Title: The Hour of the Dragon
Author: Robert E. Howard
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Title: The Hour of the Dragon
Author: Robert E. Howard



Chapter 1: O Sleeper, Awake!

THE LONG TAPERS flickered, sending the black shadows wavering along
the walls, and the velvet tapestries rippled. Yet there was no wind in
the chamber. Four men stood about the ebony table on which lay the
green sarcophagus that gleamed like carven jade. In the upraised right
hand of each man a curious black candle burned with a weird greenish
light. Outside was night and a lost wind moaning among the black
trees.

Inside the chamber was tense silence, and the wavering of the shadows,
while four pairs of eyes, burning with intensity, were fixed on the
long green case across which cryptic hieroglyphics writhed, as if lent
life and movement by the unsteady light. The man at the foot of the
sarcophagus leaned over it and moved his candle as if he were writing
with a pen, inscribing a mystic symbol in the air. Then he set down
the candle in its black gold stick at the foot of the case, and,
mumbling some formula unintelligible to his companions, he thrust a
broad white hand into his fur-trimmed robe. When he brought it forth
again it was as if he cupped in his palm a ball of living fire.

The other three drew in their breath sharply, and the dark, powerful
man who stood at the head of the sarcophagus whispered: "The Heart of
Ahriman!" The other lifted a quick hand for silence. Somewhere a dog
began howling dolefully, and a stealthy step padded outside the barred
and bolted door. But none looked aside from the mummy-case over which
the man in the ermine-trimmed robe was now moving the great flaming
jewel while he muttered an incantation that was old when Atlantis
sank. The glare of the gem dazzled their eyes, so that they could not
be sure of what they saw; but with a splintering crash, the carven lid
of the sarcophagus burst outward as if from some irresistible pressure
applied from within, and the four men, bending eagerly forward, saw
the occupant--a huddled, withered, wizened shape, with dried brown
limbs like dead wood showing through moldering bandages.

"Bring that thing back?" muttered the small dark man who stood on the
right, with a short, sardonic laugh. "It is ready to crumble at a
touch. We are fools--"

"Shhh!" It was an urgent hiss of command from the large man who held
the jewel. Perspiration stood upon his broad white forehead and his
eyes were dilated. He leaned forward, and, without touching the thing
with his hand, laid on the breast of the mummy the blazing jewel. Then
he drew back and watched with fierce intensity, his lips moving in
soundless invocation.

It was as if a globe of living fire nickered and burned on the dead,
withered bosom. And breath sucked in, hissing, through the clenched
teeth of the watchers. For as they watched, an awful transmutation
became apparent. The withered shape in the sarcophagus was expanding,
was growing, lengthening. The bandages burst and fell into brown dust.
The shriveled limbs swelled, straightened. Their dusky hue began to
fade.

"By Mitra!" whispered the tall, yellow-haired man on the left. "He was
not a Stygian. That part at least was true."

Again a trembling finger warned for silence. The hound outside was no
longer howling. He whimpered, as with an evil dream, and then that
sound, too, died away in silence, in which the yellow-haired man
plainly heard the straining of the heavy door, as if something outside
pushed powerfully upon it. He half turned, his hand at his sword, but
the man in the ermine robe hissed an urgent warning: "Stay! Do not
break the chain! And on your life do not go to the door!"

The yellow-haired man shrugged and turned back, and then he stopped
short, staring. In the jade sarcophagus lay a living man: a tall,
lusty man, naked, white of skin, and dark of hair and beard. He lay
motionless, his eyes wide open, and blank and unknowing as a newborn
babe's. On his breast the great jewel smoldered and sparkled.

The man in ermine reeled as if from some let-down of extreme tension.

"Ishtar!" he gasped. "It is Xaltotun!--and he lives! Valerius!
Tarascus! Amalric! Do you see? Do you see? You doubted me--but I have
not failed! We have been close to the open gates of hell this night,
and the shapes of darkness have gathered close about us---aye, they
followed him to the very door--but we have brought the great magician
back to life."

"And damned our souls to purgatories everlasting, I doubt not,"
muttered the small, dark man, Tarascus.

The yellow-haired man, Valerius, laughed harshly.

"What purgatory can be worse than life itself? So we are all damned
together from birth. Besides, who would not sell his miserable soul
for a throne?"

"There is no intelligence in his stare, Orastes," said the large man.

"He has long been dead," answered Orastes. "He is as one newly
awakened. His mind is empty after the long sleep--nay, he was dead,
not sleeping. We brought his spirit back over the voids and gulfs of
night and oblivion. I will speak to him."

He bent over the foot of the sarcophagus, and fixing his gaze on the
wide dark eyes of the man within, he said, slowly: "Awake, Xaltotun!"

The lips of the man moved mechanically. "Xaltotun!" he repeated in a
groping whisper.

"You are Xaltotun!" exclaimed Orastes, like a hypnotist driving home
his suggestions. "You are Xaltotun of Python, in Acheron."

A dim flame flickered in the dark eyes.

"I was Xaltotun," he whispered. "I am dead."

"You are Xaltotun!" cried Orastes. "You are not dead! You live!"

"I am Xaltotun," came the eery whisper. "But I am dead. In my house in
Khemi, in Stygia, there I died."

"And the priests who poisoned you mummified your body with their dark
arts, keeping all your organs intact!" exclaimed Orastes. "But now you
live again! The Heart of Ahriman has restored your life, drawn your
spirit back from space and eternity."

"The Heart of Ahriman!" The flame of remembrance grew stronger. "The
barbarians stole it from me!"

"He remembers," muttered Orastes. "Lift him from the case."

The others obeyed hesitantly, as if reluctant to touch the man they
had re-created, and they seemed not easier in their minds when they
felt firm muscular flesh, vibrant with blood and life, beneath their
fingers. But they lifted him upon the table, and Orastes clothed him
in a curious dark velvet robe, splashed with gold stars and crescent
moons, and fastened a cloth-of-gold fillet about his temples,
confining the black wavy locks that fell to his shoulders. He let them
do as they would, saying nothing, not even when they set him in a
carven thronelike chair with a high ebony back and wide silver arms,
and feet like golden claws. He sat there motionless, and slowly
intelligence grew in his dark eyes and made them deep and strange and
luminous. It was as if long-sunken witch-lights floated slowly up
through midnight pools of darkness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why have you given me life?" demanded Xaltotun. "What do you require
of me?"

The man was now fully alive and awake, his keen eyes reflecting the
working of an unclouded brain. There was no hesitation or uncertainty
in his manner. He came directly to the point, as one who knows that no
man gives something for nothing. Orastes met him with equal candor.

"We have opened the doors of hell this night to free your soul and
return it to your body because we need your aid. We wish to place
Tarascus on the throne of Nemedia, and to win for Valerius the crown
of Aquilonia. With your necromancy you can aid us."

Xaltotun's mind was devious and full of unexpected slants.

"You must be deep in the arts yourself, Orastes, to have been able to
restore my life. How is it that a priest of Mitra knows of the Heart
of Ahriman, and the incantations of Skelos?"

"I am no longer a priest of Mitra," answered Orastes. "I was cast
forth from my order because of my delving in black magic. But for
Amalric there I might have been burned as a magician.

"But that left me free to pursue my studies. I journeyed in Zamora, in
Vendhya, in Stygia, and among the haunted jungles of Khitai. I read
the iron-bound books of Skelos, and talked with unseen creatures in
deep wells, and faceless shapes in black reeking jungles. I obtained a
glimpse of your sarcophagus in the demon-haunted crypts below the
black giant-walled temple of Set in the hinterlands of Stygia, and I
learned of the arts that would bring back life to your shriveled
corpse. From moldering manuscripts I learned of the Heart of Ahriman.
Then for a year I sought its hiding-place, and at last I found it."

"Then why trouble to bring me back to life?" demanded Xaltotun, with
his piercing gaze fixed on the priests. "Why did you not employ the
Heart to further your own power?"

"Because no man today knows the secrets of the Heart," answered
Orastes. "Not even in legends live the arts by which to loose its full
powers. I knew it could restore life; of its deeper secrets I am
ignorant. I merely used it to bring you back to life. It is the use of
your knowledge we seek. As for the Heart, you alone know its awful
secrets."

Xaltotun shook his head, staring broodingly into the flaming depths.

"My necromantic knowledge is greater than the sum of all the knowledge
of other men," he said; "yet I do not know the full power of the
jewel. I did not invoke it in the old days; I guarded it lest it be
used against me. At last it was stolen, and in the hands of a
feathered shaman of the barbarians it defeated all my mighty sorcery.
Then it vanished, and I was poisoned by the jealous priests of Stygia
before I could learn where it was hidden."

"It was hidden in a cavern below the temple of Mitra, in Tarantia,"
said Orastes. "By devious ways I discovered this, after I had located
your remains in Set's subterranean temple in Stygia.

"Zamorian thieves, partly protected by spells I learned from sources
better left unmentioned, stole your mummy-case from under the very
talons of those which guarded it in the dark, and by camel-caravan and
galley and ox-wagon it came at last to this city.

"Those same thieves--or rather those of them who still lived after
their frightful quest--stole the Heart of Ahriman from its haunted
cavern below the temple of Mitra, and all the skill of men and the
spells of sorcerers nearly failed. One man of them lived long enough
to reach me and give the jewel into my hands, before he died slavering
and gibbering of what he had seen in that accursed crypt. The thieves
of Zamora are the most faithful of men to their trust. Even with my
conjurements, none but them could have stolen the Heart from where it
has lain in demon-guarded darkness since the fall of Acheron, three
thousand years ago."

Xaltotun lifted his lionlike head and stared far off into space, as
if plumbing the lost centuries.

"Three thousand years!" he muttered. "Set! Tell me what has chanced in
the world."

"The barbarians who overthrew Acheron set up new kingdoms," quoted
Orastes. "Where the empire had stretched now rose realms called
Aquilonia, and Nemedia, and Argos, from the tribes that founded them.
The older kingdoms of Ophir, Corinthia and western Koth, which had
been subject to the kings of Acheron, regained their independence with
the fall of the empire."

"And what of the people of Acheron?" demanded Orastes. "When I fled
into Stygia, Python was in ruins, and all the great, purple-towered
cities of Acheron fouled with blood and trampled by the sandals of the
barbarians."

"In the hills small groups of folk still boast descent from Acheron,"
answered Orastes. "For the rest, the tide of my barbarian ancestors
rolled over them and wiped them out. They--my ancestors--had suffered
much from the kings of Acheron."

A grim and terrible smile curled the Pythonian's lips.

"Aye! Many a barbarian, both man and woman, died screaming on the
altar under this hand. I have seen their heads piled to make a pyramid
in the great square in Python when the kings returned from the west
with their spoils and naked captives."

"Aye. And when the day of reckoning came, the sword was not spared. So
Acheron ceased to be, and purple-towered Python became a memory of
forgotten days. But the younger kingdoms rose on the imperial ruins
and waxed great. And now we have brought you back to aid us to rule
these kingdoms, which, if less strange and wonderful than Acheron of
old, are yet rich and powerful, well worth fighting for. Look!"
Orastes unrolled before the stranger a map drawn cunningly on vellum.

Xaltotun regarded it, and then shook his head, baffled.

"The very outlines of the land are changed. It is like some familiar
thing seen in a dream, fantastically distorted."

"Howbeit," answered Orastes, tracing with his forefinger, "here is
Belverus, the capital of Nemedia, in which we now are. Here run the
boundaries of the land of Nemedia. To the south and southeast are
Ophir and Corinthia, to the east Brythunia, to the west Aquilonia."

"It is the map of a world I do not know," said Xaltotun softly, but
Orastes did not miss the lurid fire of hate that flickered in his dark
eyes.

"It is a map you shall help us change," answered Orastes. "It is our
desire first to set Tarascus on the throne of Nemedia. We wish to
accomplish this without strife, and in such a way that no suspicion
will rest on Tarascus. We do not wish the land to be torn by civil
wars, but to reserve all our power for the conquest of Aquilonia.

"Should King Nimed and his sons die naturally, in a plague for
instance, Tarascus would mount the throne as the next heir, peacefully
and unopposed."

Xaltotun nodded, without replying, and Orastes continued.

"The other task will be more difficult. We cannot set Valerius on the
Aquilonian throne without a war, and that kingdom is a formidable foe.
Its people are a hardy, warlike race, toughened by continual wars
with the Picts, Zingarians and Cimmerians. For five hundred years
Aquilonia and Nemedia have intermittently waged war, and the ultimate
advantage has always lain with the Aquilonians.

"Their present king is the most renowned warrior among the western
nations. He is an outlander, an adventurer who seized the crown by
force during a time of civil strife, strangling King Namedides with
his own hands, upon the very throne. His name is Conan, and no man can
stand before him in battle.

"Valerius is now the rightful heir of the throne. He had been driven
into exile by his royal kinsman, Namedides, and has been away from his
native realm for years, but he is of the blood of the old dynasty, and
many of the barons would secretly hail the overthrow of Conan, who is
a nobody without royal or even noble blood. But the common people are
loyal to him, and the nobility of the outlying provinces. Yet if his
forces were overthrown in the battle that must first take place, and
Conan himself slain, I think it would not be difficult to put Valerius
on the throne. Indeed, with Conan slain, the only center of the
government would be gone. He is not part of a dynasty, but only a lone
adventurer."

"I wish that I might see this king," mused Xaltotun, glancing toward a
silvery mirror which formed one of the panels of the wall. This mirror
cast no reflection, but Xaltotun's expression showed that he
understood its purpose, and Orastes nodded with the pride a good
craftsman takes in the recognition of his accomplishments by a master
of his craft.

