Просмотр исходного текста страницы «Red Nails»/«Гвозди с красными шляпками»

{| border="0" width="100%" height="700px" class="simple" style="margin: 0em;"
|-
| style="vertical-align:top;"|
{| border="0" width="100%" height="300px" class="simple" style="margin: 0em; border: 1px solid #FFD700;"
| bgcolor="#FFD700" width="1px" | <br>
| width="10px" style="text-align: center;" |
| width="200px" height="300px" style="vertical-align:top;" |
=«Red Nails»=
__NOTOC__
== The Skull on the Crag ==
 
The  woman on the horse reined in her weary steed. It stood with its legs  wide-braced, its head drooping, as if it found even the weight of the  gold-tassled, red-leather bridle too heavy. The woman drew a booted foot  out of the silver stirrup and swung down from the gilt-worked saddle.  She made the reins fast to the fork of a sapling, and turned about,  hands on her hips, to survey her surroundings.
 
They  were not inviting. Giant trees hemmed in the small pool where her horse  had just drunk. Clumps of undergrowth limited the vision that quested  under the somber twilight of the lofty arches formed by intertwining  branches. The woman shivered with a twitch of her magnificent shoulders,  and then cursed.
 
She was tall,  full-bosomed, and large-limbed, with compact shoulders. Her whole figure  reflected an unusual strength, without detracting from the femininity  of her appearance. She was all woman, in spite of her bearing and her  garments. The latter were incongruous, in view of her present environs.  Instead of a skirt she wore short, wide-legged silk breeches, which  ceased a hand's breadth short of her knees, and were upheld by a wide  silken sash worn as a girdle. Flaring-topped boots of soft leather came  almost to her knees, and a low-necked, wide-collared, wide-sleeved silk  shirt completed her costume. On one shapely hip she wore a straight  double-edged sword, and on the other a long dirk. Her unruly golden  hair, cut square at her shoulders, was confined by a band of crimson  satin.
 
Against the background of somber,  primitive forest she posed with an unconscious picturesqueness, bizarre  and out of place. She should have been posed against a background of  sea clouds, painted masts, and wheeling gulls. There was the color of  the sea in her wide eyes. And that was at it should have been, because  this was Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, whose deeds are celebrated in  song and ballad wherever seafarers gather.
 
She  strove to pierce the sullen green roof of the arched branches and see  the sky which presumably lay above it, but presently gave it up with a  muttered oath.
 
Leaving her horse tied,  she strode off toward the east, glancing back toward the pool from time  to time in order to fix her route in her mind. The silence of the forest  depressed her. No birds sang in the lofty boughs, nor did any rustling  in the bushes indicate the presence of small animals. For leagues she  had traveled in a realm of brooding stillness, broken only by the sounds  of her own flight.
 
She had slaked her  thirst at the pool, but now felt the gnawings of hunger and began  looking about for some of the fruit on which she had sustained herself  since exhausting the food originally in her saddlebags.
 
Ahead  of her, presently, she saw an outcropping of dark, flintlike rock that  sloped upward into what looked like a rugged crag rising among the  trees. Its summit was lost to view amidst a cloud of encircling leaves.  Perhaps its peak rose above the treetops, and from it she could see what  lay beyond--if, indeed, anything lay beyond but more of this apparently  illimitable forest through which she had ridden for so many days.
 
A narrow ridge formed a natural ramp that led up the steep face of the crag. After she had ascended some fifty feet, she came to the belt of leaves that surrounded the rock. The trunks of the trees did not crowd close to the crag, but the ends of their lower branches extended about it, veiling it with their foliage. She groped on in leafy obscurity, not able to see either above or below her; but presently she glimpsed blue sky, and a moment later came out in the clear, hot sunlight and saw the forest roof stretching away under her feet.
 
