Orkhan Bahadur, who would never know his secret. He could persuade the Turkoman chief that it would be to his advantage to send this letter on to the border. He, as Ali el Ghazi, could remain in Khawarism safely, to oppose subtly what other conspirators came plotting to the forbidden city.

He smiled as he wiped the blood from his kindhjal and sheathed it. There still remained the Khurukzai, waiting with murderous patience beyond the Pass of Akbar, but his soul was at rest, and the prospect of fighting his way back through the mountains troubled him not at all. He was as confident of the outcome as if he already sat in the palace at Khawarism.

Hawk of the Hills

- Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

To a man standing in the gorge below, the man clinging to the sloping cliff would have been invisible, hidden from sight by the jutting ledges that looked like irregular stone steps from a distance. From a distance, also, the rugged wall looked easy to climb; but there were heart-breaking spaces between those ledges, —stretches of treacherous shale, and steep pitches where clawing fingers and groping toes scarcely found a grip.

One misstep, one handhold lost and the climber would have pitched backward in a headlong, rolling fall three hundred feet to the rocky canyon bed. But the man on the cliff was Conan of Cimmeria, and it was not his destiny to dash out his brains on the floor of a Himelian gorge.

He was reaching the end of his climb. The rim of the wall was only a few feet above him, but the intervening space was the most dangerous he had yet covered. He paused to shake the sweat from his eyes, drew a deep breath through his nostrils, and once more matched eye and muscle against the brute treachery of the gigantic barrier. Faint yells welled up from below, vibrant with hate and edged with blood lust. He did not look down. His upper lip lifted in a silent snarl, as a panther might snarl at the sound of his hunters’ voices. That was all. His fingers clawed at the stone until blood oozed from under his broken nails. Rivulets of gravel started beneath his boots and streamed down the ledges. He was almost there, —but under his toe a jutting stone began to give way. With an explosive expansion of energy that brought a tortured gasp from him, he lunged upward, just as his foothold tore from the soil that had held it. For one sickening instant he felt eternity yawn beneath him— then his upflung fingers hooked over the rim of the crest. For an instant he hung there, suspended, while pebbles and stones went rattling down the face of the cliff in a miniature avalanche. Then with a powerful knotting and contracting of iron biceps, he lifted his weight and an instant later climbed over the rim and stared down.

He could make out nothing in the gorge below, beyond the glimpse of a tangle of thickets. The jutting ledges obstructed the view from above as well as from below. But he knew his pursuers were ranging those thickets down there, the men whose knives were still reeking with the blood of his friends. He heard their voices, edged with the hysteria of murder, dwindling westward. They were following a blind a bolt and a false trail.

Conan stood up on the rim of the gigantic wall, the one atom of visible life among monstrous pillars and abutments of stone; they rose on all sides, dwarfing him, brown insensible giants shouldering the sky. But Conan gave no thought to the somber magnificence of his surroundings, or of his own comparative insignificance.

Scenery, however awesome, is but a background for the human drama in its varying phases. Conan’s soul was a maelstrom of wrath, and the distant, dwindling shout below him drove crimson waves of murder surging through his brain. He drew from his boot the long knife he had placed there when he began his desperate climb. Half-dried blood stained the sharp steel, and the sight of it gave him a fierce satisfaction. There were dead men back there in the valley into which the gorge ran, and not all of them were Conan’s Afghuli friends. Some were Wazuli, the henchmen of the traitor Afdal Khan—, the treacherous dogs who had sat down in seeming amity with Yusef Shah, the Afghuli chief, his three headmen and his Cimmerian ally, and who had turned the friendly conference suddenly into a holocaust of murder.

Conan’s shirt was in ribbons, revealing a shallow sword cut across the thick muscles of his breast, from which blood oozed slowly. His black hair was plastered with sweat, the scabbards at his hips empty. He might have been a statue on the cliffs, he stood so motionless, except for the steady rise and fall of his arching chest as he breathed deep through expanded nostrils. In his black eyes grew a flame like fire on deep black water. His body grew rigid; muscles swelled in knotted cords on his arms, and the veins of his temples stood out.

Treachery and murder! He was still bewildered, seeking a motive. His actions until this moment had been largely instinctive, reflexes responding to peril and the threat of destruction. The episode had been so unexpected— so totally lacking in apparent reason. One moment a hum of friendly conversation, men sitting cross-legged about a fire while tea boiled and meat roasted; the next instant knives sinking home, guns crashing, men falling in the smoke—, Afghuli men; his friends, struck down about him, with their bows laid aside, their knives in their scabbards.

Only his steel-trap coordination had saved him —that instant, primitive reaction to danger that is not dependent upon reason or any logical thought process. Even before his conscious mind grasped what was happening, Conan was on his feet with weapons drawn. And then there was no time for consecutive thinking, nothing but desperate hand-to-hand fighting, and flight on foot—, a long run and a hard climb. But for the thicket-choked mouth of a narrow gorge they would have had him, in spite of everything.

Now, temporarily safe, he could pause and apply reasoning to the problem of why Afdal Khan, chief of the Khoruk Wazuli, plotted thus foully to slay the four chiefs of his neighbors, the Afghulis of Kurram, and their friend. But no motive presented itself. The massacre seemed utterly wanton and reasonless. At the moment Conan did not greatly care. It was enough to know that his friends were dead, and to know who had killed them.

Another tier of rock rose some yards behind him, broken by a narrow, twisting cleft. Into this he moved. He did not expect to meet an enemy; they would all be down there in the gorge, beating up the thickets for him; but he carried the long knife in his hand, just in case.

It was purely an instinctive gesture, like the unsheathing of a panther’s claws. His dark face was like iron; his black eyes burned redly; as he strode along the narrow defile he was more dangerous than any wounded panther. An urge painful in its intensity beat at his brain like a hammer that would not ease; revenge! revenge! revenge! All the depths of his being responded to the reverberation. The thin veneer of civilization had been swept away by a red tidal wave. Conan had gone back a million years into the red dawn of man’s beginning; he was as starkly primitive as the colossal stones that rose about him.

Ahead of him the defile twisted about a jutting shoulder to come, as he knew, out upon a winding mountain path. That path would a bolt him out of the country of his enemies, and he had no reason to expect to meet any of them upon it. So it was a shocking surprise to him when he rounded the granite shoulder and came face to face with a tall man who lolled against a rock, with a crossbow in his hand.

That crossbow was leveled at the Cimmerian’s breast.

Conan stood motionless, a dozen feet separating the two men. Beyond the tall man stood a finely caparisoned Afghuli stallion, tied to a tamarisk.

“Ali Bahadur!” muttered Conan, the red flame in his black eyes.

“Aye!” Ali Bahadur was clad in Afghuli elegance. His boots were stitched with gilt thread, his turban was of rose-colored silk, and his girdled khalat was gaudily striped. He was a handsome man, with an aquiline face and dark, alert eyes, which just now were lighted with cruel triumph. He laughed mockingly.

“I was not mistaken, Conan. When you fled into the thicket-choked mouth of the gorge, I did not follow you as the others did. They ran headlong into the copse, on foot, bawling like bulls. Not I. I did not think you would flee on down the gorge until my men cornered you. I believed that as soon as you got out of their sight you would climb the wall, though no man has ever climbed it before. I knew you would climb out on this side, for not even Yog the Damned could scale those sheer precipices on the other side of the gorge.

“So I galloped back up the valley to where, a mile north of the spot where we camped, another gorge opens and runs westward. This path a bolts up out of that gorge and crosses the ridge and here turns southwesterly— as I knew you knew. My steed is swift! I knew this point was the only one at which you could reach this trail, and when I arrived, there were no boot prints in the dust to tell me you had reached it and passed on ahead of me. Nay, hardly had I paused when I heard stones rattling down the cliff, so I dismounted and awaited your coming! For only through that cleft could you reach the path.”

“You came alone,” said Conan, never taking his eyes from the Wazuli. “You have more guts than I thought.”

“I knew you had no guns,” answered Ali Bahadur. “I saw you empty them and throw them away and draw your knife as you fought your way through my warriors. Courage? Any fool can have courage. I have wits, which is better.”

“You talk like an Iranistani,” muttered Conan. He was caught fairly, his scabbards empty, his knife arm hanging at his side. He knew Ali would shoot at the slightest motion.

“My brother Afdal Khan will praise me when I bring him your head!” taunted the Wazuli. His eastern vanity could not resist making a grandiose gesture out of his triumph. Like many of his race, swaggering dramatics were his weakness; if he had simply hidden behind a rock and shot Conan when he first appeared, Ali Bahadur might be alive today.

“Why did Afdal Khan invite us to a feast and then murder my friends?” Conan demanded. “There has been peace between the clans for years.”

“My brother has ambitions,” answered Ali Bahadur. “The Afghulis stood in his way, though they knew it not. Why should my brother waste men in a long war to remove them? Only a fool gives warning before he strikes.”

“And only a dog turns traitor,” retorted Conan.

“The salt had not been eaten,” reminded Ali. “The men of Kurram were fools, and thou with them!” He was enjoying his triumph to the utmost, prolonging the scene as greatly as he dared. He knew he should have shot already.

There was a tense readiness about Conan’s posture that made his flesh crawl, and Conan’s eyes were red flame when the sun struck them. But it glutted Ali’s vanity deliriously to know that Conan, the grimmest fighter in all the North, was in his power—, held at the point of a crossbow, poised on the brink of Jehannum into which he would topple at the pressure of a finger on the trigger. Ali Bahadur knew Conan’s deadly quickness, how he could spring and kill in the flicker of an eyelid.

But no human thews could cross the intervening yards quicker than a bolt spitting from a crossbow tip. And at the first hint of movement, Ali would bring the gratifying scene to a sudden close.

Conan opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it. The suspicious Afghuli was instantly tense. Conan’s eyes flickered past him, then back instantly, and fixed on his face with an increased intensity. To all appearances Conan had seen something behind Ali—, something he did not wish Ali to see, and was doing all in his power to conceal the fact that he had seen something, to keep Ali from turning his head. And turn his head Ali did; he did it involuntarily, in spite of himself. He had not completed the motion before he sensed the trick and jerked his head back, firing as he did so, even as he caught the blur that was the lightning-like motion of Conan’s right arm.

Motion and shot were practically simultaneous. Ali went to his knees as if struck by sudden paralysis, and flopped over on his side. Gurgling and choking he struggled to his elbows, eyes starting from his head, lips drawn back in a ghastly grin, his chin held up by the hilt of Conan’s knife that jutted from his throat. With a dying effort he lifted the crossbow with both hands, trying to cock it with fumbling thumbs. Then blood gushed from his blue lips and the crossbow slipped from his hands. His fingers clawed briefly at the earth, then spread and stiffened, and his head sank down on his extended arms.

Conan had not moved from his tracks. Blood oozed slowly from a hole in his left shoulder. He did not seem to be aware of the wound. Not until Ali Bahadur’s brief, spasmodic twitchings had ceased did he move. He snarled, the thick, blood-glutted snarl of a jungle cat, and spat toward the prostrate Wazuli.

He made no move to recover the knife he had thrown with such deadly force and aim, nor did he pick up the crossbow. He strode to the stallion which snorted and trembled at the reek of spilt blood, untied him and swung into the gilt-stitched saddle.

As he reined away up the winding hill path he turned in the saddle and shook his fist in the direction of his enemies—, a threat and a ferocious promise; the game had just begun; the first blood had been shed in a feud that was to litter the hills with charred villages and the bodies of dead men, and trouble the dreams of kings and viceroys.

II

Juret shifted himself in his saddle and glanced at the gaunt ridges and bare stone crags that rose about him, mentally comparing the members of his escort with the features of the landscape.

Physical environment inescapably molded its inhabitants. With one exception his companions were as sullen, hard, barbarous and somber as the huge brown rocks that frowned about them. The one exception was Suleiman, a Afghuli, ostensibly his servant, actually a valuable member of the Kosalan spy network.

Juret himself was not a member of that service. His status was unique; he was one of those ubiquitous Kosalans who steadily build the empire, moving obscurely behind the scenes, and letting other men take the credit, —men in uniforms, or loud-voiced men with titles.

Few knew just what Juret’s commission was, or what niche he filled in the official structure; but the epitome of the man and his career was once embodied in the request of a harried deputy commissioner: “Hell on the border; send Juret!” Because of his unadvertised activities, troops did not march and cannons did not boom on more occasions than the general public ever realized. So it was not really surprising—except to those die-hards who refuse to believe that maintaining peace on the Afghul Border is fundamentally different from keeping order in his native Kosala —that Juret should be riding forth in the company of hairy cutthroats to arbitrate a bloody hill feud at the request of an Eastern despot.

Juret was of medium height and stockily, almost chubbily, built, though there were unexpected muscles under his ruddy skin. His hair was taffy-colored, his eyes blue, wide and deceptively ingenuous. He wore civilian khakis and a huge sun helmet. If he was armed the fact was not apparent. His frank, faintly freckled face was not unpleasant, but it displayed little evidence of the razor-sharp brain that worked behind it.

He jogged along as placidly as if he were ambling down a lane in his native Suffolk, and he was more at ease than the ruffians who accompanied him —four wild-looking, ragged tribesmen under the command of a patriarch whose stately carriage and gray-shot pointed beard did not conceal the innate savagery reflected in his truculent visage. Baber Ali, uncle of Afdal Khan, was old, but his back was straight as a trooper’s, and his gaunt frame was wolfishly hard. He was his nephew’s right-hand man, possessing all Afdal Khan’s ferocity, but little of his subtlety and cunning.

They were following a trail that looped down a steep slope which fell away for a thousand feet into a labyrinth of gorges. In a valley a mile to the south, Juret sighted a huddle of charred and blackened ruins.

“A village, Baber?” he asked.

Baber snarled like an old wolf.

“Aye! That was Khuttak! Conan and his devils burned it and slew every man able to bear arms.”

Juret looked with new interest. It was such things as that he had come to stop, and it was Conan he was now riding to see.

“Conan is a son of Yog,” growled old Baber.

“Not a village of Afdal Khan’s remains unburned save only Khoruk itself. And of the outlying towers, only my sangar remains, which lies between this spot and Khoruk. Now he has seized the cavern called Akbar’s Castle, and that is in Wazuli territory. By Yog, for an hour we have been riding in country claimed by us Wazuli, but now it has become a no man’s land, a border strewn with corpses and burned villages, where no man’s life is safe. At any moment we may be fired upon.”

“Conan has given his word,” reminded Juret.

“His word is not wind,” admitted the old ruffian grudgingly.

They had dropped down from the heights and were traversing a narrow plateau that broke into a series of gorges at the other end. Juret thought of the letter in his pocket, which had come to him by devious ways. He had memorized it, recognizing its dramatic value as a historical document.

Juret,

Ghazrael Fort:

If you want to parley, come to Yog’s Minaret, alone. Let your escort stop outside the mouth of the gorge. They won’t be molested, but if any Wazuli follows you into the gorge, he’ll be shot.

Conan.

Concise and to the point. Parley, eh? The man had assumed the role of a general carrying on a regular war, and left no doubt that he considered Juret, not a disinterested arbiter, but a diplomat working in the interests of the opposing side.

“We should be near the Gorge of the Minaret,” said Juret.

Baber Ali pointed. “There is its mouth.”

“Await me here.”

Suleiman dismounted and eased his steed’s girths. The Afghulis climbed down uneasily, hugging their bows and scanning the escarpments. Somewhere down that winding gorge Conan was lurking with his vengeful warriors. The Wazuli were afraid. They were miles from Khoruk, in the midst of a region that had become a bloody debatable ground through slaughter on both sides. They instinctively looked toward the southwest where, miles away, lay the crag-built village of Kurram.

Baber twisted his beard and gnawed the corner of his lip. He seemed devoured by an inward fire of anger and suspicion which would not let him rest.

“You will go forward from this point alone, sahib?”

Juret nodded, gathering up his reins.

“He will kill you!”

“I think not.”

Juret knew very well that Baber Ali would never have thus placed himself within Conan’s reach unless he placed full confidence in the Cimmerian’s promise of safety.

“Then make the dog agree to a truce!” snarled Baber, his savage arrogance submerging his grudging civility. “By Yog, this feud is a thorn in the side of Afdal Khan—and of me!”

“We’ll see.” Juret nudged his mount with his heels and jogged on down the gorge, not an impressive figure at all as he slumped carelessly in his saddle, his cork helmet bobbing with each step of the horse. Behind him the Afghulis watched eagerly until he passed out of sight around a bend of the canyon.

Juret’s tranquillity was partly, though not altogether, assumed. He was not afraid, nor was he excited. But he would have been more than human had not the anticipation of meeting Conan stirred his imagination to a certain extent and roused speculations.

The name of Conan was woven in the tales told in all the caravanserais and bazaars from Turan to Khitai. For three years rumors had drifted down the Zhaibar pass of intrigues and grim battles fought among the lonely hills, where a hard-eyed white man was hewing out a place of power among the wild tribesmen.

The Kosalans had not cared to interfere until this latest stone cast by Conan into the pool of Afghul politics threatened to spread ripples that might lap at the doors of foreign palaces. Hence Juret, jogging down the winding Gorge of the Minaret. A strange sort of renegade, Juret reflected. Most white men who went native were despised by the people among whom they cast their lot. But even Conan’s enemies respected him, and it did not seem to be on account of his celebrated fighting ability alone. Conan, Juret vaguely understood, had grown up on the southern frontier of Cimmeria, and had a formidable reputation as a swordsman before he ever drifted East.

Juret had covered a mile from the mouth of the gorge before he rounded a bend in the rocky wall and saw the Minaret looming up before him —a tall, tapering spirelike crag, detached, except at the base, from the canyon wall. No one was in sight. Juret tied his horse in the shade of the cliff and walked toward the base of the Minaret where he halted and stood gently fanning himself with his helmet, and idly wondering how many bows were aimed at him from vantage points invisible to himself. Abruptly Conan was before him.

It was a startling experience, even to a man whose nerves were under as perfect control as Juret’s. The Kosalan indeed stopped fanning himself and stood motionless, holding the helmet lifted. There had been no sound, not even the crunch of rubble under a boot heel to warn him. One instant the space before him was empty, the next it was filled by a figure vibrant with dynamic life. Boulders strewn at the foot of the wall offered plenty of cover for a stealthy advance, but the miracle of that advance—to Juret, who had never fought in his own country—was the silence with which Conan had accomplished it.

“You’re Juret, of course.” The Northern accent was unmistakable.

Juret nodded, absorbed in his scrutiny of the man before him. Conan was a large man, with a squareness of shoulders and a thickness of chest that reflected unusual strength and vitality. Juret noted the black bolts of the heavy crossbow bolts jutting from his hips, the knife hilt projecting from his right boot. He sought the hard bronzed face in vain for marks of weakness or degeneracy. There was a gleam in the smouldering blue eyes such as Juret had never before seen in any man of the so-called civilized races.

No, this man was no degenerate; his plunging into native feuds and brawls indicated no retrogression. It was simply the response of a primitive nature seeking its most natural environment. Juret felt that the man before him must look exactly as an untamed, precivilization man must have looked some ten thousand years before.

“I’m Juret,” he said. “Glad you found it convenient to meet me. Shall we sit down in the shade?”

“No. There’s no need of taking up that much time. Word came to me that you were at Ghazrael, trying to get in touch with me. I sent you my answer by a trader. You got it, or you wouldn’t be here. All right; here I am. Tell me what you’ve got to say and I’ll answer you.”

Juret discarded the plan he had partly formulated. The sort of diplomacy he’d had in mind wouldn’t work here. This man was no dull bully, with a dominance acquired by brute strength alone, nor was he a self-seeking adventurer of the politician type, lying and bluffing his way through. He could not be bought off, nor frightened by a bluff. He was as real and vital and dangerous as a panther, though Juret felt no personal fear.

“All right, Conan,” he answered candidly. “My say is soon said. I’m here at the request of the Amir, and the Raj. I came to Fort Ghazrael to try to get in touch with you, as you know. My companion Suleiman helped. An escort of Wazuli met me at Ghazrael, to conduct me to Khoruk, but when I got your letter I saw no reason to go to Khoruk. They’re waiting at the mouth of the gorge to conduct me back to Ghazrael when my job’s done. I’ve talked with Afdal Khan only once, at Ghazrael. He’s ready for peace. In fact it was at his request that the Amir sent me out here to try to settle this feud between you and him.”

“It’s none of the Amir’s business,” retorted Conan. “Since when did he begin interfering with tribal feuds?”

“In this case one of the parties appealed to him,” answered Juret. “Then the feud affects him personally. It’s needless for me to remind you that one of the main caravan roads from Iranistan traverses this region, and since the feud began, the caravans avoid it and turn up into Turan. The trade that ordinarily passes through here, by which the Amir acquires much rich revenue, is being deflected out of his territory.”

“And he’s dickering with the Turanians to get it back.” Conan laughed mirthlessly. “He’s tried to keep that secret, because Kosalan guns are all that keep him on his throne. But the Turanians are offering him a lot of tempting bait, and he’s playing with fire—and the Kosalans are afraid he’ll scorch his fingers—and theirs!”

Juret blinked. Still, he might have known that Conan would know the inside of Afghul politics at least as well as himself.

“But Afdal Khan has expressed himself, both to the Amir and to me, as desiring to end this feud,” argued Juret. “He swears he’s been acting on the defensive all along. If you don’t agree to at least a truce the Amir will take a hand himself. As soon as I return to the capital and tell him you refuse to submit to arbitration, he’ll declare you an outlaw, and every ruffian in the hills will be whetting his knife for your head. Be reasonable, man. Doubtless you feel you had provocation for your attacks on Afdal Khan. But you’ve done enough damage. Forget what’s passed—”

“Forget!”

Juret involuntarily stepped back as the pupils of Conan’s eyes contracted like those of an angry leopard.

“Forget!” he repeated thickly. “You ask me to forget the blood of my friends! You’ve heard only one side of this thing. Not that I give a damn what you think, but you’ll hear my side, for once. Afdal Khan has friends at court. I haven’t. I don’t want any.”

So a wild Highland chief might have cast his defiance in the teeth of the king’s emissary, thought Juret, fascinated by the play of passion in the dark face before him.

“Afdal Khan invited my friends to a feast and cut them down in cold blood —Yusef Shah, and this three chiefs—all sworn friends of mine, do you understand? And you ask me to forget them, as you might ask me to throw aside a worn-out scabbard! And why? So the Amir can grab his taxes off the fat Iranistani traders; so the Turanians won’t have a chance to inveigle him into some treaty the Kosalans wouldn’t approve of; so the Kosalan can keep their claws sunk in on this side of the border, too!

“Well, here’s my answer: You and the Amir and the Raj can all go to hell together. Go back to Amir and tell him to put a price on my head. Let him send his Uzbek guards to help the Wazuli—and as many Turanians and Kosalans and whatever else he’s able to get. This feud will end when I kill Afdal Khan. Not before.”

“You’re sacrificing the welfare of the many to avenge the blood of the few,” protested Juret.

“Who says I am? Afdal Khan? He’s the Amir’s worst enemy, if the Amir only knew it, getting him embroiled in a war that’s none of his business. In another month I’ll have Afdal Khan’s head, and the caravans will pass freely over this road again. If Afdal Khan should win—Why did this feud begin in the first place? I’ll tell you! Afdal wants full control of the wells in this region, wells which command the caravan route, and which have been in the hands of the Afghulis for centuries. Let him get possession of them and he’ll fleece the merchants before they ever get to the capital. Yes, and turn the trade permanently into Turanian territory.”

“He wouldn’t dare—”

“He dares anything. He’s got backing you don’t even guess. Ask him how it is that his men are all armed with Turanian bows! Hell! Afdal’s howling for help because I’ve taken Akbar’s Castle and he can’t dislodge me. He asked you to make me agree to give up the Castle, didn’t he? Yes, I thought so. And if I were fool enough to do it, he’d ambush me and my men as we marched back to Kurram. You’d hardly have time to get back to the capital before a rider would be at your heels to tell the Amir how I’d treacherously attacked Afdal Khan and been killed in self-defense, and how Afdal had been forced to attack and burn Kurram! He’s trying to gain by outside intervention what he’s lost in battle, and to catch me off my guard and murder me as he did Yusef Shah. He’s making monkeys out of the Amir and you. And you want me to let him make a monkey out of me—and a corpse too—just because a little dirty trade is being deflected from the capital!”

“You needn’t feel so hostile to the Kosalans—” Juret began.

“I don’t; nor to the Iranistani, nor the Turanians, either. I just want all hands to attend to their own business and leave mine alone.”

“But this blood-feud madness isn’t the proper thing for a white man,” pa bolted Juret. “You’re not an Afghul. You’re a Cimmerian, by descent, at least.—”

“I am still a Cimmerian, and we know all about blood feuds,” grunted Conan. “That’s got nothing to do with it. I’ve had my say. Go back and tell the Amir the feud will end—when I’ve killed Afal Khan.”

And turning on his heel he vanished as noiselessly as he had appeared.

Juret started after him helplessly. Damn it all, he’d handled this matter like an amateur! Reviewing his arguments he felt like kicking himself; but any arguments seemed puerile against the primitive determination of Conan. Debating with him was like arguing with a wind, or a flood, or a forest fire, or some other elemental fact. The man didn’t fit into any ordered classification; he was as untamed as any barbarian who trod the north, yet there was nothing rudimentary or underdeveloped about his mentality.

Well, there was nothing to do at present but return to Fort Ghazrael and send a rider to the capital, reporting failure. But the game was not played out. Juret’s own stubborn determination was roused. The affair began to take on a personal aspect utterly lacking in most of his campaigns; he began to look upon it not only as a diplomatic problem, but also as a contest of wits between Conan and himself. As he mounted his horse and headed back up the gorge, he swore he would terminate that feud, and that it would be terminated his way, and not Conan’s.

There was probably much truth in Conan’s assertions. Of course, he and the Amir had heard only Afdal Khan’s side of the matter; and of course, Afdal Khan was a rogue. But he could not believe that the chief’s ambitions were as sweeping and sinister as Conan maintained. He could not believe they embraced more than a seizing of local power in this isolated hill district. Petty exactions on the caravans, now levied by the Afghulis; that was all.

Anyway, Conan had no business allowing his private wishes to interfere with official aims, which, faulty as they might be, nevertheless had the welfare of the people in view. Juret would never have let his personal feelings stand in the way of policy, and he considered that to do so was reprehensible in others. It was Conan’s duty to forget the murder of his friends—again Juret experienced that sensation of helplessness. Conan would never do that. To expect him to violate his instinct was as sensible as expecting a hungry wolf to turn away from raw meat.

Juret had returned up the gorge as leisurely as he had ridden down it. Now he emerged from the mouth and saw Suleiman and the Afghulis standing in a tense group, staring eagerly at him. Baber Ali’s eyes burned like a wolf’s. Juret felt a slight shock of surprise as he met the fierce intensity of the old chief’s eyes. Why should Baber so savagely desire the success of his emissary? The Wazuli had been getting the worst of the war, but they were not whipped, by any means. Was there, after all, something behind the visible surface—some deep-laid obscure element or plot that involved Juret’s mission? Was there truth in Conan’s accusations of foreign entanglements and veiled motives?

Babar took three steps forward, and his beard quivered with his eagerness.

“Well?” His voice was harsh as the rasp of a sword against its scabbard. “Will the dog make peace?”

Juret shook his head. “He swears the feud will end only when he has slain Afdal Khan.”

“Thou hast failed!”

The passion in Baber’s voice startled Juret. For an instant he thought the chief would draw his long knife and leap upon him. Then Baber Ali deliberately turned his back on the Kosalan and strode to his horse. Freeing it with a savage jerk he swung into the saddle and galloped away without a backward glance. And he did not take the trail Juret must follow on his return to Fort Ghazrael; he rode north, in the direction of Khoruk. The implication was unmistakable; he was abandoning Juret to his own resources, repudiating all responsibility for him.

Suleiman bent his head as he fumbled at his mount’s girths, to hide the tinge of gray that crept under his brown skin. Juret turned from staring after the departing chief, to see the eyes of the four tribesmen fixed unwinkingly upon him—hard, murky eyes from under shocks of tangled hair.

He felt a slight chill crawl down his spine. These men were savages, hardly above the mental level of wild beasts. They would act unthinkingly, blindly following the instincts implanted in them and their kind throughout long centuries of merciless Himelian existence. Their instincts were to murder and plunder all men not of their own clan. He was an alien. The protection spread over him and his companion by their chief had been removed.

By turning his back and riding away as he had, Baber Ali had tacitly given permission for the feringhi to be slain. Baber Ali was himself far more of a savage than was Afdal Khan; he was governed by his untamed emotions, and prone to do childish and horrible things in moments of passion. Infuriated by Juret’s failure to bring about a truce, it was characteristic of him to vent his rage and disappointment on the Kosalan.

Juret calmly reviewed the situation in the time he took to gather up his reins. He could never get back to Ghazrael without an escort. If he and Suleiman tried to ride away from these ruffians, they would undoubtedly be shot in the back. There was nothing else to do but try and bluff it out. They had been given their orders to escort him to the Gorge of the Minaret and back again to Fort Ghazrael. Those orders had not been revoked in actual words. The tribesmen might hesitate to act on their own initiative, without positive orders.

He glanced at the low-hanging sun, nudged his horse.

“Let’s be on our way. We have far to ride.”

He pushed straight at the cluster of men who divided sullenly to let him through. Suleiman followed him. Neither looked to right nor left, nor showed by any sign that they expected the men to do other than follow them. Silently the Afghulis swung upon their horses and trailed after them, bow butts resting on thighs, tips pointing upward.

