Conan Stories quotes

“Stand back!” her voice shrilled with terror. “Touch me not, Shah Amurath, or I will throw myself into the water and drown!”

He laughed, and his laughter was like the purr of a sword sliding from a silken sheath.

“No, you will not drown, Olivia, daughter of confusion, for the marge is too shallow, and I can catch you before you can reach the deeps. You gave me a merry chase, by the gods, and all my men are far behind us.

Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. “

Aye, civilized men sell their children as slaves to savages, sometimes. They call your race barbaric, Conan of Cimmeria.

”

I was reared in a naked land. It was those cursed marshes, with their stench and stinging flies, that nigh unmanned me. I am at home in the high lands. As for pirates—” He grinned enigmatically, and bent to the oars.

The sun sank like a dull-glowing copper ball into a lake of fire.

The blue of the sea merged with the blue of the sky, and both turned to soft dark velvet, clustered with stars and the mirrors of stars. Olivia reclined in the bows of the gently rocking boat, in a state dreamy and unreal.

“Nothing entered,” a laugh of hysteria escaped her. “It was something there already.

Ah, Mitra, we lay down to sleep among them, like sheep making their bed in the shambles!

”

“The nameless, forgotten ones. Who knows? They have gone back into the still waters of the lakes, the quiet hearts of the hills, the gulfs beyond the stars.

Gods are no more stable than men.

”

“The nameless, forgotten ones. Who knows?

They have gone back into the still waters of the lakes, the quiet hearts of the hills, the gulfs beyond the stars.

Gods are no more stable than men.”

There intruded vaguely a wonderment at the mad pranks of Fate, that could make the daughter of a king the companion of a red-handed barbarian. With it came a revulsion toward her own kind.

Her father, and Shah Amurath, they were civilized men. And from them she had had only suffering.

She had never encountered any civilized man who treated her with kindness unless there was an ulterior motive behind his actions. Conan had shielded her, protected her, and—so far—demanded nothing in return.

“I’ve nothing to conceal,” replied the Cimmerian. “

By Crom, though I’ve spent considerable time among you civilized peoples, your ways are still beyond my comprehension.

“Well, last night in a tavern, a captain in the king’s guard offered violence to the sweetheart of a young soldier, who naturally ran him through. But it seems there is some cursed law against killing guardsmen, and the boy and his girl fled away.

“But I choked my ire and held my peace, and the judge squalled that I had shown contempt for the court, and that I should be hurled into a dungeon to rot until I betrayed my friend.

So then, seeing they were all mad, I drew my sword and cleft the judge’s skull; then I cut my way out of the court, and seeing the high constable’s stallion tied near by, I rode for the wharfs, where I thought to find a ship bound for foreign parts.

”

Conan towered above them, and no two of them could match his strength. They were hardy and robust, but his was the endurance and vitality of a wolf, his thews steeled and his nerves whetted by the hardness of his life in the world’s wastelands.

He was quick to laugh, quick and terrible in his wrath.

He was a valiant trencherman, and strong drink was a passion and a weakness with him. Naive as a child in many ways, unfamiliar with the sophistry of civilization, he was naturally intelligent, jealous of his rights, and dangerous as a hungry tiger.

“

The wildest she-devil unhanged.

Unless I read the signs a-wrong, it was her butchers who destroyed that village on the bay. May I some day see her dangling from the yardarm! She is called the queen of the black coast. She is a Shemite woman, who leads black raiders.

Her rich black hair, black as a Stygian night, fell in rippling burnished clusters down her supple back. Her dark eyes burned on the Cimmerian.

She was untamed as a desert wind, supple and dangerous as a she-panther.

She came close to him, heedless of his great blade, dripping with blood of her warriors. Her supple thigh brushed against it, so close she came to the tall warrior. Her red lips parted as she stared up into his somber menacing eyes.

“Look at me, Conan!” She threw wide her arms. “I am Bêlit, queen of the black coast.

Oh, tiger of the North, you are cold as the snowy mountains which bred you.

Take me and crush me with your fierce love! Go with me to the ends of the earth and the ends of the sea! I am a queen by fire and steel and slaughter—be thou my king!”