She  was standing on a broad shelf which was about even with the treetops,  and from it rose a spirelike jut that was the ultimate peak of the crag  she had climbed. But something else caught her attention at the moment.  Her foot had struck something in the litter of blown dead leaves which  carpeted the shelf. She kicked them aside and looked down on the  skeleton of a man. She ran an experienced eye over the bleached frame,  but saw no broken bones nor any sign of violence. The man must have died  a natural death; though why he should have climbed a tall crag to die  she could not imagine.
 
She scrambled up  to the summit of the spire and looked toward the horizons. The forest  roof--which looked like a floor from her vantage point--was just as  impenetrable as from below. She could not even see the pool by which she  had left her horse. She glanced northward, in the direction from which  she had come. She saw only the rolling green ocean stretching away and  away, with just a vague blue line in the distance to hint of the hill  range she had crossed days before, to plunge into this leafy waste.
 
West  and east the view was the same; though the blue hill-line was lacking  in those directions. But when she turned her eyes southward she  stiffened and caught her breath. A mile away in that direction the  forest thinned out and ceased abruptly, giving way to a cactus-dotted  plain. And in the midst of that plain rose the walls and towers of a  city. Valeria swore in amazement. This passed belief. She would not have  been surprised to sight human habitations of another sort--the  beehive-shaped huts of the black people, or the cliff-dwellings of the  mysterious brown race which legends declared inhabited some country of  this unexplored region. But it was a startling experience to come upon a  walled city here so many long weeks' march from the nearest outposts of  any sort of civilization.
 
Her hands  tiring from clinging to the spirelike pinnacle, she let herself down on  the shelf, frowning in indecision. She had come far--from the camp of  the mercenaries by the border town of Sukhmet amidst the level  grasslands, where desperate adventurers of many races guard the Stygian  frontier against the raids that come up like a red wave from Darfar. Her  flight had been blind, into a country of which she was wholly ignorant.  And now she wavered between an urge to ride directly to that city in  the plain, and the instinct of caution which prompted her to skirt it  widely and continue her solitary flight.
 
Her  thoughts were scattered by the rustling of the leaves below her. She  wheeled catlike, snatched at her sword; and then she froze motionless,  staring wide-eyed at the man before her.
 
He  was almost a giant in stature, muscles rippling smoothly under his  skin, which the sun had burned brown. His garb was similar to hers,  except that he wore a broad leather belt instead of a girdle. Broadsword  and poniard hung from his belt.
 
"Conan, the Cimmerian!" ejaculated the woman. "What are you doing on my trail?"
 
He  grinned hardly, and his fierce blue eyes burned with a light any woman  could understand as they ran over her magnificent figure, lingering on  the swell of her splendid breasts beneath the light shirt, and the clear  white flesh displayed between breeches and boot-tops.
 
"Don't you know?" he laughed. "Haven't I made my admiration for you plain ever since I first saw you?"
 
"A  stallion could have made it no plainer," she answered disdainfully.  "But I never expected to encounter you so far from the ale barrels and  meatpots of Sukhmet. Did you really follow me from Zarallo's camp, or  were you whipped forth for a rogue?"
 
He laughed at her insolence and flexed his mighty biceps.
 
"You  know Zarallo didn't have enough knaves to whip me out of camp," he  grinned. "Of course I followed you. Lucky thing for you, too, wench!  When you knifed that Stygian officer, you forfeited Zarallo's favor, and  protection, and you outlawed yourself with the Stygians."
 
"I know it," she replied sullenly. "But what else could I do? You know what my provocation was."
 
"Sure,"  he agreed. "If I'd been there, I'd have knifed him myself. But if a  woman must live in the war camps of men, she can expect such things."
 
Valeria stamped her booted foot and swore.
 
"Why won't men let me life 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. His horse was better than yours.  He'd have caught you and cut your throat within a few more miles."
 
"Well?" she demanded.
 
"Well what?" He seemed puzzled.
 
"What of the Stygian?"
 
"Why,  what do you suppose?" he returned impatiently. "I killed him, of  course, and left his carcass for the vultures. That delayed me, though,  and I almost lost your trail when you crossed the rocky spurs of the  hills. Otherwise I'd have caught up with you long ago."
 