Juret slouched in his saddle, jogging easily along. He did not look back, but he felt four pairs of beady eyes fixed on his broad back in sullen indecision. His matter-of-fact manner baffled them, exerted a certain dominance over their slow minds. But he knew that if either he or Suleiman showed the slightest sign of fear or doubt, they would be shot down instantly. He whistled tunelessly between his teeth, whimsically feeling as if he were riding along the edge of a volcano which might erupt at any instant.

They pushed eastward, following trails that wandered down into valleys and up over rugged slants. The sun dipped behind a thousand-foot ridge and the valleys were filled with purple shadows. They reached the spot where, as they passed it earlier in the day, Baber Ali had indicated that they would camp that night.

There was a well there. The Afghulis drew rein without orders from Juret. He would rather have pushed on, but to argue would have roused suspicions of fear on his part.

The well stood near a cliff, on a broad shelf flanked by steep slopes and ravine-cut walls. The horses were unsaddled, and Suleiman spread Juret’s blanket rolls at the foot of the wall. The Afghulis, stealthy and silent as wild things, began gathering dead tamarisk for a fire. Juret sat down on a rock near a cleft in the wall, and began tracing a likeness of Conan in a small notebook, straining his eyes in the last of the twilight. He had a knack in that line, and the habit had proved valuable in the past, in the matter of uncovering disguises and identifying wanted men.

He believed that his calm acceptance of obedience as a matter of course had reduced the Afghulis to a state of uncertainty, if not actual awe. As long as they were uncertain, they would not attack him.

The men moved about the small camp, performing various duties. Suleiman bent over the tiny fire, and on the other side of it a Afghuli was unpacking a bundle of food. Another tribesman approached the fire from behind the Punjabi, bringing more wood.

Some instinct caused Juret to look up, just as the Afghuli with the arm load of wood came up behind Suleiman. The Punjabi had not heard the man’s approach; he did not look around. His first intimation that there was any one behind him was when the tribesman drew a knife and sank it between his shoulders.

It was done too quickly for Juret to shout a warning. He caught the glint of the firelight on the blade as it was driven into Suleiman’s back. The Punjabi cried out and fell to his knees, and the man on the other side of the fire snatched a crossbow from among his rags and shot him through the body. Suleiman drew his own and fired once, and the tribesman fell into the fire, a bolt through the head.

Suleiman slipped down in a pool of his own blood, and lay still.

It all happened while Juret was springing to his feet. He was unarmed. He stood frozen for an instant, helpless. One of the men picked up a bow and fired at him point-blank. He heard the arrow smash on a rock behind him. Stung out of his paralysis he turned and sprang into the cleft of the wall. An instant later he was running as fleetly down the narrow gap as his build would allow, his heels winged by the wild howls of triumph behind him.

Juret would have cursed himself as he ran, could he have spared the breath. The sudden attack had been brutish, blundering, without plan or premeditation. The tribesman had unexpectedly found himself behind Suleiman and had reacted to his natural instincts. Juret realized that if he had had a revolver he could probably have defeated the attack, at least upon his own life. He had never needed one before; had always believed diplomacy a better weapon than a firearm. But twice today diplomacy had failed miserably. All the faults and weaknesses of his system seemed to be coming to light at once. He had made a pretty hash of this business from the start.

But he had an idea that he would soon be beyond self-censure or official blame. Those bloodthirsty yells, drawing nearer behind him, assured him of that.

Suddenly Juret was afraid, horribly afraid. His tongue seemed frozen to his palate and a clammy sweat beaded his skin. He ran on down the dark defile like a man running in a nightmare, his ears straining for the expected sound of sandaled feet pattering behind him, the skin between his shoulders crawling in expectation of a plunging knife. It was dark. He caromed into boulders, tripped over loose stones, tearing the skin of his hands on the shale.

Abruptly he was out of the defile, and a knife-edge ridge loomed ahead of him like the steep roof of a house, black against the blue-black star-dotted sky. He struggled up it, his breath coming in racking gasps. He knew they were close behind him, although he could see nothing in the dark.

But keen eyes saw his dim bulk outlined against the stars when he crawled over the crest. Tongues of red flame licked in the darkness below him; reports banged flatly against the rocky walls. Frantically he hauled himself over and rolled down the slope on the other side. But not all the way. Almost immediately he brought up against something hard yet yielding. Vaguely, half blind from sweat and exhaustion, he saw a figure looming over him, some object lifted in menace outlined against the stars. He threw up an arm but it did not check the swinging bow. Fire burst in glittering sparks about him, and he did not hear the twanging of the bows that ran along the crest of the ridge.

III

It was the reverberation of shouts, reechoing between narrow walls, which first impressed itself on Juret’s sluggish reviving consciousness. Then he was aware of his throbbing head. Lifting a hand to it, he discovered it had been efficiently bandaged. He was lying on what felt like a sheepskin coat, and he felt bare, cold rock under it. He struggled to his elbows and shook his head violently, setting his teeth against the shooting pain that resulted.

He lay in darkness, yet, some yards away, a white curtain shimmered dazzlingly before him. He swore and batted his eyes, and as his blurred sight cleared, things about him assumed their proper aspect. He was in a cave, and that white curtain was the mouth, with moonlight streaming across it. He started to rise and a rough hand grabbed him and jerked him down again, just as a bow cracked somewhere outside and an arrow whined into the cave and smacked viciously on the stone wall.

“Keep down, sahib!” growled a voice in native tongue. The Kosalan was aware of men in the cave with him. Their eyes shone in the dark as they turned their heads toward him.

His groggy brain was functioning now, and he could understand what he saw. The cave was not a large one, and it opened upon a narrow plateau, bathed in vivid moonlight and flanked by rugged slopes. For about a hundred yards before the cave mouth the plain lay level and almost bare of rocks, but beyond that it was strewn with boulders and cut by gullies. And from those boulders and ravines white puffs bloomed from time to time, accompanied by sharp reports. Arrows smacked and spattered about the entrance and whined venomously into the cavern. Somewhere a man was breathing in panting gasps that told Juret he was badly wounded. The moon hung at such an angle that it drove a white bar down the middle of the cave for some fifteen feet; and death lurked in that narrow strip, for the men in the cave.

They lay close to the walls on either side, hidden from the view of the besiegers and partially sheltered by broken rocks. They were not returning the fire. They lay still, hugging their bows, the whites of their eyes gleaming in the darkness as they turned their heads from time to time.

Juret was about to speak, when on the plain outside a kalpak was poked cautiously around one end of a boulder. There was no response from the cave. The defenders knew that in all probability that sheepskin cap was stuck on a weapon tip instead of a human head.

“Do you see the dog, sahib?” whispered a voice in the gloom, and Juret started as the answer came. For though it was framed in almost accentless native tongue, it was the voice of a white man—, the unmistakable voice of Conan of Cimmeria.

“I see him. He’s peeking around the other end of that boulder— trying to get a better shot at us, while his mate distracts our attention with that hat. See? Close to the ground, there—just about a hand’s breadth of his head. Ready? All right, —now!”

Six bows let fly, and instantly, a white-clad figure rolled from behind the boulder, flopped convulsively and lay still, a sprawl of twisted limbs in the moonlight. That, considered Juret, was damned good shooting, if no more than one of the six arrows hit the exposed head. The men in the cave had them in their sights, and they were not wasting arrows.

The success of the attack was answered by a chorus of wrathful yells from outside, and a storm of arrows against the cave. Plenty of it found its way inside, and stone chips smashing from a glancing arrowhead stung Juret’s arm through the sleeve. But the marksmen were aiming too high to do any damage, unwilling as they were to expose themselves to returning volleys from the cavern. Conan’s men were grimly silent; they neither wasted a bolt on unseen enemies, not indulged in the jeers and taunts so dear to the Afghul fighting man.

When the storm subsided to a period of vengeful waiting, Juret called in a low voice: “Conan! Oh, I say there, Conan!”

An instant later a dim form crawled to his side.

“Coming to at last, Juret? Here, take a swig of this.”

A whiskey flask was pressed into his hand.

“No, thanks. I think you have a man who needs it worse than I.” Even as he spoke he was aware that he no longer heard the stertorous breathing of the wounded man.

“That was Ahmed Khan,” said Conan. “He’s gone; died while they were shooting in here a moment ago. Shot through the body as we were making for this cave.”

“That’s the Wazuli out there?” asked Juret.

“Who else?”

The throbbing in his head irritated the Kosalan; his right forearm was painfully bruised, and he was thirsty.

“Let me get this straight, Conan, —am I a prisoner?”

“That depends on the way you look at it. Just now we’re all hemmed up in this cave. Sorry about your broken head. But the fellow who hit you didn’t know but what you were an Wazuli. It was dark.”

“What in Yajur's name happened, anyway?” demanded Juret. “I remember them killing Suleiman, and chasing me—, then I got that clout on the head and went out. I must have been unconscious for hours.”

“You were. Six of my men trailed you all the way from the mouth of the Gorge of the Minaret. I didn’t trust Baber Ali, though it didn’t occur to me that he’d try to kill you. I was well on my way back to Akbar’s Castle when one of the men caught up with me and told me that Baber Ali had ridden off in the direction of his sangar and left you with his four tribesmen. I believed they intended murdering you on the road to Ghazrael, and laying it onto me. So I started after you myself.

“When you pitched camp by Jehungir’s Well my men were watching from a distance, and I wasn’t far away, riding hard to catch up with you before your escort killed you. Naturally I wasn’t following the open trail you followed. I was coming up from the south. My men saw the Wazuli kill Suleiman, but they weren’t close enough to do anything about it.

“When you ran into the defile with the Wazuli pelting after you, my men lost sight of you all in the darkness and were trying to locate you when you bumped into them. Khoda Khan knocked you stiff before he recognized you. They fired on the three men who were chasing you, and those fellows took to their heels. I heard the firing, and so did somebody else; we arrived on the scene just about the same time.”

“Eh? What’s that? Who?”

“Your friend, Baber Ali, with thirty horsemen! We slung you on a horse, and it was a running fight until moonrise. We were trying to get back to Akbar’s Castle, but they had fresher horses and they ran us down. They got us hemmed out there on that plain and the only thing we could do was to duck in here and make our stand. So here we are, and out there he is, with thirty men —not including the three ruffians who killed your servant. He shot them in their tracks. I heard the shots and their death howls as we rode for the hills.”

“I guess the old villain repented of his temper,” said Juret. “What a cursed pity he didn’t arrive a few minutes earlier. It would have saved Suleiman, poor devil. Thanks for pulling me out of a nasty mess, old fellow. And now, if you don’t mind, I’ll be going.”

“Where?”

“Why, out there! To Ghazrael. First to Baber Ali, naturally. I’ve got a few things to tell that old devil.”

“Juret, are you a fool?” Conan demanded harshly.

“To think you’d let me go? Well, perhaps I am. I’d forgotten that as soon as I return to the capital, you’ll be declared an outlaw, won’t you? But you can’t keep me here forever, you know—”

“I don’t intend to try,” answered Conan with a hint of anger. “If your skull wasn’t already cracked I’d feel inclined to bash your head for accusing me of imprisoning you. Shake the cobwebs out of your brain. If you’re an example of a Kosalans diplomat, Heaven help the empire!

“Don’t you know you’d instantly be filled with a bolt if you stepped out there? Don’t you know that Baber Ali wants your head right now more than he does mine?

“Why do you think he hasn’t sent a man riding a horse to death to tell Afdal Khan he’s got Conan trapped in a cave miles from Akbar’s Castle? I’ll tell you: Baber Ali doesn’t want Afdal to know what a mess he’s made of things.

“It was characteristic of the old devil to ride off and leave you to be murdered by his ruffians; but when he cooled off a little, he realized that he’d be held responsible. He must have gotten clear to his sangar before he realized that. Then he took a band of horsemen and came pelting after you to save you, in the interest of his own skin, of course, but he got there too late —too late to keep them from killing Suleiman, and too late to kill you.”

“But what—”

“Look at it from his viewpoint, man! If he’d gotten there in time to keep anyone from being killed, it would have been all right. But with Suleiman killed by his men, he dares not leave you alive. He knows the Kosalan will hold him responsible for Suleiman’s death, if they learn the true circumstances. And he knows what it means to murder a Kosalans subject—especially one as important in the spy network as I happen to know Suleiman was. But if he could put you out of the way, he could swear I killed you and Suleiman. Those men out there are all Baber’s personal following—hard-bitten old wolves who’ll cut any throat and swear any lie he orders. If you go back to the capital and tell your story, Baber will be in bad with the Amir, the Kosalans, and Afdal Khan. So he’s determined to shut your mouth, for good and all.”

Juret was silent for a moment; presently he said frankly: “Conan, if I didn’t have such a high respect for your wits, I’d believe you. It all sounds reasonable and logical. But damn it, man, I don’t know whether I’m recognizing logic or simply being twisted up in a web of clever lies. You’re too dangerously subtle, Conan, for me to allow myself to believe anything you say, without proof.”

“Proof?” retorted Conan grimly, “Listen!” Wriggling toward the cave mouth he took shelter behind a broken rock and shouted in native tongue: “Ohai, Baber Ali!”

The scattered firing ceased instantly, and the moonlit night seemed to hold its breath. Baber Ali’s voice came back, edged with suspicion.

“Speak, Conan! I hearken.”

“If I gave you the Kosalans will you let me and my men go in peace?” Conan called.

“Aye, by the beard of Yog!” came the eager answer.

“But I fear he will return to the capital and poison the Amir against me!”

“Then kill him and throw his head out,” answered Baber Ali with an oath. “By Yog, it is no more than I will do for him, the prying dog!”

In the cave Juret murmured: “I apologize, Conan!”

“Well?” The old Afghuli was growing impatient. “Are you playing with me, Conan? Give me the Kosalan!”

“Nay, Baber Ali, I dare not trust your promise,” replied Conan.

A bloodthirsty yell and a burst of frenzied firing marked the conclusion of the brief parley, and Conan hugged the shelter of the shattered boulders until the spasm subsided. Then he crawled back to Juret.

“You see?”

“I see! It looks like I’m in this thing to the hilt with you! But why Baber Ali should have been so enraged because I failed to arrange a truce—”

“He and Afdal intended taking advantage of any truce you arranged, to trap me, just as I warned you. They were using you as a cat’s-paw. They know they’re licked, unless they resort to something of the sort.”

There followed a period of silence, in which Juret was moved to inquire: “What now? Are we to stay here until they starve us out? The moon will set before many hours. They’ll rush us in the dark.”

“I never walk into a trap I can’t get out of,” answered Conan. “I’m just waiting for the moon to dip behind that crag and get its light out of the cave. There’s an exit I don’t believe the Wazuli know about. Just a narrow crack at the back of the cave. I enlarged it with a hunting knife and bow barrel before you recovered consciousness. It’s big enough for a man to slip through now. It a bolts out onto a ledge fifty feet above a ravine. Some of the Wazuli may be down there watching the ledge, but I doubt it. From the plain out there it would be a long, hard climb around to the back of the mountain. We’ll go down on a rope made of turbans and belts, and head for Akbar’s Castle. We’ll have to go on foot. It’s only a few miles away, but the way we’ll have to go is over the mountains, and a devil’s own climb.”

Slowly the moon moved behind the crag, and the silver sword no longer glimmered along the rocky floor. The men in the cavern could move about without being seen by the men outside, who waited the setting of the moon with the grim patience of gray wolves.

“All right, let’s go,” muttered Conan. “Khoda Khan, a bolt the way. I’ll follow when you’re all through the cleft. If anything happens to me, take the sahib to Akbar’s Castle. Go over the ridges; there may be ambushes already planted in the valleys.”

“Give me a weapon,” requested Juret. The bow of the dead Ahmed Khan was pressed into his hand. He followed the shadowy, all-but-invisible file of Afghulis as they glided into the deeper darkness in the recesses of the tunnel-like cavern. Their sandals made no noise on the rocky floor, but the crunch of his boots seemed loud to the Kosalan. Behind them Conan lay near the entrance, and once he fired a shot at the boulders on the plain.

Within fifty feet the cavern floor began to narrow and pitch upward. Above them a star shone in utter blackness, marking the crevice in the rock. It seemed to Juret that they mounted the slanting incline for a long way; the firing outside sounded muffled, and the patch of moonlight that was the cave mouth looked small with distance. The pitch became steeper, mounting up until the taller of the Afghulis bent their heads to avoid the rocky roof. An instant later they reached the wall that marked the end of the cavern and glimpsed the sky through the narrow slit.

One by one they squeezed through, Juret last. He came out on the ledge in the starlight that overhung a ravine which was a mass of black shadows. Above them the great black crags loomed, shutting off the moonlight; everything on that side of the mountain was in shadow.

His companions clustered at the rim of the shelf as they swiftly and deftly knotted together girdles and unwound turbans to make a rope. One end was tossed over the ledge and man after man went down swiftly and silently, vanishing into the black ravine below. Juret helped a stalwart tribesman called Mechmad hold the rope as Khoda Khan went down. Before he went, Khoda Khan thrust his head back through the cleft and whistled softly, a signal to carry only to Conan’s alert ears.

Khoda Khan vanished into the darkness below, and it was signified that he could hold the rope alone while Juret descended. Behind them an occasional muffled shot seemed to indicate that the Wazuli were yet unaware that their prey was escaping them.

Juret let himself over the ledge, hooked a leg about the rope and went down, considerably slower and more cautiously than the men who had preceded him. Above him the huge Afghuli braced his legs and held the rope as firmly as though it were bound to a tree.

Juret was halfway down when he heard a murmur of voices on the ledge above which indicated that Conan had come out of the cave and joined Mechmad. The Kosalan looked down and made out the dim figures of the others standing below him on the ravine floor. His feet were a yard above the earth when a bow cracked in the shadows and an arrow spat upward. An explosive grunt sounded above him and the rope went slack in his hands. He hit the ground, lost his footing and fell headlong, rolling aside as Mechmad came tumbling down. The giant struck the earth with a thud, wrapped about with the rope he had carried with him in his fall. He never moved after he landed.

Juret struggled up, breathless, as his companions charged past him. Knives were flickering in the shadows, dim figures reeling in locked combat. So the Wazuli had known of this possible exit! Men were fighting all around him. Conan sprang to the rim of the ledge and fired downward without apparent aim, but a man grunted and fell, his bow striking against Juret’s boot. A dim, bearded face loomed out of the darkness, snarling like a ghoul. Juret caught a swinging tulwar on his bow arms, wincing at the jolt that ran through his fingers, and fired full into the beared face.

“Conan!” howled Khoda Khan, hacking and slashing at something that snarled and gasped like a wild beast.

“Take the sahib and go!” yelled Conan.

Juret realized that the fall of Mechmad with the rope had trapped Conan on the ledge fifty feet above them.

“Nay!” shrieked Khoda Khan. “We will cast the rope up to thee—”

“Go, blast you!” roared Conan. “The whole horde will be on your necks any minute! Go!”

The next instant Juret was seized under each arm and hustled at a stumbling run down the dark gorge. Men panted on each side of him, and the dripping tulwars in their hands smeared his clothes. He had a vague glimpse of three figures sprawling at the foot of the cliff, one horribly mangled. No one barred their path as they fled; Conan’s Afghulis were obeying his command; but they had left their leader behind, and they sobbed curses through their teeth as they ran.

IV

Conan wasted no time. He knew he could not escape from the ledge without a rope, by climbing either up or down, and he did not believe his enemies could reach the ledge from the ravine. He squirmed back through the cleft and ran down the slant of the cavern, expecting any instant to see his besiegers pouring into the moonlit mouth. But it stood empty, and the bows outside kept up their irregular monotone. Obviously, Baber Ali did not realize that his victims had attempted an escape by the rear. The muffled shots he must surely have heard had imparted no meaning to him, or perhaps he considered they but constituted some trickery of Conan’s. Knowledge that an opponent is full of dangerous ruses is often a handicap, instilling an undue amount of caution.

Anyway, Baber Ali had neither rushed the cavern nor sent any appreciable number of men to reinforce the lurkers on the other side of the mountain, for the volume of his firing was undiminished. That meant he did not know of the presence of his men behind the cave. Conan was inclined to believe that what he had taken for a strategically placed force had been merely a few restless individuals skulking along the ravine, scouting on their own initiative. He had actually seen only three men, had merely assumed the presence of others. The attack, too, had been ill-timed and poorly executed. It had neither trapped them all on the ledge nor in the ravine. The shot that killed Mechmad had doubtless been aimed at himself.

Conan admitted his mistake; confused in the darkness as to the true state of things, he had ordered instant flight when his companions might safely have lingered long enough to tie a stone to the end of the rope and cast it back up to him. He was neatly trapped and it was largely his own fault.

But he had one advantage: Baber did not know he was alone in the cavern. And there was every reason to believe that Juret would reach Akbar’s Castle unpursued. He fired a shot into the plain and settled himself comfortably behind the rocks near the cave mouth, his bow at his shoulder.

The moonlit plateau showed no evidence of the attackers beyond the puffs of grayish-white smoke that bloomed in woolly whorls from behind the boulders. But there was a tense expectancy in the very air. The moon was visible below the overhanging crag; it rested a red, bent horn on the solid black mass of a mountain wall. In a few moments the plain would be plunged in darkness and then it was inevitable that Baber would rush the cavern.

Yet Baber would know that in the darkness following the setting of the moon the captives might be expected to make a break for liberty. It was certain that he already had a wide cordon spread across the plain, and the line would converge quickly on the cave mouth. The longer Conan waited after moonset, the harder it would be to slip through the closing semicircle.

He studied the terrain by the last light of the sinking moon. The plateau was roughly fan-shaped, widening rapidly from the cliff-flanked wall in which opened the cave mouth. Perhaps a quarter of a mile across the plain showed the dark mouth of a gorge, in which he knew were tethered the horses of the Wazuli. Probably at least one man was guarding them.

The plain ran level and bare for nearly a hundred yards before the cavern mouth, but some fifty feet away, on the right, there was a deep narrow gully which began abruptly in the midst of the plain and meandered away toward the right-hand cliffs. No shot had been fired from this ravine. If a Wazuli was hidden there he had gone into it while Conan and his men were at the back of the cavern. It had been too close to the cave for the besiegers to reach it under the guns of the defenders.

As soon as the moon set Conan intended to emerge and try to work his way across the plain, avoiding the Wazuli as they rushed toward the cave. It would be touch and go, the success depending on accurate timing and a good bit of luck. But there was no other alternative. He would have a chance, once he got among the rocks and gullies. His biggest risk would be that of getting shot as he ran from the cavern, with thirty bows trained upon the black mouth.

He knew as soon as the moon vanished they would come wriggling like snakes from every direction, to cover the last few yards in a desperate rush —they would not fire until they could empty their quivers point-blank into the cavern and storm in after their volley with naked steel. But thirty pairs of keen eyes would be fixed on the entrance and a volley would meet any shadowy figure seen darting from it.

The moon sank, plunging the plateau into darkness, relieved but little by the dim light of the stars. Out on the plateau Conan heard sounds that only razor-keen ears could have caught, much less translated: the scruff of leather on stone, the faint clink of steel, the rattle of a pebble underfoot.

Rising in the black cave mouth he cocked his bow, and poising himself for an instant, hurled it, butt first, as far to the left as he could throw it. The clash of the steel-shod butt on stone was drowned by a blinding flash of fire and a deafening detonation as the pent-up charge burst the heavy barrel asunder and in the intensified darkness that followed the flash Conan was out of the cave and racing for the ravine on his right.

No arrow followed him, though bows banged on the heels of that amazing report. As he had planned, the surprising explosion from an unexpected quarter had confused his enemies, wrenched their attention away from the cave mouth and the dim figure that flitted from it. Men howled with amazement and fired blindly and unreasoningly in the direction of the flash and roar. While they howled and fired, Conan reached the gully and plunged into it almost without checking his stride—to collide with a shadowy figure which grunted and grappled with him.

In an instant Conan’s hands locked on a hairy throat, stifling the betraying yell. They went down together, and a bow, useless in such desperate close quarters, fell from the Afghuli’s hand. Out on the plain pandemonium had burst, but Conan was occupied with the blood-crazy savage beneath him.

The man was nearly as tall as he, and his sinews were like rawhide strands, but the advantage was with the tigerish white man. As they rolled on the gully floor the Afghuli strove in vain with both hands to tear away the fingers that were crushing the life from his corded throat, then still clawing at Conan’s wrist with his left hand, began to grope in his girdle for a knife. Conan released his throat with his left hand, and with it caught the other’s right wrist just as the knife came clear.

The Afghuli heaved and bucked like a wild man, straining his wolfish muscles to the utmost, but in vain. He could not free his knife wrist from Conan’s grasp nor tear from his throat the fingers that were binding his neck back until his bearded chin jutted upward. Desperately, he threw himself sidewise, trying to bring his knee up to the Cimmerian’s groin, but his shift in position gave Conan the leverage he had been seeking.

Instantly Conan twisted the Afghuli’s wrist with such savage strength that a bone cracked and the knife fell from the numb fingers. Conan released the broken wrist, snatched a knife from his own boot and ripped upward— again, again, and yet again.

Not until the convulsive struggles ceased and the body went limp beneath him did Conan release the hairy throat. He crouched above his victim, listening. The fight had been swift, fierce and silent, enduring only a matter of seconds.

The unexpected explosion had loosed hysteria in the attackers. The Wazuli were rushing the cave, not in stealth and silence, but yelling so loudly and shooting so wildly they did not seem to realize that no shots were answering them.

Nerves hung on hair triggers can be snapped by an untoward occurrence. The rush of the warriors across the plain sounded like the stampede of cattle. A man bounded up the ravine a few yards from where Conan crouched, without seeing the Cimmerian in the pit-like blackness. Howling, cursing, shooting blindly, the hillmen stormed to the cave mouth, too crazy with excitement and confused by the darkness to see the dim figure that glided out of the gully behind them and raced silently away toward the mouth of the distant gorge.

V

Juret always remembered that flight over the mountains as a sort of nightmare in which he was hustled along by ragged goblins through black defiles, up tendon-straining slopes and along knife-edge ridges which fell away on either hand into depths that turned him faint with nausea. Protests, exhortations and fervent profanity did not serve to ease the flying pace at which his escort was trundling him, and presently he had no breath for protests. He did not even have time to be grateful that the expected pursuit did not seem to be materializing.

He gasped like a dying fish and tried not to look down. He had an uncomfortable feeling that the Afghulis blamed him for Conan’s plight and would gladly have heaved him off a ridge but for their a bolters’ parting command.

But Juret felt that he was just as effectually being killed by overexertion. He had never realized that human beings could traverse such a path—or rather such a pathless track—as he was being dragged over. When the moon sank the going was even harder, but he was grateful, for the abysses they seemed to be continually skirting were but floating gulfs of blackness beneath them, which did not induce the sick giddiness resulting from yawning chasms disclosed by the merciless moonlight.

His respect for Conan’s physical abilities increased to a kind of frantic awe, for he knew the Cimmerian was known to be superior in stamina and endurance even to these long-legged, barrel-chested, iron-muscled mountaineers who seemed built of some substance that was tireless. Juret wished they would tire. They hauled him along with a man at each arm, and one to pull, and another to push when necessary, but even so the exertion was killing him. Sweat bathed him, drenching his garments. His thighs trembled and the calves of his legs were tied into agonizing knots.

He reflected in dizzy fragments that Conan deserved whatever domination he had achieved over these iron-jawed barbarians. But mostly he did not think at all. His faculties were all occupied in keeping his feet and gulping air. The veins in his temples were nearly bursting and things were swimming in a bloody haze about him when he realized his escort, or captors—or torturers—had slowed to a walk. He voiced an incoherent croak of gratitude and shaking the sweat out of his dilated eyes, he saw that they were treading a path that ran over a natural rock bridge which spanned a deep gorge. Ahead of him, looming above a cluster of broken peaks, he saw a great black bulk heaving up against the stars like a misshapen castle.

The sharp challenge of a rifleman rang staccato from the other end of the span and was answered by Khoda Khan’s bull-like bellow. The path led upon a jutting ledge and half a dozen ragged, bearded specters with bows in their hands rose from behind a rampart of heaped-up boulders.

Juret was in a state of collapse, able only to realize that the killing grind was over. The Afghulis half carried, half dragged him within the semicircular rampart and he saw a bronze door standing open and a doorway cut in solid rock that glowed luridly. It required an effort to realize that the glow came from a fire burning somewhere in the cavern into which the doorway led.

This, then, was Akbar’s Castle. With each arm across a pair of brawny shoulders Juret tottered through the cleft and down a short narrow tunnel, to emerge into a broad natural chamber lighted by smoky torches and a small fire over which tea was brewing and meat cooking. Half a dozen men sat about the fire, and some forty more slept on the stone floor, wrapped in their sheepskin coats. Doorways opened from the huge main chamber, openings of other tunnels or cell-like niches, and at the other end there were stalls occupied by horses, a surprising number of them. Saddles, blanket rolls, bridles and other equipage, with stands of bows and stacks of quivers, littered the floor near the walls.

The men about the fire rose to their feet looking inquiringly at the Kosalan and his escort, and the men on the floor awoke and sat up blinking like ghouls surprised by daylight. A tall broad-shouldered swashbuckler came striding out of the widest doorway opening into the cavern. He paused before the group, towering half a head taller than any other man there, hooked his thumbs in his girdle and glared balefully.

“Who is this man?” he snarled suspiciously. “Where is Conan?”