"I will try to show him to you," he said. And seating himself before
the mirror, he gazed hypnotically into its depths, where presently a
dim shadow began to take shape.

It was uncanny, but those watching knew it was no more than the
reflected image of Orastes' thought, embodied in that mirror as a
wizard's thoughts are embodied in a magic crystal. It floated hazily,
then leaped into startling clarity--a tall man, mightily shouldered and
deep of chest, with a massive corded neck and heavily muscled limbs.
He was clad in silk and velvet, with the royal lions of Aquilonia
worked in gold upon his rich jupon, and the crown of Aquilonia shone
on his square-cut black mane; but the great sword at his side seemed
more natural to him than the regal accouterments. His brow was low and
broad, his eyes a volcanic blue that smoldered as if with some inner
fire. His dark, scarred, almost sinister face was that of a fighting-
man, and his velvet garments could not conceal the hard, dangerous
lines of his limbs.

"That man is no Hyborian!" exclaimed Xaltotun.

"No; he is a Cimmerian, one of those wild tribesmen who dwell in the
gray hills of the north."

"I fought his ancestors of old," muttered Xaltotun. "Not even the
kings of Acheron could conquer them."

"They still remain a terror to the nations of the south," answered
Orastes. "He is a true son of that savage race, and has proved
himself, thus far, unconquerable."

Xaltotun did not reply; he sat staring down at the pool of living fire
that shimmered in his hand. Outside, the hound howled again, long and
shudderingly.

Chapter 2: The Black Wind Blows

THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON had birth in war and pestilence and unrest. The
black plague stalked through the streets of Belverus, striking down
the merchant in his stall, the serf in his kennel, the knight at his
banquet board. Before it the arts of the leeches were helpless. Men
said it had been sent from Hell as punishment for the sins of pride
and lust. It was swift and deadly as the stroke of an adder. The
victim's body turned purple and then black, and within a few minutes
he sank down dying, and the stench of his own putrefaction was in his
nostrils even before death wrenched his soul from his rotting body. A
hot, roaring wind blew incessantly from the south, and the crops
withered in the fields, the cattle sank and died in their tracks.

Men cried out on Mitra, and muttered against the king; for somehow,
throughout the kingdom, the word was whispered that the king was
secretly addicted to loathsome practises and foul debauches in the
seclusion of his nighted palace. And then in that palace death stalked
grinning on feet about which swirled the monstrous vapors of the
plague. In one night the king died with his three sons, and the drums
that thundered their dirge drowned the grim and ominous bells that
rang from the carts that lumbered through the streets gathering up the
rotting dead.

That night, just before dawn, the hot wind that had blown for weeks
ceased to rustle evilly through the silken window curtains. Out of the
north rose a great wind that roared among the towers, and there was
cataclysmic thunder, and blinding sheets of lightning, and driving
rain. But the dawn shone clean and green and clear; the scorched
ground veiled itself in grass, the thirsty crops sprang up anew, and
the plague was gone--its miasma swept clean out of the land by the
mighty wind.

Men said the gods were satisfied because the evil king and his spawn
were slain, and when his young brother Tarascus was crowned in the
great coronation hall, the populace cheered until the towers rocked,
acclaiming the monarch on whom the gods smiled.

Such a wave of enthusiasm and rejoicing as swept the land is
frequently the signal for a war of conquest. So no one was surprized
when it was announced that King Tarascus had declared the truce made
by the late king with their western neighbors void, and was gathering
his hosts to invade Aquilonia. His reason was candid; his motives,
loudly proclaimed, gilded his actions with something of the glamour of
a crusade. He espoused the cause of Valerius, "rightful heir to the
throne"; he came, he proclaimed, not as an enemy of Aquilonia, but as
a friend, to free the people from the tyranny of a usurper and a
foreigner.

If there were cynical smiles in certain quarters, and whispers
concerning the king's good friend Amalric, whose vast personal wealth
seemed to be flowing into the rather depleted royal treasury, they
were unheeded in the general wave of fervor and zeal of Tarascus'
popularity. If any shrewd individuals suspected that Amalric was the
real ruler of Nemedia, behind the scenes, they were careful not to
voice such heresy. And the war went forward with enthusiasm.

The king and his allies moved westward at the head of fifty thousand
men--knights in shining armor with their pennons streaming above their
helmets, pikemen in steel caps and brigandines, crossbowmen in
leather jerkins. They crossed the border, took a frontier castle and
burned three mountain villages, and then, in the valley of the Valkia,
ten miles west of the boundary line, they met the hosts of Conan, king
of Aquilonia--forty-five thousand knights, archers and men-at-arms, the
flower of Aquilonian strength and chivalry. Only the knights of
Poitain, under Prospero, had not yet arrived, for they had far to ride
up from the southwestern corner of the kingdom. Tarascus had struck
without warning. His invasion had come on the heels of his
proclamation, without formal declaration of war.

The two hosts confronted each other across a wide, shallow valley,
with rugged cliffs, and a shallow stream winding through masses of
reeds and willows down the middle of the vale. The camp followers of
both hosts came down to this stream for water, and shouted insults and
hurled stones across at one another. The last glints of the sun shone
on the golden banner of Nemedia with the scarlet dragon, unfurled in
the breeze above the pavilion of King Tarascus on an eminence near the
eastern cliffs. But the shadow of the western cliffs fell like a vast
purple pall across the tents and the army of Aquilonia, and upon the
black banner with its golden lion that floated above King Conan's
pavilion.

All night the fires flared the length of the valley, and the wind
brought the call of trumpets, the clangor of arms, and the sharp
challenges of the sentries who paced their horses along either edge of
the willow-grown stream.

It was in the darkness before dawn that King Conan stirred on his
couch, which was no more than a pile of silks and furs thrown on a
dais, and awakened. He started up, crying out sharply and clutching at
his sword. Pallantides, his commander, rushing in at the cry, saw his
king sitting upright, his hand on his hilt, and perspiration dripping
from his strangely pale face.

"Your Majesty!" exclaimed Pallantides. "Is aught amiss?"

"What of the camp?" demanded Conan. "Are the guards out?"

"Five hundred horsemen patrol the stream, Your Majesty," answered the
general. "The Nemedians have not offered to move against us in the
night. They wait for dawn, even as we."

"By Crom," muttered Conan. "I awoke with a feeling that doom was
creeping on me in the night."

He stared up at the great golden lamp which shed a soft glow over the
velvet hangings and carpets of the great tent. They were alone; not
even a slave or a page slept on the carpeted floor; but Conan's eyes
blazed as they were wont to blaze in the teeth of great peril, and the
sword quivered in his hand. Pallantides watched him uneasily. Conan
seemed to be listening.

"Listen!" hissed the king. "Did you hear it? A furtive step!"

"Seven knights guard your tent, Your Majesty," said Pallantides. "None
could approach it unchallenged."

"Not outside," growled Conan. "It seemed to sound inside the tent."

Pallantides cast a swift, startled look around. The velvet hangings
merged with shadows in the corners, but if there had been anyone in the
pavilion besides themselves, the general would have seen him. Again he
shook his head.

"There is no one here, sire. You sleep in the midst of your host."

"I have seen death strike a king in the midst of thousands," muttered
Conan. "Something that walks on invisible feet and is not seen--"

"Perhaps you were dreaming, Your Majesty," said Pallantides, somewhat
perturbed.

"So I was," grunted Conan. "A devilish dream it was, too. I trod again
all the long, weary roads I traveled on my way to the kingship."

He fell silent, and Pallantides stared at him unspeaking. The. king
was an enigma to the general, as to most of his civilized subjects.
Pallantides knew that Conan had walked many strange roads in his wild,
eventful life, and had been many things before a twist of Fate set him
on the throne of Aquilonia.

"I saw again in the battlefield whereon I was born," said Conan,
resting his chin moodily on a massive fist. "I saw myself in a
pantherskin loin-clout, throwing my spear at the mountain beasts.
I was a mercenary swordsman again, a hetman of the kozaki who dwell
along the Zaporoska River, a corsair looting the coasts of Kush, a
pirate of the Barachan Isles, a chief of the Himelian hillmen. All
these things I've been, and of all these things I dreamed; all the
shapes that have been I passed like an endless procession, and their
feet beat out a dirge in the sounding dust.

"But throughout my dreams moved strange, veiled figures and ghostly
shadows, and a far-away voice mocked me. And toward the last I seemed
to see myself lying on this dais in my tent, and a shape bent over me,
robed and hooded. I lay unable to move, and then the hood fell away
and a moldering skull grinned down at me. Then it was that I awoke."

"This is an evil dream, Your Majesty," said Pallantides, suppressing a
shudder. "But no more."

Conan shook his head, more in doubt than in denial. He came of a
barbaric race, and the superstitions and instincts of his heritage
lurked close beneath the surface of his consciousness.

"I've dreamed many evil dreams," he said, "and most of them were
meaningless. But by Crom, this was not like most dreams! I wish this
battle were fought and won, for I've had a grisly premonition ever
since King Nimed died in the black plague. Why did it cease when he
died?"

"Men say he sinned--"

"Men are fools, as always," grunted Conan. "If the plague struck all
who sinned, then by Crom there wouldn't be enough left to count the
living! Why should the gods--who the priests tell me are just--slay five
hundred peasants and merchants and nobles before they slew the king,
if the whole pestilence were aimed at him? Were the gods smiting
blindly, like swordsmen in a fog? By Mitra, if I aimed my strokes no
straighter, Aquilonia would have had a new king long ago.

"No! The black plague's no common pestilence. It lurks in Stygian
tombs, and is called forth into being only by wizards. I was a
swordsman in Prince Almuric's army that invaded Stygia, and of his
thirty thousand, fifteen thousand perished by Stygian arrows, and the
rest by the black plague that rolled on us like a wind out of the
south. I was the only man who lived."

"Yet only five hundred died in Nemedia," argued Pallantides.

"Whoever called it into being knew how to cut it short at will,"
answered Conan. "So I know there was something planned and diabolical
about it. Someone called it forth, someone banished it when the work
was completed--when Tarascus was safe on the throne and being hailed as
the deliverer of the people from the wrath of the gods. By Crom, I
sense a black, subtle brain behind all this. What of this stranger who
men say gives counsel to Tarascus?"

"He wears a veil," answered Pallantides; "they say he is a foreigner;
a stranger from Stygia."

"A stranger from Stygia!" repeated Conan scowling. "A stranger from
Hell, more like!--Ha! What is that?"

"The trumpets of the Nemedians!" exclaimed Pallantides. "And hark, how
our own blare upon their heels! Dawn is breaking, and the captains are
marshaling the hosts for the onset! Mitra be with them, for many will
not see the sun go down behind the crags."

"Send my squires to me!" exclaimed Conan, rising with alacrity and
casting off his velvet night-garment; he seemed to have forgotten his
forebodings at the prospect of action. "Go to the captains and see
that all is in readiness. I will be with you as soon as I don my
armor."

Many of Conan's ways were inexplicable to the civilized people he
ruled, and one of them was his insistence on sleeping alone in his
chamber or tent. Pallantides hastened from the pavilion, clanking in
the armor he had donned at midnight after a few hours' sleep. He cast
a swift glance over the camp, which was beginning to swarm with
activity, mail clinking and men moving about dimly in the uncertain
light, among the long lines of tents. Stars still glimmered palely in
the western sky, but long pink streamers stretched along the eastern
horizon, and against them the dragon banner of Nemedia flung out its
billowing silken folds.

Pallantides turned toward a smaller tent near by, where slept the
royal squires. These were tumbling out already, roused by the
trumpets. And as Pallantides called to them to hasten, he was frozen
speechless by a deep fierce shout and the impact of a heavy blow
inside the king's tent, followed by a heart-stopping crash of a
falling body. There sounded a low laugh that turned the general's
blood to ice.

Echoing the cry, Pallantides wheeled and rushed back into the
pavilion. He cried out again as he saw Conan's powerful frame
stretched out on the carpet. The king's great two-handed sword lay
near his hand, and a shattered tent-pole seemed to show where his
sword had fallen. Pallantides' sword was out, and he glared about the
tent, but nothing met his gaze. Save for the king and himself it was
empty, as it had been when he left it.

"Your Majesty!" Pallantides threw himself on his knees beside the
fallen giant.

Conan's eyes were open; they blazed up at him with full intelligence
and recognition. His lips writhed, but no sound came forth. He seemed
unable to move.

Voices sounded without. Pallantides rose swiftly and stepped to the
door. The royal squires and one of the knights who guarded the tent
stood there. "We heard a sound within," said the knight
apologetically. "Is all well with the king?"

Pallantides regarded him searchingly.

"None has entered or left the pavilion this night?"

"None save yourself, my lord," answered the knight, and Pallantides
could not doubt his honesty.

"The king stumbled and dropped his sword," said Pallantides briefly.
"Return to your post."

As the knight turned away, the general covertly motioned to the five
royal squires, and when they had followed him in, he drew the flap
closely. They turned pale at the sight of the king stretched upon the
carpet, but Pallantides' quick gesture checked their exclamations.

The general bent over him again, and again Conan made an effort to
speak. The veins in his temples and the cords in his neck swelled with
his efforts, and he lifted his head clear off the ground. Voice came
at last, mumbling and half intelligible.

"The thing--the thing in the corner!"

Pallantides lifted his head and looked fearfully about him. He saw the
pale faces of the squires in the lamplight, the velvet shadows that
lurked along the walls of the pavilion. That was all.

"There is nothing here, Your Majesty," he said.