Rising on tiptoe, arms stretched upward, a quivering line of naked white, she cried to the desperate horde: “Wolves of the blue sea, behold ye now the dance—the mating-dance of Bêlit, whose fathers were kings of Askalon!”

And she danced, like the spin of a desert whirlwind, like the leaping of a quenchless flame, like the urge of creation and the urge of death.

Her white feet spurned the bloodstained deck and dying men forgot death as they gazed frozen at her.

“

Mystery and terror are about us, Conan, and we glide into the realm of horror and death,

” she said. “Are you afraid?”

“Their chief is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die.

Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune!

He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man’s soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?”

“Their chief is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune!

He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man’s soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?

”

“There is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people,” answered Conan. “

In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm of clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity.

”

I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom’s realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer’s Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care.

Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content.

Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me.

Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion.

I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

”

She was the first to spring ashore, closely followed by Conan, and after them trooped the ebon-skinned pirates, white plumes waving in the morning wind, spears ready, eyes rolling dubiously at the surrounding jungle.

Over all brooded a silence as sinister as that of a sleeping serpent.

Bêlit posed picturesquely among the ruins, the vibrant life in her lithe figure contrasting strangely with the desolation and decay about her.

Bêlit’s eyes were like a woman’s in a trance.

The Shemite soul finds a bright drunkenness in riches and material splendor, and the sight of this treasure might have shaken the soul of a sated emperor of Shushan.

“Take up the jewels, dogs!” her voice was shrill with her emotions.

Strings of frozen iridescence hung between his dusky fingers; drops of red fire dripped from his hands, piled high with starlight and rainbow.

It was as if a black titan stood straddle-legged in the bright pits of hell, his lifted hands full of stars.

“That flying devil has staved in the water-casks,” said Conan. “If we hadn’t been so dazed by these stones we’d have heard the noise. We were fools not to have left a man on guard. We can’t drink this river water.

They lived, loved and died, though the individual span of life was enormous. Then, after uncounted millions of years, the Change began. The vista shimmered and wavered, like a picture thrown on a windblown curtain.

Over the city and the land the ages flowed as waves flow over a beach, and each wave brought alterations.

Somewhere on the planet the magnetic centers were shifting; the great glaciers and ice-fields were withdrawing toward the new poles.

Conan stood in the moonlit silence, the dripping sword sagging in his hand, staring down at the remnants of his enemy. The red eyes glared up at him with awful life, then glazed and set; the great hands knotted spasmodically and stiffened.

And the oldest race in the world was extinct.

Conan lifted his head, mechanically searching for the beast-things that had been its slaves and executioners. None met his gaze. The bodies he saw littering the moon-splashed grass were of men, not beasts: hawk-faced, dark-skinned men, naked, transfixed by arrows or mangled by sword-strokes.

Again dawn tinged the ocean. A redder glow lit the river-mouth. Conan of Cimmeria leaned on his great sword upon the white beach, watching the Tigress swinging out on her last voyage. There was no light in his eyes that contemplated the glassy swells.

Out of the rolling blue wastes all glory and wonder had gone.

A fierce revulsion shook him as he gazed at the green surges that deepened into purple hazes of mystery.

There was no light in his eyes that contemplated the glassy swells. Out of the rolling blue wastes all glory and wonder had gone. A fierce revulsion shook him as he gazed at the green surges that deepened into purple hazes of mystery.

Bêlit had been of the sea; she had lent it splendor and allure. Without her it rolled a barren, dreary and desolate waste from pole to pole.

She belonged to the sea; to its everlasting mystery he returned her. He could do no more.

“

For every beast and for every man there is a trap he will not escape,

” quoth Ghaznavi. “When we have parleyed with the kozaks for the ransom of captives, I have observed this man Conan. He has a keen relish for women and strong drink. Have your captive Octavia fetched here.”

“

Does a man take a band of warriors with him, when going to a rendezvous with a woman he desires?

” retorted Ghaznavi. “The chances are all that he will go alone. But we will take care of the other alternative.

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

Conan stood paralyzed in the disruption of the faculties which demoralizes anyone who is confronted by an impossible negation of sanity.