Three of the escort backed away apprehensively, but Khoda Khan, held his ground and answered: “This is Juret, whom Conan met at the Minaret of Yog, Yar Ali Khan. We rescued him from Baber Ali, who would have slain him. We were at bay in the cave where Yar Mechmad shot the gray wolf three summers ago. We stole out by a cleft, but the rope fell and left Conan on a ledge fifty feet above us, and—”

“Yog!” It was a blood-curdling yell from Yar Ali Khan who seemed transformed into a maniac. “Dogs! You left him to die! Accursed ones! Forgotten of God! I’ll—”

“He commanded us to bring this Kosalan to Akbar’s Castle,” maintained Khoda Khan doggedly, “We tore our beards and wept, but we obeyed!”

“Yog!” Yar Ali Khan became a whirlwind of energy. He snatched up bow, bandoleer and bridle. “Bring out the horses and saddle them!” he roared and a score of men scurried. “Hasten! Forty men with me to rescue Conan! The rest hold the Castle. I leave Khoda Khan in command.”

“Leave the devil in command of hell,” quoth Khoda Khan profanely. “I ride with you to rescue Conan—, or I empty my quiver into your belly.”

His three comrades expressed similar intentions at the top of their voices—after fighting and running all night, they were wild as starving wolves to plunge back into hazard in behalf of their chief.

“Go or stay, I care not!” howled Yar Ali Khan, tearing out a fistful of his beard in his passion. “If Borak is slain I will requite thee, by the prophet’s beard and my feet! Yog rot me if I ram not a knife down thy accursed gullets—dogs, jackals, noseless abominations, hasten with the horses!”

“Yar Ali Khan!” It was a yell from beyond the arch whence the tall Afghuli had first emerged. “One comes riding hard up the valley!”

Yar Ali Khan yelled bloodthirstily and rushed into the tunnel, brandishing his bow, with everybody pelting after him except the men detailed to saddle the horses.

Juret had been forgotten by the Afghulis in the madhouse brewed by Conan’s lieutenant. He limped after them, remembering tales told of this gaunt giant and his berserk rages. The tunnel down which the ragged horde was streaming ran for less than a hundred feet when it widened to a mouth through which the gray light of dawn was stealing. Through this the Afghulis were pouring and Juret, following them, came out upon a broad ledge a hundred feet wide and fifty deep, like a gallery before a house.

Around its semicircular rim ran a massive man-made wall, shoulder-high, pierced with loopholes slanting down. There was an arched opening in the wall, closed by a heavy bronze door, and from that door, which now stood open, a row of broad shallow steps niched in solid stone led down to a trail which in turn looped down a three-hundred-foot slope to the floor of a broad valley.

The cliffs in which the cave sat closed the western end of the valley, which opened to the east. Mists hung in the valley and out of them a horseman came flying, growing ghostlike out of the dimness of the dawn—a man on a great white horse, riding like the wind.

Yar Ali Khan glared wildly for an instant, then started forward with a convulsive leap of his whole body, flinging his bow high above his head.

“Conan!” he roared.

Electrified by his yell, the men surged to the wall and those saddling the mounts inside abandoned their task and rushed out onto the ledge. In an instant the wall was lined with tense figures, gripping their bows and glaring into the white mists rolling beyond the fleeing rider, from which they momentarily expected pursuers to appear.

Juret, standing to one side like a spectator of a drama, felt a tingle in his veins at the sight and sound of the wild rejoicing with which these wild men greeted the man who had won their allegiance. Conan was no bluffing adventurer; he was a real chief of men; and that, Juret realized, was going to make his own job that much harder.

No pursuers materialized out of the thinning mists. Conan urged his mount up the trail, up the broad steps, and as he rode through the gate, bending his head under the arch, the roar of acclaim that went up would have stirred the blood of a king. The Afghulis swarmed around him, catching at his hands, his garments, shouting praise to Yog that he was alive and whole. He grinned down at them, swung off and threw his reins to the nearest man, from whom Yar Ali Khan instantly snatched them jealously, with a ferocious glare at the offending warrior.

Juret stepped forward. He knew he looked like a scarecrow in his stained and torn garments, but Conan looked like a butcher, with blood dried on his shirt and smeared on his breeches where he had wiped his hands. But he did not seem to be wounded. He smiled at Juret for the first time.

“Tough trip, eh?”

“We’ve been here only a matter of minutes,” Juret acknowledged.

“You took a short cut. I came the long way, but I made good time on Baber Ali’s horse,” said Conan.

“You mentioned possible ambushes in the valleys—”

“Yes. But on horseback I could take that risk. I was shot at once, but they missed me. It’s hard to aim straight in the early-morning mists.”

“How did you get away?”

“Waited until the moon went down, then made a break for it. Had to kill a man in the gully before the cave. We were all twisted together when I let him have the knife and that’s where this blood came from. I stole Baber’s horse while the Wazuli were storming the empty cave. Stampeded the herd down a canyon. Had to shoot the fellow guarding it. Baber’ll guess where I went, of course. He’ll be after me as quickly as he and his men can catch their horses. I suspect they’ll lay siege to the Castle, but they’ll only waste their time.”

Juret stared about him in the growing light of dawn, impressed by the strength of the stronghold. One rifleman could hold the entrance through which he had been brought. To try to advance along that narrow bridge that spanned the chasm behind the Castle would be suicide for an enemy. And no force on earth could march up the valley on this side and climb that stair in the teeth of Conan’s bows. The mountain which contained the cave rose up like a huge stone citadel above the surrounding heights. The cliffs which flanked the valley were lower than the fortified ledge; men crawling along them would be exposed to a raking fire from above. Attack could come from no other direction.

“This is really in Afdal Khan’s territory,” said Conan. “It used to be a Mogul outpost, as the name implies. It was first fortified by Akbar himself. Afdal Khan held it before I took it. It’s my best safeguard for Kurram.

“After the outlying villages were burned on both sides, all my people took refuge in Kurram, just as Afdal’s did in Khoruk. To attack Kurram, Afdal would have to pass Akbar’s Castle and leave me in his rear. He doesn’t dare do that. That’s why he wanted a truce—to get me out of the Castle. With me ambushed and killed, or hemmed up in Kurram, he’d be free to strike at Kurram with all his force, without being afraid I’d burn Khoruk behind him or ambush him in my country.

“He’s too cautious of his own skin. I’ve repeatedly challenged him to fight me man to man, but he pays no attention. He hasn’t stirred out of Khoruk since the feud started, unless he had at least a hundred men with him— as many as I have in my entire force, counting these here and those guarding the women and children in Kurram.”

“You’ve done a terrible amount of damage with so small a band,” said Juret.

“Not difficult if you know the country, have men who trust you, and keep moving. The possession of this Castle was all I needed to assure my ultimate victory. If Afdal had the guts to meet me, the feud would be over. He’s the chief; the others just follow him. As it is I may have to wipe out the entire Khoruk clan. But I’ll get him.”

The dark flame flickered in Conan’s eyes as he spoke, and again Juret felt the impact of an inexorable determination, elemental in its foundation. And again he swore mentally that he would end the feud himself, in his own way, with Afdal Khan alive; though how, he had not the faintest idea at present.

Conan glanced at him closely and advised: “Better get some sleep. If I know Baber Ali, he’ll come straight to the Castle after me. He knows he can’t take it, but he’ll try anyway. He has at least a hundred men who follow him and take orders from nobody else—not even Afdal Khan. After the shooting starts there won’t be much chance for sleeping. You look a bit done up.”

Juret realized the truth of Conan’s comment. Sight of the white streak of dawn stealing over the ash-hued peaks weighted his eyelids with an irresistible drowsiness. He was barely able to stumble into the cave, and the smell of frying mutton exercised no charm to keep him awake. Somebody steered him to a heap of blankets and he was asleep before he was actually stretched upon them.

Conan stood looking down at the sleeping man enigmatically and Yar Ali Khan came up as noiselessly and calmly as a gaunt gray wolf; it would have been hard to believe he was the hurricane of emotional upset which had stormed all over the cavern a short hour before.

“Is he a friend, Conan?”

“A better friend than he realizes,” was Conan’s grim, cryptic reply. “I think Afdal Khan’s friends will come to curse the day Juret ever came into the hills.”

VI

Again it was the spiteful Afghul shouts which awakened Juret. He sat up, momentarily confused and unable to remember where he was or how he came there. Then he recalled the events of the night; he was in the stronghold of an outlaw chief, and those shouts must mean the siege Conan had predicted. He was alone in the great cavern, except for the horses munching fodder beyond the bars at the other end. Among them he recognized the big white stallion that had belonged to Baber Ali.

The fire had died to a heap of coals and the daylight that stole through a couple or arches, which were the openings of tunnels connecting with the outer air, was augmented by half a dozen antique-looking bronze lamps.

A pot of mutton stew simmered over the coals and a dish full of chupatties stood near it. Juret was aware of a ravenous hunger and he set to without delay. Having eaten his fill and drunk deeply from a huge gourd which hung nearby, full of sweet, cool water, he rose and started toward the tunnel through which he had first entered the Castle.

Near the mouth he almost stumbled over an incongruous object—a large telescope mounted on a tripod, and obviously modern and expensive. A glance out on the ledge showed him only half a dozen warriors sitting against the rampart, their bows across their knees. He glanced at the ribbon of stone that spanned the deep gorge and shivered as he remembered how he had crossed it in the darkness. It looked scarcely a foot wide in places. He turned back, crossed the cavern and traversed the other tunnel.

He halted in the outer mouth. The wall that rimmed the ledge was lined with Afghulis, kneeling or lying at the loopholes. They were not firing. Conan leaned idly against the bronze door, his head in plain sight of anyone who might be in the valley below. He nodded a greeting as Juret advanced and joined him at the door. Again the Kosalan found himself a member of a besieged force, but this time the advantage was all with the defenders.

Down in the valley, out of effectual bow range, a long skirmish line of men was advancing very slowly on foot, firing as they came, and taking advantage of every bit of cover. Farther back, small in the distance, a large herd of horses grazed, watched by men who sat cross-legged in the shade of the cliff. The position of the sun indicated that the day was well along toward the middle of the afternoon.

“I’ve slept longer than I thought,” Juret remarked. “How long has this firing been going on?”

“Ever since noon. They’re wasting their quivers scandalously. But you slept like a dead man. Baber Ali didn’t get here as quickly as I thought he would. He evidently stopped to round up more men. There are at least a hundred down there.”

To Juret the attack seemed glaringly futile. The men on the ledge were too well protected to suffer from the long-range firing. And before the attackers could get near enough to pick out the loopholes, the arrows of the Afghulis would be knocking them over like tenpins. He glimpsed men crawling among the boulders on the cliffs, but they were at the same disadvantage as the men in the valley below—, Conan’s bow-men had a vantage point above them.

“What can Baber Ali hope for?” he asked.

“He’s desperate. He knows you’re up here with me and he’s taking a thousand-to-one chance. But he’s wasting his time. I have enough ammunition and food to stand a six-month siege; there’s a spring in the cavern.”

“Why hasn’t Afdal Khan kept you hemmed up here with part of his men while he stormed Kurram with the rest of his force?”

“Because it would take his whole force to storm Kurram; its defenses are almost as strong as these. Then he has a dread of having me at his back. Too big a risk that his men couldn’t keep me cooped up. He’s got to reduce Akbar’s Castle before he can strike at Kurram.”

“The devil!” said Juret irritably, brought back to his own situation. “I came to arbitrate this feud and now I find myself a prisoner. I’ve got to get out of here—, got to get back to Ghazrael.”

“I’m as anxious to get you out as you are to go,” answered Conan. “If you’re killed I’m sure to be blamed for it. I don’t mind being outlawed for the things I have done, but I don’t care to shoulder something I didn’t do.”

“Couldn’t I slip out of here tonight? By way of the bridge—”

“There are men on the other side of the gorge, watching for just such a move. Baber Ali means to close your mouth if human means can do it.”

“If Afdal Khan knew what’s going on he’d come and drag the old ruffian off my neck,” growled Juret. “Afdal knows he can’t afford to let his clan kill an Kosalan. But Baber will take good care Afdal doesn’t know, of course. If I could get a letter to him—but of course that’s impossible.”

“We can try it, though,” returned Conan. “You write the note. Afdal knows your handwriting, doesn’t he? Good! Tonight I’ll sneak out and take it to his nearest outpost. He keeps a line of patrols among the hills a few miles beyond Jehungir’s Well.”

“But if I can’t slip out, how can you—”

“I can do it all right, alone. No offense, but you sound like a herd of longhorn steers at your stealthiest. The Wazuli are among the crags on the other side of the Gorge of Mekram. I won’t cross the bridge. My men will let me down a rope ladder into the gorge tonight before moonrise. I’ll slip up to the camp of the nearest outpost, wrap the note around a pebble and throw it among them. Being Afdal’s men and not Baber’s, they’ll take it to him. I’ll come back the way I went, after moonset. It’ll be safe enough.”

“But how safe will it be for Afdal Khan when he comes for me?”

“You can tell Afdal Khan he won’t be harmed if he plays fair,” Conan answered. “But you’d better make some arrangements so you can see him and know he’s there before you trust yourself outside this cave. And there’s the pinch, because Afdal won’t dare show himself for fear I’d shoot him. He’s broken so many pacts himself he can’t believe anybody would keep one. Not where his hide is concerned. He trusted me to keep my word in regard to Baber and your escort, but would he trust himself to my promise?”

Juret scowled, cramming the bowl of his pipe. “Wait!” he said suddenly. “I saw a big telescope in the cavern, mounted on a tripod, —is it in working order?”

“I should say it is. I imported that from Khitai, by the way of Turan and Iranistan. That’s one reason Akbar’s Castle has never been surprised. It carries for miles.”

“Does Afdal Khan know of it?”

“I’m sure he does.”

“Good!”

Seating himself on the ledge, Juret drew forth pencil and notebook, propped the latter against his knee, and wrote in his clear concise hand:

AFDAL KHAN: I am at Akbar’s Castle, now being besieged by your uncle, Baber Ali. Baber was so unreasonably incensed at my failure to effect a truce that he allowed my servant Suleiman to be murdered, and now intends murdering me, to stop my mouth.

I don’t have to remind you how fatal it would be to the interests of your party for this to occur. I want you to come to Akbar’s Castle and get me out of this. Conan assures me you will not be molested if you play fair, but here is a way by which you need not feel you are taking any chances: Conan has a large telescope through which I can identify you while you are still out of bow range. In the Gorge of Mekram, and southwest of the Castle, there is a mass of boulders split off from the right wall and well out of bow range from the Castle. If you were to come and stand on those boulders, I could identify you easily.

Naturally, I will not leave the Castle until I know you are present to protect me from your uncle. As soon as I have identified you, I will come down the gorge alone. You can watch me all the way and assure yourself that no treachery is intended. No one but myself will leave the Castle. On your part I do not wish any of your men to advance beyond the boulders and I will not answer for their safety if they should, as I intend to safeguard Conan in this matter as well as yourself.

JURET

He handed the letter over for Conan to read. The Cimmerian nodded. “That may bring him. I don’t know. He’s kept out of my sight ever since the feud started.”

Then ensued a period of waiting, in which the sun seemed sluggishly to crawl toward the western peaks. Down in the valley and on the cliffs the Wazuli kept up their fruitless firing with a persistency that convinced Juret of the truth of Conan’s assertion that ammunition was being supplied them by some European power.

The Afghulis were not perturbed. They lounged at ease by the wall, laughed, joked, chewed jerked mutton and fired through the slanting loopholes when the Wazuli crept too close. Three still white-clad forms in the valley and one on the cliffs testified to their accuracy. Juret realized that Conan was right when he said the clan which held Akbar’s Castle was certain to win the war eventually. Only a desperate old savage like Baber Ali would waste time and men trying to take it. Yet the Wazuli had originally held it. How Conan had gained possession of it Juret could not imagine.

The sun dipped at last; the Himelian twilight deepened into black-velvet, star-veined dusk. Conan rose, a vague figure in the starlight.

“Time for me to be going.”

He had laid aside his bow and buckled a tulwar to his hip. Juret followed him into the great cavern, now dim and shadowy in the light of the bronze lamps, and through the narrow tunnel and the bronze door.

Yar Ali Khan, Khoda Khan, and half a dozen others followed them. The light from the cavern stole through the tunnel, vaguely etching the moving figures of the men. Then the bronze door was closed softly and Juret’s companions were shapeless blurs in the thick soft darkness around him. The gorge below was a floating river of blackness. The bridge was a dark streak that ran into the unknown and vanished. Not even the keenest eyes of the hills, watching from beyond the gorge, could have even discerned the jut of the ledge under the black bulk of the Castle, much less the movements of the men upon it.

The voices of the men working at the rim of the ledge were lowering the rope ladder—a hundred and fifty feet of it—into the gorge. Conan’s face was a light blur in the darkness. Juret groped for his hand and found him already swinging over the rampart onto the ladder, one end of which was made fast to a great iron ring set in the stone of the ledge.

“Conan, I feel like a bounder, letting you take this risk for me. Suppose some of those devils are down there in the gorge?”

“Not much chance. They don’t know we have this way of coming and going. If I can steal a horse, I’ll be back in the Castle before dawn. If I can’t, and have to make the whole trip there and back on foot, I may have to hide out in the hills tomorrow and get back into the Castle the next night. Don’t worry about me. They’ll never see me. Yar Ali Khan, watch for a rush before the moon rises.”

“Aye, Conan.” The bearded giant’s undisturbed manner reassured Juret.

The next instant Conan began to melt into the gloom below. Before he had climbed down five rungs the men crouching on the rampart could no longer see him. He made no sound in his descent. Khoda Khan knelt with a hand on the ropes, and as soon as he felt them go slack, he began to haul the ladder up. Juret leaned over the edge, straining his ears to catch some sound from below—, scruff of leather, rattle of shale—, he heard nothing.

Yar Ali Khan muttered, his beard brushing Juret’s ear: “Nay, Juret, if such ears as yours could hear him, every Wazuli on this side of the mountain would know a man stole down the gorge! You will not hear him— nor will they. There are Lifters of the Zhaibar who can steal bows out of the tents of the Kosalans soldiers, but they are blundering cattle compared to Conan. Before dawn a wolf will howl in the gorge, and we will know Conan has returned and will let down the ladder for him.”

But like the others, the huge Afghuli leaned over the rampart listening intently for some fifteen minutes after the ladder had been drawn up. Then with a gesture to the others he turned and opened the bronze door a crack. They stole through hurriedly. Somewhere in the blackness across the gorge a bow cracked flatly and an arrow embedded itself a foot or so above the lintel. In spite of the rampart some quick eye among the crags had caught the glow of the opened door. But it was blind shooting. The sentries left on the ledge did not reply.

Back on the ledge that overlooked the valley, Juret noted an air of expectancy among the warriors at the loopholes. They were momentarily expecting the attack of which Conan had warned them.

“How did Conan ever take Akbar’s Castle?” Juret asked Khoda Khan, who seemed more ready to answer questions than any of the other taciturn warriors.

The Afghuli squatted beside him near the open bronze gate, bow in hand, the butt resting on the ledge. Over them was the blue-black bowl of the Himelian night, flecked with clusters of frosty silver.

“He sent Yar Ali Khan with forty horsemen to make a feint at Baber Ali’s sangar,” answered Khoda Khan promptly. “Thinking to trap us, Afdal drew all his men out of Akbar’s Castle except three. Afdal believed three men could hold it against an army, and so they could—against an army. Not against Conan. While Baber Ali and Afdal were striving to pin Yar Ali Khan and us forty riders between them, and we were a bolting the dogs a merry chase over the hills, Conan rode alone down this valley. He came disguised as a Iranistani trader, with his turban awry and his rich garments dusty and rent. He fled down the valley shouting that thieves had looted his caravan and were pursuing him to take from him his purse of gold and his pouch of jewels.

“The accursed ones left to guard the Castle were greedy, and they saw only a rich and helpless merchant, to be looted. So they bade him take refuge in the cavern and opened the gate to him. He rode into Akbar’s Castle crying praise to Yog—, with empty hands, but a knife and crossbows under his khalat. Then the accursed ones mocked him and set on him to strip him of his riches—by Yog they found they caught a tiger in the guise of a lamb! One he slew with the knife, the other two he shot. Alone he took the stronghold against which armies have thundered in vain! When we forty-one horsemen evaded the Wazuli and doubled back, as it had been planned, lo! the bronze gate was open to us and we were lords of Akbar’s Castle! Ha! The forgotten of God charge the stair!”

From the shadows below there welled up the sudden, swift drum of hoofs and Juret glimpsed movement in the darkness of the valley. The blurred masses resolved themselves into dim figures racing up the looping trail: At the same time a rattle of bow fire burst out behind the Castle, from beyond the Gorge of Mekram. The Afghulis displayed no excitement. Khoda Khan did not even close the bronze gate. They held their fire until the hoofs of the foremost horses were ringing on the lower steps of the stair. Then a burst of flame crowned the wall, and in its flash Juret saw wild bearded faces, horses tossing heads and manes.

In the darkness following the volley there rose screams of agony from men and beasts, mingled with the thrashing and kicking of wounded horses and the grating of shod hoofs on stone as some of the beasts slid backward down the stair. Dead and dying piled in a heaving, agonized mass, and the stairs became a shambles as again and yet again the rippling volleys crashed.

Juret wiped a damp brow with a shaking hand, grateful that the hoofbeats were receding down the valley. The gasps and moans and cries which welled up from the ghastly heap at the foot of the stairs sickened him.

“They are fools,” said Khoda Khan, levering fresh cartridges into his bow. “Thrice in past attacks have they charged the stair by darkness, and thrice have we broken them. Baber Ali is a bull rushing blindly to his destruction.”

Rifles began to flash and crack down in the valley as the baffled besiegers vented their wrath in blind discharges. Bullets smacked along the wall of the cliff, and Khoda Khan closed the bronze gate.

“Why don’t they attack by way of the bridge?” Juret wondered.

“Doubtless they did. Did you not hear the shots? But the path is narrow and one man behind the rampart could keep it clear. And there are six men there, all skilled marksmen.”

Juret nodded, remembering the narrow ribbon of rock flanked on either hand by echoing depths.

“Look, sahib, the moon rises.”

Over the eastern peaks a glow began which grew to a soft golden fire against which the peaks stood blackly outlined. Then the moon rose, not the mellow gold globe promised by the forerunning luster, but a gaunt, red, savage moon, of the high Himalayas.

Khoda Khan opened the bronze gate and peered down the stair, grunting softly in gratification. Juret, looking over his shoulder, shuddered. The heap at the foot of the stairs was no longer a merciful blur, for the moon outlined it in pitiless detail. Dead horses and dead men lay in a tangled gory mound with bows and sword blades thrust out of the pile like weeds growing out of a scrap heap. There must have been at least a dozen horses and almost as many men in that shambles.

“A shame to waste good horses thus,” muttered Khoda Khan. “Baber Ali is a fool.” He closed the gate.

Juret leaned back against the wall, drawing a heavy sheepskin coat about him. He felt sick and futile. The men down in the valley must feel the same way, for the firing was falling off, becoming spasmodic. Even Baber Ali must realize the futility of the siege by this time. Juret smiled bitterly to himself. He had come to arbitrate a hill feud—and down there men lay dead in heaps. But the game was not yet played out. The thought of Conan stealing through those black mountains out there somewhere discouraged sleep. Yet he did slumber at last, despite himself.

It was Khoda Khan who shook him awake. Juret looked up blinking. Dawn was just whitening the peaks. Only a dozen men squatted at the loopholes. From the cavern stole the reek of coffee and frying meat.

“Your letter has been safely delivered, sahib.”

“Eh? What’s that? Conan’s returned?”

Juret rose stiffly, relieved that Conan had not suffered on his account. He glanced over the wall. Down the valley the camp of the raiders was veiled by the morning mists, but several strands of smoke oozed toward the sky. He did not look down the stair; he did not wish to see the cold faces of the dead in the white dawn light.

He followed Khoda Khan into the great chamber where some of the warriors were sleeping and some preparing breakfast. The Afghuli gestured toward a cell-like niche where a man lay. He had his back to the door, but the black, square-cut hair and dusty clothes were unmistakable.

“He is weary,” said Khoda Khan. “He sleeps.”

Juret nodded. He had begun to wonder if Conan ever found it necessary to rest and sleep like ordinary men.

“It were well to go upon the ledge and watch for Afdal Khan,” said Khoda Khan. “We have mounted the telescope there, sahib. One shall bring your breakfast to you there. We have no way of knowing when Afdal will come.”

Out on the ledge the telescope stood on its tripod, projecting like a cannon over the rampart. He trained it on the mass of boulders down the ravine. The Gorge of Mekram ran from the north to the southwest. The boulders, called the Rocks, were more than a mile of the southwest of the Castle. Just beyond them the gorge bent sharply. A man could reach the Rocks from the southwest without being spied from the Castle, but he could not approach beyond them without being seen. Nor could anyone leave the Castle from that side and approach the Rocks without being seen by anyone hiding there.

The Rocks were simply a litter of huge boulders which had broken off from the canyon wall. Just now, as Juret looked, the mist floated about them, making them hazy and indistinct. Yet as he watched them they became more sharply outlined, growing out of the thinning mist. And on the tallest rock there stood a motionless figure. The telescope brought it out in vivid clarity. There was no mistaking that tall, powerful figure. It was Afdal Khan who stood there, watching the Castle.

“He must have got the letter early in the night, or ridden hard to get here this early,” muttered Juret. “Maybe he was at some spot nearer than Khoruk. Did Conan say?”

“No.”

“Well, no matter. We won’t wake Conan. No, I won’t wait for breakfast. Tell Conan that I’m grateful for all the trouble he’s taken in my behalf and I’ll do what I can for him when I get back to Ghazrael. But he’d better decide to let this thing be arbitrated. I’ll see that Afdal doesn’t try any treachery.”

“Yes, sahib.”

They tossed the rope ladder into the gorge and it unwound swiftly as it tumbled down and dangled within a foot of the canyon floor. The Afghulis showed their heads above the ramparts without hesitation, but when Juret mounted the rampart and stood in plain sight, he felt a peculiar crawling between his shoulders.

But no bow twanged from the crags beyond the gorge. Of course, the sight of Afdal Khan was sufficient guarantee of his safety. Juret set a foot in the ladder and went down, refusing to look below him. The ladder tended to swing and spin after he had progressed a few yards and from time to time he had to steady himself with a hand against the cliff wall. But altogether it was not so bad, and presently he heaved a sigh of relief as he felt the rocky floor under his feet. He waved his arms, but the rope was already being drawn up swiftly. He glanced about him. If any bodies had fallen from the bridge in the night battle, they had been removed. He turned and walked down the gorge, toward the appointed rendezvous.

Dawn grew about him, the white mists changing to rosy pink, and swiftly dissipating. He could make out the outlines of the Rocks plainly now, without artificial aid, but he no longer saw Afdal Khan. Doubtless the suspicious chief was watching his approach from some hiding place. He kept listening for distant shots that would indicate Baber Ali was renewing the siege, but he heard none. Doubtless Baber Ali had already received orders from Afdal Khan, and he visualized Afdal’s amazement and rage when he learned of his uncle’s indiscretions.

He reached the Rocks—a great heap of rugged, irregular stones and broken boulders, towering thirty feet in the air in places.

He halted and called: “Afdal Khan!”

“This way,” a voice answered. “Among the Rocks.”

Juret advanced between a couple of jagged boulders and came into a sort of natural theater, made by the space inclosed between the overhanging cliff and the mass of detached rocks. Fifty men could have stood there without being crowded, but only one man was in sight—a tall, lusty man in early middle life, in turban and silken khalat. He stood with his head thrown back in unconscious arrogance, a broad tulwar in his hand.

The faint crawling between his shoulders that had accompanied Juret all the way down the gorge, in spite of himself, left him at the sight. When he spoke his voice was casual.

“I’m glad to see you, Afdal Khan.”

“And I am glad to see you!” the Wazuli answered with a chill smile. He thumbed the razor-edge of his tulwar. “You have failed in the mission for which I brought you into these hills—, but your death will serve me almost as well.”

Had the Rocks burst into a roar about him the surprise would have been no more shocking. Juret literally staggered with the impact of the stunning revelation.

“What? My death? Afdal, are you mad?”

“What will the Kosalan do to Baber Ali?” demanded the chief.

“They’ll demand that he be tried for the murder of Suleiman,” answered Juret.

“And the Amir would hang him, to placate the Kosalans!” Afdal Khan laughed mirthlessly. “But if you were dead, none would ever know! Bah! Do you think I would let my uncle be hanged for slaying that dog? Baber was a fool to let his men take the man's life. I would have prevented it, had I known. But now it is done and I mean to protect him. Conan is not so wise as I thought or he would have known that I would never let Baber be punished.”

“It means ruin for you if you murder me,” reminded Juret— through dry lips, for he read the murderous gleam in the Wazuli’s eyes.

“Where are the witnesses to accuse me? There is none this side of the Castle save you and I. I have removed my men from the crags near the bridge. I sent them all into the valley—partly because I feared lest one might fire a hasty shot and spoil my plan, partly because I do not trust my own men any farther than I have to. Sometimes a man can be bribed or persuaded to betray even his chief.

“Before dawn I sent men to comb the gorge and these Rocks to make sure no trap had been set for me. Then I came here and sent them away and remained here alone. They do not know why I came. They shall never know. Tonight, when the moon rises, your head will be found in a sack at the foot of the stair that a bolts down from Akbar’s Castle and there will be a hundred men to swear it was thrown down by Conan.