"It was there, in the corner," muttered the king, tossing his lion-
maned head from side to side in his efforts to rise. "A man--at least
he looked like a man--wrapped in rags like a mummy's bandages, with a
moldering cloak drawn about him, and a hood. All I could see was his
eyes, as he crouched there in the shadows. I thought he was a shadow
himself, until I saw his eyes. They were like black jewels.

"I made at him and swung my sword, but I missed him clean--how, Crom
knows--and splintered that pole instead. He caught my wrist as I
staggered off balance, and his fingers burned like hot iron. All the
strength went out of me, and the floor rose and struck me like a club.
Then he was gone, and I was down, and--curse him!--I can't move! I'm
paralyzed!"

Pallantides lifted the giant's hand, and his flesh crawled. On the
king's wrist showed the blue marks of long, lean fingers. What hand
could grip so hard as to leave its print on that thick wrist?
Pallantides remembered that low laugh he had heard as he rushed into
the tent, and cold perspiration beaded his skin. It had not been Conan
who laughed.

"This is a thing diabolical!" whispered a trembling squire. "Men say
the children of darkness war for Tarascus!"

"Be silent!" ordered Pallantides sternly.

Outside, the dawn was dimming the stars. A light wind sprang up from
the peaks, and brought the fanfare of a thousand trumpets. At the
sound a convulsive shudder ran through the king's mighty form. Again
the veins in his temples knotted as he strove to break the invisible
shackles which crushed him down.

"Put my harness on me and tie me into my saddle," he whispered. "I'll
lead the charge yet!"

Pallantides shook his head, and a squire plucked his skirt.

"My lord, we are lost if the host learns the king has been smitten!
Only he could have led us to victory this day."

"Help me lift him on the dais," answered the general.

They obeyed, and laid the helpless giant on the furs, and spread a
silken cloak over him. Pallantides turned to the five squires and
searched their pale faces long before he spoke.

"Our lips must be sealed for ever as to what happens in this tent," he
said at last. "The kingdom of Aquilonia depends upon it. One of you go
and fetch me the officer Valannus, who is a captain of the Pellian
spearmen."

The squire indicated bowed and hastened from the tent, and Pallantides
stood staring down at the stricken king, while outside trumpets
blared, drums thundered, and the roar of the multitudes rose in the
growing dawn. Presently the squire returned with the officer
Pallantides had named--a tall man, broad and powerful, built much like
the king. Like him, also, he had thick black hair. But his eyes were
gray and he did not resemble Conan in his features.

"The king is stricken by a strange malady," said Pallantides briefly.
"A great honor is yours; you are to wear his armor and ride at the
head of the host today. None must know that it is not the king who
rides."

"It is an honor for which a man might gladly give up his life,"
stammered the captain, overcome by the suggestion. "Mitra grant that I
do not fail of this mighty trust!"

And while the fallen king stared with burning eyes that reflected the
bitter rage and humiliation that ate his heart, the squires stripped
Valannus of mail shirt, burganet and leg-pieces, and clad him in
Conan's armor of black plate mail, with the vizored salade, and the
dark plumes nodding over the wivern crest. Over all they put the
silken surcoat with the royal lion worked in gold upon the breast, and
they girt him with a broad gold-buckled belt which supported a jewel-
hilted broadsword in a cloth-of-gold scabbard. While they worked,
trumpets clamored outside, arms clanged, and across the river rose a
deep-throated roar as squadron after squadron swung into place.

Full-armed, Vallanus dropped to his knee and bent his plumes before
the figure that lay on the dais.

"Lord king, Mitra grant that I do not dishonor the harness I wear this
day!"

"Bring me Tarascus's head and I'll make you a baron!" In the stress of
his anguish Conan's veneer of civilization had fallen from him. His
eyes flamed, he ground his teeth in fury and blood-lust, as barbaric
as any tribesmen in the Cimmerian hills.

Chapter 3: The Cliffs Reel

THE AQUILONIAN HOST was drawn up, long serried lines of pikemen and
horsemen in gleaming steel, when a giant figure in black armor emerged
from the royal pavilion, and as he swung up into the saddle of the
black stallion held by four squires, a roar that shook the mountains
went up from the host. They shook their blades and thundered forth
their acclaim of their warrior king--knights in gold-chased armor,
pikemen in mail coats and basinets, archers in their leather jerkins,
with their longbows in their left hands.

The host on the opposite side of the valley was in motion, trotting
down the long gentle slope toward the river; their steel shone through
the mists of morning that swirled about their horses' feet.

The Aquilonian host moved leisurely to meet them. The measured tramp
of the armored horses made the ground tremble. Banners flung out long
silken folds in the morning wind; lances swayed like a bristling
forest, dipped and sank, their pennons fluttering about them.

Ten men-at-arms, grim, taciturn veterans who could hold their tongues,
guarded the royal pavilion. One squire stood in the tent, peering out
through a slit in the doorway. But for the handful in the secret, no
one else in the vast host knew that it was not Conan who rode on the
great stallion at the head of the army.

The Aquilonian host had assumed the customary formation:

The strongest part was the center, composed entirely of heavily armed
knights; the wings were made up of smaller bodies of horsemen, mounted
men-at-arms, mostly, supported by pikemen and archers. The latter were
Bossonians from the western marches, strongly built men of medium
stature, in leathern jackets and iron head-pieces.

The Nemedian army came on in similar formation and the two hosts moved
toward the river, the wings, in advance of the centers. In the center
of the Aquilonian host the great lion banner streamed its billowing
black folds over the steel-clad figure on the black stallion.

But on his dais in the royal pavilion Conan groaned in anguish of
spirit, and cursed with strange heathen oaths.

"The hosts move together," quoth the squire, watching from the door.
"Hear the trumpets peal! Ha! The rising sun strikes fire from lance 
heads and helmets until I am dazzled. It turns the river crimson--aye,
it will be truly crimson before this day is done!

"The foe have reached the river. Now arrows fly between the hosts like
stinging clouds that hide the sun. Ha! Well loosed, bowman! The
Bossonians have the better of it! Hark to them shout!"

Faintly in the ears of the king, above the din of trumpets and
clanging steel, came the deep fierce shout of the Bossonians as they
drew and loosed in perfect unison.

"Their archers seek to hold ours in play while their knights ride into
the river," said the squire. "The banks are not steep; they slope to
the water's edge. The knights come on, they crash through the willows.
By Mitra, the clothyard shafts find every crevice of their harness!
Horses and men go down, struggling and thrashing in the water. It is
not deep, nor is the current swift, but men are drowning there,
dragged under by their armor, and trampled by the frantic horses. Now
the knights of Aquilonia advance. They ride into the water and engage
the knights of Nemedia. The water swirls about their horses' bellies
and the clang of sword against sword is deafening."

"Crom!" burst in agony from Conan's lip. Life was coursing sluggishly
back into his veins, but still he could not lift his mighty frame from
the dais.

"The wings close in," said the squire. "Pikemen and swordsmen fight
hand to hand in the stream, and behind them the bowmen ply their
shafts.

"By Mitra, the Nemedian arbalesters are sorely harried, and the
Bossonians arch their arrows to drop amid the rear ranks. Their center
gains not a foot, and their wings are pushed back up from the stream
again."

"Crom, Ymir, and Mitra!" raged Conan. "Gods and devils, could I but
reach the fighting, if but to die at the first blow!"

Outside through the long hot day the battle stormed and thundered. The
valley shook to charge and countercharge, to the whistling of shafts,
and the crash of rending shields and splintering lances. But the hosts
of Aquilonia held fast. Once they were forced back from the bank, but
a countercharge, with the black banner flowing over the black
stallion, regained the lost ground. And like an iron rampart they held
the right bank of the stream, and at last the squire gave Conan the
news that the Nemedians were falling back from the river.

"Their wings are in confusion!" he cried. "Their knights reel back
from the sword play. But what is this? Your banner is in motion--the
center sweeps into the stream! By Mitra, Valannus is leading the host
across the river!"

"Fool!" groaned Conan. "It may be a trick. He should hold his
position; by dawn Prospero will be here with the Poitanian levies."

"The knights ride into a hail of arrows!" cried the squire. "But they
do not falter! They sweep on--they have crossed! They charge up the
slope! Pallantides has hurled the wings across the river to their
support! It is all he can do. The lion banner dips and staggers above
the melee.

"The knights of Nemedia make a stand. They are broken! They fall back!
Their left wing is in full flight, and our pikemen cut them down as
they run! I see Valannus, riding and smiting like a madman. He is
carried beyond himself by the fighting-lust. Men no longer look to
Pallantides. They follow Valannus, deeming him Conan, as he rides with
closed vizor.

"But look! There is method in his madness! He swings wide of the
Nemedian front, with five thousand knights, the pick of the army. The
main host of the Nemedians is in confusion--and look! Their flank is
protected by the cliffs, but there is a defile left unguarded! It is
like a great cleft in the wall that opens again behind the Nemedian
lines. By Mitra, Valannus sees and seizes the opportunity! He has
driven their wing before him, and he leads his knights toward that
defile. They swing wide of the main battle; they cut through a line of
spearmen, they charge into the defile!"

"An ambush!" cried Conan, striving to struggle upright.

"No!" shouted the squire exultantly. "The whole Nemedian host is in
full sight! They have forgotten the defile! They never expected to be
pushed back that far. Oh, fool, fool, Tarascus, to make such a
blunder! Ah, I see lances and pennons pouring from the farther mouth
of the defile, beyond the Nemedian lines. They will smite those ranks
from the rear and crumple them. Mitra, what is this?"

He staggered as the walls of the tent swayed drunkenly. Afar over the
thunder of the fight rose a deep bellowing roar, indescribably
ominous.

"The cliffs reel!" shrieked the squire. "Ah, gods, what is this? The
river foams out of its channel, and the peaks are crumbling!"

"The ground shakes and horses and riders in armor are overthrown! The
cliffs! The cliffs are falling!"

With his words there came a grinding rumble and a thunderous
concussion, and the ground trembled. Over the roar of the battle
sounded screams of mad terror.

"The cliffs have crumbled!" cried the livid squire. "They have
thundered down into the defile and crushed every living creature in
it! I saw the lion banner wave an instant amid the dust and falling
stones, and then it vanished! Ha, the Nemedians shout with triumph!
Well may they shout, for the fall of the cliffs has wiped out five
thousand of our bravest knights--hark!"

To Conan's ears came a vast torrent of sound, rising and rising in
frenzy: "The king is dead! The king is dead! Flee! Flee! The king is
dead!"

"Liars!" panted Conan. "Dogs! Knaves! Cowards! Oh, Crom, if I could
but stand--but crawl to the river with my sword in my teeth! How, boy,
do they flee?"

"Aye!" sobbed the squire. "They spur for the river; they are broken,
hurled on like spume before a storm. I see Pallantides striving to
stem the torrent--he is down, and the horses trample him! They rush
into the river, knights, bowmen, pikemen, all mixed and mingled in one
mad torrent of destruction. The Nemedians are on their heels, cutting
them down like corn."

"But they will make a stand on this side of the river!" cried the
king. With an effort that brought the sweat dripping from his temples,
he heaved himself up on his elbows.

"Nay!" cried the squire. "They cannot! They are broken! Routed! Oh
gods, that I should live to see this day!"

Then he remembered his duty and shouted to the men-at-arms who stood
stolidly watching the flight of their comrades. "Get a horse, swiftly,
and help me lift the king upon it. We dare not bide here."

But before they could do his bidding, the first drift of the storm was
upon them. Knights and spearmen and archers fled among the tents,
stumbling over ropes and baggage, and mingled with them were Nemedian
riders, who smote right and left at all alien figures. Tent ropes were
cut, fire sprang up in a hundred places, and the plundering had
already begun. The grim guardsmen about Conan's tent died where they
stood, smiting and thrusting, and over their mangled corpses beat the
hoofs of the conquerors.

But the squire had drawn the flap close, and in the confused madness
of the slaughter none realized that the pavilion held an occupant. So
the flight and the pursuit swept past, and roared away up the valley,
and the squire looked out presently to see a cluster of men
approaching the royal tent with evident purpose.

"Here comes the king of Nemedia with four companions and his squire,"
quoth he. "He will accept your surrender, my fair lord--"

"Surrender the devil's heart!" gritted the king.

He had forced himself up to a sitting posture. He swung his legs
painfully off the dais, and staggered upright, reeling drunkenly. The
squire ran to assist him, but Conan pushed him away.

"Give me that bow!" he gritted, indicating a longbow and quiver that
hung from a tent-pole.

"But Your Majesty!" cried the squire in great perturbation. "The
battle is lost! It were the part of majesty to yield with the dignity
becoming one of royal blood!"

"I have no royal blood," ground Conan. "I am a barbarian and the son
of a blacksmith."

Wrenching away the bow and an arrow, he staggered toward the opening of
the pavilion. So formidable was his appearance, naked but for short
leather breeks and sleeveless shirt, open to reveal his great, hairy
chest, with his huge limbs and his blue eyes blazing under his tangled
black mane, that the squire shrank back, more afraid of his king than
of the whole Nemedian host.

Reeling on wide-braced legs Conan drunkenly tore the door-flap open
and staggered out under the canopy. The king of Nemedia and his
companions had dismounted, and they halted short, staring in wonder at
the apparition confronting them.

"Here I am, you jackals!" roared the Cimmerian. "I am the king! Death
to you, dog-brothers!"

He jerked the arrow to its head and loosed, and the shaft feathered
itself in the breast of the knight who stood beside Tarascus. Conan
hurled the bow at the king of Nemedia.