He doubted neither his sight nor his reason, but something was monstrously out of joint. Less than a month ago only broken ruins had showed among the trees.

It pleased him to restore the city as it was in the days before its fall. By his necromancy he lifted the towers from the dust of forgotten millenniums, and the folk which had been dust for ages moved in life again.

But folk who have tasted death are only partly alive.

In the dark corners of their souls and minds death still lurks unconquered. By night the people of Dagon moved and loved, hated and feasted, and remembered the fall of Dagon and their own slaughter only as a dim dream;

The face was without weakness and without mercy. The eyes were balls of dark fire. And Conan knew that this was Khosatral Khel, the ancient from the Abyss, the god of Dagonia.

No word was spoken. No word was necessary.

Khosatral spread his great arms, and Conan, crouching beneath them, slashed at the giant’s belly. Then he bounded back, eyes blazing with surprise. The keen edge had rung on the mighty body as on an anvil, rebounding without cutting.

Khosatral loomed above the warrior in the gloom. Once let those great fingers lock and they would not loosen until the human body hung limp in their grasp.

In that twilit chamber it was as if a man fought with a dream-monster in a nightmare.

Flinging down his useless sword, Conan caught up a heavy bench and hurled it with all his power. It was such a missile as few men could even lift. On Khosatral’s mighty breast it smashed into shreds and splinters.

Only the stumps of broken columns rose above crumbling walls and broken paves and shattered dome. Conan again looked upon the ruins of Xapur as he remembered them.

The wild hetman stood like a statue for a space, dimly grasping something of the cosmic tragedy of the fitful ephemera called mankind and the hooded shapes of darkness which prey upon it.

Then as he heard his name called in accents of fear, he started, as one awaking from a dream, glanced again at the thing on the ground, shuddered and turned away toward the cliffs and the girl that waited there.

He laughed and strode with her in his arms toward the stair. “You shall judge,” he boasted. “

I’ll burn Khawarizm for a torch to light your way to my tent.

”

The king of Vendhya was dying. Through the hot, stifling night the temple gongs boomed and the conchs roared.

Their clamor was a faint echo in the gold-domed chamber where Bunda Chand struggled on the velvet-cushioned dais. Beads of sweat glistened on his dark skin; his fingers twisted the gold-worked fabric beneath him. He was young;

“

Even the arts you call sorcery are governed by cosmic laws,

” answered the man in the green turban. “The stars direct these actions, as in other affairs. Not even my masters can alter the stars. Not until the heavens were in the proper order could they perform this necromancy.”

“I do not know if you are a man or a demon, Khemsa,” he said at last. “

Few of us are what we seem.

I, whom the Kshatriyas know as Kerim Shah, a prince from Iranistan, am no greater a masquerader than most men. They are all traitors in one way or another, and half of them know not whom they serve. There at least I have no doubts;

Chunder Shan, governor of Peshkhauri, laid down his golden pen and carefully scanned that which he had written on parchment that bore his official seal. He had ruled Peshkhauri so long only because he weighed his every word, spoken or written.

Danger breeds caution, and only a wary man lives long in that wild country where the hot Vendhyan plains meet the crags of the Himelians.

An hour’s ride westward or northward and one crossed the border and was among the Hills where men lived by the law of the knife.

“Well, as to that,” muttered the governor, “

I doubt if there is anything that devil fears.

”

Her voice thrummed with hate as she uttered the last words, and her hands clenched at her sides. She looked an image of incarnate passion as she stood there with her head thrown high and her bosom heaving.

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

“It shall be as you wish, Your Majesty.” Then as she presented a calmer aspect, he rose and ventured to drop a word of warning. “I can not predict what the chief Conan’s action will be.

He led the girl through a door that opened on a winding stair. After their soft tread had faded into silence, the man on the couch sat up. Kerim Shah wiped the sweat from his face.

A knife-thrust he did not dread, but he feared Khemsa as a man fears a poisonous reptile.

“People who plot on roofs should remember to lower their voices,” he muttered. “But as Khemsa has turned against his masters, and as he was my only contact between them, I can count on their aid no longer.

Making no comment, she seated herself cross-legged on the floor, and taking the dish in her lap, she began to eat, using her fingers, which were all she had in the way of table utensils.