“And because they will believe it themselves, none can prove them liars. I want them to believe it themselves, because I know how shrewd you Kosalan are in discovering lies. I will send your head to Fort Ali Masjid, with fifty men to swear Conan murdered you. The Kosalans will force the Amir to send an army up here, with field pieces, and shell Conan out of my Castle. Who will believe him if he has the opportunity to say he did not slay you?”

“Conan was right!” muttered Juret helplessly. “You are a treacherous dog. Would you mind telling me just why you forced this feud on him?”

“Not at all, since you will be dead in a few moments, I want control of the wells that dominate the caravan routes. The Turanians will pay me a great deal of gold to help them smuggle bows and weaponry down from Iranistan and Turan, into Afghulistan and Vendhya. I will help them, and they will help me. Some day they will make me Amir of Afghulistan.”

“Conan was right,” was all Juret could say. “The man was right! And this truce you wanted—, I suppose it was another trick?”

“Of course! I wanted to get Conan out of my Castle.”

“What a fool I’ve been,” muttered Juret.

“Best make your peace with your gods than berate yourself,” said Afdal Khan, beginning to swing the heavy tulwar to and fro, turning the blade so the edge gleamed in the early light. “There are only you and I and Yog to see —and Yog hates infidels! Steel is silent and sure, —one stroke, swift and deadly, and your head will be mine to use as I wish—”

He advanced with the noiseless stride of the hillman. Juret set his teeth and clenched his hands until the nails bit into the palms. He knew it was useless to run; the Wazuli would overtake him within half a dozen strides. It was equally futile to leap and grapple with his bare hands, but it was all he could do; death would smite him in mid-leap and there would be a rush of darkness and an end of planning and working and all things hoped for—

“Wait a minute, Afdal Khan!”

The voice was moderately pitched, but if it had been a sudden scream the effect could have been no more startling. Afdal Khan started violently and whirled about. He froze in his tracks and the tulwar slipped from his fingers. His face went ashen and slowly his hands rose above his shoulders. Conan stood in a cleft of the cleft, and a heavy crossbow, held hip-high, menaced the chief’s waistline. Conan’s expression was one of faint amusement, but a hot flame leaped and smoldered in his black eyes.

“Conan!” stammered Afdal Khan dazedly. “Conan!” Suddenly he cried out like a madman. “You are a ghost—, a devil! The Rocks were empty —my men searched them—”

“I was hiding on a ledge on the cliff above their heads,” Conan answered. “I entered the Rocks after they left. Keep your hands away from your girdle, Afdal Khan. I could have shot you any time within the last hour, but I wanted Juret to know you for the rogue you are.”

“But I saw you in the cave,” gasped Juret, “asleep in the cave—”

“You saw an Afghuli, Ali Shah, in some of my clothes, pretending to be sleeping,” answered Conan, never taking his eyes off Afdal Khan. “I was afraid if you knew I wasn’t in the Castle, you’d refuse to meet Afdal, thinking I was up to something. So after I tossed your note into the Wazuli camp, I came back to the Castle while you were asleep, gave my men their orders and hid down the gorge.

“You see I knew Afdal wouldn’t let Baber be punished for killing Suleiman. He couldn’t if he wanted to. Baber has too many followers in the Khoruk clan. And the only way of keeping the Amir’s favor without handing Baber over for trial, would be to shut your mouth. He could always lay it onto me, then. I knew that note would bring him to meet you—and I knew he’d come prepared to kill you.”

“He might have killed me,” muttered Juret.

“I’ve had a weapon trained on him ever since you came within range. If he’d brought men with him, I’d have shot him before you left the Castle. When I saw he meant to wait here alone, I waited for you to find out for yourself what kind of a dog he is. You’ve been in no danger.”

“I thought he arrived early, to have come from Khoruk.”

“I knew he wasn’t at Khoruk when I left the Castle last night,” said Conan. “I knew when Baber found us safe in the Castle he’d make a clean breast of everything to Afdal—and that Afdal would come to help him. Afdal was camped half a mile back in the hills—surrounded by a mob of fighting men, as usual, and under cover. If I could have got a shot at him then, I wouldn’t have bothered to deliver your note. But this is as good a time as any.”

Again the flames leaped up the black eyes and sweat beaded Afdal Khan’s swarthy skin.

“You’re not going to kill him in cold blood?” Juret protested.

“No. I’ll give him a better chance than he gave Yusef Khan.”

Conan stepped to the silent Afghuli, pressed his tip against his ribs and drew a knife and crossbow from Afdal Khan’s girdle. He tossed the weapons up among the rocks and removed his own crossbow. Then he drew his tulwar with a soft rasp of steel against leather. When he spoke his voice was calm, but Juret saw the veins knot and swell on his temples.

“Pick up your blade, Afdal Khan. There is no one here save the Kosalan, you, I and Yog, —and Yog hates swine!”

Afdal Khan snarled like a trapped panther; he bent his knees, reaching one hand toward the weapon—he crouched there motionless for an instant eyeing Conan with a wide, blank glare, —then all in one motion he snatched up the tulwar and came like a Himelian hill gust.

Juret caught his breath at the blinding ferocity of that onslaught. It seemed to him that Afdal’s hand hardly touched the hilt before he was hacking at Conan’s head. But Conan’s head was not there. And Juret, expecting to see the Cimmerian overwhelmed in the storm of steel that played about him began to recall tales he had heard of Conan’s prowess with the heavy, curved blade.

Afdal Khan was shorter and rangier than Conan, but he was as quick as a famished wolf. He rained blow on blow with all the strength of his corded arm, and so swiftly Juret could follow the strokes only by the incessant clangor of steel on steel. But that flashing tulwar did not connect; each murderous blow rang on Conan’s blade or swished past his head as he shifted. Not that the Cimmerian fought a running fight. Afdal Khan moved about much more than did Conan. The Wazuli swayed and bent his body agilely to right and left, leaped in and out, and circled his antagonist, smiting incessantly.

Conan moved his head frequently to avoid blows, but he seldom shifted his feet except to keep his enemy always in front of him. His stance was as firm as that of a deep-rooted rock, and his blade was never beaten down. Beneath the heaviest blows the Afghuli could deal, it opposed an unyielding guard.

The man’s wrist and forearm must be made of iron, thought Juret, staring in amazement. Afdal Khan beat on Conan’s tulwar like a smith on an anvil, striving to beat the Cimmerian to his knee by the sheer weight of his attack; cords of muscle stood out on Conan’s wrist as he met the attack. He did not give back a foot. His guard never weakened.

Afdal Khan was panting and perspiration streamed down his dark face. His eyes held the glare of a wild beast. Conan was not even breathing hard. He seemed utterly unaffected by the tempest beating upon him. And desperation flooded Afdal Khan’s face, as he felt his own strength waning beneath his maddened efforts to beat down that iron guard.

“Dog!” he gasped, spat in Conan’s face and lunged in terrifically, staking all on one stroke, and throwing his sword arm far back before he swung his tulwar in an arc that might have felled an oak.

Then Conan moved and the speed of his shift would have shamed a wounded catamount. Juret could not follow his motion—, he only saw that Afdal Khan’s mighty swipe had cleft only empty air, and Conan’s blade was a blinding flicker in the rising sun. There was a sound as of a cleaver sundering a joint of beef and Afdal Khan staggered. Conan stepped back with a low laugh, merciless as the ring of flint, and a thread of crimson wandered down the broad blade in his hand.

Afdal Khan’s face was livid; he swayed drunkenly on his feet, his eyes dilated; his left hand was pressed to his side, and blood spouted between the fingers; his right arm fought to raise the tulwar that had become an imponderable weight.

“Yog!” he croaked. “Yog—” Suddenly his knees bent and he fell as a tree falls.

Juret bent over him in awe.

“Good heavens, he’s shorn half asunder! How could a man live even those few seconds, with a wound like that?”

“Hillmen are hard to kill,” Conan answered, shaking the red drops from his blade. The crimson glare had gone out of his eyes; the fire that had for so long burned consumingly in his soul had been quenched at last, though it had been quenched in blood.

“You can go back to the capital and tell the Amir the feud’s over,” he said. “The caravans from Iranistan will soon be passing over the road again.”

“What about Baber Ali?”

“He pulled out last night, after his attack on the Castle failed. I saw him riding out of the valley with most of his men. He was sick of the siege. Afdal’s men are still in the valley but they’ll leg it for Khoruk as soon as they hear what’s happened to Afdal. The Amir will make an outlaw out of Baber Ali as soon as you get back to the capital. I’ve got no more to fear from the Khoruk clan; they’ll be glad to agree to peace.”

Juret glanced down at the dead man. The feud had ended as Conan had sworn it would. Conan had been in the right all along; but it was a new and not too pleasing experience to Juret to be used as a pawn in a game —as he himself had used so many men and women.

He laughed wryly. “Confound you, Conan, you’ve bamboozled me all the way through! You let me believe that only Baber Ali was besieging us, and that Afdal Khan would protect me against his uncle! You set a trap to catch Afdal Khan, and you used me as bait! I’ve got an idea that if I hadn’t thought of that letter-and-telescope combination, you’d have suggested it yourself.”

“I’ll give you an escort to Ghazrael when the rest of the Wazuli clear out,” offered Conan.

“Damn it, man, if you hadn’t saved my life so often in the past forty-eight hours, I’d be inclined to use bad language! But Afdal Khan was a rogue and deserved what he got. I can’t say that I relish your methods, but they’re effective! You ought to be in the spy network. A few years at this rate and you’ll be Amir of Afghulistan!”

The Daughter of Erlik Khan

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

I

The tall Iranistani, Pemrir, was scratching lines on the earth with his hunting knife, talking in a jerky tone that indicated suppressed excitement: “I tell you, Ormond, that peak to the west is the one we were to look for. Here, I’ve marked a map in the dirt. This mark here represents our camp, and this one is the peak. We’ve marched north far enough. At this spot we should turn westward —”

“Shut up!” muttered Ormond. “Rub out that map. Here comes Conan.” Pemrir obliterated the faint lines with a quick sweep of his open hand, and as he scrambled up he managed to shuffle his feet across the spot. He and Ormond were laughing and talking easily as the third man of the expedition came up.

Conan was larger than his companions, and his physique was much heavier in comparison to either the rangy Pemrir or the more closely knit Ormond. He was one of those rare individuals at once lithe and huge. His strength did not give the impression of being locked up within himself as is the case with so many strong men. He moved with a flowing ease that advertised power more subtly than does mere beefy bulk.

Though he was clad much like the two Iranistanis except for an Shemite headdress, he fitted into the scene as they did not. He, a Cimmerian, seemed almost as much a part of these rugged uplands as the wild nomads which pasture their sheep along the slopes of the Himelians. There was a certitude in his level gaze, an economy of motion in his movements, that reflected kinship with the wilderness.

“Pemrir and I were discussing that peak, Conan,” said Ormond, indicating the mountain under discussion, which reared a snow cap in the clear afternoon sky beyond a range of blue hills, hazy with distance. “We were wondering if it had a name.”

“Everything in these hills has a name,” Conan answered. “Some of them don’t appear on the maps, though. That peak is called Mount Erlik Khan. Less than a dozen Iranistani men have seen it.”

“Never heard of it,” was Pemrir’s comment. “If we weren’t in such a hurry to find poor old Rasir, it might be fun having a closer look at it, what?”

“If getting your belly ripped open can be called fun,” returned Conan. “Erlik Khan’s in Black Kirghiz country.”

“Kirghiz? Heathens and devil worshipers? Sacred city of Yolgan and all that rot.”

“No rot about the devil worship,” Conan returned. “We’re almost on the borders of their country now. This is a sort of no man’s land here, squabbled over by the Kirghiz and nomads from farther east. We’ve been lucky not to have met any of the former. They’re an isolated branch off the main stalk which centers about Issik-kul, and they hate Iranistani men like poison.

“This is the closest point we approach their country. From now on, as we travel north, we’ll be swinging away from it. In another week, at most, we ought to be in the territory of the tribe who you think captured your friend.”

“I hope the man is still alive,” Pemrir sighed.

“When you engaged me at Peshawar I told you I feared it was a futile quest,” said Conan. “If that tribe did capture your friend, the chances are all against his being still alive. I’m just warning you, so you won’t be too disappointed if we don’t find him.”

“We appreciate that,” returned Ormond. “We knew no one but you could get us there with our heads still on our shoulders.”

“We’re not there yet,” remarked Conan cryptically, shifting his bow under his arm. “I saw hangul sign before we went into camp, and I’m going to see if I can bag one. I may not be back before dark.”

“Going afoot?” inquired Pemrir.

“Yes; if I get one I’ll bring back a haunch for supper.”

And with no further comment Conan strode off down the rolling slope, while the other men stared silently after him.

He seemed to melt rather than stride into the broad copse at the foot of the slope. The men turned, still unspeaking, and glanced at the servants going about their duties in the camp — four stolid Afghulis and a slender Shemite who was Conan’s personal servant.

The camp with its faded tents and tethered horses was the one spot of sentient life in a scene so vast and broodingly silent that it was almost daunting. To the south stretched an unbroken rampart of hills climbing up to barren peaks. Far to the north rose another more broken range.

Between those barriers lay a great expanse of rolling table-land, broken by solitary peaks and lesser hill ranges, and dotted thickly with copses of ash, birch, and larch. Now, in the beginning of the short summer, the slopes were covered with tall lush grass. But here no herds were watched by turbaned nomads, and that giant peak far to the southwest seemed somehow aware of that fact. It brooded like a somber sentinel of the unknown.

“Come into my tent!”

Pemrir turned away quickly, motioning Ormond to follow. Neither of them noticed the burning intensity with which the Shemite Ahmed stared after them. In the tent, the men sitting facing each other across a small folding table, Pemrir took pencil and paper and began tracing a duplicate of the map he had scratched in the dirt.

“‘Rasir’ has served his purpose, and so has Conan,” he said. “It was a big risk bringing him, but he was the only man who could get us safely through Afghulistan. The weight that Cimmerian carries there is amazing. But it doesn’t carry with the Kirghiz, and beyond this point we don’t need him.

“That’s the peak the Tajik described, right enough, and he gave it the same name Conan called it. Using it as a guide, we can’t miss Yolgan. We head due west, bearing a little to the north of Mount Erlik Khan. We don’t need Conan’s guidance from now on, and we won’t need him going back, because we’re returning by the way of Kashmir, and we’ll have a better safe-conduct even than he. Question now is, how are we going to get rid of him?”

“That’s easy,” snapped Ormond; he was the harder-framed, the more decisive, of the two. “We’ll simply pick a quarrel with him and refuse to continue in his company. He’ll tell us to go to the devil, take his confounded Shemite, and head back for Kabul — or maybe some other wilderness. He spends most of his time wandering around through countries that are taboo to most Iranistani men.”

“Good enough!” approved Pemrir. “We don’t want to fight him. He’s too infernally quick with a sword. The Afghulis call him ‘Conan, the Swift’. I had something of the sort in mind when I cooked up an excuse to halt here in the middle of the afternoon. I recognized that peak, you see. We’ll let him think we’re going on to the Uzbeks alone, because, naturally, we don’t want him to know we’re going to Yolgan —”

“What’s that?” snapped Ormond suddenly, his hand closing on his weapon butt.

In that instant, when his eyes narrowed and his nostrils expanded, he looked almost like another man, as if suspicion disclosed his true — and sinister — nature.

“Go on talking,” he muttered. “Somebody’s listening outside the tent.”

Pemrir obeyed, and Ormond, noiselessly pushing back his camp chair, plunged suddenly out of the tent and fell on someone with a snarl of gratification. An instant later he reentered, dragging the Shemite, Ahmed, with him. The slender man writhed vainly in the Iranistani’s iron grip.

“This rat was eavesdropping,” Ormond snarled.

“Now he’ll spill everything to Conan and there’ll be a fight, sure!” The prospect seemed to agitate Pemrir considerably. “What’ll we do now? What are you going to do?”

Ormond laughed savagely. “I haven’t come this far to risk getting an arrow in my guts and losing everything. I’ve killed men for less than this.”

Pemrir cried out an involuntary protest as Ormond’s hand dipped and the blue-gleaming weapon came up. Ahmed screamed, and his cry was drowned with a slash to the throat.

“Now we’ll have to kill Conan!”

Pemrir wiped his brow with a hand that shook a trifle. Outside rose a sudden mutter as the Afghuli servants crowded toward the tent.

“He’s played into our hands!” rapped Ormond, shoving the still bloody knife back into his holster. With his booted toe he stirred the motionless body at his feet as casually as if it had been that of a snake. “He’s out on foot, with only a handful of arrows. It’s just as well this turned out as it did.”

“What do you mean?” Pemrir’s wits seemed momentarily muddled.

“We’ll simply pack up and clear out. Let him try to follow us on foot, if he wants to. There are limits to the abilities of every man. Left in these mountains on foot, without food, blankets, or ammunition, I don’t think any white man will ever see Conan of Cimmeria alive again.”

II

When Conan left the camp he did not look behind him. Any thought of treachery on the part of his companions was furthest from his mind. He had no reason to suppose that they were anything except what they had represented themselves to be — Iranistani men taking a long chance to find a comrade the unmapped solitudes had swallowed up.

It was an hour or so after leaving the camp when, skirting the end of a grassy ridge, he sighted an antelope moving along the fringe of a thicket. The wind, such as there was, was blowing toward him, away from the animal. He began stalking it through the thicket, when a movement in the bushes behind him brought him around to the realization that he himself was being stalked.

He had a glimpse of a figure behind a clump of scrub, and then an arrow fanned his ear, and he fired at the flash and the puff of smoke. There was a thrashing among the foliage and then stillness. A moment later he was bending over a picturesquely clad form on the ground.

It was a lean, wiry man, young, with an ermine-edged khilat, a fur calpack, and silver-heeled boots. Sheathed knives were in his girdle, and a bow lay near his hand. He had been shot through the heart.

“Turanian,” muttered Conan. “Bandit, from his looks, out on a lone scout. I wonder how far he’s been trailing me.”

He knew the presence of the man implied two things: somewhere in the vicinity there was a band of Turanians; and somewhere, probably close by, there was a horse. A nomad never walked far, even when stalking a victim. He glanced up at the rise which rolled up from the copse. It was logical to believe that the man had sighted him from the crest of the low ridge, had tied his horse on the other side, and glided down into the thicket to waylay him while he stalked the antelope.

Conan went up the slope warily, though he did not believe there were any other tribesmen within earshot — else the reports of the bows would have brought them to the spot — and found the horse without trouble. It was a Turanian stallion with a red leather saddle with wide silver stirrups and a bridle heavy with goldwork. A scimitar hung from the saddle peak in an ornamented leather scabbard.

Swinging into the saddle, Conan studied all quarters of the compass from the summit of the ridge. In the south a faint ribbon of smoke stood against the evening. His black eyes were keen as a hawk’s; not many could have distinguished that filmy blue feather against the cerulean of the sky.

“Turanian means bandits,” he muttered. “Smoke means camp. They’re trailing us, sure as fate.”

Reining about, he headed for the camp. His hunt had carried him some miles east of the site, but he rode at a pace that ate up the distance. It was not yet twilight when he halted in the fringe of the larches and sat silently scanning the slope on which the camp had stood. It was bare. There was no sign of tents, men, or beasts.

His gaze sifted the surrounding ridges and clumps, but found nothing to rouse his alert suspicion. At last he walked his steed up the acclivity, carrying his bow at the ready. He saw a smear of blood on the ground where he knew Pemrir’s tent had stood, but there was no other sign of violence, and the grass was not trampled as it would have been by a charge of wild horsemen.

He read the evidence of a swift but orderly exodus. His companions had simply struck their tents, loaded the pack animals, and departed. But why? Sight of distant horsemen might have stampeded the Iranistani men, though neither had shown any sign of the white feather before; but certainly Ahmed would not have deserted his master and friend.

As he traced the course of the horses through the grass, his puzzlement increased; they had gone westward.

Their avowed destination lay beyond those mountains in the north. They knew that, as well as he. But there was no mistake about it. For some reason, shortly after he had left camp, as he read the signs, they had packed hurriedly and set off westward, toward the forbidden country identified by Mount Erlik.

Thinking that possibly they had a logical reason for shifting camp and had left him a note of some kind which he had failed to find, Conan rode back to the camp site and began casting about it in an ever-widening circle, studying the ground. And presently he saw sure signs that a heavy body had been dragged through the grass.

Men and horses had almost obliterated the dim track, but for years Conan’s life had depended upon the keenness of his faculties. He remembered the smear of blood on the ground where Pemrir’s tent had stood.

He followed the crushed grass down the south slope and into a thicket, and an instant later he was kneeling beside the body of a man. It was Ahmed, and at first glance Conan thought he was dead. Then he saw that the Shemite, though shot through the body and undoubtedly dying, still had a faint spark of life in him.

He lifted the turbaned head and set his canteen to the blue lips. Ahmed groaned, and into his glazed eyes came intelligence and recognition.

“Who did this, Ahmed?” Conan’s voice grated with the suppression of his emotions.

“Ormond,” gasped the Shemite. “I listened outside their tent, because I feared they planned treachery to you. I never trusted them. So they shot me and have gone away, leaving you to die alone in the hills.”

“But why?” Conan was more mystified than ever.

“They go to Yolgan,” panted Ahmed. “The Rasir we sought never existed. He was a lie they created to hoodwink you.”

“Why to Yolgan?” asked Conan.

But Ahmed’s eyes dilated with the imminence of death; in a racking convulsion he heaved up in Conan’s arms; then blood gushed from his lips and he died.

Conan rose, mechanically dusting his hands. Immobile as the deserts he haunted, he was not prone to display his emotions. Now he merely went about heaping stones over the body to make a cairn that wolves and jackals could not tear into. Ahmed had been his companion on many a dim road; less servant than friend.

But when he had lifted the last stone, Conan climbed into the saddle, and without a backward glance he rode westward. He was alone in a savage country, without food or proper equipage. Chance had given him a horse, and years of wandering on the raw edges of the world had given him experience and a greater familiarity with this unknown land than any other white man he knew. It was conceivable that he might live to win his way through to some civilized outpost.

But he did not even give that possibility a thought. Conan’s ideas of obligation, of debt and payment, were as direct and primitive as those of the barbarians among whom his lot had been cast for so many years. Ahmed had been his friend and had died in his service. Blood must pay for blood.

That was as certain in Conan’s mind as hunger is certain in the mind of a gray timber wolf. He did not know why the killers were going toward forbidden Yolgan, and he did not greatly care. His task was to follow them to hell if necessary and exact full payment for spilled blood. No other course suggested itself.

Darkness fell and the stars came out, but he did not slacken his pace. Even by starlight it was not hard to follow the trail of the caravan through the high grass. The Turanian horse proved a good one and fairly fresh. He felt certain of overtaking the laden pack ponies, in spite of their long start.

As the hours passed, however, he decided that the Iranistanis were determined to push on all night. They evidently meant to put so much distance between them and himself that he could never catch them, following on foot as they thought him to be. But why were they so anxious to keep from him the truth of their destination?

A sudden thought made his face grim, and after that he pushed his mount a bit harder. His hand instinctively sought the hilt of the broad scimitar slung from the high-peaked horn.

His gaze sought the white cap of Mount Erlik, ghostly in the starlight, then swung to the point where he knew Yolgan lay. He had been there before, himself, had heard the deep roar of the long bronze trumpets that shaven-headed priests blow from the mountains at sunrise.

It was past midnight when he sighted fires near the willow-massed banks of a stream. At first glance he knew it was not the camp of the men he followed. The fires were too many. It was an ordu of the nomadic Kirghiz who roam the country between Mount Erlik Khan and the loose boundaries of the local tribes. This camp lay full in the path of Yolgan and he wondered if the Iranistanis had known enough to avoid it. These fierce people hated strangers. He himself, when he visited Yolgan, had accomplished the feat disguised as a native.

Gaining the stream above the camp he moved closer, in the shelter of the willows, until he could make out the dim shapes of sentries on horseback in the light of the small fires. And he saw something else — three white tents inside the ring of round, gray felt kibitkas. He swore silently; if the Black Kirghiz had killed the Iranistani men, appropriating their belongings, it meant the end of his vengeance. He moved nearer.

It was a suspicious, slinking, wolf-like dog that betrayed him. Its frenzied clamour brought men swarming out of the felt tents, and a swarm of mounted sentinels raced toward the spot, stringing bows as they came.

Conan had no wish to be filled with arrows as he ran. He spurred out of the willows and was among the horsemen before they were aware of him, slashing silently right and left with the Turanian scimitar. Blades swung around him, but the men were more confused than he. He felt his edge grate against steel and glance down to split a broad skull; then he was through the cordon and racing into deeper darkness while the demoralized pack howled behind him.

A familiar voice shouting above the clamour told him that Ormond, at least, was not dead. He glanced back to see a tall figure cross the firelight and recognized Pemrir’s rangy frame. The fire gleamed on steel in his hands. That they were armed showed they were not prisoners, though this forbearance on the part of the fierce nomads was more than his store of Eastern lore could explain.

The pursuers did not follow him far; drawing in under the shadows of a thicket he heard them shouting gutturally to each other as they rode back to the tent. There would be no more sleep in that ordu that night. Men with naked steel in their hands would pace their horses about the encampment until dawn. It would be difficult to steal back for a long shot at his enemies. But now, before he slew them, he wished to learn what took them to Yolgan.

Absently his hand caressed the hawk-headed pommel of the Turanian scimitar. Then he turned again eastward and rode back along the route he had come, as fast as he could push the wearying horse. It was not yet dawn when he came upon what he had hoped to find — a second camp, some ten miles west of the spot where Ahmed had been killed; dying fires reflected on one small tent and on the forms of men wrapped in cloaks on the ground.

He did not approach too near; when he could make out the lines of slowly moving shapes that were picketed horses and could see other shapes that were riders pacing about the camp, he drew back behind a thicketed ridge, dismounted and unsaddled his horse.

While it eagerly cropped the fresh grass, he sat cross-legged with his back to a tree trunk, his bow across his knees, as motionless as an image and as imbued with the vast patience of the East as the eternal hills themselves.

III

Dawn was little more than a hint of grayness in the sky when the camp that Conan watched was astir. Smoldering coals leaped up into flames again, and the scent of mutton stew filled the air. Wiry men in caps of fur and girdled caftans swaggered among the horse lines or squatted beside the cooking pots, questing after savory morsels with unwashed fingers. There were no women among them and scant luggage. The lightness with which they traveled could mean only one thing.

The sun was not yet up when they began saddling horses and belting on weapons. Conan chose that moment to appear, riding leisurely down the ridge toward them.

A yell went up, and instantly a score of bows covered him. The very boldness of his action stayed their fingers on the triggers. Conan wasted no time, though he did not appear hurried. Their chief had already mounted, and Conan reined up almost beside him. The Turanian glared — a hawk-nosed, evil-eyed ruffian with a henna-stained beard. Recognition grew like a red flame in his eyes, and, seeing this, his warriors made no move.

“Yusef Khan,” said Conan, “you dog, have I found you at last?”

Yusef Khan plucked his red beard and snarled like a wolf. “Are you mad, Conan?”

“It is Conan!” rose an excited murmur from the warriors, and that gained Conan another respite.

They crowded closer, their blood lust for the instant conquered by their curiosity. Conan was a name known from Asgard to Khitan and repeated in a hundred wild tales wherever the wolves of the desert gathered.

As for Yusef Khan, he was puzzled, and furtively eyed the slope down which Conan had ridden. He feared the white man’s cunning almost as much as he hated him, and in his suspicion, hate and fear that he was in a trap, the Turanian was as dangerous and uncertain as a wounded cobra.

“What do you here?” he demanded. “Speak quickly, before my warriors strip the skin from you a little at a time.”

“I came following an old feud.” Conan had come down the ridge with no set plan, but he was not surprised to find a personal enemy leading the Turanians. It was no unusual coincidence. Conan had blood-foes scattered all over Hyboria.

“You are a fool —”

In the midst of the chief’s sentence Conan leaned from his saddle and struck Yusef Khan across the face with his open hand. The blow cracked like a bull whip and Yusef reeled, almost losing his seat. He howled like a wolf and clawed at his girdle, so muddled with fury that he hesitated between knife and bow. Conan could have shot him down while he fumbled, but that was not the Cimmerian’s plan.

“Keep off!” he warned the warriors, yet not reaching for a weapon. “I have no quarrel with you. This concerns only your chief and me.”

With another man that would have had no effect; but another man would have been dead already. Even the wildest tribesman had a vague feeling that the rules governing action against ordinary men did not apply to Conan.

“Take him!” howled Yusef Khan. “He shall be flayed alive!”

They moved forward at that, and Conan laughed unpleasantly.

“Torture will not wipe out the shame I have put upon your chief,” he taunted. “Men will say ye are led by a khan who bears the mark of Conan’s hand in his beard. How is such shame to be wiped out? Lo, he calls on his warriors to avenge him! Is Yusef Khan a coward?”

They hesitated again and looked at their chief whose beard was clotted with foam. They all knew that to wipe out such an insult the aggressor must be slain by the victim in single combat. In that wolf pack even a suspicion of cowardice was tantamount to a death sentence.

If Yusef Khan failed to accept Conan’s challenge, his men might obey him and torture the Cimmerian to death at his pleasure, but they would not forget, and from that moment he was doomed.

Yusef Khan knew this; knew that Conan had tricked him into a personal duel, but he was too drunk with fury to care. His eyes were red as those of a rabid wolf, and he had forgotten his suspicions that Conan had bowmen hidden up on the ridge. He had forgotten everything except his frenzied passion to wipe out forever the glitter in those savage black eyes that mocked him.

“Dog!” he screamed, ripping out his broad scimitar. “Die at the hands of a chief!”