"Curse my shaky hand! Come in and take me if you dare!"

Reeling backward on unsteady legs, he fell with his shoulders against
a tent-pole, and propped upright, he lifted his great sword with both
hands.

"By Mitra, it is the king!" swore Tarascus. He cast a swift look about
him, and laughed. "That other was a jackal in his harness! In, dogs,
and take his head!"

The three soldiers--men-at-arms wearing the emblem of the royal guards--
rushed at the king, and one felled the squire with a blow of a mace.
The other two fared less well. As the first rushed in, lifting his
sword, Conan met him with a sweeping stroke that severed mail-links
like cloth, and sheared the Nemedian's arm and shoulder clean from his
body. His corpse, pitching backward, fell across his companion's legs.
The man stumbled, and before he could recover, the great sword was
through him.

Conan wrenched out his steel with a racking gasp, and staggered back
against the tent-pole. His great limbs trembled, his chest heaved, and
sweat poured down his face and neck. But his eyes flamed with exultant
savagery and he panted: "Why do you stand afar off, dog of Belverus? I
can't reach you; come in and die!" Tarascus hesitated, glanced at the
remaining man-at-arms, and his squire, a gaunt, saturnine man in black
mail, and took a step forward. He was far inferior in size and
strength to the giant Cimmerian, but he was in full armor, and was
famed in all the western nations as a swordsman. But his squire caught
his arm.

"Nay, Your Majesty, do not throw away your life. I will summon archers
to shoot this barbarian, as we shoot lions."

Neither of them had noticed that a chariot had approached while the
fight was going on, and now came to a halt before them. But Conan saw,
looking over their shoulders, and a queer chill sensation crawled
along his spine. There was something vaguely unnatural about the
appearance of the black horses that drew the vehicle, but it was the
occupant of the chariot that arrested the king's attention.

He was a tall man, superbly built, clad in a long unadorned silk robe.
He wore a Shemitish head-dress, and its lower folds hid his features,
except for the dark, magnetic eyes. The hands that grasped the reins,
pulling the rearing horses back on their haunches, were white but
strong. Conan glared at the stranger, all his primitive instincts
roused. He sensed an aura of menace and power that exuded from this
veiled figure, a menace as definite as the windless waving of tall
grass that marks the path of the serpent.

"Hail, Xaltotun!" exclaimed Tarascus. "Here is the king of Aquilonia!
He did not die in the landslide as we thought."

"I know," answered the other, without bothering to say how he knew.
"What is your present intention?"

"I will summon the archers to slay him," answered the Nemedian. "As
long as he lives he will be dangerous to us."

"Yet even a dog has uses," answered Xaltotun. "Take him alive."

Conan laughed raspingly. "Come in and try!" he challenged. "But for my
treacherous legs I'd hew you out of that chariot like a woodman hewing
a tree. But you'll never take me alive, damn you!"

"He speaks the truth, I fear," said Tarascus. "The man is a barbarian,
with the senseless ferocity of a wounded tiger. Let me summon the
archers."

"Watch me and learn wisdom," advised Xaltotun.

His hand dipped into his robe and came out with something shining--a
glistening sphere. This he threw suddenly at Conan. The Cimmerian
contemptuously struck it aside with his sword--at the instant of
contact there was a sharp explosion, a flare of white, blinding flame,
and Conan pitched senseless to the ground.

"He is dead?" Tarascus' tone was more assertion than inquiry.

"No. He is but senseless. He will recover his senses in a few hours.
Bid your men bind his arms and legs and lift him into my chariot."

With a gesture Tarascus did so, and they heaved the senseless king
into the chariot, grunting with their burden. Xaltotun threw a velvet
cloak over his body, completely covering him from any who might peer
in. He gathered the reins in his hands.

"I'm for Belverus," he said. "Tell Amalric that I will be with him if
he needs me. But with Conan out of the way, and his army broken, lance
and sword should suffice for the rest of the conquest. Prospero cannot
be bringing more than ten thousand men to the field, and will
doubtless fall back to Tarantia when he hears the news of the battle.
Say nothing to Amalric or Valerius or anyone about our capture. Let
them think Conan died in the fall of the cliffs."

He looked at the man-at-arms for a long space, until the guardsman
moved restlessly, nervous under the scrutiny.

"What is that about your waist?" Xaltotun demanded.

"Why, my girdle, may it please you, my lord!" stuttered the amazed
guardsman.

"You lie!" Xaltotun's laugh was merciless as a sword edge. "It is a
poisonous serpent! What a fool you are, to wear a reptile about your
waist!"

With distended eyes the man looked down; and to his utter horror he
saw the buckle of his girdle rear up at him. It was a snake's head! He
saw the evil eyes and the dripping fangs, heard the hiss and felt the
loathsome contact of the thing about his body. He screamed hideously
and struck at it with his naked hand, felt its fangs flesh themselves
in that hand--and then he stiffened and fell heavily. Tarascus looked
down at him without expression. He saw only the leathern girdle and
the buckle, the pointed tongue of which was stuck in the guardsman's
palm. Xaltotun turned his hypnotic gaze on Tarascus' squire, and the
man turned ashen and began to tremble, but the king interposed: "Nay,
we can trust him."

The sorcerer tautened the reins and swung the horses around. "See that
this piece of work remains secret. If I am needed, let Altaro,
Orastes' servant, summon me as I have taught him. I will be in your
palace at Belverus."

Tarascus lifted his hand in salutation, but his expression was not
pleasant to see as he looked after the departing mesmerist.

"Why should he spare the Cimmerian?" whispered the frightened squire.

"That I am wondering myself," grunted Tarascus. Behind the rumbling
chariot the dull roar of battle and pursuit faded in the distance; the
setting sun rimmed the dins with scarlet flame, and the chariot moved
into the vast blue shadows floating up out of the east.

Chapter 4: "From What Hell Have You Crawled?"

OF THAT LONG ride in the chariot of Xaltotun, Conan knew nothing. He
lay like a dead man while the bronze wheels clashed over the stones of
mountain roads and swished through the deep grass of fertile valleys,
and finally dropping down from the rugged heights, rumbled
rhythmically along the broad white road that winds through the rich
meadowlands to the walls of Belverus.

Just before dawn some faint reviving of life touched him. He heard a
mumble of voices, the groan of ponderous hinges. Through a slit in the
cloak that covered him he saw, faintly in the lurid glare of torches,
the great black arch of a gateway, and the bearded faces of men-at-
arms, the torches striking fire from their spearheads and helmets.

"How went the battle, my fair lord?" spoke an eager voice, in the
Nemedian tongue.

"Well indeed," was the curt reply. "The king of Aquilonia lies slain
and his host is broken."

A babble of excited voices rose, drowned the next instant by the
whirling wheels of the chariot on the flags. Sparks flashed from under
the revolving rims as Xaltotun lashed his steeds through the arch. But
Conan heard one of the guardsmen mutter: "From beyond the border to
Belverus between sunset and dawn! And the horses scarcely sweating! By
Mitra, they--" Then silence drank the voices, and there was only the
clatter of hoofs and wheels along the shadowy street.

What he had heard registered itself on Conan's brain but suggested
nothing to him. He was like a mindless automaton that hears and sees,
but does not understand. Sights and sounds flowed meaninglessly about
him. He lapsed again into a deep lethargy, and was only dimly aware
when the chariot halted in a deep, high-walled court, and he was
lifted from it by many hands and borne up a winding stone stair, and
down a long dim corridor. Whispers, stealthy footsteps, unrelated
sounds surged or rustled about him, irrelevant and far away.

Yet his ultimate awakening was abrupt and crystal-clear. He possessed
full knowledge of the battle in the mountains and its sequences, and
he had a good idea of where he was.

He lay on a velvet couch, clad as he was the day before, but with his
limbs loaded with chains not even he could break. The room in which he
lay was furnished with somber magnificence, the walls covered with
black velvet tapestries, the floor with heavy purple carpets. There
was no sign of door or window, and one curiously carven gold lamp,
swinging from the fretted ceiling, shed a lurid light over all.

In that light the figure seated in a silver, thronelike chair before
him seemed unreal and fantastic, with an illusiveness of outline that
was heightened by a filmy silken robe. But the features were distinct--
unnaturally so in that uncertain light. It was almost as if a weird
nimbus played about the man's head, casting the bearded face into bold
relief, so that it was the only definite and distinct reality in that
mystic, ghostly chamber.

It was a magnificent face, with strongly chiseled features of
classical beauty. There was, indeed, something disquieting about the
calm tranquility of its aspect, a suggestion of more than human
knowledge, of a profound certitude beyond human assurance. Also an
uneasy sensation of familiarity twitched at the back of Oman's
consciousness. He had never seen this man's face before, he well knew;
yet those features reminded him of something or someone. It was like
encountering in the flesh some dream-image that had haunted one in
nightmares.

"Who are you?" demanded the king belligerently, struggling to a
sitting position in spite of his chains.

"Men call me Xaltotun," was the reply, in a strong, golden voice.

"What place is this?" the Cimmerian next demanded.

"A chamber in the palace of King Tarascus, in Belverus."

Conan was not surprized. Belverus, the capital, was at the same time
the largest Nemedian city so near the border.

"And where's Tarascus?"

"With the army."

"Well," growled Conan, "if you mean to murder me, why don't you do it
and get it over with?"

"I did not save you from the king's archers to murder you in
Belverus," answered Xaltotun.

"What the devil did you do to me?" demanded Conan.

"I blasted your consciousness," answered Xaltotun. "How, you would not
understand. Call it black magic, if you will."

Conan had already reached that conclusion, and was mulling over
something else.

"I think I understand why you spared my life," he rumbled. "Amalric
wants to keep me as a check on Valerius, in case the impossible
happens and he becomes king of Aquilonia. It's well known that the
baron of Tor is behind this move to seat Valerius on my throne. And if
I know Amalric, he doesn't intend that Valerius shall be anything more
than a figurehead, as Tarascus is now."

"Amalric knows nothing of your capture," answered Xaltotun. "Neither
does Valerius. Both think you died at Valkia."

Conan's eyes narrowed as he stared at the man in silence.

"I sensed a brain behind all this," he muttered, "but I thought it was
Amalric's. Are Amalric, Tarascus and Valerius all but puppets dancing
on your string? Who are you?"

"What does it matter? If I told you, you would not believe me. What if
I told you I might set you back on the throne of Aquilonia?"

Conan's eyes burned on him like a wolf.

"What's your price?"

"Obedience to me."

"Go to hell with your offer!" snarled Conan. "I'm no figurehead. I won
my crown with my sword. Besides, it's beyond your power to buy and
sell the throne of Aquilonia at your will. The kingdom's not
conquered; one battle doesn't decide a war."

"You war against more than swords," answered Xaltotun. "Was it a
mortal's sword that felled you in your tent before the fight? Nay, it
was a child of the dark, a waif of outer space, whose fingers were
afire with the frozen coldness of the black gulfs, which froze the
blood in your veins and the marrow of your thews. Coldness so cold it
burned your flesh like white-hot iron!"

"Was it chance that led the man who wore your harness to lead his
knights into the defile?--chance that brought the cliffs crashing down
upon them?"

Conan glared at him unspeaking, feeling a chill along his spine.
Wizards and sorcerers abounded in his barbaric mythology, and any fool
could tell that this was no common man. Conan sensed an inexplicable
something about him that set him apart--an alien aura of Time and
Space, a sense of tremendous and sinister antiquity. But his stubborn
spirit refused to flinch.

"The fall of the cliffs was chance," he muttered truculently. "The
charge into the defile was what any man would have done."

"Not so. You would not have led a charge into it. You would have
suspected a trap. You would never have crossed the river in the first
place, until you were sure the Nemedian rout was real. Hypnotic
suggestions would not have invaded your mind, even in the madness of
battle, to make you mad, and rush blindly into the trap laid for you,
as it did the lesser man who masqueraded as you."

"Then if this was all planned," Conan grunted skeptically, "all a plot
to trap my host, why did not the 'child of darkness' kill me in my
tent?"

"Because I wished to take you alive. It took no wizardry to predict
that Pallantides would send another man out in your harness. I wanted
you alive and unhurt. You may fit into my scheme of things. There is a
vital power about you greater than the craft and cunning of my allies.
You are a bad enemy, but might make a fine vassal."

Conan spat savagely at the word, and Xaltotun, ignoring his fury, took
a crystal globe from a near-by table and placed it before him. He did
not support it in any way, nor place it on anything, but it hung
motionless in midair, as solidly as if it rested on an iron pedestal.
Conan snorted at this bit of necromancy, but he was nevertheless
impressed.

"Would you know of what goes on in Aquilonia?" he asked.

Conan did not reply, but the sudden rigidity of his form betrayed his
interest.

Xaltotun stared into the cloudy depths, and spoke: "It is now the
evening of the day after the battle of Valkia. Last night the main
body of the army camped by Valkia, while squadrons of knights harried
the fleeing Aquilonians. At dawn the host broke camp and pushed
westward through the mountains. Prospero, with ten thousand
Poitanians, was miles from the battlefield when he met the fleeing
survivors in the early dawn. He had pushed on all night, hoping to
reach the field before the battle joined. Unable to rally the remnants
of the broken host, he fell back toward Tarantia. Riding hard,
replacing his wearied horses with steeds seized from the countryside,
he approaches Tarantia.

"I see his weary knights, their armor gray with dust, their pennons
drooping as they push their tired horses through the plain. I see,
also, the streets of Tarantia. The city is in turmoil. Somehow word
has reached the people of the defeat and the death of King Conan. The
mob is mad with fear, crying out that the king is dead, and there is
none to lead them against the Nemedians. Giant shadows rush on
Aquilonia from the east, and the sky is black with vultures."