"And now you think you'll drag me back to Zarallo's camp?" she sneered.
 
"Don't  talk like a fool," he grunted. "Come, girl, don't be such a spitfire.  I'm not like that Stygian you knifed, and you know it."
 
"A penniless vagabond," she taunted.
 
He laughed at her.
 
"What  do you call yourself? You haven't enough money to buy a new seat for  your breeches. Your disdain doesn't deceive me. You know I've commanded  bigger ships and more men than you ever did in your life. As for being  penniless--what rover isn't, most of the time? I've squandered enough  gold in the seaports of the world to fill a galleon. You know that,  too."
 
"Where are the fine ships and the bold lads you commanded now?" she sneered.
 
"At  the bottom of the sea, mostly," he replied cheerfully. "The Zingarans  sank my last ship off the Shemite shore--that's why I joined Zarallo's  Free Companions. But I saw I'd been stung when we marched to the Darfar  border. The pay was poor and the wine was sour, and I don't like black  women. And that's the only kind that came to our camp at Sukhmet--rings  in their noses and their teeth filed--bah! Why did you join Zarallo?  Sukhmet's a long way from salt water."
 
"Red  Ortho wanted to make me his mistress," she answered sullenly. "I jumped  overboard one night and swam ashore when we were anchored off the  Kushite coast. Off Zabhela, it was. There was a Shemite trader told me  that Zarallo had brought his Free Companies south to guard the Darfar  border. No better employment offered. I joined an east-bound caravan and  eventually came to Sukhmet."
 
"It was  madness to plunge southward as you did," commented Conan, "but it was  wise, too, for Zarallo's patrols never thought to look for you in this  direction. Only the brother of the man you killed happened to strike  your trail."
 
"And now what do you intend doing?" she demanded.
 
"Turn  west," he answered. "I've been this far south, but not this far east.  Many days' traveling to the west will bring us to the open savannas,  where the black tribes graze their cattle. I have friends among them.  We'll get to the coast and find a ship. I'm sick of the jungle."
 
"Then be on your way," she advised. "I have other plans."
 
"Don't be a fool!" He showed irritation for the first time. "You can't keep on wandering through this forest."
 
"I can if I choose."
 
"But what do you intend doing?"
 
"That's none of your affair," she snapped.
 
"Yes,  it is," he answered calmly. "Do you think I've followed you this far,  to turn around and ride off empty-handed? Be sensible, wench. I'm not  going to harm you."
 
He stepped toward her, and she sprang back, whipping out her sword.
 
"Keep back, you barbarian dog! I'll spit you like a roast pig!"
 
He halted, reluctantly, and demanded: "Do you want me to take that toy away from you and spank you with it?"
 
"Words! Nothing but words!" she mocked, lights like the gleam of the sun on blue water dancing in her reckless eyes.
 
He  knew it was the truth. No living man could disarm Valeria of the  Brotherhood with his bare hands. He scowled, his sensations a tangle of  conflicting emotions. He was angry, yet he was amused and filled with  admiration for her spirit. He burned with eagerness to seize that  splendid figure and crush it in his iron arms, yet he greatly desired  not to hurt the girl. He was torn between a desire to shake her soundly,  and a desire to caress her. He knew if he came any nearer her sword  would be sheathed in his heart. He had seen Valeria kill too many men in  border forays and tavern brawls to have any illusions about her. He  knew she was as quick and ferocious as a tigress. He could draw his  broadsword and disarm her, beat the blade out of her hand, but the  thought of drawing a sword on a woman, even without intent of injury,  was extremely repugnant to him.
 
"Blast your soul, you hussy!" he exclaimed in exasperation. "I'm going to take off your--"
 
He  started toward her, his angry passion making him reckless, and she  poised herself for a deadly thrust. Then came a startling interruption  to a scene at once ludicrous and perilous.
 
"What's that?"
 