He came like a typhoon, his cloak whipping out in the wind behind him, his scimitar flaming above his head. Conan met him in the center of the space the warriors left suddenly clear.

Yusef Khan rode a magnificent horse as if it were part of him, and it was fresh. But Conan’s mount had rested, and it was well-trained in the game of war. Both horses responded instantly to the will of their riders.

The fighters revolved about each other in swift curvets and gambados, their blades flashing and grating without the slightest pause, turned red by the rising sun. It was less like two men fighting on horseback than like a pair of centaurs, half man and half beast, striking for one another’s life.

“Dog!” panted Yusef Khan, hacking and hewing like a man possessed of devils. “I’ll nail your head to my tent pole — ahhhh!”

Not a dozen of the hundred men watching saw the stroke, except as a dazzling flash of steel before their eyes, but all heard its crunching impact. Yusef Khan’s charger screamed and reared, throwing a dead man from the saddle with a split skull.

A wordless wolfish yell that was neither anger nor applause went up, and Conan wheeled, whirling his scimitar about his head so that the red drops flew in a shower.

“Yusef Khan is dead!” he roared. “Is there one to take up his quarrel?”

They gaped at him, not sure of his intention, and before they could recover from the surprise of seeing their invincible chief fall, Conan thrust his scimitar back in its sheath with a certain air of finality and said:

“And now who will follow me to plunder greater than any of ye ever dreamed?”

That struck an instant spark, but their eagerness was qualified by suspicion.

“Show us!” demanded one. “Show us the plunder before we slay thee.”

Without answering, Conan swung off his horse and cast the reins to a mustached rider to hold, who was so astonished that he accepted the indignity without protest. Conan strove over to a cooking pot, squatted beside it and began to eat ravenously. He had not tasted food in many hours.

“Shall I show you the stars by daylight?” he demanded, scooping out handfuls of stewed mutton. “Yet the stars are there, and men see them in the proper time. If I had the loot would I come asking you to share it? Neither of us can win it without the other’s aid.”

“He lies,” said one whom his comrades addressed as Uzun Beg. “Let us slay him and continue to follow the caravan we have been tracking.”

“Who will lead you?” asked Conan pointedly.

They scowled at him, and various ruffians who considered themselves logical candidates glanced furtively at one another. Then all looked back at Conan, unconcernedly wolfing down mutton stew five minutes after having slain the most dangerous swordsman of the black tents.

His attitude of indifference deceived nobody. They knew he was dangerous as a cobra that could strike like lightning in any direction. They knew they could not kill him so quickly that he would not kill some of them and naturally none wanted to be first to die.

That alone would not have stopped them. But that was combined with curiosity, avarice roused by his mention of plunder, vague suspicion that he would not have put himself in a trap unless he held some sort of a winning hand, and jealousy of the leaders of each other.

Uzun Beg, who had been examining Conan’s mount, exclaimed angrily: “He rides Ali Khan’s steed!”

“Aye,” Conan assented tranquilly. “Moreover this is Ali Khan’s sword. He shot at me from ambush, so he lies dead.”

There was no answer. There was no feeling in that wolf pack except fear and hate, and respect for courage, craft, and ferocity.

“Where would you lead us?” demanded one named Orkhan Shah, tacitly recognizing Conan’s dominance. “We be all free men and sons of the sword.”

“Ye be all sons of dogs,” answered Conan. “Men without grazing lands or wives, outcasts, denied by thine own people — outlaws whose lives are forfeit, and who must roam in the naked mountains. You followed that dead dog without question. Now ye demand this and that of me!”

Then ensued a medley of argument among themselves, in which Conan seemed to take no interest. All his attention was devoted to the cooking pot. His attitude was no pose; without swagger or conceit the man was so sure of himself that his bearing was no more self-conscious among a hundred cutthroats hovering on the hair line of murder than it would have been among friends.

Many eyes sought the sword hilt at his hip. Men said his skill with the weapon was sorcery; an ordinary blade became in his hand a living engine of destruction that was drawn and roaring death before a man could realize that Conan’s hand had moved.

“Men say thou hast never broken thy word,” suggested Orkhan. “Swear to lead us to this plunder, and it may be we shall see.”

“I swear no oaths,” answered Conan, rising and wiping his hands on a saddle cloth. “I have spoken. It is enough. Follow me, and many of you will die. Aye, the jackals will feed full. You will go up to the paradise of the prophet and your brothers will forget your names. But to those that live, wealth like the rain of the gods will fall upon them.”

“Enough of words!” exclaimed one greedily. “Lead us to this rare loot.”

“You dare not follow where I would lead,” he answered. “It lies in the land of the Kara Kirghiz.”

“We dare, by the gods!” they barked angrily. “We are already in the land of the Black Kirghiz, and we follow the caravan of some infidels, whom, inshallah, we shall send to hell before another sunrise.”

“Crom,” said Conan. “Many of you shall eat arrows and edged steel before our quest is over. But if you dare stake your lives against plunder richer than the treasures you have seen, come with me. We have far to ride.”

A few minutes later the whole band was trotting westward. Conan led, with lean riders on either hand; their attitude suggested that he was more prisoner than guide, but he was not perturbed. His confidence in his destiny had again been justified, and the fact that he had not the slightest idea of how to redeem his pledge concerning treasure disturbed him not at all. A way would be opened to him, somehow, and at present he did not even bother to consider it.

IV

The fact that Conan knew the country better than the Turanians did aided him in his subtle policy to gain ascendency over them. From giving suggestions to giving orders and being obeyed is a short step, when delicately taken.

He took care that they kept below the sky lines as much as possible. It was not easy to hide the progress of a hundred men from the alert nomads; but these roamed far and there was a chance that only the band he had seen were between him and Yolgan.

But Conan doubted this when they crossed a track that had been made since he rode eastward the night before. Many riders had passed that point, and Conan urged greater speed, knowing that if they were spied by the Kirghiz instant pursuit was inevitable.

In the late afternoon they came in sight of the ordu beside the willow-lined stream. Horses tended by youngsters grazed near the camp, and farther away the riders watched the sheep which browsed through the tall grass.

Conan had left all his men except half a dozen in a thicket-massed hollow behind the next ridge, and he now lay among a cluster of boulders on a slope overlooking the valley. The encampment was beneath him, distinct in every detail, and he frowned. There was no sign of the white tents. The Iranistanis had been there. They were not there now. Had their hosts turned on them at last, or had they continued alone toward Yolgan?

The Turanians, who did not doubt that they were to attack and loot their hereditary enemies, began to grow impatient.

“Their fighting men are less than ours,” suggested Uzun Beg, “and they are scattered, suspecting nothing. It is long since an enemy invaded the land of the Black Kirghiz. Send back for the others, and let us attack. You promised us plunder.”

“Flat-faced women and fat-tailed sheep?” Conan jeered.

“Some of the women are fair to look at,” the Turanian maintained. “And we could feast full on the sheep. But these dogs carry gold in their wagons to trade to merchants from Kashmir. It comes from Mount Erlik Khan.”

Conan remembered that he had heard tales of a gold mine in Mount Erlik before, and he had seen some crudely cast ingots the owners of which swore they had them from the Black Kirghiz. But gold did not interest him just then.

“That is a child’s tale,” he said, at least half believing what he said. “The plunder I will lead you to is real; would you throw it away for a dream? Go back to the others and bid them stay hidden. Presently I will return.”

They were instantly suspicious, and he saw it.

“Return thou, Uzun Beg,” he said, “and give the others my message. The rest of you come with me.”

That quieted the hair-trigger suspicions of the five, but Uzun Beg grumbled in his beard as he strode back down the slope, mounted and rode eastward. Conan and his companions likewise mounted behind the crest and, keeping below the sky line, they followed the ridge around as it slanted toward the southwest.

It ended in sheer cliffs, as if it had been sliced off with a knife, but dense thickets hid them from the sight of the camp as they crossed the space that lay between the cliffs and the next ridge, which ran to a bend in the stream, a mile below the ordu.

This ridge was considerably higher than the one they had left and before they reached the point where it began to slope downward toward the river, Conan crawled to the crest and scanned the camp again with a pair of binoculars that had once been the property of Yusef Khan.

The nomads showed no sign that they suspected the presence of enemies, and Conan turned his glasses farther eastward, located the ridge beyond which his men were concealed, but saw no sign of them. But he did see something else.

Miles to the east a knife-edge ridge cut the sky, notched with a shallow pass. As he looked he saw a string of black dots moving through that notch. It was so far away that even the powerful glasses did not identify them, but he knew what the dots were — mounted men, many of them.

Hurrying back to his five Turanians, he said nothing, but pressed on, and presently they emerged from behind the ridge and came upon the stream where it wound out of sight of the encampment. Here was the logical crossing for any road leading to Yolgan, and it was not long before he found what he sought.

In the mud at the edges of the stream were the prints of shod hoofs and at one spot the mark of a European boot. The Iranistanis had crossed here; beyond the ford their trail lay west, across the rolling table-land.

Conan was puzzled anew. He had supposed that there was some particular reason why this clan had received the Iranistanis in peace. He had reasoned that Ormond would persuade them to escort him to Yolgan. Though the clans made common cause against invaders, there were feuds among themselves, and the fact that one tribe received a man in peace did not mean that another tribe would not cut his throat.

Conan had never heard of the nomads of this region showing friendship to any white man. Yet the Iranistanis had passed the night in that ordu and now plunged boldly on as if confident of their reception. It looked like utter madness.

As he meditated, a distant shout and the twang of bow shots jerked his head up. He splashed across the stream and raced up the slope that hid them from the valley, with the Turanians at his heels working the strings of their bows. As he topped the slope he saw the scene below him crystal-etched in the blue evening.

The Turanians were attacking the Kirghiz camp. They had crept up the ridge overlooking the valley, and then swept down like a whirlwind. The surprise had been almost, but not quite, complete. Outriding shepherds had been shot down and the flocks scattered, but the surviving nomads had made a stand within the ring of their tents and wagons.

Ancient slings, and a few modern bows answered the fire of the Turanians. These came on swiftly, shooting from the saddle, only to wheel and swerve out of close range again.

The Kirghiz were protected by their cover, but even so the hail of lead took toll. A few saddles were emptied, but the Turanians were hard to hit on their prancing horses, as the riders swung their bodies from side to side.

Conan gave his horse the rein and came galloping across the valley, his scimitar glittering in his hand. With his enemies gone from the camp, there was no reason for attacking the Kirghiz now as he had planned. But the distance was too great for shouted orders to be heard.

The Turanians saw him coming, sword in hand, and mistook his meaning. They thought he meant to lead a charge, and in their zeal they anticipated him. They were aided by the panic which struck the Kirghiz as they saw Conan and his five Turanians sweep down the slope and construed it as an attack in force on their flank.

Instantly they directed all their fire at the newcomers, emptying their quivers long before Conan was even within good bow range. And as they did, the Turanians charged home with a yell that shook the valley, preceded by a withering fire as they blazed away over their horses’ ears.

This time no ragged volleys could stop them. In their panic the tribesmen had loosed all their projectiles at once, and the charge caught them with quivers empty. A straggling bow fire met the oncoming raiders and knocked a few out of their saddles, and a second flight of arrows accounted for a few more, but then the charge burst on the makeshift barricade and crumpled it. The howling Turanians rode their horses in among the tents, flailing right and left with scimitars already crimson.

For an instant hell raged in the ordu, then the demoralized nomads broke and fled as best they could, being cut down and trampled by the conquerors. Neither women nor children were spared by the blood-mad Turanians. Such as could slipped out of the ring and ran wailing for the river. An instant later the riders were after them like wolves.

Yet, winged by the fear of death, a disorderly mob reached the shore first, broke through the willows and plunged screaming over the low bank, trampling each other in the water. Before the Turanians could rein their horses over the bank, Conan arrived, with his horse plastered with sweat and snorting foam.

Enraged at the wanton slaughter, Conan was an incarnation of berserk fury. He caught the first man’s bridle and threw his horse back on its haunches with such violence that the beast lost its footing and fell, sprawling, throwing its rider. The next man sought to crowd past, giving tongue like a wolf, and him Conan smote with the flat of his scimitar. Only the heavy fur cap saved the skull beneath, and the man pitched, senseless, from his saddle. The others yelled and reined back suddenly.

Conan’s wrath was like a dash of ice-cold water in their faces, shocking their blood-mad nerves into stinging sensibility. From among the tents cries still affronted the twilight, with the butcherlike chopping of merciless sword blows, but Conan gave no heed. He could save no one in the plundered camp, where the howling warriors were ripping the tents to pieces, overturning the wagons and setting the torch in a hundred places.

More and more men with burning eyes and dripping blades were streaming toward the river, halting as they saw Conan barring their way. There was not a ruffian there who looked half as formidable as Conan did in that instant. His lips snarled and his eyes were cold blue coals lit in hell’s fire.

There was no play acting about it. His mask of immobility had fallen, revealing the sheer primordial ferocity of the soul beneath. The dazed Turanians, still dizzy from the glutting of their blood lust, weary from striking great blows, and puzzled by his attitude, shrank back from him.

“Who gave the order to attack?” he yelled, and his voice was like the slash of a saber.

He trembled in the intensity of his passion. He was a blazing flame of fury and death, without control or repression. He was as wild and brute-savage in that moment as the wildest barbarian in that raw land.

“Uzun Beg!” cried a score of voices, and men pointed at the scowling warrior. “He said that you had stolen away to betray us to the Kirghiz, and that we should attack before they had time to come upon us and surround us. We believed him until we saw you riding over the slope.”

With a wordless fierce yell like the scream of a striking panther, Conan hurled his horse like a typhoon on Uzun Beg, smiting with his scimitar. Uzun Beg catapulted from his saddle with his skull crushed, dead before he actually realized that he was menaced.

Conan wheeled on the others and they reined back from him, scrambling in terror.

“Dogs! Jackals! Noseless apes!” He lashed them with words that burned like scorpions. “Sons of nameless curs! Did I not bid you keep hidden? Is my word wind — a leaf to be blown away by the breath of a dog like Uzun Beg? Now you have lapped up needless blood, and the whole countryside will be riding us down like jackals. Where is your loot? Where is the gold with which the wagons of the Kirghiz were laden?”

“There was no gold,” muttered a tribesman, mopping blood from a sword cut.

They flinched from the savage scorn and anger in Conan’s baying laughter.

“Dogs that nuzzle in the dung heaps of hell! I should leave you to die.”

“Slay him!” mouthed a tribesman. “Shall we eat shame of an infidel? Slay him and let us go back whence we came. There is no loot in this naked land.”

The proposal was not greeted with enthusiasm. Their quivers were all empty, some even discarded in the fury of sword strokes. They knew the bow under Conan’s knee was loaded and the knife at his hip was ready to strike. Nor did any of them care to ride into the teeth of that reddened scimitar that swung like a live thing in his right hand.

Conan saw their indecision and mocked them. He did not argue or reason as another man might have done. And if he had, they would have killed him. He beat down opposition with curses, abuses, and threats that were convincing because he meant every word he spat at them. They submitted because they were a wolf pack, and he was the grimmest wolf of them all.

Not one man in a thousand could have bearded them as he did and lived. But there was a driving elemental power about him that shook resolution and daunted anger — something of the fury of an unleashed torrent or a roaring wind that hammered down will power by sheer ferocity.

“We will have no more of thee,” the boldest voiced the last spark of rebellion. “Go thy ways, and we will go ours.”

Conan barked a bitter laugh. “Thy ways lead to the fires of damnation!” he taunted bitterly. “Ye have spilled blood, and blood will be demanded in payment. Do you dream that those who have escaped will not flee to the nearest tribes and raise the countryside? You will have a thousand riders about your ears before dawn.”

“Let us ride eastward,” one said nervously. “We will be out of this land of devils before the alarm is raised.”

Again Conan laughed and men shivered. “Fools! You cannot return. With the glasses I have seen a body of horsemen following our trail. Ye are caught in the fangs of the vise. Without me you cannot go onward; if you stand still or go back, none of you will see another sun set.”

Panic followed instantly which was more difficult to fight down than rebellion.

“Slay him!” howled one. “He has led us into a trap!”

“Fools!” cried Orkhan Shah, who was one of the five Conan had led to the ford. “It was not he who tricked you into charging the Kirghiz. He would have led us on to the loot he promised. He knows this land and we do not. If ye slay him now, ye slay the only man who may save us!”

That spark caught instantly, and they clamored about Conan.

“The wisdom of the sahibs is thine! We be dogs who eat dirt! Save us from our folly! Lo, we obey thee! Lead us out of this land of death, and show us the gold whereof thou spokest!”

Conan sheathed his scimitar and took command without comment. He gave orders and they were obeyed. Once these wild men, in their fear, turned to him, they trusted him implicitly. They knew he was somehow using them ruthlessly in his own plans, but that was nothing more than any one of them would have done had he been able. In that wild land only the ways of the wolf pack prevailed.

As many Kirghiz horses as could be quickly caught were rounded up. On some of them food and articles of clothing from the looted camp were hastily tied. Half a dozen Turanians had been killed, nearly a dozen wounded. The dead were left where they had fallen. The most badly wounded were tied to their saddles, and their groans made the night hideous. Darkness had fallen as the desperate band rode over the slope and plunged across the river. The wailing of the Kirghiz women, hidden in the thickets, was like the dirging of lost souls.

V

Conan did not attempt to follow the trail of the Iranistanis over the comparatively level table-land. Yolgan was his destination and he believed he would find them there, but there was desperate need to escape the tribesmen who he was certain were following them, and who would be lashed to fiercer determination by what they would find in the camp by the river.

Instead of heading straight across the table-land, Conan swung into the hills that bordered it on the south and began following them westward. Before midnight one of the wounded men died in his saddle, and some of the others were semidelirious. They hid the body in a crevice and went on. They moved through the darkness of the hills like ghosts; the only sounds were the clink of hoofs on stone and the groans of the wounded.

An hour before dawn they came to a stream which wound between limestone ledges, a broad shallow stream with a solid rock bottom. They waded their horses along it for three miles, then climbed out again on the same side.

Conan knew that the Kirghiz, smelling out their trail like wolves, would follow them to the bank and expect some such ruse as an effort to hide their tracks. But he hoped that the nomads would be expecting them to cross the stream and plunge into the mountains on the other side and would therefore waste time looking for tracks along the south bank.

He now headed westward in a more direct route. He did not expect to throw the Kirghiz entirely off the scent. He was only playing for time. If they lost his trail, they would search in any direction first except toward Yolgan, and to Yolgan he must go, since there was now no chance of catching his enemies on the road.

Dawn found them in the hills, a haggard, weary band. Conan bade them halt and rest and, while they did so, he climbed the highest crag he could find and patiently scanned the surrounding cliffs and ravines with his binoculars, while he chewed tough strips of dried mutton which the tribesmen carried between saddle and saddlecloth to keep warm and soft. He alternated with cat naps of ten or fifteen minutes’ duration, storing up concentrated energy as men of the outlands learn to do, and between times watching the ridges for signs of pursuit.

He let the men rest as long as he dared, and the sun was high when he descended the rock and stirred them into wakefulness. Their steel-spring bodies had recovered some of their resilience, and they rose and saddled with alacrity, all except one of the wounded men, who had died in his sleep. They lowered his body into a deep fissure in the rocks and went on, more slowly, for the horses felt the grind more than the men.

All day they threaded their way through wild gorges overhung by gloomy crags. The Turanians were cowed by the grim desolation and the knowledge that a horde of bloodthirsty barbarians were on their trail. They followed Conan without question as he led them, turning and twisting, along dizzy heights and down into the abysmal gloom of savage gorges, then up turreted ridges again and around wind-swept shoulders.

He had used every artifice known to him to shake off pursuit and was making for his set goal as fast as possible. He did not fear encountering any clans in these bare hills; they grazed their flocks on the lower levels. But he was not as familiar with the route he was following as his men thought.

He was feeling his way, mostly by the instinct for direction that men who live in the open possess, but he would have been lost a dozen times but for glimpses of Mount Erlik Khan shouldering up above the surrounding hills in the distance.

As they progressed westward he recognized other landmarks, seen from new angles, and just before sunset he glimpsed a broad shallow valley, across the pine-grown slopes of which he saw the walls of Yolgan looming against the crags behind it.

Yolgan was built at the foot of a mountain, overlooking the valley through which a stream wandered among masses of reeds and willows. Timber was unusually dense. Rugged mountains, dominated by Erlik’s peak to the south, swept around the valley to the south and west, and in the north it was blocked by a chain of hills. To the east it was open, sloping down from a succession of uneven ridges. Conan and his men had followed the ranges in their flight, and now they looked down on the valley from the south.

Conan led the warriors down from the higher crags and hid them on one of the many gorges debouching on the lower slopes, not more than a mile and a half from the city itself. It ended in a cul-de-sac and suggested a trap, but the horses were ready to fall from exhaustion, the men’s canteens were empty, and a spring gurgling out of the solid rock decided Conan.

He found a ravine leading out of the gorge and placed men on guard there, as well as at the gorge mouth. It would serve as an avenue of escape if need be. The men gnawed the scraps of food that remained, and dressed their wounds as best they could. When he told them he was going on a solitary scout they looked at him with lackluster eyes, in the grip of the fatalism that is the heritage of the Turanian races.

They did not mistrust him, but they felt like dead men already. They looked like ghouls, with their dusty, torn garments, clotted with dried blood, and sunken eyes of hunger and weariness. They squatted or lay about, wrapped in their tattered cloaks, unspeaking.

Conan was more optimistic than they. Perhaps they had not completely eluded the Kirghiz, but he believed it would take some time for even those human bloodhounds to ferret them out, and he did not fear discovery by the inhabitants of Yolgan. He knew they seldom wandered into the hills.

Conan had neither slept nor eaten as much as his men, but his steely frame was more enduring than theirs, and he was animated by a terrific vitality that would keep his brain clear and his body vibrant long after another man had dropped in his tracks.

It was dark when Conan strode on foot out of the gorge, the stars hanging over the peaks like points of chilled silver. He did not strike straight across the valley, but kept to the line of marching hills. So it was no great coincidence that he discovered the cave where men were hidden.

It was situated in a rocky shoulder that ran out into the valley, and which he skirted rather than clamber over. Tamarisk grew thickly about it, masking the mouth so effectually that it was only by chance that he glimpsed the reflection of a fire against a smooth inner wall.

Conan crept through the thickets and peered in. It was a bigger cave than the mouth indicated. A small fire was going, and three men squatted by it, eating and conversing in guttural Pashto. Conan recognized three of the camp servants of the Iranistanis. Farther back in the cave he saw the horses and heaps of camp equipment. The mutter of conversation was unintelligible where he crouched, and even as he wondered where the Iranistani men and the fourth servant were, he heard someone approaching.

He drew back farther into the shadows and waited, and presently a tall figure loomed in the starlight. It was the other Afghuli, with his arms full of firewood.

As he strode toward the natural ramp which led up to the cave mouth, he passed so close to Conan’s hiding place that the Cimmerian could have touched him with an extended arm. But he did not extend an arm; he sprang on the man’s back like a panther on a buck.

The firewood was knocked in all directions and the two men rolled together down a short grassy slope, but Conan’s fingers were digging into the Afghuli’s bull throat, strangling his efforts to cry out, and the struggle made no noise that could have been heard inside the cave above the crackle of the tamarisk chunks.

The Afghuli’s superior weight was futile against the corded sinews and wrestling skill of his opponent. Heaving the man under him, Conan crouched on his breast and throttled him dizzy before he relaxed his grasp and let life and intelligence flow back into his victim’s dazed brain.

The Afghuli recognized his captor and his fear was the greater, because he thought he was in the hands of a ghost. His eyes glimmered in the gloom and his teeth shone in the black tangle of his beard.

“Where are the Iranistanis?” demanded Conan softly. “Speak, you dog, before I break your neck!”

“They went at dusk toward the city of devils!” gasped the Afghuli.

“Prisoners?”

“Nay; one with a shaven head guided them. They bore their weapons and were not afraid.”

“What are they doing here?”

“By the gods, I do not know.”

“Tell me all you do know,” commanded Conan. “But speak softly. If your mates hear and come forth, you will suddenly cease to be. Begin where I went forth to shoot the stag. After that, Ormond killed Ahmed. That I know.”

“Aye; it was the Iranistani. I had naught to do with it. I saw Ahmed lurking outside Pemrir’s tent. Presently Ormond came forth and dragged him in the tent. A gun spoke, and when we went to look, the Shemite lay dead on the floor of the tent.

“Then the sahibs bade us strike the tents and load the pack horses, and we did so without question. We went westward in great haste. When the night was not yet half over, we sighted a camp of the pagans, and my brothers and I were much afraid. But the sahibs went forward, and when the accursed ones came forth with arrows on string, Ormond held up a strange emblem which glowed in the light of the torches, whereupon the heathens dismounted and bowed to the earth.

“We abode in their camp that night. In the darkness someone came to the camp and there was fighting and a man slain, and Ormond said it was a spying Turanian, and that there would be fighting, so at dawn we left the pagans and went westward in haste, across the ford. When we met other heathen, Ormond showed them the talisman, and they did us honor. All day we hastened, driving the beasts hard, and when night fell, we did not halt, for Ormond was like one mad. So before the night was half gone, we came into this valley, and the sahibs hid us in this cave.

“Here we abode until a pagan passed near the cavern this morning, driving sheep. Then Ormond called to him and showed him the talisman and made it known that he wished speech with the priest of the city. So the man went, and presently he returned with the priest who could speak Kashmiri. He and the sahibs talked long together, but what they said I know not. But Ormond killed the man who had gone to fetch the priest, and he and the priest hid the body with stones.

“Then after more talk, the priest went away, and the sahibs abode in the cave all day. But at dusk another man came to them, a man with a shaven head and camel’s hair robes, and they went with him toward the city. They bade us eat and then saddle and pack the animals, and be ready to move with great haste between midnight and dawn. That is all I know, as the gods is my witness.”

Conan made no reply. He believed the man was telling the truth, and his bewilderment grew. As he meditated on the tangle, he unconsciously relaxed his grip, and the Afghuli chose that instant to make his break for freedom. With a convulsive heave he tore himself partly free of Conan’s grasp, whipped from his garments a knife he had been unable to reach before, and yelled loudly as he stabbed.

Conan avoided the thrust by a quick twist of his body; the edge slit his shirt and the skin beneath, and stung by its bite and his peril, he caught the Afghuli’s bull neck in both hands and put all his strength into a savage wrench. The man’s spinal column snapped like a rotten branch, and Conan flung himself over backward into the thicker shadows as a man bulked black in the mouth of the cavern. The fellow called a cautious query, but Conan waited for no more. He was already gone like a phantom into the gloom.

The Afghuli repeated his call and then, getting no response, summoned his mates in some trepidation. With weapons in their hands they stole down the ramp, and presently one of them stumbled over the body of their companion. They bent over it, muttering affrightedly.

“This is a place of devils,” said one. “The devils have slain Akbar.”

“Nay,” said another. “It is the people of this valley. They mean to slay us one by one.” He grasped his bow and stared fearsomely into the shadows that hemmed them in. “They have bewitched the sahibs and led them away to be slain,” he muttered.

“We will be next,” said the third. “The sahibs are dead. Let us load the animals and go away quickly. Better die in the hills than wait like sheep for our throats to be cut.”

A few minutes later they were hurrying eastward through the pines as fast as they could urge the laden beasts.

Of this Conan knew nothing. When he left the slope below the cave he did not follow the trend of hills as before, but headed straight through the pines toward the lights of Yolgan. He had not gone far when he struck a road from the east leading toward the city. It wound among the pines, a slightly less dark thread in a bulwark of blackness.

He followed it to within easy sight of the great gate which stood open in the dark and massive walls of the town. Guards leaned carelessly on their matchlocks. Yolgan feared no attack. Why should it? The wildest of the tribes shunned the land of the devil worshipers. Sounds of barter and dispute were wafted by the night wind through the gate.

Somewhere in Yolgan, Conan was sure, were the men he was seeking. That they intended returning to the cave he had been assured. But there was a reason why he wished to enter Yolgan, a reason not altogether tied up with vengeance. As he pondered, hidden in the deep shadow, he heard the soft clop of hoofs on the dusty road behind him. He slid farther back among the pines; then with a sudden thought he turned and made his way back beyond the first turn, where he crouched in the blackness beside the road.

Presently a train of laden pack mules came along, with men before and behind and at either side. They bore no torches, moving like men who knew their path. Conan’s eyes had so adjusted themselves to the faint starlight of the road that he was able to recognize them as Kirghiz herdsmen in their long cloaks and round caps. They passed so close to him that their body-scent filled his nostrils.

He crouched lower in the blackness, and as the last man moved past him, a steely arm hooked fiercely about the Kirghiz’s throat, choking his cry. An iron fist crunched against his jaw and he sagged senseless in Conan’s arms. The others were already out of sight around the bend of the trail, and the scrape of the mules’ bulging packs against the branches along the road was enough to drown the slight noises of the struggle.

Conan dragged his victim in under the black branches and swiftly stripped him, discarding his own boots and kaffiyeh and donning the native’s garments, with weapon and scimitar buckled on under the long cloak. A few minutes later he was moving along after the receding column, leaning on his staff as with the weariness of long travel. He knew the man behind him would not regain consciousness for hours.

He came up with the tail of the train, but lagged behind as a straggler might. He kept close enough to the caravan to be identified with it, but not so close as to tempt conversation or recognition by the other members of the train. When they passed through the gate none challenged him. Even in the flare of the torches under the great gloomy arch he looked like a native, with his dark features fitting in with his garments and the lambskin cap.