Conan cursed deeply.

"What are these but words? The raggedest beggar in the street might
prophesy as much. If you say you saw all that in the glass ball, then
you're a liar as well as a knave, of which last there's no doubt!
Prospero will hold Tarantia, and the barons will rally to him. Count
Trocero of Poitain commands the kingdom in my absence, and he'll drive
these Nemedian dogs howling back to their kennels. What are fifty
thousand Nemedians? Aquilonia will swallow them up. They'll never see
Belverus again. It's not Aquilonia which was conquered at Valkia; it
was only Conan."

"Aquilonia is doomed," answered Xaltotun, unmoved. "Lance and ax and
torch shall conquer her; or if they fail, powers from the dark of ages
shall march against her. As the cliffs fell at Valkia, so shall walled
cities and mountains fall, if the need arise, and rivers roar from
their channels to drown whole provinces.

"Better if steel and bowstring prevail without further aid from the
arts, for the constant use of mighty spells sometimes sets forces in
motion that might rock the universe."

"From what hell have you crawled, you nighted dog?" muttered Conan,
staring at the man. The Cimmerian involuntarily shivered; he sensed
something incredibly ancient, incredibly evil.

Xaltotun lifted his head, as if listening to whispers across the void.
He seemed to have forgotten his prisoner. Then he shook his head
impatiently, and glanced impersonally at Conan.

"What? Why, if I told you, you would not believe me. But I am wearied
of conversation with you; it is less fatiguing to destroy a walled
city than it is to frame my thoughts in words a brainless barbarian
can understand."

"If my hands were free," opined Conan, "I'd soon make a brainless
corpse out of you."

"I do not doubt it, if I were fool enough to give you the
opportunity," answered Xaltotun, clapping his hands. His manner
had changed; there was impatience in his tone, and a certain
nervousness in his manner, though Conan did not think this attitude
was in any way connected with himself.

"Consider what I have told you, barbarian," said Xaltotun.

"You will have plenty of leisure. I have not yet decided what I shall
do with you. It depends on circumstances yet unborn. But let this be
impressed upon you: that if I decide to use you in my game, it will be
better to submit without resistance than to suffer my wrath."  Conan
spat a curse at him, just as hangings that masked a door swung apart
and four giant negroes entered. Each was clad only in a silken breech-
clout supported by a girdle, from which hung a great key.

Xaltotun gestured impatiently toward the king and turned away, as if
dismissing the matter entirely from his mind. His fingers twitched
queerly. From a carven green jade box he took a handful of shimmering
black dust, and placed it in a brazier which stood on a golden tripod
at his elbow. The crystal globe, which he seemed to have forgotten,
fell suddenly to the floor, as if its invisible support had been
removed.

Then the blacks had lifted Conan--for so loaded with chains was he that
he could not walk--and carried him from the chamber. A glance back,
before the heavy, gold-bound teak door was closed, showed him Xaltotun
leaning back in his thronelike chair, his arms folded, while a thin
wisp of smoke curled up from the brazier. Oman's scalp prickled. In
Stygia, that ancient and evil kingdom that lay far to the south, he
had seen such black dust before. It was the pollen of the black lotus,
which creates deathlike sleep and monstrous dreams; and he knew that
only the grisly wizards of the Black Ring, which is the nadir of evil,
voluntarily seek the scarlet nightmares of the black lotus, to revive
their necromantic powers.

The Black Ring was a fable and a lie to most folk of the western
world, but Conan knew of its ghastly reality, and its grim votaries
who practise their abominable sorceries amid the black vaults of
Stygia and the nighted domes of accursed Sabatea. He glanced back at
the cryptic, gold-bound door, shuddering at what it hid.

Whether it was day or night the king could not tell. The palace of
King Tarascus seemed a shadowy, nighted place, that shunned natural
illumination. The spirit of darkness and shadow hovered over it, and
that spirit, Conan felt, was embodied in the stranger Xaltotun. The
negroes carried the king along a winding corridor so dimly lighted
that they moved through it like black ghosts bearing a dead man, and
down a stone stair that wound endlessly. A torch in the hand of one
cast the great deformed shadows streaming along the wall; it was like
the descent into hell of a corpse borne by dusky demons.

At last they reached the foot of the stair, and then they traversed a
long straight corridor, with a blank wall on one hand pierced by an
occasional arched doorway with a stair leading up behind it, and on
the other hand another wall showing heavy barred doors at regular
intervals of a few feet.

Halting before one of these doors, one of the blacks produced the key
that hung at his girdle, and turned it in the lock. Then, pushing open
the grille, they entered with their captive. They were in a small
dungeon with heavy stone walls, floor and ceiling, and in the opposite
wall there was another grilled door. What lay beyond that door Conan
could not tell, but he did not believe it was another corridor. The
glimmering light of the torch, flickering through the bars, hinted at
shadowy spaciousness and echoing depths.

In one corner of the dungeon, near the door through which they had
entered, a cluster of rusty chains hung from a great iron ring set in
the stone. In these chains a skeleton dangled. Conan glared at it with
some curiosity, noticing the state of the bare bones, most of which
were splintered and broken; the skull which had fallen from the
vertebrae, was crushed as if by some savage blow of tremendous force.

Stolidly one of the blacks, not the one who had opened the door,
removed the chains from the ring, using his key on the massive lock,
and dragged the mass of rusty metal and shattered bones over to one
side. Then they fastened Conan's chains to that ring, and the third
black turned his key in the lock of the farther door, grunting when he
had assured himself that it was properly fastened.

Then they regarded Conan cryptically, slit-eyed ebony giants, the
torch striking highlights from their glossy skin.

He who held the key to the nearer door was moved to remark,
gutturally: "This your palace now, white dog-king! None but master and
we know. All palace sleep. We keep secret. You live and die here,
maybe. Like him!" He contemptuously kicked the shattered skull and
sent it clattering across the stone floor.

Conan did not deign to reply to the taunt and the black, galled
perhaps by his prisoner's silence, muttered a curse, stooped and spat
full in the king's face. It was an unfortunate move for the black.
Conan was seated on the floor, the chains about his waist; ankles and
wrists locked to the ring in the wall. He could neither rise, nor move
more than a yard out from the wall. But there was considerable slack
in the chains that shackled his wrists, and before the bullet-shaped
head could be withdrawn out of reach, the king gathered this slack in
his mighty hand and smote the black on the head. The man fell like a
butchered ox and his comrades stared to see him lying with his scalp
laid open, and blood oozing from his nose and ears.

But they attempted no reprisal, nor did they accept Conan's urgent
invitation to approach within reach of the bloody chain in his hand.
Presently, grunting in their apelike speech, they lifted the
senseless black and bore him out like a sack of wheat, arms and legs
dangling. They used his key to lock the door behind them, but did not
remove it from the gold chain that fastened it to his girdle. They
took the torch with them, and as they moved up the corridor the
darkness slunk behind them like an animate thing. Their soft padding
footsteps died away, with the glimmer of their torch, and darkness and
silence remained unchallenged.

Chapter 5: The Haunter of the Pits

CONAN LAY STILL, enduring the weight of his chains and the despair of
his position with the stoicism of the wilds that had bred him. He did
not move, because the jangle of his chains, when he shifted his body,
sounded startlingly loud in the darkness and stillness, and it was his
instinct, born of a thousand wilderness-bred ancestors, not to betray
his position in his helplessness. This did not result from a logical
reasoning process; he did not lie quiet because he reasoned that the
darkness hid lurking dangers that might discover him in his
helplessness. Xaltotun had assured him that he was not to be harmed,
and Conan believed that it was in the man's interest to preserve him,
at least for the time being. But the instincts of the wild were there,
that had caused him in his childhood to lie hidden and silent while
wild beasts prowled about his covert.

Even his keen eyes could not pierce the solid darkness. Yet after a
while, after a period of time he had no way of estimating, a faint
glow became apparent, a sort of slanting gray beam, by which Conan
could see, vaguely, the bars of the door at his elbow, and even make
out the skeleton of the other grille. This puzzled him, until at last
he realized the explanation. He was far below ground, in the pits
below the palace; yet for some reason a shaft had been constructed
from somewhere above. Outside, the moon had risen to a point where its
light slanted dimly down the shaft. He reflected that in this manner
he could tell the passing of the days and nights. Perhaps the sun,
too, would shine down that shaft, though on the other hand it might be
closed by day. Perhaps it was a subtle method of torture, allowing a
prisoner but a glimpse of daylight or moonlight.

His gaze fell on the broken bones in the farther corner, glimmering
dimly. He did not tax his brain with futile speculation as to who the
wretch had been and for what reason he had been doomed, but he
wondered at the shattered condition of the bones. They had not been
broken on a rack. Then, as he looked, another unsavory detail made
itself evident. The shin-bones were split lengthwise, and there was
but one explanation; they had been broken in that manner in order to
obtain the marrow. Yet what creature but man breaks bones for their
marrow? Perhaps those remnants were mute evidence of a horrible,
cannibalistic feast, of some wretch driven to madness by starvation.
Conan wondered if his own bones would be found at some future date,
hanging in their rusty chains. He fought down the unreasoning panic of
a trapped wolf.

The Cimmerian did not curse, scream, weep or rave as a civilized man
might have done. But the pain and turmoil in his bosom were none the
less fierce. His great limbs quivered with the intensity of his
emotions. Somewhere, far to the westward, the Nemedian host was
slashing and burning its way through the heart of his kingdom. The
small host of Poitanians could not stand before them. Prospero might
be able to hold Tarantia for weeks, or months; but eventually, if not
relieved, he must surrender to greater numbers. Surely the barons
would rally to him against the invaders. But in the meanwhile he,
Conan, must lie helpless in a darkened cell, while others led his
spears and fought for his kingdom. The king ground his powerful teeth
in red rage.

Then he stiffened as outside the farther door he heard a stealthy
step. Straining his eyes he made out a bent, indistinct figure outside
the grille. There was a rasp of metal against metal, and he heard the
clink of tumblers, as if a key had been turned in the lock. Then the
figure moved silently out of his range of vision. Some guard, he
supposed, trying the lock. After a while he heard the sound repeated
faintly somewhere farther on, and that was followed by the soft
opening of a door, and then a swift scurry of softly shod feet
retreated in the distance. Then silence fell again.

Conan listened for what seemed a long time, but which could not have
been, for the moon still shone down the hidden shaft, but he heard no
further sound. He shifted his position at last, and his chains
clanked. Then he heard another, lighter footfall--a soft step outside
the nearer door, the door though which he had entered the cell. An
instant later a slender figure was etched dimly in the gray light.

"King Conan!" a soft voice intoned urgently. "Oh, my lord, are you
there?"

"Where else?" he answered guardedly, twisting his head about to stare
at the apparition.

It was a girl who stood grasping the bars with her slender fingers.
The dim glow behind her outlined her supple figure through the wisp of
silk twisted about her loins, and shone vaguely on jeweled breast-
plates. Her dark eyes gleamed in the shadows, her white limbs
glistened softly, like alabaster. Her hair was a mass of dark foam, at
the burnished luster of which the dim light only hinted.

"The keys to your shackles and to the farther door!" she whispered,
and a slim white hand came through the bars and dropped three objects
with a clink to the flags beside him.

"What game is this?" he demanded. "You speak in the Nemedian tongue,
and I have no friends in Nemedia. What deviltry is your master up to
now? Has he sent you here to mock me?"

"It is no mockery!" The girl was trembling violently. Her bracelets
and breast-plates clinked against the bars she grasped. "I swear by
Mitra! I stole the keys from the black jailers. They are the keepers
of the pits, and each bears a key which will open only one set of
locks. I made them drunk. The one whose head you broke was carried
away to a leech, and I could not get his key. But the others I stole.
Oh, please do not loiter! Beyond these dungeons lie the pits which are
the doors to Hell."

Somewhat impressed, Conan tried the keys dubiously, expecting to meet
only failure and a burst of mocking laughter. But he was galvanized to
discover that one, indeed, loosed him of his shackles, fitting not
only the lock that held them to the ring, but the locks on his limbs
as well. A few seconds later he stood upright, exulting fiercely in
his comparative freedom. A quick stride carried him to the grille, and
his fingers closed about a bar and the slender wrist that was pressed
against it, imprisoning the owner, who lifted her face bravely to his
fierce gaze.

"Who are you, girl?" he demanded. "Why do you do this?"

"I am only Zenobia," she murmured, with a catch of breathlessness, as
if in fright; "only a girl of the king's seraglio."

"Unless this is some cursed trick," muttered Conan, "I cannot see why
you bring me these keys."

She bowed her dark head, and then lifted it and looked full into his
suspicious eyes. Tears sparkled like jewels on her long dark lashes.

"I am only a girl of the king's seraglio," she said, with a certain
humility. "He has never glanced at me, and probably never will. I am
less than one of the dogs that gnaw the bones in his banquet hall.

"But I am no painted toy; I am of flesh and blood. I breathe, hate,
fear, rejoice and love. And I have loved you. King Conan, ever since I
saw you riding at the head of your knights along the streets of
Belverus when you visited King Nimed, years ago. My heart tugged at
its strings to leap from my bosom and fall in the dust of the street
under your horse's hoofs."

Color flooded her countenance as she spoke, but her dark eyes did not
waver. Conan did not at once reply; wild and passionate and untamed he
was, yet any but the most brutish of men must be touched with a
certain awe or wonder at the baring of a woman's naked soul.