After all, adaptability is one of the tests of true aristocracy.

Conan stood looking down at her, his thumbs hooked in his girdle. He never sat cross-legged, after the Eastern fashion.

Perhaps there was another way, besides the method she had planned, to accomplish her purpose. She could not mistake the look that was beginning to dawn in this wild man’s eyes as they rested on her.

Kingdoms have fallen when a woman’s slim white hands pulled the strings of destiny.

Suddenly she stiffened, pointing.

But Conan was not a son of the East. Its traditions were meaningless to him; he was the product of an utterly alien atmosphere.

Hypnotism was not even a myth in Cimmeria.

The heritage that prepared a native of the East for submission to the mesmerist was not his.

The Rakhsha had learned the full flood of his own power when he faced at bay the knives of the maddened Wazulis in the ravine behind Khurum village; but the Cimmerian’s resistance had perhaps shaken his newfound confidence a trifle.

Sorcery thrives on success, not on failure.

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

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

“Is the dog that licks up the offal in the temple yard the vassal of the god?”

returned the Master.

“It was a girdle Khemsa gave me before he died,” Conan answered. “Yes, I found him on the trail. It is a curious one, which I’ll show you when I have time.

Against some spells it was weak, but against others it was strong, and a good knife is always a hearty incantation.

”

I’ll find a place for you to hide until I come back to you. You spoke of your kingdom—well, I don’t pretend to look on those hairy devils as my children, but after all, such as they are, they’re my henchmen.

A chief should never desert his followers, even if they desert him first.

They think they were right in kicking me out—hell, I won’t be cast off! I’m still chief of the Afghulis, and I’ll prove it! I can climb down on foot into the gorge.”

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

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

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

“The people awaken and grow fearful,” said Constantius sardonically. “You had better go and reassure them, Salome!”

“Call me Taramis,” answered Salome. “We must become accustomed to it.”

“What have you done?” cried Taramis. “What have you done?”

The western and northern horizons were dotted with villages, miniature in the distance. A lesser distance to the southeast a silvery gleam marked the course of a river, and beyond that river sandy desert began abruptly to stretch away and away beyond the horizon.

Conan stared at that expanse of empty waste shimmering tawnily in the late sunlight as a trapped hawk stares at the open sky.

A revulsion shook him when he glanced at the gleaming towers of Khauran. The city had betrayed him—trapped him into circumstances that left him hanging to a wooden cross like a hare nailed to a tree.

Thirst assailed him savagely. He had drunk deeply of wine the night before, and no water had touched his lips since before the battle in the square, that dawn. And killing was thirsty, salt-sweaty work.

He glared at the distant river as a man in hell glares through the opened grille.

He thought of gushing freshets of white water he had breasted, laved to the shoulders in liquid jade. He remembered great horns of foaming ale, jacks of sparkling wine gulped carelessly or spilled on the tavern floor.

He remembered great horns of foaming ale, jacks of sparkling wine gulped carelessly or spilled on the tavern floor. He bit his lip to keep from bellowing in intolerable anguish as a tortured animal bellows.

The sun sank, a lurid ball in a fiery sea of blood.

Against a crimson rampart that banded the horizon the towers of the city floated unreal as a dream. The very sky was tinged with blood to his misted glare. He licked his blackened lips and stared with bloodshot eyes at the distant river.

Ferocious triumph surged through Conan’s numbed brain. Life beat strongly and savagely through his veins.

He could still deal death; he still lived. Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.

“By Mitra!” Either a voice spoke, or he suffered from hallucination. “In all my life I have never seen such a thing!”

Most of them have been living the lives of outlaws in the deserts east of Khauran, and are gaunt and hard and desperate as man-eating tigers. One of them will be a match for any three squat mercenaries.

It takes oppression and hardship to stiffen men’s guts and put the fire of hell into their thews.

They were broken up into small bands; all they needed was a leader. They believed the word I sent them by my riders, and assembled at the oasis and put themselves at my disposal.”

He crushed her to him and drank her kisses with the gratitude of a weary fighter who has attained rest at last through tribulation and storm.