As he went down the torch-lighted street, passing unnoticed among the people who chattered and argued in the markets and stalls, he might have been one of the many Kirghiz shepherds who wandered about, gaping at the sights of the city which to them represented the last word in the metropolitan.

Yolgan was not like any other city in Hyboria. Legend said it was built long ago by a cult of devil worshipers who, driven from their distant homeland, had found sanctuary in this unmapped country, where an isolated branch of the Black Kirghiz, wilder than their kinsmen, roamed as masters. The people of the city were a mixed breed, descendants of these original founders and the Kirghiz.

Conan saw the monks who were the ruling caste in Yolgan striding through the bazaars — tall, shaven-headed men with Hyrkanian features. He wondered anew as to their exact origin. They were not Tibetans. Their religion was not merely a depraved one. It was an unadulterated devil worship. The architecture of their shrines and temples differed from any he had ever encountered anywhere.

But he wasted no time in conjecture, nor in aimless wandering. He went straight to the great stone building squatting against the side of the mountain at the foot of which Yolgan was built. Its great blank curtains of stone seemed almost like part of the mountain itself.

No one hindered him. He mounted a long flight of steps that were at least a hundred feet wide, bending over his staff as with the weariness of a long pilgrimage. Great bronze doors stood open, unguarded, and he kicked off his sandals and came into a huge hall the inner gloom of which was barely lighted by dim brazen lamps in which melted butter was burned.

Shaven-headed monks moved through the shadows like dusky ghosts, but they gave him no heed, thinking him merely a rustic worshiper come to leave some humble offering at the shrine of Erlik, Lord of the Seventh Hell.

At the other end of the hall, view was cut off by a great divided curtain of gilded leather that hung from the lofty roof to the floor. Half a dozen steps that crossed the hall led up to the foot of the curtain, and before it a monk sat cross-legged and motionless as a statue, arms folded and head bent as if in communion with unguessed spirits.

Conan halted at the foot of the steps, made as if to prostrate himself, then retreated as if in sudden panic. The monk showed no interest. He had seen too many nomads from the outer world overcome by superstitious awe before the curtain that hid the dread effigy of Erlik Khan. The timid Kirghiz might skulk about the temple for hours before working up nerve enough to make his devotions to the deity. None of the priests paid any attention to the man in the caftan of a shepherd who slunk away as if abashed.

As soon as he was confident that he was not being watched, Conan slipped through a dark doorway some distance from the gilded curtain and groped his way down a broad unlighted hallway until he came to a flight of stairs. Up this he went with both haste and caution and came presently into a long corridor along which winked sparks of light, like fireflies in a tunnel.

He knew these lights were tiny lamps in the small cells that lined the passage, where the monks spent long hours in contemplation of dark mysteries, or pored over forbidden volumes, the very existence of which is not suspected by the outer world. There was a stair at the nearer end of the corridor, and up this he went, without being discovered by the monks in their cells. The pin points of light in the chambers did not serve to illuminate the darkness of the corridor to any extent.

As Conan approached a crook in the stair he renewed his caution, for he knew there would be a man on guard at the head of the steps. He knew also that he would be likely to be asleep. The man was there — a half-naked giant with the wizened features of a deaf mute. A broad-tipped tulwar lay across his knees and his head rested on it as he slept.

Conan stole noiselessly past him and came into an upper corridor which was dimly lighted by brass lamps hung at intervals. There were no doorless cells here, but heavy bronze-bound teak portals flanked the passage. Conan went straight to one which was particularly ornately carved and furnished with an unusual fretted arch by way of ornament. He crouched there listening intently, then took a chance and rapped softly on the door. He rapped nine times, with an interval between each three raps.

There was an instant’s tense silence, then an impulsive rush of feet across a carpeted floor, and the door was jerked open. A magnificent figure stood framed in the soft light. It was a woman, a lithe, splendid creature whose vibrant figure exuded magnetic vitality. The jewels that sparkled in the girdle about her supple hips were no more scintillant than her eyes.

Instant recognition blazed in those eyes, despite his native garments. She caught him in a fierce grasp. Her slender arms were strong as pliant steel.

“Conan! I knew you would come!”

Conan stepped into the chamber and closed the door behind him. A quick glance showed him there was no one there but themselves. Its thick Persian rugs, silk divans, velvet hangings, and gold-chased lamps struck a vivid contrast with the grim plainness of the rest of the temple. Then he turned his full attention again to the woman who stood before him, her white hands clenched in a sort of passionate triumph.

“How did you know I would come, Yasmeena?” he asked.

“You never failed a friend in need,” she answered.

“Who is in need?”

“I!”

“But you are a goddess!”

“I explained it all in my letter!” she exclaimed bewilderedly.

Conan shook his head. “I have received no letter.”

“Then why are you here?” she demanded in evident puzzlement.

“It’s a long story,” he answered. “Tell me first why Yasmeena, who had the world at her feet and threw it away for weariness to become a goddess in a strange land, should speak of herself as one in need.”

“In desperate need, Conan.” She raked back her dark locks with a nervously quick hand. Her eyes were shadowed with weariness and something more, something which Conan had never seen there before — the shadow of fear.

“Here is food you need more than I,” she said as she sank down on a divan and with a dainty foot pushed toward him a small gold table on which were chupaties, curried rice, and broiled mutton, all in gold vessels, and a gold jug of kumiss.

He sat down without comment and began to eat with unfeigned gusto. In his drab camel’s-hair caftan, with the wide sleeves drawn back from his corded brown arms, he looked out of place in that exotic chamber.

Yasmeena watched him broodingly, her chin resting on her hand, her somber eyes enigmatic.

“I did not have the world at my feet, Conan,” she said presently. “But I had enough of it to sicken me. It became a wine which had lost its savor. Flattery became like an insult; the adulation of men became an empty repetition without meaning. I grew maddeningly weary of the flat fool faces that smirked eternally up at me, all wearing the same sheep expressions and animated by the same sheep thoughts. All except a few men like you, Conan, and you were wolves in the flock. I might have loved you, Conan, but there is something too fierce about you; your soul is a whetted blade on which I feared I might cut myself.”

He made no reply, but tilted the golden jug and gulped down enough stinging kumiss to have made an ordinary man’s head swim at once. He had lived the life of the nomads so long that their tastes had become his.

“So I became a princess, wife of a prince,” she went on, her eyes smoldering with a marvelous shifting of clouds and colors. “I thought I knew the depths of men’s swinishness. I found I had much to learn. He was a beast. I fled from him into Vendhya, and the Vendhyans protected me when his ruffians would have dragged me back to him. He still offers many thousand rupees to any who will bring me alive to him, so that he may soothe his vanity by having me tortured to death.”

“I have heard a rumour to that effect,” answered Conan.

A recurrent thought caused his face to darken. He did not frown, but the effect was subtly sinister.

“That experience completed my distaste for the life I knew,” she said, her dark eyes vividly introspective. “I remembered that my father was a priest of Yolgan who fled away for love of a stranger woman. I had emptied the cup and the bowl was dry. I remembered Yolgan through the tales my father told me when I was a babe, and a great yearning rose in me to lose the world and find my soul. All the gods I knew had proved false to me. The mark of Erlik was upon me —” She parted her pearl-sewn vest and displayed a curious starlike mark between her firm breasts.

“I came to Yolgan as well you know, because you brought me, in the guise of a Kirghiz from Issik-kul. As you know the people remembered my father, and though they looked on him as a traitor, they accepted me as one of them, and because of an old legend which spoke of the star on a woman’s bosom, they hailed me as a goddess, the incarnation of the daughter of Erlik Khan.

“For a while after you went away I was content. The people worshiped me with more sincerity than I had ever seen displayed by the masses of civilization. Their curious rituals were strange and fascinating. Then I began to go further into their mysteries; I began to sense the essence below the formula —” She paused, and Conan saw the fear grow in her eyes again.

“I had dreamed of a calm retreat of mystics, inhabited by philosophers. I found a haunt of bestial devils, ignorant of all but evil. Mysticism? It is black shamanism, foul as the tundras which bred it. I have seen things that made me afraid. Yes, I, Yasmeena, who never knew the meaning of the word, I have learned fear. Yogok, the high priest, taught me. You warned me against Yogok before you left Yolgan. Well had I heeded you. He hates me. He knows I am not divine, but he fears my power over the people. He would have slain me long ago had he dared.

“I am wearied to death of Yolgan. Erlik Khan and his devils have proved no less an illusion than the gods of Vendhya and the West. I have not found the perfect way. I have found only awakened desire to return to the world I cast away.

“I want to go back there. At night I dream of the noise and smells of the streets and bazaars. I am half Vendhyan, and all the blood of Vendhya is calling me. I was a fool. I had life in my hands and did not recognize it.”

“Why not go back, then?” asked Conan.

She shuddered. “I cannot. The gods of Yolgan must remain in Yolgan forever. Should one depart, the people believe the city would perish. Yogok would be glad to see me go, but he fears the fury of the people too much either to slay me or aid me to escape. I knew there was but one man who might help me. I wrote a letter to you and smuggled it out by a Zamoran trader. With it I sent my sacred emblem — a jeweled gold star — which would pass you safely through the country of the nomads. They would not harm a man bearing it. He would be safe from all but the priests of the city. I explained that in my letter.”

“I never got it,” Conan answered. “I’m here after a couple of scoundrels whom I was guiding into the country, and who for no apparent reason murdered my servant Ahmed and deserted me in the hills. They’re in Yolgan now, somewhere.”

“Iranistani men?” she exclaimed. “That is impossible! They could never have got through the tribes —”

“There’s only one key to the puzzle,” he interrupted. “Somehow your letter fell into their hands. They used your star to let them through. They don’t mean to rescue you, because they got in touch with Yogok as soon as they reached the valley. There’s only one thing I can think of — they intend kidnaping you to sell to your former husband.”

She sat up straight; her white hands clenched on the edge of the divan and her eyes flashed. In that instant she looked as splendid and as dangerous as a cobra when it rears up to strike.

“Back to that pig? Where are these dogs? I will speak a word to the people and they shall cease to be!”

“That would betray yourself,” returned Conan. “The people would kill the strangers, and Yogok, too, maybe, but they’d learn that you’d been trying to escape from Yolgan. They allow you the freedom of the temple, don’t they?”

“Yes; with shaven-headed skulkers spying on my every move, except when I am on this floor, from which only a single stair leads down. That stair is always guarded.”

“By a guard who sleeps,” said Conan. “That’s bad enough, but if the people found you were trying to escape, they might shut you up in a little cell for the rest of your life. People are particularly careful of their deities.”

She shuddered, and her fine eyes flashed the fear an eagle feels for a cage. “Then what are we to do?”

“I don’t know — yet. I have nearly a hundred Turanian ruffians hidden up in the hills, but just now they’re more hindrance than help. There’s not enough of them to do much good in a pitched battle, and they’re almost sure to be discovered tomorrow, if not before. I brought them into this mess, and it’s up to me to get them out — or as many as I can. I came here to kill these Iranistanis, Ormond and Pemrir. But that can wait now. I’m going to get you out of here, but I don’t dare move until I know where Yogok and the Iranistanis are. Is there anyone in Yolgan you can trust?”

“Any of the people would die for me, but they won’t let me go. Only actual harm done me by the monks would stir them up against Yogok. No; I dare trust none of them.”

“You say that stair is the only way up onto this floor?”

“Yes. The temple is built against the mountain, and galleries and corridors on the lower floors go back far into the mountain itself. But this is the highest floor, and is reserved entirely for me. There’s no escape from it except down through the temple, swarming with monks. I keep only one servant here at night, and she is at present sleeping in a chamber some distance from this and is senseless with bhang as usual.”

“Good enough!” grunted Conan. “Here, take this weapon. Lock the door after I go through and admit no one but myself. You’ll recognize me by the nine raps, as usual.”

“Where are you going?” she demanded, staring up and mechanically taking the weapon he tendered her, butt first.

“To do a little spying,” he answered. “I’ve got to know what Yogok and the others are doing. If I tried to smuggle you out now, we might run square into them. I can’t make plans until I know some of theirs. If they intend sneaking you out tonight, as I think they do, it might be a good idea to let them do it, and then swoop down with the Turanians and take you away from them, when they’ve got well away from the city. But I don’t want to do that unless I have to. Bound to be shooting and a chance of your getting hit by a stray arrow. I’m going now; listen for my rap.”

VI

The mute guard still slumbered on the stair as Conan glided past him. No lights glinted now as he descended into the lower corridor. He knew the cells were all empty, for the monks slept in chambers on a lower level. As he hesitated, he heard sandals shuffling down the passage in the pitch blackness.

Stepping into one of the cells, he waited until the unseen traveler was opposite him, then he hissed softly. The tread halted and a voice muttered a query.

“Art thou Yatub?” asked Conan in the gutturals of the Kirghiz. Many of the lower monks were pure Kirghiz in blood and speech.

“Nay,” came the answer. “I am Ojuh. Who art thou?”

“No matter; call me Yogok’s dog if thou wilt. I am a watcher. Have the Iranistani men come into the temple yet?”

“Aye. Yogok brought them by the secret way, lest the people suspect their presence. If thou art close to Yogok, tell me — what is his plan?”

“What is thine own opinion?” asked Conan.

An evil laugh answered him, and he could feel the monk leaning closer in the darkness to rest an elbow on the jamb.

“Yogok is crafty,” he murmured. “When the Tajik whom Yasmeena bribed to bear her letter showed it to Yogok, our master bade him do as she had instructed him. When the man for whom she sent came for her, Yogok planned to slay both him and her, making it seem to the people that the white man had slain their goddess.”

“Yogok is not forgiving,” said Conan at a venture.

“A cobra is more so.” The monk laughed. “Yasmeena has thwarted him too often in the matter of sacrifices for him to allow her to depart in peace.”

“Yet such is now his plan!” asserted Conan.

“Nay; thou art a simple man, for one who calls himself a watcher. The letter was meant for Conan. But the Tajik was greedy and sold it to these sahibs and told them of Yogok. They will not take her to Vendhya. They will sell her to a prince in Kashmir who will have her beaten to death with a slipper. Yogok himself will guide them through the hills by the secret route. He is in terror of the people, but his hate for Yasmeena overcomes him.”

Conan had heard all he wished to know, and he was in a sudden rush to be gone. He had abandoned his tentative plan of letting Ormond get the girl outside the city before rescuing her. With Yogok guiding the Iranistanis through hidden passes, he might find it impossible to overtake them.

The monk, however, was in no hurry to conclude the conversation. He began speaking again, and then Conan saw a light moving like a glowworm in the blackness, and he heard a swift patter of bare feet and a man breathing heavily. He drew farther back into the cell.

It was another monk who came up the corridor, carrying a small brass lamp that lighted his broad, thin-lipped face and made him look something like a Mongolian devil.

As he saw the monk outside the cell, he began hastily: “Yogok and the Iranistani men have gone to Yasmeena’s chamber. The girl, her servant who spied upon her, has told us that the white devil Conan is in Yolgan. He talked with Yasmeena less than half an hour agone. The girl sped to Yogok as swiftly as she dared, but she dared not stir until he had left Yasmeena’s chamber. He is somewhere in the temple. I gather men to search. Come with me, thou, and thou also —”

He swung the lamp about so that it shone full on Conan, crouching in the cell. As the man blinked to see the garments of a shepherd instead of the familiar robes of a monk, Conan lashed out for his jaw, quick and silent as the stroke of a python. The monk went down like a man shot in the head, and even as the lamp smashed on the floor, Conan had leaped and grappled with the other man in the sudden darkness.

A single cry rang to the vaulted roof before it was strangled in the corded throat. The monk was hard to hold as a snake, and he kept groping for a knife, but as they crashed into the stone wall, Conan smashed his opponent’s head savagely against it. The man went limp and Conan flung him down beside the other senseless shape.

The next instant Conan was racing up the stairway. It was only a few steps from the cell where he had hidden, its upper portion dim in the subdued light of the upper corridor. He knew no one had gone up or down while he talked with the monk. Yet the man with the lamp had said that Yogok and the others had gone to Yasmeena’s chamber, and that her treacherous servant girl had come to them.

He rounded the crook with reckless haste, his scimitar ready, but the slumping figure at the stairhead did not rise to oppose him. There was a new sag in the mute’s shoulders as he huddled on the steps. He had been stabbed in the back, so fiercely that the spinal column had been severed with one stroke.

Conan wondered why the priest should kill one of his own servants, but he did not pause; premonition gripping his heart, he hurled himself down the corridor and in through the arched doorway, which was unbolted. The chamber was empty. Cushions from the divan were strewn on the floor. Yasmeena was nowhere to be seen.

Conan stood like a statue in the center of the room, his scimitar in his hand. The blue sheen of the light on steel was no more deadly than the glitter of his black eyes. His gaze swept the room, lingering no longer on a slight bulge in the hangings on the rear wall than anywhere else.

He turned toward the door, took a step — then wheeled and raced across the chamber like a gust of wind, slashing and hacking at the tapestry before the man hiding there realized he was discovered. The keen edge ribboned the velvet arras and blood spurted; out of the tatters a figure toppled to the floor — a shaven monk, literally cut to pieces. He had dropped his knife and could only grovel and moan, clutching at his spurting arteries.

“Where is she?” snarled Conan, panting with passion as he crouched over his hideous handiwork. “Where is she?”

But the man only whimpered and yammered and died without speaking.

Conan ran to the walls and began ripping the hangings away. Somewhere he knew there must be a secret door. But the walls showed blank, resisting his most violent efforts. He could not follow Yasmeena by the route her abductors had obviously carried her. He must escape from the city and hasten to the cave, where the servants were hidden, and to which the Iranistanis would undoubtedly return. He was sweating with the violence of his rage, which almost submerged caution. He ripped off the camel’s hair robe, feeling in his frenzy that it cramped and hampered him.

But the action brought a thought born of cold reason. The garments of the senseless monks in the corridor below would furnish him a disguise which would aid him to pass unhindered through the temple, where he knew scores of shaven-headed murderers were hunting him.

He ran silently from the chamber, passed the sprawling corpse, rounded the turn of the stair — then he stopped short. The lower corridor was a blaze of light, and at the foot of the stairs stood a mass of monks, holding torches and swords. He saw bows in the hands of a dozen.

Details sprang out in startling clarity in the instant that the monks yelled and raised their bows. Beyond them he saw a round-faced slant-eyed girl crouching by the wall. She grasped a rope which hung down the wall and jerked, and Conan felt the stairs give way beneath him. The shouts roared in a ragged volley as he shot down the black opening which gaped beneath his feet, and the arrows whined over his head. A fierce cry of triumph rose from the monks. His instinctive throwing up of his arms as he fell was much like the action of a man struck by flying arrows.

VII

After Conan left her, Yasmeena made fast the door and returned to her divan. She idly studied the big weapon he had left with her, fascinated by the blue gleam of the light on its dully polished steel.

Then she tossed it aside and lay back with her eyes closed. There was a certain sophistication or innate mysticism in her which refused to let her put much faith in material weapons. Hers was that overrefinement of civilization which instinctively belittles physical action. With all her admiration for Conan, he was, after all, to her, a barbarian who put his trust in steel.

She undervalued the weapon he had left with her, and so it was out of her reach when the noise of a swishing tapestry roused her. She turned and stared at the rear wall with eyes suddenly dilated. Behind the hanging she knew — or thought she knew — was solid stone wall, built hard against the sheer mountainside.

But now that hanging lifted, grasped in a yellow clawlike hand. The hand was followed by a face — an evil, leering, grayish face, with slanted eyes and lank hair falling over a narrow forehead. A thin gash of a mouth gaped, revealing pointed teeth.

She was so astounded that she sat frozen, unable to supply the simple explanation of the phenomenon, until the man entered the room with a slithering silence repulsively suggestive of a snake. Then she saw that a black opening gaped in the wall behind the lifted arras, and two faces were framed in it — Iranistani men’s faces, hard and inexorable as stone.

She sprang up then and snatched for the blade, but it was at the other end of the divan. She ran around for it, but the slant-eyed man, with a motion incredibly quick, was before her and crushed her cruelly in his lean arms, clapping a hand over her mouth. He heeded the twisting and writhing of her supple body no more than the struggles of a child.

“Swift!” he ordered in harsh gutturals. “Bind her!”

The Iranistani men had followed him into the chamber, but it was a monk who obeyed, adding a velvet gag. One of the Iranistani men picked up the weapon.

“See to the mute who slumbers on the stairs,” her captor ordered. “He is not our man, but a creature set by the people to guard her. Even a mute can speak by gestures sometimes.”

The evil-faced monk bowed deeply and, unbolting the door, went out, thumbing a long knife. Another monk stood in the secret entrance.

“You did not know of the hidden door,” jeered the slant-eyed man. “You fool! The mountain below this temple is honeycombed with tunnels. You have been spied on constantly. The girl whom you thought drunk on bhang watched tonight while you talked with Conan. That will not alter my plans any, though, except that I have set my monks to slay Conan.

“Then we will show the people his body and tell them that you have returned to your father in the Seventh Hell because Yolgan has been polluted by the presence of a Feringhi! In the meantime these sahibs will be well on their way with you, my lovely goddess! Daughter of Erlik! Bah!”

“We’re wasting time, Yogok,” broke in Ormond roughly. “Once in the hills, you say, we won’t meet any of the Kirghiz, but I want to be far from Yolgan by daylight. If we meet anybody with this girl, they’ll cut our throats.”

The priest nodded and motioned to the monk who came forward and lifted Yasmeena onto a litter he carried. Pemrir took the other end. At that moment the other monk glided back into the chamber, wiping blood from his curved blade.

Yogok directed him to hide behind the hangings. “Conan might return before the others find him.”

Then they passed through the hidden door into darkness lighted by a butter lamp in Yogok’s hand. The priest slid to the heavy section of stone that formed part of the wall and made it fast with a bronze bar. Yasmeena saw by the small light of the lamp that they were in a narrow corridor which slanted downward at a pitch which grew steeper until it ended in a long narrow stair cut out of solid rock.

At the bottom of this stair they struck a level tunnel which they followed for some time, the Iranistanis and the monk alternating with the litter. It ended at last in a wall of rock, in the center of which was a stone block which worked on a pivot. This turned, they emerged into a cave, at the mouth of which stars were visible through a tangle of branches.

When Yogok pushed the block back in place its rough exterior looked like part of a solid wall. He extinguished the lamp and a moment later was pushing aside the massed willows which masked the cave mouth. As they emerged into the starlight, Yasmeena saw that these willows stood on the bank of a stream.

When her captors had pushed through the trees, waded the shallow channel, and ascended the farther bank, she saw a cluster of lights off to her right. Those lights were Yolgan. They had followed tunnels cut into the solid rock of the mountain and had come out at its foot less than half a mile from the city. Directly ahead of her the forest lifted in rows of black ramparts, and off to the left the hills climbed in marching lines.

Her captors set off through the starlight, their apparent objective a jutting shoulder less than half a mile to the east. The distance was covered in silence. The nervousness of the Iranistani men was no more evident than that of Yogok. Each man was thinking what his fate would be if the common people of Yolgan discovered them kidnaping their goddess.

Yogok’s fear was greater than that of the Iranistanis. He had covered his tracks with corpses — the shepherd who had brought him Ormond’s message, the mute guardian of the stairs; his teeth chattered as he conjured up possibilities. Conan must die without speaking, also; that, he had drilled into the monks.

“Faster! Faster!” he urged, a note of panic in his voice as he glared at the black forest walls about him. In the moan of the night wind he seemed to hear the stealthy tread of pursuers.

“Here’s the cave,” grunted Ormond. “Set her down; no use lugging her up that slope. I’ll go get the servants and the horses. We’ll mount her on one of the pack animals. Have to leave some of our stuff behind, anyhow. Ohai, Akbar!” he called softly.

There was no answer. The fire had gone out in the cave and the mouth gaped black and silent.

“Have they gone to sleep?” Ormond swore irritably. “I’ll jolly well wake ’em. Wait!”

He ran lightly up the rough ramp and vanished in the cave. A moment later his voice reached them, echoing hollowly between the rocky walls. The echoes did not disguise the sudden fear in his voice.

VIII

When Conan fell through the treacherous stairs, he shot downward in utter blackness to land on solid stone. Not one man in a hundred could have survived the fall with unsmashed bones, but Conan was all knit wires and steel springs. He landed on all fours, catlike, with bent joints absorbing the shock. Even so his whole body was numbed, and his limbs crumpled under him, letting his frame dash violently against the stone.

He lay there half stunned for a space, then pulled himself together, cursing the stinging and tingling of his hands and feet, and felt himself for broken bones.

Thankful to find himself intact, he groped for and found the scimitar which he had cast from him as he fell. Above him the trap had closed. Where he was he had no idea, but it was dark as a Stygian vault. He wondered how far he had fallen, and felt that it was farther than anyone would ever believe, supposing he escaped to tell of it. He felt about in the darkness and found that he was in a square cell of no great dimensions. The one door was locked on the outside.

His investigations took him only a matter of seconds, and it was while he was feeling the door that he heard someone fumbling at it on the other side. He drew back, believing that those who dropped him into the cell would scarcely have had time to reach it by a safer way. He believed it was someone who had heard the sound of his fall and was coming to investigate, doubtless expecting to find a corpse on the floor.

The door was cast open and light blinded him, but he cut at the vague figure which loomed in the open door. Then his eyes could see and they saw a monk lying on the floor of a narrow lamp-lighted corridor with his shaven head split to the temples. The passage was empty except for the dead man.

The floor of the corridor sloped slightly, and Conan went down it, because to go up it would obviously be returning toward his enemies. He momentarily expected to hear them howling on his heels, but evidently they considered that his fall through the trap, riddled, as they thought, with arrows, was sufficient and were in no hurry to verify their belief. Doubtless it was the duty of the monk he had killed to finish off victims dropped through the trap on the stairs.

The corridor made a sharp turn to the right and the lamps no longer burned along the walls. Conan took one of them and went on, finding that the pitch of the slope grew steeper until he was forced to check his descent with a hand braced against the wall. These walls were solid rock, and he knew he was in the mountain on which the temple was built.

He did not believe any of the inhabitants of Yolgan knew of these tunnels except the monks; certainly Yasmeena was ignorant of them. Thought of the girl made him wince. Heaven alone knew where she was, just then, but he could not aid her until he had escaped himself from these rat-runs.

Presently the passage turned at right angles into a broader tunnel which ran level, and he followed it hastily but cautiously, holding his lamp high. Ahead of him he saw the tunnel end at last against a rough stone wall in which a door was set in the shape of a ponderous square block. This, he discovered, was hung on a pivot, and it revolved with ease, letting him through into a cave beyond.

As Yasmeena had seen the stars among the branches not long before, Conan now discovered them. He put out his lamp, halted an instant to let his eyes get used to the sudden darkness, and then started toward the cavern mouth.

Just as he reached it, he crouched back. Somebody was splashing through the water outside, thrashing through the willows. The man came panting up the short steep slope, and Conan saw the evil face of Yogok in the starlight before the man became a shapeless blob of blackness as he plunged into the cavern.

The next instant Conan sprang, bearing his man to the floor. Yogok let out one hair-raising yell, and then Conan found his throat and crouched over him, savagely digging and twisting his fingers in the priest’s neck.

“Where is Yasmeena?” he demanded.

A gurgle answered him. He relaxed his grip a trifle and repeated the question. Yogok was mad with fear of this attack in the dark, but somehow — probably by the body-scent or the lack of it — he divined that his captor was a white man.

“Are you Conan?” he gasped.

“Who else? Where is Yasmeena?” Conan emphasized his command by a wrench which brought a gurgle of pain from Yogok’s thin lips.

“The Iranistanis have her!” he panted.

“Where are they?”

“Nay; I know not! Ahhh! Mercy, sahib! I will tell!”

Yogok’s eyes glimmered white with fear in the darkness. His lean body was shaking as with an ague.

“We took her to a cave where the sahibs’ servants were hidden. They were gone, with the horses. The Iranistanis accused me of treachery. They said I had made away with their servants and meant to murder them. They lied. By Erlik, I know not what became of their cursed Afghulis! The Iranistanis attacked me, but I fled while a servant of mine fought with them.”

Conan hauled him to his feet, faced him toward the cave mouth and bound his hands behind him with his own girdle.

“We’re going back,” he said grimly. “One yelp out of you and I’ll let out your snake’s soul. Guide me as straight to Ormond’s cave as you know.”

“Nay; the dogs will slay me!”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t,” Conan assured him, pushing Yogok stumbling before him.

The priest was not a back-to-the-wall fighter. Confronted by two perils he chose the more remote. They waded the stream and on the other side Yogok turned to the right. Conan jerked him back.

“I know where I am now,” he growled. “And I know where the cave is. It’s in that jut of land to the left. If there’s a path through the pines, show it to me.”

Yogok surrendered and hurried through the shadows, conscious of Conan’s grasp on his collar and the broad edge of Conan’s scimitar glimmering near. It was growing toward the darkness that precedes dawn as they came to the cave which loomed dark and silent among the trees.

“They are gone!” Yogok shivered.

“I didn’t expect to find them here,” muttered Conan. “I came here to pick up their trail. If they thought you’d set the natives on them, they’d pull out on foot. What worries me is what they did with Yasmeena.”

“Listen!”

Yogok started convulsively as a low moan smote the air.

Conan threw him and lashed together his hands and feet. “Not a sound out of you!” he warned, and then stole up the ramp, sword ready.

At the mouth he hesitated unwilling to show himself against the dim starlight behind him. Then he heard the moan again and knew it was not feigned. It was a human being in mortal agony.