She bent her head then, and pressed her red lips to the fingers that
imprisoned her slim wrist. Then she flung up her head as if in sudden
recollection of their position, and terror flared in her dark eyes.
"Haste!" she whispered urgently. "It is past midnight. You must be
gone."

"But won't they skin you alive for stealing these keys?"

"They'll never know. If the black men remember in the morning who gave
them the wine, they will not dare admit the keys were stolen from them
while they were drunk. The key that I could not obtain is the one that
unlocks this door. You must make your way to freedom through the pits.
What awful perils lurk beyond that door I cannot even guess. But
greater danger lurks for you if you remain in this cell.

"King Tarascus has returned--"

"What? Tarascus?"

"Aye! He has returned, in great secrecy, and not long ago he descended
into the pits and then came out again, pale and shaking, like a man
who had dared a great hazard. I heard him whisper to his squire,
Arideus, that despite Xaltotun you should die."

"What of Xaltotun?" murmured Conan. He felt her shudder.

"Do not speak of him!" she whispered. "Demons are often summoned by
the sound of their names. The slaves say that he lies in his chamber,
behind a bolted door, dreaming the dreams of the black lotus. I
believe that even Tarascus secretly fears him, or he would slay you
openly. But he has been in the pits tonight, and what he did here,
only Mitra knows."

"I wonder if that could have been Tarascus who fumbled at my cell door
awhile ago?" muttered Conan.

"Here is a dagger!" she whispered, pressing something through the
bars. His eager fingers closed on an object familiar to their touch.
"Go quickly through yonder door, turn to the left and make your way
along the cells until you come to a stone stair. On your life do not
stray from the line of the cells! Climb the stair and open the door at
the top; one of the keys will fit it. If it be the will of Mitra, I
will await you there."  Then she was gone, with a patter of light
slippered feet.

Conan shrugged his shoulders, and turned toward the farther grille.
This might be some diabolical trap planned by Tarascus, but plunging
headlong into a snare was less abhorrent to Conan's temperament than
sitting meekly to await his doom. He inspected the weapon the girl had
given him, and smiled grimly. Whatever else she might be, she was
proven by that dagger to be a person of practical intelligence. It was
no slender stiletto, selected because of a jeweled hilt or gold guard,
fitted only for dainty murder in milady's boudoir; it was a forthright
poniard, a warrior's weapon, broad-bladed, fifteen inches in length,
tapering to a diamond-sharp point.

He grunted with satisfaction. The feel of the hilt cheered him and
gave him a glow of confidence. Whatever webs of conspiracy were drawn
about him, whatever trickery and treachery ensnared him, this knife
was real. The great muscles of his right arm swelled in anticipation
of murderous blows.

He tried the farther door, fumbling with the keys as he did so. It was
not locked. Yet he remembered the black man locking it. That furtive,
bent figure, then, had been no jailer seeing that the bolts were in
place. He had unlocked the door, instead. There was a sinister
suggestion about that unlocked door. But Conan did not hesitate. He
pushed open the grille and stepped from the dungeon into the outer
darkness.

As he had thought, the door did not open into another corridor. The
flagged floor stretched away under his feet, and the line of cells ran
away to right and left behind him, but he could not make out the other
limits of the place into which he had come. He could see neither the
roof nor any other wall. The moonlight filtered into that vastness
only through the grilles of the cells, and was almost lost in the
darkness. Less keen eyes than his could scarcely have discerned the
dim gray patches that floated before each cell door.

Turning to the left, he moved swiftly and noiselessly along the line
of dungeons, his bare feet making no sound on the flags. He glanced
briefly into each dungeon as he passed it. They were all empty, but
locked. In some he caught the glimmer of naked white bones. These pits
were a relic of a grimmer age, constructed long ago when Belverus was
a fortress rather than a city. But evidently their more recent use had
been more extensive than the world guessed.

Ahead of him, presently, he saw the dim outline of a stair sloping
sharply upward, and knew it must be the stair he sought. Then he
whirled suddenly, crouching in the deep shadows at its foot.

Somewhere behind him something was moving--something bulky and stealthy
that padded on feet which were not human feet. He was looking down the
long row of cells, before each one of which lay a square of dim gray
light that was little more than a patch of less dense darkness. But he
saw something moving along these squares. What it was he could not
tell, but it was heavy and huge, and yet it moved with more than human
ease and swiftness. He glimpsed it as it moved across the squares of
gray, then lost it as it merged in the expanses of shadow between. It
was uncanny, in its stealthy advance, appearing and disappearing like
a blur of the vision.

He heard the bars rattle as it tried each door in turn. Now it had
reached the cell he had so recently quitted, and the door swung open
as it tugged. He saw a great bulky shape limned faintly and briefly in
the gray doorway, and then the thing had vanished into the dungeon.
Sweat beaded Conan's face and hands. Now he knew why Tarascus had come
so subtly to his door, and later had fled so swiftly. The king had
unlocked his door, and, somewhere in these hellish pits, had opened a
cell or cage that held some grim monstrosity.

Now the thing was emerging from the cell and was again advancing up
the corridor, its misshapen head close to the ground. It paid no more
heed to the locked doors. It was smelling out his trail. He saw it
more plainly now; the gray light limned a giant anthropomorphic body,
but vaster of bulk and girth than any man. It went on two legs, though
it stooped forward, and it was grayish and shaggy, its thick coat shot
with silver. Its head was a grisly travesty of the human, its long
arms hung nearly to the ground.

Conan knew it at last--understood the meaning of those crushed and
broken bones in the dungeon, and recognized the haunter of the pits.
It was a gray ape, one of the grisly man-eaters from the forests that
wave on the mountainous eastern shores of the Sea of Vilayet. Half
mythical and altogether horrible, these apes were the goblins of
Hyborian legendry, and were in reality ogres of the natural world,
cannibals and murderers of the nighted forests.

He knew it scented his presence, for it was coming swiftly now,
rolling its barrel-like body rapidly along on its short, mighty, bowed
legs. He cast a quick glance up the long stair, but knew that the
thing would be on his back before he could mount to the distant door.
He chose to meet it face to face.

Conan stepped out into the nearest square of moonlight, so as to have
all the advantage of illumination that he could; for the beast, he
knew, could see better than himself in the dark. Instantly the brute
saw him; its great yellow tusks gleamed in the shadows, but it made no
sound. Creatures of night and the silence, the gray apes of Vilayet
were voiceless. But in its dim, hideous features, which were a bestial
travesty of a human face, showed ghastly exultation.

Conan stood poised, watching the oncoming monster without a quiver. He
knew he must stake his life on one thrust; there would be no chance
for another; nor would there be time to strike and spring away. The
first blow must kill, and kill instantly, if he hoped to survive that
awful grapple. He swept his gaze over the short, squat throat, the
hairy swagbelly, and the mighty breast, swelling in giant arches like
twin shields. It must be the heart; better to risk the blade being
deflected by the heavy ribs than to strike in where a stroke was not
instantly fatal. With full realization of the odds, Conan matched his
speed of eye and hand and his muscular power against the brute might
and ferocity of the man-eater. He must meet the brute breast to
breast, strike a deathblow, and then trust to the ruggedness of his
frame to survive the instant of manhandling that was certain to be
his.

As the ape came rolling in on him, swinging wide its terrible arms, he
plunged in between them and struck with all his desperate power. He
felt the blade sink to the hilt in the hairy breast, and instantly,
releasing it, he ducked his head and bunched his whole body into one
compact mass of knotted muscles, and as he did so he grasped the
closing arms and drove his knee fiercely into the monster's belly,
bracing himself against that crushing grapple.

For one dizzy instant he felt as if he were being dismembered in the
grip of an earthquake; then suddenly he was free, sprawling on the
floor, and the monster was gasping out its life beneath him, its red
eyes turned upward, the hilt of the poniard quivering in its breast.
His desperate stab had gone home.

Conan was panting as if after long conflict, trembling in every limb.
Some of his joints felt as if they had been dislocated, and blood
dripped from scratches on his side where the monster's talons had
ripped; his muscles and tendons had been savagely wrenched and
twisted. If the beast had lived a second longer, it would surely have
dismembered him. But the Cimmerian's mighty strength had resisted, for
the fleeting instant it had endured, the dying convulsion of the ape
that would have torn a lesser man limb from limb.

Chapter 6: The Thrust of a Knife

CONAN STOOPED AND tore the knife from the monster's breast. Then he
went swiftly up the stair. What other shapes of fear the darkness held
he could not guess, but he had no desire to encounter any more. This
touch-and-go sort of battling was too strenuous even for the giant
Cimmerian. The moonlight was fading from the floor, the darkness
closing in, and something like panic pursued him up the stair. He
breathed a gusty sigh of relief when he reached the head, and felt the
third key turn in the lock. He opened the door slightly, and craned
his neck to peer through, half expecting an attack from some human or
bestial enemy.

He looked into a bare stone corridor, dimly lighted, and a slender,
supple figure stood before the door.

"Your Majesty!" It was a low, vibrant cry, half in relief and half in
fear. The girl sprang to his side, then hesitated as if abashed.

"You bleed," she said. "You have been hurt!"

He brushed aside the implication with an impatient hand.

"Scratches that wouldn't hurt a baby. Your skewer came in handy,
though. But for it Tarascus's monkey would be cracking my shin bones
for the marrow right now. But what now?"

"Follow me," she whispered. "I will lead you outside the city wall. I
have a horse concealed there."

She turned to lead the way down the corridor, but he laid a heavy hand
on her naked shoulder.

"Walk beside me," he instructed her softly, passing his massive arm
about her lithe waist. "You've played me fair so far, and I'm inclined
to believe in you; but I've lived this long only because I've trusted
no one too far, man or woman. So! Now if you play me false you won't
live to enjoy the jest."

She did not flinch at sight of the reddened poniard or the contact of
his hard muscles about her supple body.

"Cut me down without mercy if I play you false," she answered. "The
very feel of your arm about me, even in menace, is as the fulfillment
of a dream."

The vaulted corridor ended at a door, which she opened. Outside lay
another black man, a giant in turban and silk loincloth, with a curved
sword lying on the flags near his hand. He did not move.

"I drugged his wine," she whispered, swerving to avoid the recumbent
figure. "He is the last, and outer, guard of the pits. None ever
escaped from them before, and none has ever wished to seek them; so
only these black men guard them. Only these of all the servants knew
it was King Conan that Xaltotun brought a prisoner in his chariot. I
was watching, sleepless, from an upper casement that opened into the
court, while the other girls slept; for I knew that a battle was being
fought, or had been fought, in the west, and I feared for you.

"I saw the blacks carry you up the stair, and I recognized you in the
torchlight. I slipped into this wing of the palace tonight, in time to
see them carry you to the pits. I had not dared come here before
nightfall. You must have lain in drugged senselessness all day in
Xaltotun's chamber.

"Oh, let us be wary! Strange things are afoot in the palace tonight.
The slaves said that Xaltotun slept as he often sleeps, drugged by the
lotus of Stygia, but Tarascus is in the palace. He entered secretly,
through the postern, wrapped in his cloak, which was dusty as with long
travel, and attended only by his squire, the lean silent Arideus. I
cannot understand, but I am afraid."

They came out at the foot of a narrow, winding stair, and mounting it,
passed through a narrow panel which she slid aside. When they had
passed through, she slipped it back in place, and it became merely a
portion of the ornate wall. They were in a more spacious corridor,
carpeted and tapestried, over which hanging lamps shed a golden glow.

Conan listened intently, but he heard no sound throughout the palace.
He did not know in what part of the palace he was, or in which
direction lay the chamber of Xaltotun. The girl was trembling as she
drew him along the corridor, to halt presently beside an alcove masked
with satin tapestry. Drawing this aside, she motioned for him to step
into the niche, and whispered: "Wait here! Beyond that door at the end
of the corridor we are likely to meet slaves or eunuchs at any time of
the day or night. I will go and see if the way is clear, before we
essay it."  

Instantly his hair-trigger suspicions were aroused. "Are
you leading me into a trap?"

Tears sprang into her dark eyes. She sank to her knees and seized his
muscular hand. "Oh, my king, do not mistrust me now!" Her voice shook
with desperate urgency. "If you doubt and hesitate, we are lost! Why
should I bring you up out of the pits to betray you now?"

"All right," he muttered. "I'll trust you; though, by Crom, the habits
of a lifetime are not easily put aside. Yet I wouldn't harm you now,
if you brought all the swordsmen in Nemedia upon me. But for you
Tarascus's cursed ape would have come upon me in chains and unarmed.
Do as you wish, girl."

Kissing his hands, she sprang lithely up and ran down the corridor, to
vanish through a heavy double door.

He glanced after her, wondering if he was a fool to trust her; then he
shrugged his mighty shoulders and pulled the satin hangings together,
masking his refuge. It was not strange that a passionate young beauty
should be risking her life to aid him; such things had happened often
enough in his life. Many women had looked on him with favor, in the
days of his wanderings, and in the time of his kingship.

Yet he did not remain motionless in the alcove, waiting for her
return. Following his instincts, he explored the niche for another
exit, and presently found one--the opening of a narrow passage, masked
by the tapestries, that ran to an ornately carved door, barely visible
in the dim light that filtered in from the outer corridor. And as he
stared into it, somewhere beyond that carven door he heard the sound
of another door opening and shutting, and then a low mumble of voices.
The familiar sound of one of those voices caused a sinister expression
to cross his dark face. Without hesitation he glided down the passage,
and crouched like a stalking panther beside the door. It was not
locked, and manipulating it delicately, he pushed it open a crack,
with a reckless disregard for possible consequences that only he could
have explained or defended.