But not all men seek rest and peace; some are born with the spirit of the storm in their blood, restless harbingers of violence and bloodshed, knowing no other path.

…

Near that stump rose a heavy cross, and on that cross a man hung by spikes through his hands and feet.

“Seven months ago, Constantius,” said Conan, “it was I who hung there, and you who sat here.”

Constantius did not reply; he licked his gray lips and his eyes were glassy with pain and fear. Muscles writhed like cords along his lean body.

“You are more fit to inflict torture than to endure it,” said Conan tranquilly. “I hung there on a cross as you are hanging, and I lived, thanks to circumstances and a stamina peculiar to barbarians.

But you civilized men are soft; your lives are not nailed to your spines as are ours.

Your fortitude consists mainly in inflicting torment, not in enduring it. You will be dead before sundown. And so, Falcon of the desert, I leave you to the companionship of another bird of the desert.”

the gaze of each, as he passed a certain spot, turned impersonally and with the desert man’s lack of compassion, toward the cross and the gaunt figure that hung there, black against the sunrise. Their horses’ hoofs beat out a knell in the dust.

Lower and lower swept the wings of the hungry vultures.

There was no reason to suppose men lied when they said that Alkmeenon was empty and deserted, haunted only by the ghosts of the dead past. But it was Conan’s nature to be suspicious and wary.

The silence was primordial; not even a leaf quivered on a branch.

When he bent to peer under the trees, he saw nothing but the marching rows of trunks, receding and receding into the blue gloom of the deep woods.

“Why, you sacrilegious little hussy!” rumbled Conan. “

Do you not fear the gods? Crom! is there no honesty anywhere?

”

Conan dumped the senseless black on the floor, and lifted his sword.

The Cimmerian had lived too long in the wild places of the world to have any illusions about mercy. The only safe enemy was a headless enemy.

But before he could strike, a startling scream checked the lifted blade. It came from the oracle chamber.

“It’s nothing to me,” the other retorted. “

I’m a mercenary. I sell my sword to the highest bidder.

I never planted wheat and never will, so long as there are other harvests to be reaped with the sword. But you Hyborians have expanded as far as you’ll be allowed to expand.

“

Tiberias gave one scream, and then his throat was torn open and he was selling his otter skins in Hell.

The mule ran away into the woods. Listen! Even now you can hear him thrashing about under the trees. The demon didn’t have time to take Tiberias’ head; it took fright as we came up.”

The shadows were thickening. A darkening blue mist blurred the outlines of the foliage.

The forest deepened in the twilight, became a blue haunt of mystery sheltering unguessed things.

They had covered more than a mile, and the muscles in Balthus’ sturdy arms were beginning to ache a little, when a cry rang shuddering from the woods whose blue shadows were deepening into purple.

“A swamp devil,” responded Conan morosely. “Grab those poles. We’ll take in the body, anyway. At least our load’s a bit lighter.”

With which grim philosophy he gripped the leathery loop and stalked down the trail.

Fort Tuscelan stood on the eastern bank of Black River, the tides of which washed the foot of the stockade.

No white man has ever plunged deep into that fastness and returned alive to tell us what he found. We are wise in our civilized knowledge, but our knowledge extends just so far—to the western bank of that ancient river!

Who knows what shapes earthly and unearthly may lurk beyond the dim circle of light our knowledge has cast?

“Who knows what gods are worshipped under the shadows of that heathen forest, or what devils crawl out of the black ooze of the swamps? Who can be sure that all the inhabitants of that black country are natural?

“The soldiers, who do not believe in ghosts or devils,” he said, “are almost in a panic of fear. You, who believe in ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and all manner of uncanny things, do not seem to fear any of the things in which you believe.”

“There’s nothing in the universe cold steel won’t cut,” answered Conan.

“I threw my ax at the demon, and he took no hurt, but I might have missed, in the dusk, or a branch deflected its flight. I’m not going out of my way looking for devils;

“There’s nothing in the universe cold steel won’t cut,” answered Conan. “I threw my ax at the demon, and he took no hurt, but I might have missed, in the dusk, or a branch deflected its flight.

I’m not going out of my way looking for devils; but I wouldn’t step out of my path to let one go by.