It  was Valeria who exclaimed, but they both started violently, and Conan  wheeled like a cat, his great sword flashing into his hand. Back in the  forest had burst forth an appalling medley of screams--the screams of  horses in terror and agony. Mingled with their screams there came the  snap of splintering bones.
 
"Lions are slaying the horses!" cried Valeria.
 
"Lions,  nothing!" snorted Conan, his eyes blazing. "Did you hear a lion roar?  Neither did I! Listen to those bones snap--not even a lion could make  that much noise killing a horse."
 
He  hurried down the natural ramp and she followed, their personal feud  forgotten in the adventurers' instinct to unite against common peril.  The screams had ceased when they worked their way downward through the  green veil of leaves that brushed the rock.
 
"I  found your horse tied by the pool back there," he muttered, treading so  noiselessly that she no longer wondered how he had surprised her on the  crag. "I tied mine beside it and followed the tracks of your boots.  Watch, now!"
 
They had emerged from the  belt of leaves, and stared down into the lower reaches of the forest.  Above them the green roof spread its dusky canopy. Below them the  sunlight filtered in just enough to make a jade-tinted twilight. The  giant trunks of trees less than a hundred yards away looked dim and  ghostly.
 
"The horses should be beyond  that thicket, over there," whispered Conan, and his voice might have  been a breeze moving through the branches. "Listen!"
 
Valeria  had already heard, and a chill crept through her veins; so she  unconsciously laid her white hand on her companion's muscular brown arm.  From beyond the thicket came the noisy crunching of bones and the loud  rending of flesh, together with the grinding, slobbering sounds of a  horrible feast.
 
"Lions wouldn't make that noise," whispered Conan. "Something's eating our horses, but it's not a lion--Crom!"
 
The  noise stopped suddenly, and Conan swore softly. A suddenly risen breeze  was blowing from them directly toward the spot where the unseen slayer  was hidden.
 
"Here it comes!" muttered Conan, half lifting his sword.
 
The  thicket was violently agitated, and Valeria clutched Conan's arm hard.  Ignorant of jungle lore, she yet knew that no animal she had ever seen  could have shaken the tall brush like that.
 
"It  must be as big as an elephant," muttered Conan, echoing her thought.  "What the devil--" His voice trailed away in stunned silence.
 
Through  the thicket was thrust a head of nightmare and lunacy. Grinning jaws  bared rows of dripping yellow tusks; above the yawning mouth wrinkled a  saurian-like snout. Huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times  magnified, stared unwinkingly at the petrified humans clinging to the  rock above it. Blood smeared the scaly, flabby lips and dripped from the  huge mouth.
 
The head, bigger than that  of a crocodile, was further extended on a long scaled neck on which  stood up rows of serrated spikes, and after it, crushing down the briars  and saplings, waddled the body of a titan, a gigantic, barrel-bellied  torso on absurdly short legs. The whitish belly almost raked the ground,  while the serrated backbone rose higher than Conan could have reached  on tiptoe. A long spiked tail, like that of a gargantuan scorpion,  trailed out behind.
 
"Back up the crag,  quick!" snapped Conan, thrusting the girl behind him. "I don't think he  can climb, but he can stand on his hind legs and reach us--"
 
With  a snapping and rending of bushes and saplings, the monster came  hurtling through the thickets, and they fled up the rock before him like  leaves blown before a wind. As Valeria plunged into the leafy screen a  backward glance showed her the titan rearing up fearsomely on his  massive hind legs, even as Conan had predicted. The sight sent panic  racing through her. As he reared, the beast seemed more gigantic than  ever; his snouted head towered among the trees. Then Conan's iron hand  closed on her wrist and she was jerked headlong into the blinding welter  of the leaves, and out again into the hot sunshine above, just as the  monster fell forward with his front feet on the crag with an impact that  made the rock vibrate.
 
Behind the  fugitives the huge head crashed through the twigs, and they looked down  for a horrifying instant at the nightmare visage framed among the green  leaves, eyes flaming, jaws gaping. Then the giant tusks clashed together  futilely, and after that the head was withdrawn, vanishing from their  sight as if it had sunk in a pool.
 