It was masked on the other side by tapestries, but through a thin slit
in the velvet he looked into a chamber lit by a candle on an ebony
table. There were two men in that chamber. One was a scarred,
sinister-looking ruffian in leather breeks and ragged cloak; the other
was Tarascus, king of Nemedia.

Tarascus seemed ill at ease. He was slightly pale, and he kept
starting and glancing about him, as if expecting and fearing to hear
some sound or footstep.

"Go swiftly and at once," he was saying. "He is deep in drugged
slumber, but I know not when he may awaken."

"Strange to hear words of fear issuing from the lips of Tarascus,"
rumbled the other in a harsh, deep voice.

The king frowned.

"I fear no common man, as you well know. But when I saw the cliffs
fall at Valkia I knew that this devil we had resurrected was no
charlatan. I fear his powers, because I do not know the full extent of
them. But I know that somehow they are connected with this accursed
thing which I have stolen from him. It brought him back to life; so it
must be the source of his sorcery.

"He had it hidden well; but following my secret order a slave spied on
him and saw him place it in a golden chest, and saw where he hid the
chest. Even so, I would not have dared steal it had Xaltotun himself
not been sunk in lotus slumber.

"I believe it is the secret of his power. With it Orastes brought him
back to life. With it he will make us all slaves, if we are not wary.
So take it and cast it into the sea as I have bidden you. And be sure
you are so far from land that neither tide nor storm can wash it up on
the beach. You have been paid."

"So I have," grunted the ruffian. "And I owe more than gold to you,
king; I owe you a debt of gratitude. Even thieves can be grateful."

"Whatever debt you may feel you owe me," answered Tarascus, "will be
paid when you have hurled this thing into the sea."

"I'll ride for Zingara and take ship from Kordava," promised the
other. "I dare not show my head in Argos, because of the matter of a
murder or so--"

"I care not, so it is done. Here it is; a horse awaits you in the
court. Go, and go swiftly!"

Something passed between them, something that flamed like living fire.
Conan had only a brief glimpse of it; and then the ruffian pulled a
slouch hat over his eyes, drew his cloak about his shoulder, and
hurried from the chamber. And as the door closed behind him, Conan
moved with the devastating fury of unchained blood-lust. He had held
himself in check as long as he could. The sight of his enemy so near
him set his wild blood seething and swept away all caution and
restraint.

Tarascus was turning toward an inner door when Conan tore aside the
hangings and leaped like a blood-mad panther into the room. Tarascus
wheeled, but even before he could recognize his attacker, Conan's
poniard ripped into him.

But the blow was not mortal, as Conan knew the instant he struck. His
foot had caught in a fold of the curtains and tripped him as he
leaped. The point fleshed itself in Tarascus' shoulder and plowed
down along his ribs, and the king of Nemedia screamed.

The impact of the blow and Conan's lunging body hurled him back
against the table and it toppled and the candle went out. They were
both carried to the floor by the violence of Conan's rush, and the
foot of the tapestry hampered them both in its folds. Conan was
stabbing blindly in the dark, Tarascus screaming in a frenzy of
panicky terror. As if fear lent him superhuman energy, Tarascus tore
free and blundered away in the darkness, shrieking:

"Help! Guards! Arideus! Orastes! Orastes!"

Conan rose, kicking himself free of the tangling tapestries and the
broken table, cursing with the bitterness of his bloodthirsty
disappointment. He was confused, and ignorant of the plan of the
palace. The yells of Tarascus were still resounding in the distance,
and a wild outcry was bursting forth in answer. The Nemedian had
escaped him in the darkness, and Conan did not know which way he had
gone. The Cimmerian's rash stroke for vengeance had failed, and there
remained only the task of saving his own hide if he could.

Swearing luridly, Conan ran back down the passage and into the alcove,
glaring out into the lighted corridor, just as Zenobia came running up
it, her dark eyes dilated with terror.

"Oh, what has happened?" she cried. "The palace is roused! I swear I
have not betrayed you--"

"No, it was I who stirred up the hornet's nest," he grunted. "I tried
to pay off a score. What's the shortest way out of this?"

She caught his wrist and ran fleetly down the corridor. But before
they reached the heavy door at the other end, muffled shouts arose
from behind it and the portals began to shake under an assault from
the other side. Zenobia wrung her hands and whimpered.

"We are cut off! I locked that door as I returned through it. But they
will burst it in in a moment. The way to the postern gate lies through
it."

Conan wheeled. Up the corridor, though still out of sight, he heard a
rising clamor that told him his foes were behind as well as before
him--

"Quick! Into this door!" the girl cried desperately, running across
the corridor and throwing open the door of a chamber.

Conan followed her through, and then threw the gold catch behind them.
They stood in an ornately furnished chamber, empty but for themselves,
and she drew him to a gold-barred window, through which he saw trees
and shrubbery.

"You are strong," she panted. "If you can tear these bars away, you
may yet escape. The garden is full of guards, but the shrubs are
thick, and you may avoid them. The southern wall is also the outer
wall of the city. Once over that, you have a chance to get away. A
horse is hidden for you in a thicket beside the road that runs
westward, a few hundred paces to the south of the fountain of
Thrallos. You know where it is?"

"Aye! But what of you? I had meant to take you with me."

A flood of joy lighted her beautiful face.

"Then my cup of happiness is brimming! But I will not hamper your
escape. Burdened with me you would fail. Nay, do not fear for me. They
will never suspect that I aided you willingly. Go! What you have just
said will glorify my life throughout the long years."

He caught her up in his iron arms, crushed her slim, vibrant figure to
him and kissed her fiercely on eyes, cheeks, throat and lips, until
she lay panting in his embrace; gusty and tempestuous as a storm-wind,
even his lovemaking was violent.

"I'll go," he muttered. "But by Crom, I'll come for you some day!"

Wheeling, he gripped the gold bars and tore them from their sockets
with one tremendous wrench; threw a leg over the sill and went down
swiftly, clinging to the ornaments on the wall. He hit the ground
running and melted like a shadow into the maze of towering rosebushes
and spreading trees. The one look he cast back over his shoulder
showed him Zenobia leaning over the windowsill, her arms stretched
after him in mute farewell and renunciation.

Guards were running through the garden, all converging toward the
palace, where the clamor momentarily grew louder--tall men in burnished
cuirasses and crested helmets of polished bronze. The starlight struck
glints from their gleaming armor, among the trees, betraying their
every movement; but the sound of their coming ran far before them. To
Conan, wilderness-bred, their rush through the shrubbery was like the
blundering stampede of cattle. Some of them passed within a few feet
of where he lay flat in a thick cluster of bushes, and never guessed
his presence. With the palace as their goal, they were oblivious to
all else about them. When they had gone shouting on, he rose and fled
through the garden with no more noise than a panther would have made.

So quickly he came to the southern wall, and mounted the steps that
led to the parapet. The wall was made to keep people out, not in. No
sentry patrolling the battlements was in sight. Crouching by an
embrasure he glanced back at the great palace rearing above the
cypresses behind him. Lights blazed from every window, and he could
see figures flitting back and forth across them like puppets on
invisible strings. He grinned hardly, shook his fist in a gesture of
farewell and menace, and let himself over the outer rim of the
parapet.

A low tree, a few yards below the parapet, received Conan's weight, as
he dropped noiselessly into the branches. An instant later he was
racing through the shadows with the swinging hillman's stride that
eats up long miles.

Gardens and pleasure villas surrounded the walls of Belverus. Drowsy
slaves, sleeping by their watchman's pikes, did not see the swift and
furtive figure that scaled walls, crossed alleys made by the arching
branches of trees, and threaded a noiseless way through orchards and
vineyards. Watchdogs woke and lifted their deep-booming clamor at a
gliding shadow, half scented, half sensed, and then it was gone.

In a chamber of the palace, Tarascus writhed and cursed on a blood-
spattered couch, under the deft, quick fingers of Orastes. The palace
was thronged with wide-eyed, trembling servitors, but the chamber
where the king lay was empty save for himself and the renegade priest.

"Are you sure he still sleeps?" Tarascus demanded again, setting his
teeth against the bite of the herb juices with which Orastes was
bandaging the long, ragged gash in his shoulder and ribs. "Ishtar,
Mitra and Set! That burns like molten pitch of hell!"

"Which you would be experiencing even now, but for your good fortune,"
remarked Orastes. "Whoever wielded that knife struck to kill. Yes, I
have told you that Xaltotun still sleeps. Why are you so urgent upon
that point? What has he to do with this?"

"You know nothing of what has passed in the palace tonight?" Tarascus
searched the priest's countenance with burning intensity.

"Nothing. As you know, I have been employed in translating manuscripts
for Xaltotun, for some months now, transcribing esoteric volumes
written in the younger languages into script he can read. He was well
versed in all the tongues and scripts of his day, but he has not yet
learned all the newer languages, and to save time he has me translate
these works for him, to learn if any new knowledge has been discovered
since his time. I did not know that he had returned last night until
he sent for me and told me of the battle. Then I returned to my
studies, nor did I know that you had returned until the clamor in the
palace brought me out of my cell."  

"Then you do not know that
Xaltotun brought the king of Aquilonia a captive to this palace?"

Orastes shook his head, without particular surprize. "Xaltotun merely
said that Conan would oppose us no more. I supposed that he had
fallen, but did not ask the details."

"Xaltotun saved his life when I would have slain him," snarled
Tarascus. "I saw his purpose instantly. He would hold Conan captive to
use as a club against us--against Amalric, against Valerius, and
against myself. So long as Conan lives he is a threat, a unifying
factor for Aquilonia, that might be used to compel us into courses we
would not otherwise follow. I mistrust this undead Pythonian. Of late
I have begun to fear him.

"I followed him, some hours after he had departed eastward. I wished
to learn what he intended doing with Conan. I found that he had
imprisoned him in the pits. I intended to see that the barbarian died,
in spite of Xaltotun. And I accomplished--" A cautious knock sounded
at the door. "That's Arideus," grunted Tarascus. "Let him in."  The
saturnine squire entered, his eyes blazing with suppressed excitement.
"How, Arideus?" exclaimed Tarascus. "Have you found the man who
attacked me?"

"You did not see him, my lord?" asked Arideus, as one who would assure
himself of a fact he already knows to exist. "You did not recognize
him?"

"No. It happened so quick, and the candle was out--all I could think of
was that it was some devil loosed on me by Xaltotun's magic--"

"The Pythonian sleeps in his barred and bolted room. But I have been
in the pits."  Arideus twitched his lean shoulders excitedly.

"Well, speak, man!" exclaimed Tarascus impatiently. "What did you find
there?"

"An empty dungeon," whispered the squire. "The corpse of the great
ape!"

"What?" Tarascus started upright, and blood gushed from his opened
wound.

"Aye! The man-eater is dead--stabbed through the heart--and Conan is
gone!"

Tarascus was gray of face as he mechanically allowed Orastes to force
him prostrate again and the priest renewed work upon his mangled
flesh.

"Conan!" he repeated. "Not a crushed corpse--escaped! Mitra! He is no
man; but a devil himself! I thought Xaltotun was behind this wound. I
see now. Gods and devils! It was Conan who stabbed me! Arideus!"

"Aye, Your Majesty!"

"Search every nook in the palace. He may be skulking through the dark
corridors now like a hungry tiger. Let no niche escape your scrutiny,
and beware. It is not a civilized man you hunt, but a blood-mad
barbarian whose strength and ferocity are those of a wild beast. Scour
the palace-grounds and the city. Throw a cordon about the walls. If
you find he has escaped from the city, as he may well do, take a troop
of horsemen and follow him. Once past the walls it will be like
hunting a wolf through the hills. But haste, and you may yet catch
him."

"This is a matter which requires more than ordinary human wits," said
Orastes. "Perhaps we should seek Xaltotun's advice."

"No!" exclaimed Tarascus violently. "Let the troopers pursue Conan and
slay him. Xaltotun can hold no grudge against us if we kill a prisoner
to prevent his escape."

"Well," said Orastes, "I am no Acheronian, but I am versed in some of
the arts, and the control of certain spirits which have cloaked
themselves in material substance. Perhaps I can aid you in this
matter."

The fountain of Thrallos stood in a clustered ring of oaks beside the
road a mile from the walls of the city. Its musical tinkle reached
Conan's ears through the silence of the starlight. He drank deep of
its icy stream, and then hurried southward toward a small, dense
thicket he saw there. Rounding it, he saw a great white horse tied
among the bushes. Heaving a deep gusty sigh he reached it with one
stride--a mocking laugh brought him about, glaring.

A dully glinting, mail-clad figure moved out of the shadows into the
starlight. This was no plumed and burnished palace guardsman. It was a
tall man in morion and gray chain mail--one of the Adventurers, a class
of warriors peculiar to Nemedia; men who had not attained to the
wealth and position of knighthood, or had fallen from that estate;
hard-bitten fighters, dedicating their lives to war and adventure.
They constituted a class of their own, sometimes commanding troops,
but themselves accountable to no man but the king. Conan knew that he
could have been discovered by no more dangerous a foeman.

A quick glance among the shadows convinced him that the man was alone,
and he expanded his great chest slightly, digging his toes into the
turf, as his thews coiled tensely.

"I was riding for Belverus on Amalric's business," said the
Adventurer, advancing warily. The starlight was a long sheen on the
great two-handed sword he bore naked in his hand. "A horse whinnied to
mine from the thicket. I investigated and thought it strange a steed
should be tethered here. I waited--and lo, I have caught a rare prize!"

The Adventurers lived by their swords.