”

They were wild men, of a sort, yet there was still a wide gulf between them and the Cimmerian. They were sons of civilization, reverted to a semi-barbarism.

He was a barbarian of a thousand generations of barbarians.

They had acquired stealth and craft, but he had been born to these things. He excelled them even in lithe economy of motion. They were wolves, but he was a tiger.

They were sons of civilization, reverted to a semi-barbarism. He was a barbarian of a thousand generations of barbarians. They had acquired stealth and craft, but he had been born to these things. He excelled them even in lithe economy of motion.

They were wolves, but he was a tiger.

Balthus admired them and their leader and felt a pulse of pride that he was admitted into their company. He was proud that his paddle made no more noise than did theirs.

“Some kind of devilment,” muttered the forest runner. “They might have gathered here to watch Zogar’s magic-making. He’ll make some rare magic with our carcasses.

Well, a border-man doesn’t expect to die in bed.

But I wish we’d gone out along with the rest.”

Its jaws were massive, but its head was brutishly shaped. Its brain capacity was small. It had room for no instincts except those of destruction.

It was a freak of carnivorous development, evolution run amuck in a horror of fangs and talons.

This was the monstrosity Zogar Sag had summoned out of the forest. Balthus no longer doubted the actuality of the shaman’s magic. Only the black arts could establish a domination over that tiny-brained, mighty-thewed monster.

“They got over their panic cursed quick!” panted Balthus, complying with a fresh burst of speed.

“They’re not afraid of anything, very long,” grunted Conan.

For a space nothing was said between them. The fugitives devoted all their attention to covering distance. They were plunging deeper and deeper into the wilderness and getting farther away from civilization at every step, but Balthus did not question Conan’s wisdom.

“Once all living things worshipped him. That was long ago, when beasts and men spoke one language.

Men have forgotten him; even the beasts forget. Only a few remember.

The men who remember Jhebbal Sag and the beasts who remember are brothers and speak the same tongue.”

“Civilized men laugh,” said Conan. “But not one can tell me how Zogar Sag can call pythons and tigers and leopards out of the wilderness and make them do his bidding. They would say it is a lie, if they dared.

That’s the way with civilized men. When they can’t explain something by their half-baked science, they refuse to believe it.

”

“

I’ve roamed far; farther than any other man of my race ever wandered.

I’ve seen all the great cities of the Hyborians, the Shemites, the Stygians and the Hyrkanians. I’ve roamed in the unknown countries south of the black kingdoms of Kush, and east of the Sea of Vilayet.

He felt lonely, in spite of his companion.

Conan was as much a part of this wilderness as Balthus was alien to it.

The Cimmerian might have spent years among the great cities of the world; he might have walked with the rulers of civilization; he might even achieve his wild whim some day and rule as king of a civilized nation; stranger things had happened.

But he was no less a barbarian. He was concerned only with the naked fundamentals of life. The warm intimacies of small, kindly things, the sentiments and delicious trivialities that make up so much of civilized men’s lives were meaningless to him.

A wolf was no less a wolf because a whim of chance caused him to run with the watchdogs.

Bloodshed and violence and savagery were the natural elements of the life Conan knew; he could not, and would never, understand the little things that are so dear to civilized men and women.

Balthus mentally compared the great gaunt hard body with the fat sleek hounds tumbling vociferously over one another in his father’s kennel yard. He sighed.

The frontier was no less hard for beasts than for men.

This dog had almost forgotten the meaning of kindness and friendliness.

The quivering flame had a solid core; the flame was but a green garment that masked some animate and evil entity; but the Cimmerian was unable to make out its shape or likeness. Then, shockingly, a voice spoke to him from amidst the fiery column.

“Why do you stand like a sheep waiting for the butcher, Conan?”

The voice was human but carried strange vibrations that were not human.

But fear had fought for it when it slew its other victims, and Conan was not afraid.

He knew that any being clothed in material flesh can be slain by material weapons, however grisly its form may be.

One flailing talon-armed limb knocked his helmet from his head. A little lower and it would have decapitated him. But fierce joy surged through him as his savagely driven sword sank deep in the monster’s groin.

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,” the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian.

“Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”

Behind him the players halted their game to stare after him with a cryptic speculation in their eyes. They said nothing, but the Stygian laughed, a ghastly laugh of inhuman cynicism and mockery. The others lowered their eyes uneasily, avoiding one another’s glance.

The arts studied by a Stygian scholar are not calculated to make him share the feelings of a normal human being.

Conan followed Aram down a corridor lighted by copper lamps, and it did not please him to note his host’s noiseless tread. Aram’s feet were clad in soft slippers and the hallway was carpeted with thick Turanian rugs;

It was the stealthy opening of a door which awakened the Cimmerian.

He did not awake as civilized men do, drowsy and drugged and stupid. He awoke instantly, with a clear mind, recognizing the sound that had interrupted his sleep.

Lying there tensely in the dark he saw the outer door slowly open. In a widening crack of starlit sky he saw framed a great black bulk, broad, stooping shoulders and a misshapen head blocked out against the stars.

Conan blew out the light, stepped to the door and opened it, and ran his hand over the ornaments on the outer side. One of them was movable and worked the bolt inside. The room was a trap to catch human prey like rabbits.

But this time instead of a rabbit it had caught a saber-toothed tiger.

Conan returned to the other door, lifted the bolt and pressed against it. It was immovable and he remembered the bolt on the other side. Aram was taking no chances either with his victims or the men with whom he dealt.

Conan spat in disgust, and a moment later led his companion out into the road which was becoming a street, with still, unlighted houses on each side.

Slinking in the shadows was not congenial to his nature.

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

The girl murmured an endearment to the unconscious man, and there was no hypocrisy in her attitude. She obviously loved Alafdhal sincerely. Whatever business arrangement she made with Conan would have no bearing on her relationship with Alafdhal.

Women are more practical about these things than men.

“Follow me!” She hurried along the street, while the Cimmerian strode easily after her, in no way discomforted by his limp burden. He kept a wary eye out for black shadows skulking under arches, but saw nothing suspicious.

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

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

“You fool!” he all but whispered. “I think you never saw a man from the West before. Did you deem yourself strong, because you were able to twist the heads off civilized folk, poor weaklings with muscles like rotten string? Hell!

Valeria stamped her booted foot and swore.

“Why won’t men let me live a man’s life?”

“That’s obvious!” Again his eager eyes devoured her. “But you were wise to run away. The Stygians would have had you skinned. That officer’s brother followed you; faster than you thought, I don’t doubt. He wasn’t far behind you when I caught up with him.

“He’s just gorged on horse-meat, and like a real snake, he can go for a long time without eating or drinking again. But he doesn’t sleep after eating, like a real snake, it seems. Anyway, he can’t climb this crag.”

Conan spoke imperturbably. He was a barbarian, and the terrible patience of the wilderness and its children was as much a part of him as his lusts and rages.

He could endure a situation like this with a coolness impossible to a civilized person.

“Spears!” he muttered. “What a blasted fool I am not to have thought of that before!

That shows what a pretty woman does to a man’s mind.

”

“What good will that do?” she demanded. “You told me that a blade couldn’t pierce his scales—”

“He hasn’t got scales all over him,” answered Conan. “There’s more than one way of skinning a panther.”

Moving down to the edge of the leaves, he reached the spear up and carefully thrust the blade through one of the Apples of Derketa, drawing aside to avoid the darkly purple drops that dripped from the pierced fruit.

“Run!” snarled Conan, his eyes blazing like those of a trapped wolf. “It’s all we can do!”

Sailor’s boots are not made for sprinting, and the life of a pirate does not train one for a runner.

Within a hundred yards Valeria was panting and reeling in her gait, and behind them the crashing gave way to a rolling thunder as the monster broke out of the thickets and into the more open ground.

“I was a kozak before I was a pirate,” he answered. “They live in the saddle.

I snatch naps like a panther watching beside the trail for a deer to come by. My ears keep watch while my eyes sleep.

”

She too hitched her sword-belt as she rose. Her terrors of the night were past. The roaring dragons of the distant forest were like a dim dream. There was a swagger in her stride as she moved off beside the Cimmerian.

Whatever perils lay ahead of them, their foes would be men. And Valeria of the Red Brotherhood had never seen the face of the man she feared.