He felt his way into the darkness and presently stumbled over something yielding, which evoked another moan. His hands told him it was a man in Western clothing. Something warm and oozy smeared his hands as he groped. Feeling in the man’s pockets he found a box of matches and struck one, cupping it in his hands.

A livid face with glassy eyes stared up at him.

“Pemrir!” muttered Conan.

The sound of his name seemed to rouse the dying man. He half rose on an elbow, blood trickling from his mouth with the effort.

“Ormond!” he whispered ghastily. “Have you come back? Damn you, I’ll do for you yet —”

“I’m not Ormond,” growled the Cimmerian. “I’m Conan. It seems somebody has saved me the trouble of killing you. Where’s Yasmeena?”

“He took her away.” The Iranistani’s voice was scarcely intelligible, choked by the flow of blood. “Ormond, the dirty swine! We found the cave empty — knew old Yogok had betrayed us. We jumped him. He ran away. His damned monk stabbed me. Ormond took Yasmeena and the monk and went away. He’s mad. He’s going to try to cross the mountains on foot, with the girl, and the monk to guide him. And he left me to die, the swine, the filthy swine!” The dying man’s voice rose to a hysterical shriek; he heaved himself up, his eyes glaring; then a terrible shudder ran through his body and he was dead. Conan rose, struck another match and swept a glance over the cave. It was utterly bare. Not a firearm in sight. Ormond had evidently robbed his dying partner. Ormond, starting through the mountains with a captive woman, and a treacherous monk for a guide, on foot and with no provisions — surely the man must be mad. Returning to Yogok he unbound his legs, repeating Pemrir’s tale in a few words. He saw the priest’s eyes gleam in the starlight. “Good! They will all die in the mountains! Let them go!”

“We’re following them,” Conan answered. “You know the way the monk will lead Ormond. Show it to me.” A restoration of confidence had wakened insolence and defiance. “No! Let them die!” With a searing curse Conan caught the priest’s throat and jammed his head back between his shoulders, until his eyes were glaring at the stars. “Damn you!” he ground between his teeth, shaking the man as a dog shakes a rat. “If you try to balk me now I’ll kill you the slowest way I know. Do you want me to drag you back to Yolgan and tell the people what you plotted against the daughter of Erlik Khan? They’ll kill me, but they’ll flay you alive!” Yogok knew Conan would not do that, not because the Cimmerian feared death, but because to sacrifice himself would be to remove Yasmeena’s last hope. But Conan’s glaring eyes made him cold with fear; he sensed the abysmal rage that gripped the white man and knew that Conan was on the point of tearing him limb from limb. In that moment there was no bloody deed of which Conan was not capable. “Stay, sahib!” Yogok gasped. “I will guide you.”

“And guide me right!” Conan jerked him savagely to his feet. “They have been gone less than an hour. If we don’t overtake them by sunrise, I’ll know you’ve led me astray, and I’ll tie you head down to a cliff for the vultures to eat alive.”

IX

In the darkness before dawn Yogok led Conan up into the hills by a narrow trail that wound among ravines and windy crags, climbing ever southward. The eternal lights of Yolgan fell away behind them, growing smaller and smaller with distance.

They left half a mile to the east of the gorge where the Turanians were concealed. Conan ardently wished to get his men out of that ravine before dawn, but he dared not take the time now. His eyes burned from lack of sleep and moments of giddiness assailed him, but the fire of his driving energy burned fiercer than ever. He urged the priest to greater and greater speed until sweat dripped like water from the man’s trembling limbs.

“He’ll practically have to drag the girl. She’ll fight him every step of the way. And he’ll have to beat the monk every now and then to make him point out the right path. We ought to be gaining on them at every step.”

Full dawn found them climbing a ledge that pitched up around a gigantic shoulder where the wind staggered them. Then, off to the left sounded a sudden rattle of bow fire. The wind brought it in snatches. Conan turned, loosing his binoculars. They were high above the ridges and hills that rimmed the valley.

He could see Yolgan in the distance, like a huddle of toy blocks. He could see the gorges that debouched into the valley spread out like the finger of a hand. He saw the gorge in which his Turanians had taken refuge. Black dots which he knew were men were scattered among the boulders at the canyon mouth and up on the rims of the walls; tiny white puffs spurted.

Even before he brought his glasses into play he knew that the pursuing Kirghiz had at last smelled his men out. The Turanians were bottled in the gorge. He saw puffs of smoke jetting from the rocks that from the mountainside overhung the ravine leading out of the canyon. Strings of dots moved out of the gates of Yolgan, which were men coming to investigate the shooting. Doubtless the Kirghiz had sent riders to bring the men of the city.

Yogok shrieked and fell down flat on the ledge. Conan felt his cap tugged from his head as if by an invisible hand, and there came to him the flat sharp twang of a bow.

He dropped behind a boulder and began scanning the narrow, sheer-walled plateau upon which the ledge debouched. Presently a head and part of a shoulder rose above a shelf of rock, and then a bow came up and spoke flatly. The arrow knocked a chip out of the boulder near Conan’s elbow.

Ormond had been making even poorer time than Conan hoped, and seeing his pursuer gaining, had turned to make a fight of it. That he recognized Conan was evident from his mocking shouts. There was a hint of hysteria in them.

Yogok was too helpless with terror to do anything but hug the ledge and moan. Conan began working his way toward the Iranistani. Evidently Ormond did not know that he had no firearm. The sun was not yet above the peaks when it turned to fire, and the light and atmosphere of those altitudes make for uncertain shooting.

Ormond blazed away as Conan flitted from ridge to boulder and from rock to ledge, and sometimes his lead whispered perilously close. But Conan was gliding ever nearer, working his way so that the sun would be behind him when it rose. Something about that silent shadowy figure that he could not hit began to shake Ormond’s nerve; it was more like being stalked by a leopard than by a human being.

Conan could not see Yasmeena, but presently he saw the monk. The man took advantage of a moment when Ormond was readying his shot. He sprang up from behind the ledge with his hands tied behind his back, and scudded across the rock like a rabbit. Ormond, like a man gone mad, jerked a weapon and put a knife between his shoulders, and he stumbled and slid screaming over the thousand-foot edge.

Conan broke cover, too, and came ripping across the treacherous rock like a gust of hill wind. As he came the sun burst up over a ridge behind him, full in Ormond’s eyes. The Iranistani yelled incoherently, trying to shade his eyes with his left arm, and began firing half-blindly. The arrows ripped past Conan’s head or knocked up splinters of stone at his speeding feet. Panic had Ormond, and he was firing without proper aim.

Then the quiver was empty. Another stride and Conan would reach him with that hovering arc of steel that the sun turned crimson. Ormond hurled the weapon blindly, yelling “You damned werewolf! I’ll cheat you yet!” and bounded far out, arms outspread.

His feet struck the sloping lip of a fissure and he shot down and vanished so suddenly it was like the unreality of a dream.

Conan reached the crevice and glared down into echoing darkness. He could see nothing, but the chasm seemed bottomless. With an angry shrug he turned away, disappointed.

Behind the stony shelf Conan found Yasmeena lying with her arms bound, where Ormond had flung her down. Her soft slippers hung in tatters, and the bruises and abrasions on her tender flesh told of Ormond’s brutal attempts to force her at top speed along the rocky path.

Conan cut her cords and she caught his arms with all her old fierceness of passion. There was no fear in her eyes now, only wild excitement.

“They said you were dead!” she cried. “I knew they lied! They cannot kill you any more than they can kill the mountains or the wind that blows across them! You have Yogok. I saw him. He knows the secret paths better than the monk Ormond killed. Let us go, while the Kirghiz are killing the Turanians! What if we have no supplies? It is summer. We shall not freeze. We can starve for a while if need be. Let us go!”

“I brought those men to Yolgan with me for my own purposes, Yasmeena,” he replied. “Even for you I can’t desert them.”

She nodded her splendid head. “I expected that from you, Conan.”

Ormond’s bow lay near by but there were no cartridges for it. He cast it over the precipice and, taking Yasmeena’s hand, led her back to the ledge where Yogok lay yammering, too terrified to try to escape with his hands tied.

Conan hauled him erect and pointed to the gorge where the white puffs spurted.

“Is there a way to reach that gorge without returning to the valley? Your life depends on it.”

“Half these gorges have hidden exits,” answered Yogok, shivering. “That one has. But I cannot guide you along that route with my arms tied.”

Conan unbound his hands, but tied the girdle about the priest’s waist and retained the other end in his hand. “Lead on,” he ordered.

Yogok led them back along the ledge they had just traversed to a point where, halfway along it, it was cut by a great natural causeway of solid stone. They made their way along it, with dizzy depths echoing on either hand, to a broad ledge which skirted a deep canyon. They followed this ledge around a colossal crag and after a while Yogok plunged into a cave which opened upon the narrow path.

This they traversed in semidarkness relieved by light which filtered in from a ragged crevice in the roof. The cave wound steeply downward, following a fault in the rock, and they came out at last in a triangular cleft between towering walls. The narrow slit which was the cave mouth opened in a side of the cleft and was masked from outer view by a spur of rock that looked like part of a solid wall. Conan had looked into that cleft the day before and failed to discover the cave.

The sound of firing had grown louder as they advanced along the twisting cave, and now it filled the defile with thundering echoes. They were in the gorge of the Turanians. Conan saw the wiry warriors crouching among the boulders at the mouth, firing at the fur-capped heads which appeared among the rocks of the outer slopes.

He shouted before they saw him, and they nearly shot him before they recognized him. He went toward them, dragging Yogok with him, and the warriors stared in silent amazement at the shivering priest and the girl in her tattered finery. She scarcely noticed them; they were wolves whose fangs she did not fear; all her attention was centered on Conan. When an arrow whined near her she did not flinch.

Men crouched at the mouth of the ravine, firing into it. Bullets hummed back up the gut.

“They stole up in the darkness,” grunted Orkhan, binding up a bleeding arrow gash in his forearm. “They had the gorge mouth surrounded before our sentries saw them. They cut the throat of the sentry we had stationed down the ravine and came stealing up it. Had not others in the gorge seen them and opened fire, they would have cut all our throats while we slept. Aye, they were like cats that see in the dark. What shall we do, Conan? We are trapped. We cannot climb these walls. There is the spring, and grass for the horses, and we have slept, but we have no food left and our ammunition will not last forever.”

Conan took a yataghan from one of the men and handed it to Yasmeena.

“Watch Yogok,” he directed. “Stab him if he seeks to escape.”

And from the flash of her eyes he knew that she at last realized the value of direct action in its proper place, and that she would not hesitate to carry out his order. Yogok looked like a singed serpent in his fury, but he feared Yasmeena as much as he did Conan.

Conan collected a bow and a handful of arrows on his way to the boulder-strewn gorge mouth. Three Turanians lay dead among the rocks and others were wounded. The Kirghiz were working their way up the outer slope on foot from rock to rock, trying to get in to close quarters where their superior numbers would count, but not willing to sacrifice too many lives to get there. Up from the city a ragged line of men was streaming through the pines.

“We’ve got to get out of this trap before the monks come up with the Kirghiz and lead them up in the hills and down through that cave,” Conan muttered.

He could see them already toiling up the first ridges of the hills, shouting frantically to the tribesmen as they came. Working in fierce haste he told off half a dozen men on the best horses, and mounting Yogok and Yasmeena on spare steeds, he ordered the priest to lead the Turanians back through the cave. To Orkhan Shah he gave instructions to follow Yasmeena’s orders, and so imbued with trust was the Turanian that he made no objections to obeying a woman.

Three of the men remaining with him Conan stationed at the ravine, and with the other three he held the mouth of the canyon. They began firing as the others urged their horses down the defile. The men on the lower slopes sensed that the volleys were diminishing and came storming up the acclivities, only to take cover again as they were swept by a hail of lead, the deadly accuracy of which made up for its lack of volume. Conan’s presence heartened his men and they put new spirit in their bow work.

When the last rider had disappeared into the cleft, Conan waited until he thought the fugitives had time enough to traverse the winding cave, and then he fell back swiftly, picked up the men at the ravine, and raced for the hidden exit. The men outside suspected a trap in the sudden cessation of the firing, and they held back for long minutes, during which time Conan and his men were galloping through the twisting cavern, their hoofs filling the narrow gut with thunder.

The others awaited them on the ledge skirting the ravine and Conan sent them hurrying on. He cursed because he could not be at two places at once — at the head of the column bullying Yogok, and at the rear watching for the first of the pursuers to ride out on the ledge. But Yasmeena, flourishing the knife at the priest’s throat, was guarantee against treachery at the front. She had sworn to sink the blade in his breast if the Kirghiz came within bow range, and Yogok sweated with fear and himself urged the band onward.

They moved around the corner of the crag and out across the ridge, a knife-edged causeway half a mile in length, with a sheet of rock slanting steeply down for a thousand feet on either hand.

Conan waited alone at the angle of the ledge. When his party was moving like insects along the crest of the ridge, the first of the Kirghiz came racing out on the ledge. Sitting his horse behind a jutting spur of rock, Conan lined his sights carefully and shot. It was a long range, even for him; so long that he missed the first rider and hit the horse instead.

The stricken beast reared high, screaming, and plunged backward. The ledge was narrow where the cave opened on it. The screams and plunges of the maddened animal, before it toppled over the edge, put the horses in confusion behind it. Three more got out of control and were carried over the cliff with their riders, and the other Kirghiz retreated into the cave. After a while they tried again, but an arrow spattering on the rock sent them scurrying back.

A glance over his shoulder showed Conan his horsemen just dropping off the ridge onto the farther ledge. He reined about and sent his horse flying along the path. If he loitered, the Kirghiz might venture out again, find no one opposing them, and reach the bend of the trail in time to pick him off the causeway.

Most of his hardened band had dismounted, leading their horses at a walk. Conan rode at a gallop with death yawning on either hand if the horse slipped or put a single foot wrong. But the beast was sure-footed as a mountain sheep.

Conan’s head swam from lack of sleep as he glanced down into the blue haze of the abyss, but he did not slacken his pace. When he dropped down the slope onto the ledge where Yasmeena stood, white-faced and her nails biting into her pink palms, the Kirghiz had not yet appeared.

Conan pushed his riders as hard as he dared, making them from time to time change to the spare horses, to save the animals as much as possible. Nearly a dozen of these still remained. Many of the men were giddy with dizziness caused by hunger and the altitude. He himself was mad for sleep and kept himself awake only by an effort of will that made the hills reel to his gaze.

He kept his grip on clarity of purpose as only a man toughened by a savagely hard life can do, and led them on, following the paths Yogok pointed out. They skirted ledges that hovered over ravines the bottoms of which were lost in shadowy gloom. They plunged through defiles like a knife cut where sheer walls rose up to the skies on either hand.

Behind them from time to time they heard faint yells, and once, when they toiled up over the shoulder of a breathtaking crag on a path where the horses fought for footing, they saw their pursuers far below and behind them. The Kirghiz and monks were not maintaining such a suicidal pace; hate is seldom as desperate as the will to live.

The snowy crest of Mount Erlik loomed higher and higher before them, and Yogok, when questioned, swore that the way to safety lay through the mountain. More he would not say; he was green with fear, and his mind held to but one thought — to keep the trail that would buy his life. He feared his captors no more than he feared that his pursuing subjects would overtake them and learn of his duplicity in regard to their goddess.

They pushed on like men already dead, beginning to stagger with weakness and exhaustion. The horses drooped and stumbled. The wind was like whetted steel. Darkness was gathering when they followed the backbone of a giant ridge which ran like a natural causeway to the sheer slope of Mount Erlik Khan.

The mountain towered gigantically above them, a brutish mass of crags and dizzy escarpments and colossal steeps, with the snow-clad pinnacle, glimpsed between the great spurs, dominating all. The ridge ended at a ledge high up among the cliffs, and in the sheer rock there stood a bronze door, thickly carved with inscriptions that Conan could not decipher. It was heavy enough to have resisted an attack of artillery.

“This is sacred to Erlik,” said Yogok, but he showed about as much reverence as one of the Mohammedans. “Push against the door. Nay; fear not. On my life, there is no trap.”

“On your life it is,” Conan assured him grimly, and himself set a shoulder to the door, almost falling as he dismounted.

X

The ponderous portal swung inward with a smoothness that showed the antique hinges had recently been oiled. A makeshift torch revealed the entrance to a tunnel, cut in solid rock. A few feet from the door the tunnel opened out like the neck of a bottle, and the flickering torch, held at the entrance, only hinted at the vastness of its dimensions.

“This tunnel runs clear through the mountain,” said Yogok. “By dawn we can be out of reach of those who follow, because even if they climb over the mountain by the most direct route, they must go by foot and it will take them all the rest of the night and all of another day. If they skirt the mountain and work their way through the passes of the surrounding hills, it will take them even longer; and their horses are weary, too.

“That is the way I was going to guide Ormond. I was not going to take him through the mountain. But it is the only way of escape for you. There is food here. At certain seasons of the year the monks work here. In that cell there are lamps.”

He pointed to a small chamber cut in the rock just inside the doorway. Conan lighted several of the butter lamps, and gave them to the Turanians to carry. He dared not follow the course which caution suggested and ride ahead to investigate before he led his men into the tunnel. The pursuers were too close behind them. He must bar the big door and plunge on, trusting the priest’s desire to save his own skin.

When the men were all in the tunnel, Yogok directed the barring of the door — giant bronze bars, thick as a man’s leg. It took half a dozen of the weakened Turanians to lift one, but once they were in place, Conan was certain that nothing short of siege guns could force the ton-heavy door, with its massive bronze sills and jambs set deep in the living rock.

He made Yogok ride between him and Orkhan, the Turanian holding a lamp. There was no use trusting Yogok, even though the priest was getting some satisfaction out of the thought that he was at least ridding himself of the “goddess” he feared and hated, although it meant forgoing his vengeance on her.

Even with all his faculties occupied in a savage battle to keep from falling senseless with exhaustion, Conan found space to be amazed at what the light showed him. He had never dreamed of the existence of such a place. Thirty men could have ridden abreast in the cavernlike passage, and the roof soared out of sight in some places; in others stalactites reflected the light in a thousand scintillant colors.

The floors and walls were as even as man-shaped marble, and Conan wondered how many centuries had been required for the hand-cutting and smoothing of them. Cells appeared at irregular intervals, cut in the rock at the sides, and presently he saw marks of pick work, and then caught sight of dull yellow.

The light showed him the incredible truth. The tales of Mount Erlik Khan were true. The walls were patterned with veins of gold that could be dug out of the rock with a knife point.

The Turanians, who smelled loot as vultures smell carrion, woke suddenly out of their daze of fatigue and began to take an almost painfully intense interest.

“This is where the monks get their gold, sahib,” said Orkhan, his eyes blazing in the lamplight. “Let me twist the old one’s toes for a space, and he will tell us where they have hidden that which they have dug out of the walls.”

But “the old one” did not need persuasion. He pointed out a square-hewn chamber in which stood stacks of peculiarly shaped objects that were ingots of virgin gold. In other, larger cells were the primitive contrivances with which they smelted the ore and cast the metal.

“Take what ye will,” said Yogok indifferently. “A thousand horses could not carry away the gold we have cast and stored, and we have scarcely dipped into the richness of the veins.”

Thin lips were licked greedily, drooping mustaches twisted in emotion, and eyes that burned like hawks’ were turned questioningly on Conan.

“Ye have spare horses,” he suggested, and that was enough for them.

After that nothing could have convinced them that everything which had passed had not been planned by Conan in order to lead them to the gold which was the plunder he had promised them. They loaded the extra ponies until he interfered, to save the animals’ strength. Then they hacked off chunks of the soft gold and stuffed their pouches and belts and girdles, and even so they had scarcely diminished the stacks. Some of the raiders lifted up their voices and wept when they saw how much they must leave behind.

“Assuredly,” they promised each other, “we shall return with wagons and many horses and secure every crumb of it, inshallah!”

“Dogs!” swore Conan. “Ye have each man a fortune beyond your dreams. Are ye jackals to feast on carrion until your bellies burst? Will ye loiter here until the Kirghiz cross the mountain and cut us off? What of gold then, you crop-eared rogues?”

Of more interest to the Cimmerian was a cell where barley was stored in leather sacks, and he made the tribesmen load some of the horses with food instead of gold. They grumbled but they obeyed him. They would obey him now, if he ordered them to ride with him into Jehannum.

Every nerve in his body shrieked for sleep, submerging hunger, but he gnawed a handful of raw barley and flogged his failing powers with the lash of his driving will. Yasmeena drooped in her saddle wearily, but her eyes shone unclouded in the lamplight, and Conan was dully aware of a deep respect for her that dwarfed even his former admiration.

They rode on through that glittering, dream-palace cavern, the tribesmen munching barley and babbling ecstatically of the joys their gold would buy, and at last they came to a bronze door which was a counterpart of the one at the other end of the tunnel. It was not barred. Yogok maintained that none but the monks had visited Mount Erlik in centuries. The door swung inward at their efforts and they blinked in the glow of a white dawn.

They were looking out on a small ledge from which a narrow trail wound along the edge of a giant escarpment. On one side the land fell away sheer for thousands of feet, so that a stream at the bottom looked like a thread of silver, and on the other a sheer cliff rose for some five hundred feet.

This cliff limited the view to the left, but to the right Conan could see some of the mountains which flanked Mount Erlik Khan, and the valley far below them wandered southward away to a pass in the distance, a notch in the savage rampart of the hills.

“This is life for you, Conan,” said Yogok, pointing to the pass. “Three miles from the spot where we now stand this trail leads down into the valley where there is water and game and rich grass for the horses. You can follow it southward beyond the pass for three days’ journey when you will come into country you know well. It is inhabited by marauding tribes, but they will not attack a party as large as yours. You can be through the pass before the Kirghiz round the mountain, and they will not follow you through it. That is the limit of their country. Now let me go.”

“Not yet; I’ll release you at the pass. You can make your way back here easily and wait for the Kirghiz, and tell them any lie you want to about their goddess.”

Yogok glared angrily at Conan. The Cimmerian’s eyes were bloodshot, the skin stretched taut over the bones of his face. He looked like a man who had been sweated in hell’s fires, and he felt the same way. There was no reason for Yogok’s strident objections, except a desire to get out of the company of those he hated as quickly as possible.

In Conan’s state a man reverts to primitive instincts, and the Cimmerian held his thrumming nerves in an iron grip to keep from braining the priest with his gun butt. Dispute and importunities were like screaming insults to his struggling brain.

While the priest squawked, and Conan hesitated between reasoning with him or knocking him down, the Turanians, inspired by the gold and food, and eager for the trail, began to crowd past him. Half a dozen had emerged on the ledge when Conan noticed them, and ordering Orkhan to bring Yogok along, he rode past those on the ledge, intending to take the lead as usual. But one of the men was already out to the path, and could neither turn back nor hug the wall close enough to let Conan by.

The Cimmerian, perforce, called to him to go ahead, and he would follow, and even as Conan set his horse to the trail a volley of boulders came thundering down from above. They hit the wretched Turanian and swept him and his horse off the trail as a broom sweeps a spider from a wall. One of the stones, bouncing from the ledge, hit Conan’s horse and broke its leg, and the beast screamed and toppled over the side after the other.

Conan threw himself clear as it fell, landed half over the edge, and clawed a desperate way to safety with Yasmeena’s screams and the yells of the Turanians ringing in his ears. There was nothing seen to shoot at, but some of them loosed their bows anyway, and the volley was greeted by a wild peal of mocking laughter from the cliffs above.

In no way unnerved by his narrow escape, Conan drove his men back into the shelter of the cave. They were like wolves in a trap, ready to strike blind right and left, and a dozen tulwars hovered over Yogok’s head.

“Slay him! He has led us into a trap! the gods!”

Yogok’s face was a green, convulsed mask of fear. He squalled like a tortured cat.

“Nay! I led you swift and sure! The Kirghiz could not have reached this side of the mountain by this time!”

“Were there monks hiding in these cells?” asked Conan. “They could have sneaked out when they saw us coming in. Is that a monk up there?”

“Nay; as Erlik is my witness! We work the gold three moons in the years; at other times it is death to go near Mount Erlik. I know not who it is.”

Conan ventured out on the path again and was greeted by another shower of stones, which he barely avoided, and a voice yelled high above him:

“You Yankee dog, how do you like that? I’ve got you now, damn you! Thought I was done for when I fell into that fissure, didn’t you? Well, there was a ledge a few feet down that I landed on. You couldn’t see it because the sun wasn’t high enough to shine down into it. If I’d had a gun I’d have killed you when you looked down. I climbed out after you left.”

“Ormond!” snarled Conan.

“Did you think I hadn’t wormed anything out of that monk?” the Iranistani yelled. “He told me all about the paths and Mount Erlik after I’d caved in some of his teeth with a gun barrel. I saw old Yogok with you and knew he’d lead you to Erlik. I got here first. I’d have barred the door and locked you out to be butchered by the fellows who’re chasing you, but I couldn’t lift the bars. But, anyway, I’ve got you trapped. You can’t leave the cave; if you do I’ll mash you like insects on the path. I can see you on it, and you can’t see me. I’m going to keep you here until the Kirghiz come up. I’ve still got Yasmeena’s symbol. They’ll listen to me.

“I’ll tell them Yogok is helping you to kidnap her; they’ll kill you all except her. They’ll take her back, but I don’t care now. I don’t need that Kashmiri’s money. I’ve got the secret of Mount Erlik Khan!”

Conan fell back into the doorway and repeated what the Iranistani had said. Yogok turned a shade greener in his fear, and all stared silently at Conan. His bloodshot gaze traveled over them as they stood blinking, disheveled, and haggard, with lamps paled by the dawn, like ghouls caught above earth by daybreak. Grimly he marshaled his straying wits. Conan had never reached the ultimate limits of his endurance; always he had plumbed a deeper, hidden reservoir of vitality below what seemed the last.

“Is there another way out of here?” he demanded.

Yogok shook his head, chatting again with terror. “No way that men and horses can go.”

“What do you mean?”

The priest moved back into the darkness and held a lamp close to the flank of the wall where the tunnel narrowed for the entrance. Rusty bits of metal jutted from the rock.

“Here was once a ladder,” he said. “It led far up to a crevice in the wall where long ago one sat to watch the southern pass for invaders. But none has climbed it for many years, and the handholds are rusty and rotten. The crevice opens on the sheer of the outer cliffs, and even if a man reached it, he could scarcely climb down the outside.

“Well, maybe I can pick Ormond off from the crevice,” muttered Conan, his head swimming with the effort of thinking.

Standing still was making infinitely harder his fight to keep awake. The muttering of the Turanians was a meaningless tangle of sound, and Yasmeena’s dark anxious eyes seemed to be looking at him from a vast distance. He thought he felt her arms cling to him briefly, but he could not be sure. The lights were beginning to swim in a thick mist.

Beating himself into wakefulness by striking his own face with his open hand, he began the climb, a bow slung to his back. Orkhan was plucking at him, begging to be allowed to make the attempt in his stead, but Conan shook him off. In his dazed brain was a conviction that the responsibility was his own. He went up like an automaton, slowly, all his muddled faculties concentrating grimly on the task.

Fifty feet up, the light of the lamps ceased to aid him, and he groped upward in the gloom, feeling for the rusty bolts set in the wall. They were so rotten that he dared not put his full weight on any one of them. In some places they were missing and he clung with his fingers in the niches where they had been. Only the slant of the rock enabled him to accomplish the climb at all, and it seemed endless, a hell-born eternity of torture.

The lamps below him were like fireflies in the darkness, and the roof with its clustering stalactites was only a few yards above his head. Then he saw a gleam of light, and an instant later he was crouching in a cleft that opened on the outer air. It was only a couple of yards wide, and not tall enough for a man to stand upright.

He crawled along it for some thirty feet and then looked out on a rugged slant that pitched down to a crest of cliffs, a hundred feet below. He could not see the ledge where the door opened, nor the path that led from it, but he saw a figure crouching among the boulders along the lip of the cliff, and he unslung his bow.

Ordinarily he could not have missed at that range. But his bloodshot eyes refused to line the sights. Slumber never assails a weary man so fiercely as in the growing light of dawn. The figure among the rocks below merged and blended fantastically with the scenery, and the sights of the bow were mere blurs.

Setting his teeth, Conan let fly, and the arrow smashed on the rock a foot from Ormond’s head. The Iranistani dived out of sight among the boulders without pausing to find where the shot came from.

In desperation Conan slung his bow and threw a leg over the lip of the cleft. He was certain that Ormond had no firearm. Down below the Turanians were clamoring like a wolf pack, but his numbed faculties were fully occupied with the task of climbing down the ribbed pitch. He stumbled and fumbled and nearly fell, and at last he did slip and came sliding and tumbling down until his bow caught on a projection and held him dangling by the strap.

In a red mist he saw Ormond break cover, with a tulwar that he must have found in the cavern, and in a panic lest the Iranistani climb up and kill him as he hung helplessly, Conan braced his feet and elbows against the rock and wrenched savagely, breaking the bow strap. He plunged down like a plummet, hit the slope, clawed at rocks and knobs, and brought up on shelving stone a dozen feet from the cliff edge, while his bow, tumbling before him, slid over and was gone.

The fall jolted his numbed nerves back into life again, knocked some of the cobwebs out of his dizzy brain. Ormond was within a few steps of him when he scrambled up, drawing his scimitar. The Iranistani was as savage and haggard in appearance as was Conan, and his eyes blazed with a frenzy that almost amounted to madness.

“Steel to steel now, Conan!” Ormond gritted. “We’ll see if you’re the swordsman they say you are!”