"I know you," muttered the Nemedian. "You are Conan, king of
Aquilonia. I thought I saw you die in the valley of the Valkia, but--"
Conan sprang as a dying tiger springs. Practised fighter though the
Adventurer was, he did not realize the desperate quickness that lurks
in barbaric sinews. He was caught off guard, his heavy sword half
lifted. Before he could either strike or parry, the king's poniard
sheathed itself in his throat, above the gorget, slanting downward
into his heart. With a choked gurgle he reeled and went down, and
Conan ruthlessly tore his blade free as his victim fell. The white
horse snorted violently and shied at the sight and scent of blood on
the sword.

Glaring down at his lifeless enemy, dripping poniard in hand, sweat
glistening on his broad breast, Conan poised like a statue, listening
intently. In the woods about there was no sound, save for the sleepy
cheep of awakened birds. But in the city, a mile away, he heard the
strident blare of a trumpet.

Hastily he bent over the fallen man. A few seconds' search convinced
him that whatever message the man might have borne was intended to be
conveyed by word of mouth. But he did not pause in his task. It was
not many hours until dawn. A few minutes later the white horse was
galloping westward along the white road, and the rider wore the gray
mail of a Nemedian Adventurer.

Chapter 7: The Rending of the Veil

CONAN KNEW HIS only chance of escape lay in speed. He did not even
consider hiding somewhere near Belverus until the chase passed on; he
was certain that the uncanny ally of Tarascus would be able to ferret
him out. Besides, he was not one to skulk and hide; an open fight or
an open chase, either suited his temperament better. He had a long
start, he knew. He would lead them a grinding race for the border.

Zenobia had chosen well to selecting the white horse. His speed,
toughness and endurance were obvious. The girl knew weapons and
horses, and, Conan reflected with some satisfaction, she knew men. He
rode westward at a gait that ate up the miles.

It was a sleeping land through which he rode, past grove-sheltered
villages and white-walled villas amid spacious fields and orchards
that grew sparser as he fared westward. As the villages thinned, the
land grew more rugged, and the keeps that frowned from eminences told
of centuries of border war. But none rode down from those castles to
challenge or halt him. The lords of the keeps were following the
banner of Amalric; the pennons that were wont to wave over these
towers were now floating over the Aquilonian plains.

When the last huddled village fell behind him, Conan left the road,
which was beginning to bend toward the northwest, toward the distant
passes. To keep to the road would mean to pass by border towers, still
garrisoned with armed men who would not allow him to pass
unquestioned. He knew there would be no patrols riding the border
marches on either side, as to ordinary times, but there were those
towers, and with dawn there would probably be cavalcades of returning
soldiers with wounded men to ox-carts.

This road from Belverus was the only road that crossed the border for
fifty miles from north to south. It followed a series of passes
through the hills, and on either hand lay a wide expanse of a wild,
sparsely inhabited mountains. He maintained his due westerly
direction, intending to cross the border deep to the wilds of the
hills that lay to the south of the passes. It was a shorter route,
more arduous, but safer for a hunted fugitive. One man on a horse
could traverse country an army would find impassable.

But at dawn he had not reached the hills; they were a long, low, blue
rampart stretching along the horizon ahead of him. Here there were
neither farms nor villages, no white-walled villas loomed among
clustering trees. The dawn wind stirred the tall stiff grass, and
there was nothing but the long rolling swells of brown earth, covered
with dry grass, and to the distance the gaunt walls of a stronghold on
a low hill. Too many Aquilonian raiders had crossed the mountains to
not too-distant days for the countryside to be thickly settled as it
was farther to the east.

Dawn ran like a prairie fire across the grasslands, and high overhead
sounded a weird crying as a straggling wedge of wild geese winged
swiftly southward. In a grassy swale Conan halted and unsaddled his
mount. Its sides were heaving, its coat plastered with sweat. He had
pushed it unmercifully through the hours before dawn.

While it munched the brittle grass and rolled, he lay at the crest of
the low slope, staring eastward. Far away to the northward he could
see the road he had left, streaming like a white ribbon over a distant
rise. No black dots moved along that glistening ribbon. There was no
sign about the castle to the distance to indicate that the keepers had
noticed the lone wayfarer.

An hour later the land still stretched bare. The only sign of life was
a glint of steel on the far-off battlements, a raven to the sky that
wheeled backward and forth, dipping and rising as if seeking
something. Conan saddled and rode westward at a more leisurely gait.

As he topped the farther crest of the slope, a raucous screaming burst
out over his head, and looking up, he saw the raven flapping high
above him, cawing incessantly. As he rode on, it followed him,
maintaining its position and making the morning hideous with its
strident cries, heedless of his efforts to drive it away.

This kept up for hours, until Conan's teeth were on edge, and he felt
that he would give half his kingdom to be allowed to wring that black
neck.

"Devils of hell!" he roared to futile rage, shaking his mailed fist at
the frantic bird. "Why do you harry me with your squawking? Begone,
you black spawn of perdition, and peck for wheat to the farmers'
fields!"

He was ascending the first pitch of the hills, and he seemed to hear
an echo of the bird's clamor far behind him. Turning to his saddle, he
presently made out another black dot against  the blue. Beyond that
again he caught the glint of the afternoon sun on steel. That could
mean only one thing: armed men. And they were not riding along the
beaten road, which was out of his sight beyond the horizon. They were
following him. His face grew grim and he shivered slightly as he
stared at the raven that wheeled high above him.

"So it is more than the whim of a brainless beast?" he muttered.
"Those riders cannot see you, spawn of Hell; but the other bird can
see you, and they can see him. You follow me, he follows you, and they
follow him. Are you only a craftily trained feathered creature, or
some devil in the form of a bird? Did Xaltotun set you on my trail?
Are you Xaltotun?"

Only a strident screech answered him, a screech vibrating with harsh
mockery.

Conan wasted no more breath on his dusky betrayer. Grimly he settled
to the long grind of the hills, he dared not push the horse too hard;
the rest he had allowed it had not been enough to freshen it. He was
still far ahead of his pursuers, but they would cut down that lead
steadily. It was almost a certainty that their horses were fresher
than his, for they had undoubtedly changed mounts at that castle he
had passed.

The going grew rougher, the scenery more rugged, steep grassy slopes
pitching up to densely timbered mountainsides. Here, he knew, he might
elude his hunters, but for that hellish bird that squalled incessantly
above him. He could no longer see them in this broken country, but he
was certain that they still followed him, guided unerringly by their
feathered allies. That black shape became like a demoniac incubus,
hounding him through measureless hells. The stones he hurled with a
curse went wide or fell harmless, though in his youth he had felled
hawks on the wing.

The horse was tiring fast. Conan recognized the grim finality of his
position. He sensed an inexorable driving fate behind all this. He
could not escape. He was as much a captive as he had been in the pits
of Belverus. But he was no son of the Orient to yield passively to
what seemed inevitable. If he could not escape, he would at least take
some of his foes into eternity with him. He turned into a wide thicket
of larches that masked a slope, looking for a place to turn at bay.

Then ahead of him there rang a strange, shrill scream, human yet
weirdly timbred. An instant later he had pushed through a screen of
branches, and saw the source of that eldritch cry. In a small glade
below him four soldiers in Nemedian chain mail were binding a noose
about the neck of a gaunt old woman in peasant garb. A heap of fagots,
bound with cord on the ground near by, showed what her occupation had
been when surprized by these stragglers.

Conan felt slow fury swell his heart as he looked silently down and
saw the ruffians dragging her toward a tree whose low-spreading
branches were obviously intended to act as a gibbet. He had crossed
the frontier an hour ago. He was standing on his own soil, watching
the murder of one of his own subjects. The old woman was struggling
with surprizing strength and energy, and as he watched, she lifted her
head and voiced again the strange, weird, far-carrying call he had
heard before. It was echoed as if in mockery by the raven flapping
above the trees. The soldiers laughed roughly, and one struck her in
the mouth.

Conan swung from his weary steed and dropped down the face of the
rocks, landing with a clang of mail on the grass. The four men wheeled
at the sound and drew their swords, gaping at the mailed giant who
faced them, sword in hand.

Conan laughed harshly. His eyes were bleak as flint.

"Dogs!" he said without passion and without mercy. "Do Nemedian
jackals set themselves up as executioners and hang my subjects at
will? First you must take the head of their king. Here I stand,
awaiting your lordly pleasure!"

The soldiers stared at him uncertainly as he strode toward them.

"Who is this madman?" growled a bearded ruffian. "He wears Nemedian
mail, but speaks with an Aquilonian accent."

"No matter," quoth another. "Cut him down, and then we'll hang the old
hag."

And so saying he ran at Conan, lifting his sword. But before he could
strike, the king's great blade lashed down, splitting helmet and
skull. The man fell before him, but the others were hardy rogues. They
gave tongue like wolves and surged about the lone figure in the gray
mail, and the clamor and din of steel drowned the cries of the
circling raven.

Conan did not shout. His eyes coals of blue fire and his lips smiling
bleakly, he lashed right and left with his two-handed sword. For all
his size he was quick as a cat on his feet, and he was constantly in
motion, presenting a moving target so that thrusts and swings cut
empty air oftener than not. Yet when he struck he was perfectly
balanced, and his blows fell with devastating power. Three of the four
were down, dying in their own blood, and the fourth was bleeding from
half a dozen wounds, stumbling in headlong retreat as he parried
frantically, when Conan's spur caught in the surcoat of one of the
fallen men.

The king stumbled, and before he could catch himself the Nemedian,
with the frenzy of desperation, rushed him so savagely that Conan
staggered and fell sprawling over the corpse. The Nemedian croaked in
triumph and sprang forward, lifting his great sword with both hands
over his right shoulder, as he braced his legs wide for the stroke--and
then, over the prostrate king, something huge and hairy shot like a
thunderbolt full on the soldier's breast, and his yelp of triumph
changed to a shriek of death.

Conan, scrambling up, saw the man lying dead with his throat torn out,
and a great gray wolf stood over him, head sunk as it smelt the blood
that formed a pool on the grass.

The king turned as the old woman spoke to him. She stood straight and
tall before him, and in spite of her ragged garb, her features, clear-
cut and aquiline, and her keen black eyes, were not those of a common
peasant woman. She called to the wolf and it trotted to her side like
a great dog and rubbed its giant shoulder against her knee, while it
gazed at Conan with great green lambent eyes. Absently she laid her
hand upon its mighty neck, and so the two stood regarding the king of
Aquilonia. He found their steady gaze disquieting, though there was no
hostility in it.

"Men say King Conan died beneath the stones and dirt when the cliffs
crumbled by Valkia," she said in a deep, strong, resonant voice.

"So they say," he growled. He was in no mood for controversy, and he
thought of those armored riders who were pushing nearer every moment.
The raven above him cawed stridently, and he cast an involuntary glare
upward, grinding his teeth in a spasm of nervous irritation.

Up on the ledge the white horse stood with drooping head. The old
woman looked at it, and then at the raven; and then she lifted a
strange weird cry as she had before. As if recognizing the call, the
raven wheeled, suddenly mute, and raced eastward. But before it had
got out of sight, the shadow of mighty wings fell across it. An eagle
soared up from the tangle of trees, and rising above it, swooped and
struck the black messenger to the earth. The strident voice of
betrayal was stilled for ever.

"Crom!" muttered Conan, staring at the old woman. "Are you a magician,
too?"

"I am Zeiata," she said. "The people of the valleys call me a witch.
Was that child of the night guiding armed men on your trail?"

"Aye."  She did not seem to think the answer fantastic. "They cannot
be far behind me."

"Lead your horse and follow me, King Conan," she said briefly.

Without comment he mounted the rocks and brought his horse down to the
glade by a circuitous path. As he came he saw the eagle reappear,
dropping lazily down from the sky, and rest an instant on Zeiata's
shoulder, spreading its great wings lightly so as not to crush her
with its weight.

Without a word she led the way, the great wolf trotting at her side,
the eagle soaring above her. Through deep thickets and along tortuous
ledges poised over deep ravines she led him, and finally along a
narrow precipice-edged path to a curious dwelling of stone, half hut,
half cavern, beneath a cliff hidden among the gorges and crags. The
eagle flew to the pinnacle of this cliff, and perched there like a
motionless sentinel.

Still silent, Zeiata stabled the horse in a near-by cave, with leaves
and grass piled high for provender, and a tiny spring bubbling in the
dim recesses.

In the hut she seated the king on a rude, hide-covered bench, and she
herself sat upon a low stool before the tiny fireplace, while she made
a fire of tamarisk chunks and prepared a frugal meal. The great wolf
drowsed beside her, facing the fire, his huge head sunk on his paws,
his ears twitching in his dreams.

"You do not fear to sit in the hut of a witch?" she asked, breaking
her silence at last.

An impatient shrug of his gray-mailed shoulders was her guest's only
reply. She gave into his hands a wooden dish heaped with dried fruits,
cheese and barley bread, and a great pot of the heady upland beer,
brewed from barley grown in the high valleys.

"I have found the brooding silence of the glens more pleasing than the
babble of city streets," she said. "The children of the wild are
kinder than the children of men."  Her hand briefly stroked the ruff
of the sleeping wolf. "My children were afar from me today, or I had
not needed your sword, my king. They were coming at my call."

"What grudge had those Nemedian dogs against you?" Conan demanded.

"Skulkers from the invading army straggle all over the countryside,
from the frontier to Tarantia," she answered. "The foolish villagers
in the valleys told them that I had a store of gold hidden away, so as
to divert their attentions from their villages. They demanded treasure
from me, and my answers angered them. But neither skulkers nor the men
who p