Conan glanced down at her as she strode along beside him with her swinging stride that matched his own.

In the splotches of shadow between them, the green jewels winked like the eyes of angry cats. Beneath their feet the dully lurid floor smoldered with changing hues and colors of flame.

It was like treading the floors of hell with evil stars blinking overhead.

Three balustraded galleries ran along on each side of the hall, one above the other.

“Who are these people?” asked Olmec, and his voice was like the low, deep rumble of a distant bull. None of the people of Xuchotl spoke loudly.

It was as if they had absorbed into their souls the silence of the empty halls and deserted chambers.

“I am Conan, a Cimmerian,” answered the barbarian briefly. “This woman is Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, an Aquilonian pirate. We are deserters from an army on the Darfar border, far to the north, and are trying to reach the coast.”

Yasala made no reply. She crouched, watching her captor with eyes baleful as those of a basilisk.

Stubborn silence always fans anger.

Valeria turned and tore a handful of cords from a nearby hanging.

These crashed into the fray with the devastating effect of a hurricane plowing through a grove of saplings. In sheer strength no three Tlazitlans were a match for Conan, and in spite of his weight he was quicker on his feet than any of them.

He moved through the whirling, eddying mass with the surety and destructiveness of a gray wolf amidst a pack of alley curs, and he strode over a wake of crumpled figures.

Valeria fought beside him, her lips smiling and her eyes blazing. She was stronger than the average man, and far quicker and more ferocious. Her sword was like a living thing in her hand.

Valeria twisted herself about in his iron grip, and when she met the burning eyes of Tascela, a chill tingled along her supple spine. New experiences were flooding Valeria’s proud soul that night.

Recently she had learned to fear a man; now she knew what it was to fear a woman.

Olmec sat motionless, a gray pallor growing under his swarthy skin. Tascela brought her other hand from behind her and displayed a small gold vessel.

Valeria thought she had tasted the ultimate in humiliation already that night, but her shame at being manhandled by Olmec was nothing to the sensations that now shook her supple frame.

Valeria had always been inclined to despise the other members of her sex; and it was overwhelming to encounter another woman who could handle her like a child.

She scarcely resisted at all when Tascela forced her into a chair and drawing her bound wrists down between her knees, fastened them to the chair.

His great shoulders were as broad as those of Olmec, and more cleanly outlined, and his huge breast arched with a more impressive sweep to a hard waist that lacked the paunchy thickness of Olmec’s midsection.

He might have been an image of primal strength cut out of bronze.

Olmec was darker, but not from the burning of the sun. If Conan was a figure out of the dawn of Time, Olmec was a shambling, somber shape from the darkness of Time’s pre-dawn.

He might have been an image of primal strength cut out of bronze. Olmec was darker, but not from the burning of the sun.

If Conan was a figure out of the dawn of Time, Olmec was a shambling, somber shape from the darkness of Time’s pre-dawn.

“Lead on,” demanded Conan. “And keep ahead of me. I don’t trust you any farther than I can throw a bull by the tail.”

That hideous tittering was Tolkemec’s only reply, as he bounded into the room with a long leap that carried him over the secret trap before the door—by chance, or by some faint recollection of the ways of Xuchotl.

He was not mad, as a man is mad. He had dwelt apart from humanity so long that he was no longer human.

Only an unbroken thread of memory embodied in hate and the urge for vengeance had connected him with the humanity from which he had been cut off, and held him lurking near the people he hated.

“I can walk on it,” he assured her. “Let’s begone. It’s dawn, outside this infernal city. I’ve had enough of Xuchotl. It’s well the breed exterminated itself. I don’t want any of their accursed jewels. They might be haunted.”

“There is enough clean loot in the world for you and me,” she said, straightening to stand tall and splendid before him.

The old blaze came back in his eyes, and this time she did not resist as he caught her fiercely in his arms.

“It’s a long way to the coast,” she said presently, withdrawing her lips from his.

“What matter?” he laughed. “There’s nothing we can’t conquer. We’ll have our feet on a ship’s deck before the Stygians open their ports for the trading season. And then we’ll show the world what plundering means!”