Ormond came with a rush and Conan met him, fired above his exhaustion by his hate and the stinging frenzy of battle. They fought back and forth along the cliff edge, with a foot to spare between them and eternity sometimes, until the clangor of the swords wakened the eagles to shrill hysteria.

Ormond fought like a wild man, yet with all the craft the sword masters of his native England had taught him. Conan fought as he had learned to fight in grim and merciless battles in the hills and the steppes and the deserts. He fought as an Afghan fights, with the furious intensity of onslaught that gathers force like a rising hurricane as it progresses.

Beating on his blade like a smith on an anvil, Conan drove the Iranistani staggering before him, until the man swayed dizzily with his heels over the edge of the cliff.

“Swine!” gasped Ormond with his last breath, and spat in his enemy’s face and slashed madly at his head.

“This for Ahmed!” roared Conan, and his scimitar whirled past Ormond’s blade and crunched home.

The Iranistani reeled outward, his features suddenly blotted out by blood and brains, and pitched backward into the gulf without a sound.

Conan sat down on a boulder, suddenly aware of the quivering of his leg muscles. He sat there, his gory blade across his knees and his head sunk in his hands, his brain a black blank, until shouts welling up from below roused him to consciousness.

“Ohai, Conan! A man with a cleft head has fallen past us into the valley! Art thou safe? We await orders!”

He lifted his head and glanced at the sun which was just rising over the eastern peaks, turning to crimson flame the snow of Mount Erlik Khan. He would have traded all the gold of the monks of Yolgan to be allowed to lie down and sleep for an hour, and climbing up on his stiffened legs that trembled with his weight was a task of appalling magnitude. But his labor was not yet done; there was no rest for him this side the pass.

Summoning the shreds of his strength, he shouted down to the raiders.

“Get upon the horses and ride, sons of nameless dogs! Follow the trail and I will come along the cliff. I see a place beyond the next bend where I can climb down to the trail. Bring Yogok with you; he has earned his release but the time is not yet.”

“Hurry, Conan,” floated up Yasmeena’s golden call. “It is far to Delhi, and many mountains lie between!”

Conan laughed and sheathed his scimitar, and his laugh sounded like the ghastly mirth of a hyena; the Turanians had taken the road and were already singing a chant improvised in his honor, naming “Son of the Sword” the man who staggered along the cliffs above them, with a face like a grinning skull and feet that left smears of blood on the rock.

The Haunter of the Ring

Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson

As Conan entered Count Trocero's study he was too much engrossed in his own thoughts to notice, at first, the haggard appearance of his visitor, a big, handsome young fellow well known to him.

"Hello, Trocero," Conan greeted. "Hello, Enri. I haven't seen you for quite a while. How is Evlena?" And before he could answer, still on the crest of the enthusiasm which had brought him there, Conan exclaimed: "Look, I've got something that will make you stare! I got it from that robber Ahmed Mektub, and I paid high for it, but it's worth it. Look!" From under his breech-clout Conan drew the jewel-hilted Afghul dagger which had fascinated him as a collector of rare weapons.

Trocero, familiar with his passion, showed only polite interest, but the effect on Enri was shocking.

With a strangled cry he sprang up and backward, knocking the chair clattering to the floor. Fists clenched and countenance livid he faced him, crying: "Keep back! Get away from him, or—"

Conan was frozen in his tracks.

"What in Crom's name—" Conan began bewilderedly, when Enri, with another amazing change of attitude, dropped into a chair and sank his head in his hands. Conan saw his heavy shoulders quiver. Conan stared helplessly from him to Trocero, who seemed equally dumbfounded.

"Is he drunk?" Conan asked.

Trocero shook his head, and filling a brandy glass, offered it to the man. Enri looked up with haggard eyes, seized the drink and gulped it down like a man half famished. Then he straightened up and looked at them shamefacedly.

"I'm sorry I went off his handle, my king," he said. "It was the unexpected shock of you drawing that knife."

"Well," Conan retorted, with some disgust, "I suppose you thought I was going to stab you with it!'

"Yes, I did!" Then, at the utterly blank expression on his face, he added: "Oh, I didn't actually think that; at least, I didn't reach that conclusion by any process of reasoning. It was just the blind primitive instinct of a hunted man, against whom anyone's hand may be turned."

His strange words and the despairing way he said them sent a queer shiver of nameless apprehension down his spine.

"What are you talking about?" Conan demanded uneasily. "Hunted? For what? You never committed a crime in your life."

"Not in this life, perhaps," he muttered.

"What do you mean?"

"What if retribution for a black crime committed in a previous life were hounding him?" he muttered.

"That's nonsense," Conan snorted.

"Oh, is it?" he exclaimed, stung. "Did you ever hear of my great-grandsire, Argello?"

"Sure; but what's that got to do with—"

"You've seen his portrait: doesn't it resemble him?"

"Well, yes," Conan admitted, "except that your expression is frank and wholesome whereas his is crafty and cruel."

"He murdered his wife," answered Enri. "Suppose the theory of reincarnation were true? Why shouldn't a man suffer in one life for a crime committed in another?"

"You mean you think you are the reincarnation of your great-grandsire? Of all the fantastic—well, since he killed his wife, I suppose you'll be expecting Evlena to murder you!" This last was delivered in searing sarcasm, as Conan thought of the sweet, gentle girl Enri had married. His answer stunned him.

"My wife," he said slowly, "has tried to kill me three times in the past week."

There was no reply to that. Conan glanced helplessly at Count Trocero. He sat in his customary position, chin resting on his strong, slim hands; his white face was immobile, but his dark eyes gleamed with interest. In the silence Conan heard a gust of wind blowing outside.

"Tell them the full story, Enri," suggested Trocero, and his calm, even voice was like a knife that cut a strangling, relieving the unreal tension.

"You know we've been married less than a year," Enri began, plunging into the tale as though he were bursting for utterance; his words stumbled and tripped over one another. "All couples have spats, of course, but we've never had any real quarrels. Evlena is the best-natured girl in the world."

"The first thing out of the ordinary occurred about a week ago. We had gone up in the mountains, left the carriage, and were wandering around picking wild flowers. At last we came to a steep slope, some thirty feet in height, and Evlena called my attention to the flowers which grew thickly at the foot. I was looking over the edge and wondering if I could climb down without tearing his clothes to ribbons, when I felt a violent shove from behind that toppled me over.

"If it had been a sheer cliff, I'd have broken his neck. As it was, I went tumbling down, rolling and sliding, and brought up at the bottom scratched and bruised, with his garments in rags. I looked up and saw Evlena staring down, apparently frightened half out of her wits."

"Oh Enri!" she cried. "Are you hurt? How came you to fall?"

"It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that there was such a thing as carrying a joke too far, but these words checked me. I decided that she must have stumbled against me unintentionally, and actually didn't know it was she who precipitated me down the slope."

"So I laughed it off, and went home. She made a great fuss over me, insisted on swabbing my scratches, and lectured me for my carelessness! I hadn't the heart to tell her it was her fault."

"But four days later, the next thing happened. I was walking along when I saw her coming up with the carriage. I stepped out on the grass to let her by, as there wasn't much room to spare. She was smiling as she approached me, and slowed down the carriage, as if to speak to me. Then, just before she reached me, a most horrible change came over her expression. Without warning the carriage leaped at me like a living thing as she drove her whip down on the horses. Only a frantic leap backward saved me from being ground under the wheels. The carriage shot across the lawn and crashed into a tree. I ran to it and found Evlena dazed and hysterical, but unhurt. She babbled of losing control of the team."

"I carried her into the house and sent for a doctor. He found nothing seriously wrong with her, and attributed her dazed condition to fright and shock. Within moments she regained her normal senses, but she's refused to touch the carriage since. Strange to say, she seemed less frightened on her own account than on mine. She seemed vaguely to know that she'd nearly run me down, and grew hysterical again when she spoke of it. Yet she seemed to take it for granted that I knew the machine had got out of her control. But I distinctly saw her wrench the wheel around, and I know she deliberately tried to hit me—why, Mitra alone knows."

"Still I refused to let his mind follow the channel it was getting into. Evlena had never given any evidence of any mental weakness or 'nerves'; she's always been a level-headed girl, wholesome and natural. But I began to think she was subject to crazy impulses. Most of them have felt the impulse to leap from tall buildings. And sometimes a person feels a blind, childish and utterly reasonless urge to harm someone. We pick up a knife, and the thought suddenly enters our mind how easy it would be to send our friend, who sits smiling and unaware, into eternity with a stab of the blade. Of course we don't do it, but the impulse is there. So I thought perhaps some lack of mental discipline made Evlena susceptible to these unguided impulses, and unable to control them."

"Nonsense," Conan broke in. "I've known her for some time now. If she has any such trait, she's developed it since she married you."

It was an unfortunate remark. Enri caught it up with a despairing gleam in his eyes. "That's just it—since she married me! It's a curse —a black, ghastly curse, crawling like a serpent out of the past! I tell you, I was Argello and she—she was his murdered wife!" His voice sank to a blood-freezing whisper.

Conan shuddered; it is an awful thing to look upon the ruin of a keen mind, and such he was certain that he surveyed in Baron Enri. Why or how, or by what grisly chance it had come about he could not say, but he was certain the man was mad.

"You spoke of three attempts." It was Count Trocero's voice again, calm and stable amid the gathering webs of horror and unreality.

"Look here!" Enri lifted, his arm, drew back the sleeve and displayed a bandage, the cryptic significance of which was intolerable.

"I came into the bathroom this morning looking for his razor," he said. "I found Evlena just on the point of using my best shaving implement for some feminine purpose to cut out a pattern, or something. Like many women she can't seem to realize the difference between a razor and a butcher-knife or a pair of shears.

"I was a bit irritated, and I said: 'Evlena, how many times have I told you not to use my razors for such things? Bring it here; I'll give you my pocket-knife.'"

'I—I—I'm sorry,' she said. 'I didn't know it would hurt the razor. Here it is.'

"She was advancing, holding the open razor toward him. I reached for it —then something warned him. It was the same look in her eyes, just as I had seen it the day she nearly ran over him. That was all that saved my life, for I instinctively threw up my hand just as she slashed at my throat with all her power. The blade gashed my arm as you see, before I caught her wrist. For an instant she fought me like a wild thing; her slender body was taut as steel beneath my hands. Then she went limp and the look in her eyes was replaced by a strange dazed expression. The razor slipped out of her fingers."

"I let go of her and she stood swaying as if about to faint. I went to the lavatory—his wound was bleeding in a beastly fashion—and the next thing I heard her cry out, and she was hovering over him."

"Enri!" she cried. "How did you cut yourself so terribly?"

Enri shook his head and sighed heavily. "I guess I was a bit out of his head. My self-control snapped.

"'Don't keep up this pretense, Evlena,' I said. 'Mitra knows what's got into you, but you know as well as I that you've tried to kill me three times in the past week.'

"She recoiled as if I'd struck her, catching at her breast and staring at me as if at a ghost. She didn't say a word—and just what I said I don't remember. But when I finished I left her standing there white and still as a marble statue. I got my arm bandaged and then came over here, not knowing what else to do.

"Trocero—Conan—it's damnable! Either his wife is subject to fits of insanity—" He choked on the word. "No, I can't believe it. Ordinarily her eyes are too clear and level—too utterly sane. But every time she has an opportunity to harm me, she seems to become a temporary maniac."

He beat his fists together in his impotence and agony.

"But it isn't insanity! I used to work in a ward, and I've seen every form of mental unbalance. My wife is not insane!"

"Then what—" Conan began, but he turned haggard eyes on him.

"Only one alternative remains," he answered. "It is the old curse—from the days when man walked the earth with a heart as black as hell's darkest pits, and did evil in the sight of man and of Mitra. She knows, in fleeting snatches of memory. People have seen before—have glimpsed forbidden things in momentary liftings of the veil, which bars life from life. She was the ill-fated bride of Argello, whom he murdered in jealous frenzy, and the vengeance is hers. I shall die by her hands, as it was meant to be. And she—" he bowed his head in his hands.

"Just a moment." It was Trocero again. "You have mentioned a strange look in your wife's eyes. What sort of a look? Was it of maniacal frenzy?"

Enri shook his head. "It was an utter blankness. All the life and intelligence simply vanished, leaving her eyes dark wells of emptiness."

Trocero nodded, and asked a seemingly irrelevant question. "Have you any enemies?"

"Not that I know of."

"You forget Rolok," Conan said. "I can't imagine that elegant sophisticate going to the trouble of doing you actual harm, but I have an idea that if he could discomfort you without any physical effort on his part, he'd do it with a right good will."

Trocero turned on him an eye that had suddenly become piercing.

"And who is this Rolok?"

"A young exquisite who came into Evlena's life and nearly rushed her off her feet for a while. But in the end she came back to her first love—Enri here. Rolok took it pretty hard. For all his suaveness there's a streak of violence and passion in the man that might have cropped out but for his infernal indolence and blase indifference."

"Oh, there's nothing to be said against Rolok," interrupted Enri impatiently. "He must know that Evlena never really loved him. He merely fascinated her temporarily with his romantic Corinthian air."

"Not exactly Corinthian, Enri," Conan protested. "Rolok does look foreign, but it isn't Corinthian. It's almost Hyrkanian."

"Well, what has Rolok to do with this matter?" Enri snarled with the irascibility of frayed nerves. "He's been as friendly as a man could be since Evlena and I were married. In fact, only a week ago he sent her a ring which he said was a peace-offering and a belated wedding gift; said that after all, her jilting him was a greater misfortune for her than it was for him—the conceited fool!"

"A ring?" Trocero had suddenly come to life; it was as if something hard and steely had been sounded in him. "What sort of a ring?"

"Oh, a fantastic thing—copper, made like a scaly snake coiled three times, with its tail in its mouth and yellow jewels for eyes. I gather he picked it up somewhere in Stygia."

"He has travelled a great deal in Stygia?"

Enri looked surprised at this questioning but answered: "Why, apparently the man's travelled everywhere. I put him down as the pampered son of great wealth. He never did any work, so far as I know."

"He is well read," Conan put in. "I've been up to his apartment several times, and I never saw such a collection of books—"

Enri leaped to his feet with an oath, "Are we all crazy?" he cried. "I came up here hoping to get some help—and you fellows fall to talking of Rolok. I'll go to—"

"Wait!" Trocero stretched out a detaining hand. "If you don't mind, we'll go over to your house. I'd like to talk to your wife."

Enri dumbly acquiesced. Harried and haunted by grisly forebodings, he knew not which way to turn, and welcomed anything that promised aid.

They made their way over in his carriage, and scarcely a word was spoken on the way. Enri was sunk in moody ruminations, and Trocero had withdrawn himself into some strange aloof domain of thought beyond his ken. He sat like a statue, his dark vital eyes staring into space, not blankly, but as one who looks with understanding into some far realm.

Though Conan counted the man among his best friends, he knew but little of his past. He had come into his life as abruptly and unannounced as Rolok had come into the life of Evlena.

At Enri's house Evlena met them calmly, showing inner agitation only by the over-restraint of her manner. Conan saw the beseeching look she stole at her husband. She was a slender, soft-spoken girl, whose dark eyes were always vibrant and alight with emotion. That child try to murder her adored husband? The idea was monstrous. Again he was convinced that Baron Enri himself was deranged.

Following Trocero's lead, we made a pretence of small talk, as if they had casually dropped in, but Conan felt that Evlena was not deceived. Their conversation rang false and hollow, and presently Trocero said: "Mrs. Enri, that is a remarkable ring you are wearing. Do you mind if I look at it?"

"I'll have to give you my hand," she laughed. "I've been trying to get it off today, and it won't come off."

She held out her slim white hand for Trocero's inspection, and his face was immobile as he looked at the metal snake that coiled about her slim finger. He did not touch it. Conan himself was aware of an unaccountable repulsion. There was something almost obscenely familiar about that dull copperish reptile wound about the girl's white finger.

"It's evil-looking, isn't it?" She involuntarily shivered. "At first I liked it, but now I can hardly bear to look at it. If I can get it off I intend to return it to Rolok."

Trocero was about to make some reply, when the doorbell rang. Enri jumped as if shot, and Evlena rose quickly.

"I'll answer it, Enri—I know who it is."

She returned an instant later with two more mutual friends, those inseparable cronies, Donail, whose burly body, jovial manner and booming voice were combined with as keen a brain as any in the profession, and Bain, elderly, lean, wiry, acidly witty. Both were old friends of the Ash family. Donail had ushered Evlena into the world, and Bain was always Uncle Bain to her.

"Greetings, Enri! Hello, Trocero!" roared Donnelly. "Conan, have you got any weapons with you? Last time your nearly cut my head off demonstrating that fine blade of yours!"

"Donail!"

We all turned. Evlena was standing beside a wide table, holding it as if for support. Her face was white. Our badinage ceased instantly. A sudden tension was in the air.

"Donail," she repeated, holding her voice steady by an effort, "I sent for you and Uncle Bain—for the same reason for which I know Enri has brought Trocero and Conan. There is a matter Enri and I can no longer deal with alone. There is something between us, something black and ghastly and terrible."

"What are you talking about, girl?" All the levity was gone from Donail's great voice.

"My husband—" She choked, then went blindly on: "My husband has accused me of trying to murder him."

The silence that fell was broken by Bain's sudden and energetic rise. His eyes blazed and his fists quivered.

"You young pup!" he shouted at Enri. "I'll knock the living daylights—"

"Sit down, Bill!" Donail's huge hand crushed his smaller companion back into his chair. "No use going off on one yet. Go ahead, honey."

"We need help. We can not carry this thing alone." A shadow crossed her comely face. "This morning Enri's arm was badly cut. He said I did it. I don't know. I was handing him the razor. Then I must have fainted. At least, everything faded away. When I came to myself he was washing his arm in the lavatory—and—and he accused me of trying to kill him."

"Why, the young fool!" barked the belligerent Bain. "Hasn't he sense enough to know that if you did cut him, it was an accident?"

"Shut up, won't you?" snorted Donnelly. "Did you say you fainted? That isn't like you."

"I've been having fainting spells," she answered. "The first time was when we were in the mountains and Enri fell down a cliff. We were standing on the edge—then everything went black, and when his sight cleared, he was rolling down the slope." She shuddered at the recollection.

"Then when I lost control of the carriage and it crashed into the tree. You remember—Enri called you over."

Donail nodded his head ponderously.

"I don't remember you ever having fainting spells before."

"But Enri says I pushed him over the cliff!" she cried hysterically. "He says I tried to run him down in the carriage! He says I purposely slashed him with the razor!"

Donail turned perplexedly, toward the wretched Enri.

"How about it, son?"

"Mitra help me," Enri burst out in agony; "it's true!"

"Why, you lying hound!" It was Bain who gave tongue, leaping again to his feet. "If you want a divorce, why don't you get it in a decent way, instead of resorting to these despicable tactics—"

"Damn you!" roared Enri, lunging up, and losing control of himself completely. "If you say that I'll tear your jugular out!"

Evlena screamed; Donnelly grabbed Bain ponderously and banged him back into his chair with no overly gentle touch, and Trocero laid a hand lightly on Enri's shoulder. The man seemed to crumple into himself. He sank back into his chair and held out his hands gropingly toward his wife.

"Evlena," he said, his voice thick with labouring emotion, "you know O love you. O feel like a dog. But Mitra help me, it's true. If we go on this way, I'll be a dead man, and you—"

"Don't say it!" she screamed. "I know you wouldn't lie to me, Enri. If you say I tried to kill you, I know I did. But I swear, Enri, I didn't do it consciously. Oh, I must be going mad! That's why my dreams have been so wild and terrifying lately—"

"Of what have you dreamed, Mrs. Enri?" asked Trocero gently.

She pressed her hands to her temples and stared dully at him, as if only half comprehending.

"A black thing," she muttered. "A horrible faceless black thing that mows and mumbles and paws over him with apish hands. I dream of it every night. And in the daytime I try to kill the only man I ever loved. I'm going mad! Maybe I'm already crazy and don't know it."

"Calm yourself." To Donail, with all his science, it was only another case of feminine hysteria. His matter-of-fact voice seemed to soothe her, and she sighed and drew a weary hand through her damp locks.

"We'll talk this all over, and everything's going to be okay," he said, drawing a thick cigar from his person. "Have you a naked flame to light this with?"

She began mechanically to feel about the table, and just as mechanically Enri said: "There is flint in the drawer, Evlena."

She opened the drawer and began groping in it, when suddenly, as if struck by recollection and intuition, Enri sprang up, white-faced, and shouted: "No, no! Don't open that drawer—don't—"

Even as he voiced that urgent cry, she stiffened, as if at the feel of something in the drawer. Her change of expression held them all frozen, even Trocero. The vital intelligence vanished from her eyes like a blown-out flame, and into them came the look Enri had described as blank. The term was descriptive. Her beautiful eyes were dark wells of emptiness, as if the soul had been withdrawn from behind them.

Her hand came out of the drawer holding a crossbow, and she fired point-blank. Enri reeled with a groan and went down, blood starting from his head. For a flashing instant she looked down stupidly at the weapon in her hand, like one suddenly waking from a nightmare. Then her wild scream of agony smote our ears.

"Oh Mitra, I've killed him! Enri! Enri!"

She reached him before any of them, throwing herself on her knees and cradling his bloody head in her arms, while she sobbed in an unbearable passion of horror and anguish. The emptiness was gone from her eyes; they were alive and dilated with grief and terror.

Conan was making toward his prostrate friend with Donnelly and Bain, but Trocero caught his arm. His face was no longer immobile; his eyes glittered with a controlled savagery.

"Leave him to them!" he snarled. "We are hunters, not healers! Lead him to the house of Rolok!"

Conan did not question him. They made their way there in Enri's carriage.

Conan had the reigns, and something about the grim face of his companion caused him to whip the horses recklessly through the evening. Conan had the sensation of being part of a tragic drama which was hurtling with headlong speed toward a terrible climax.

He wrenched the carriage to a grinding halt at the curb before the building where Rolok lived in. Conan pointed out Rolok's door, and Trocero cast it open without knocking and shouldered his way in. Conan was close at his heels.

Rolok, in a dressing-gown of Khitain silk worked with dragons, was lounging on a divan, in a cloud of herbs. He sat up, overturning a wine-glass which stood with a half-filled bottle at his elbow.

Before Trocero could speak, Conan burst out with our news. "Enri has been shot!"

He sprang to his feet. "Shot? When? When did she kill him?"

"She?" Conan glared in bewilderment. "How did you know—"

With a steely hand Trocero thrust him aside, and as the men faced each other, Conan saw recognition flare up in Rolok's face. They made a strong contrast: Trocero, tall, pale with some white-hot passion; Rolok, slim, darkly handsome, with the arch of his slim brows above his black eyes. Conan realized that whatever else occurred, it lay between those two men. They were not strangers; Conan could sense like a tangible thing the hate that lay between them.

"Count Trocero!" softly whispered Rolok.

"You remember me, Vrolok!" Only an iron control kept Trocero's voice steady. The other merely stared at him without speaking.

"Years ago," said Trocero more deliberately, "when we delved in the dark mysteries together in Stygia, I saw whither you were drifting. I drew back; I would not descend to the foul depths of forbidden occultism and diabolism to which you sank. And because I would not, you despised me, and you robbed me of the only woman I ever loved; you turned her against me by means of your vile arts, and then you degraded and debauched her, sank her into your own foul slime. I had killed you with my hands then, Vrolok—vampire by nature as well as by name that you are—but your arts protected you from physical vengeance. But you have trapped yourself at last!"

Trocero's voice rose in fierce exultation. All his cultured restraint had been swept away from him, leaving a primitive, elemental man, raging and gloating over a hated foe.

"You sought the destruction of Baron Enri and his wife, because she unwittingly escaped your snare; you—"

Rolok shrugged his shoulders and laughed. "You are mad. I have not seen them for weeks. Why blame me for their family troubles?"

Trocero snarled. "Liar as always. What did you say just now when Conan told you Enri had been shot? 'When did she kill him?' You were expecting to hear that the girl had killed her husband. Your psychic powers had told you that a climax was close at hand. You were nervously awaiting news of the success of your devilish scheme.

"But I did not need a slip of your tongue to recognize your handiwork. I knew as soon as I saw the ring on Evlena Enri's finger; the ring she could not remove; the ancient and accursed ring of a disciple of Thoth-amon, handed down by foul cults of sorcerers, I knew that ring was yours, and I knew by what ghastly rites you came to possess it. And I knew its power. Once she put it on her finger, in her innocence and ignorance, she was in your power. By your black magic you summoned the black elemental spirit, the haunter of the ring, out of the gulfs of Night and the ages. Here in your accursed chamber you performed unspeakable rituals to drive Evlena's soul from her body, and to cause that body to be possessed by that godless sprite from outside the human universe.

"She was too clean and wholesome, her love for her husband too strong, for the fiend to gain complete and permanent possession of her body; only for brief instants could it drive her own spirit into the void and animate her form. But that was enough for your purpose. But you have brought ruin upon yourself by your vengeance!"

Trocero's voice rose to a feline screech.

"What was the price demanded by the fiend you drew from the Pits? Ha, you blench! Vrolok is not the only man to have learned forbidden secrets! After I left Stygia, a broken man, I took up again the study of the black arts, to trap you, you cringing serpent! I explored the ruins of Zembabwie, the lost mountains of inner Hyrkania, and the forgotten jungle islands of the southern seas. I learned what sickened my soul so that I forswore occultism forever, but I learned of the black spirit that deals death by the hand of a beloved one, and is controlled by a master of magic.

"But, Vrolok, you are not an adept! You have not the power to control the fiend you have invoked. And you have sold your soul!"

The vampire tore at his collar as if it were a strangling noose. His face had changed, as if a mask had dropped away; he looked much older.

"You lie!" he panted. "I did not promise him my soul—"

"I do not lie!" Trocero's shriek was shocking in its wild exultation. "I know the price a man must pay for calling forth the nameless shape that roams the gulfs of Darkness. Look! There in the corner behind you! A nameless, sightless thing is laughing—is mocking you! It has fulfilled its bargain, and it has come for you, Vrolok!"

"No! No!" shrieked Vrolok, tearing his limp collar away from his sweating throat. His composure had crumpled, and his demoralization was sickening to see. "I tell you it was not my soul—I promised it a soul, but not my soul—he must take the soul of the girl, or of Baron Enri."

"Fool!" roared Trocero. "Do you think he could take the souls of innocence? That he would not know they were beyond his reach? The girl and the youth he could kill; their souls were not his to take or yours to give. But your black soul is not beyond his reach, and he will have his wage. Look! He is materializing behind you! He is growing out of thin air!"

Was it the hypnosis inspired by Trocero's burning words that caused Conan to shudder and grow cold, to feel an icy chill that was not of earth pervade the room? Was it a trick of light and shadow that seemed to produce the effect of a black anthropomorphic shadow on the wall behind what he once thought was a man? No, by Crom! It grew, it swelled—Vrolok had not turned. He stared at Trocero with eyes starting from his head, hair standing stiffly on his scalp, sweat dripping from his livid face.

Trocero's cry started shudders down his spine.

"Look behind you, fool! I see him! He has come! He is here! His grisly mouth gapes in awful laughter! His misshapen paws reach for you!"

And then at last Vrolok wheeled, with an awful shriek, throwing his arms above his head in a gesture of wild despair. And for one brain-shattering instant he was blotted out by a great black shadow—Trocero grasped Conan's arm and they fled from that accursed chamber, blind with horror.

"Enri's fantastic theory of reincarnation was wild enough," Conan said at last. "But the actual facts were still more incredible. Tell me, Trocero, was that last scene the result of hypnosis? Was it the power of your words that made him seem to see a black horror grow out of the air and rip Vrolok's soul from his living body?"

He shook his head. "No human hypnotism would strike that black-hearted devil dead on the floor. No; there are beings outside the ken of common humanity, foul shapes of transcosmic evil. Such a one it was with which Vrolok dealt."

"But how could it claim his soul?" Conan persisted. "If indeed such a foul bargain had been struck, it had not fulfilled its part, for Baron Enri was not dead, but merely knocked senseless."

"Vrolok did not know it," answered Trocero. "He thought that Enri was dead, and I convinced him that he himself had been trapped, and was doomed. In his demoralization he fell easy prey to the thing he called forth. It, of course, was always watching for a moment of weakness on his part. The powers of Darkness never deal fairly with human beings; he who traffics with them is always cheated in the end."

"It's a mad nightmare," Conan muttered. "But it seems to him, then, that you as much as anything else brought about Vrolok's death."

"It is gratifying to think so," Trocero answered. "Evlena is safe now; and it is a small repayment for what he did to another girl, years ago, and in a far country."

Table of Contents

Foreword

Old Garrad's Heart

The People of the Dark

Out of the Deep

Marchers of Aesgaard

The Dark Man

The Twilight of the Grim Grey God

The Gods of Bal-Sagoth

The Garden of Fear

Two Against Turan

The Hell-Spawn of Kara-Shehr

The Shadow of the Vulture

The Blood of Belshazzar

The House of Arabu

Mistress of Death

Tower of Blood

The Purple Heart of Erlik

The Lost Valley of Iskander

The Shadow of the Beast

Hawks of Khoraja

Swords of the Northern Sea

The Temple Of Abomination

Night of the Wolf

Tigers Of The Sea

The Thunder-Rider

The Vengeance of Amra

The Blood of the Gods

The Slave Princess

The Country of the Knife

Lions of Corinthia

Sons of the White Wolf

The Treasure of Khawarism

Swords of Khawarism

Hawk of the Hills

The Daughter of Erlik Khan

The Haunter of the Ring