Peering  down through broken branches that scraped the rock, they saw it  squatting on its haunches at the foot of the crag, staring unblinkingly  up at them.
 
Valeria shuddered.
 
"How long do you suppose he'll crouch there?"
 
Conan kicked the skull on the leaf-strewn shelf.
 
"That  fellow must have climbed up here to escape him, or one like him. He  must have died of starvation. There are no bones broken. That thing must  be a dragon, such as the black people speak of in their legends. If so,  it won't leave here until we're both dead."
 
Valeria  looked at him blankly, her resentment forgotten. She fought down a  surging of panic. She had proved her reckless courage a thousand times  in wild battles on sea and land, on the blood-slippery decks of burning  war ships, in the storming of walled cities, and on the trampled sandy  beaches where the desperate men of the Red Brotherhood bathed their  knives in one another's blood in their fights for leadership. But the  prospect now confronting her congealed her blood. A cutlass stroke in  the heat of battle was nothing; but to sit idle and helpless on a bare  rock until she perished of starvation, besieged by a monstrous survival  of an elder age--the thought sent panic throbbing through her brain.
 
"He must leave to eat and drink," she said helplessly.
 
"He  won't have to go far to do either," Conan pointed out. "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.
 
"Can't we get into the trees and get away, traveling like apes through the branches?" she asked desperately.
 
He  shook his head. "I thought of that. The branches that touch the crag  down there are too light. They'd break with our weight. Besides, I have  an idea that devil could tear up any tree around here by its roots."
 
"Well,  are we going to sit here on our rumps until we starve, like that?" she  cried furiously, kicking the skull clattering across the ledge. "I won't  do it! I'll go down there and cut his damned head off--"
 
Conan  had seated himself on a rocky projection at the foot of the spire. He  looked up with a glint of admiration at her blazing eyes and tense,  quivering figure, but, realizing that she was in just the mood for any  madness, he let none of his admiration sound in his voice.
 
"Sit  down," he grunted, catching her by her wrist and pulling her down on  his knee. She was too surprised to resist as he took her sword from her  hand and shoved it back in its sheath. "Sit still and calm down. You'd  only break your steel on his scales. He'd gobble you up at one gulp, or  smash you like an egg with that spiked tail of his. We'll get out of  this jam some way, but we shan't do it by getting chewed up and  swallowed."
 
She made no reply, nor did  she seek to repulse his arm from about her waist. She was frightened,  and the sensation was new to Valeria of the Red Brotherhood. So she sat  on her companion's--or captor's--knee with a docility that would have  amazed Zarallo, who had anathematized her as a she-devil out of Hell's  seraglio.
 
Conan played idly with her  curly yellow locks, seemingly intent only upon his conquest. Neither the  skeleton at his feet nor the monster crouching below disturbed his mind  or dulled the edge of his interest.
 
The  girl's restless eyes, roving the leaves below them, discovered splashes  of color among the green. It was fruit, large, darkly crimson globes  suspended from the boughs of a tree whose broad leaves were a peculiarly  rich and vivid green. She became aware of both thirst and hunger,  though thirst had not assailed her until she knew she could not descend  from the crag to find food and water.
 
"We need not starve," she said. "There is fruit we can reach."
 
Conan glanced where she pointed.
 
"If  we ate that we wouldn't need the bite of a dragon," he grunted. "That's  what the black people of Kush call the Apples of Derketa. Derketa is  the Queen of the Dead. Drink a little of that juice, or spill it on your  flesh, and you'd be dead before you could tumble to the foot of this  crag."
 
"Oh!"
 
She  lapsed into dismayed silence. There seemed no way out of their  predicament, she reflected gloomily. She saw no way of escape, and Conan  seemed to be concerned only with her supple waist and curly tresses. If  he was trying to formulate a plan of escape, he did not show it.
 
"If  you'll take your hands off me long enough to climb up on that peak,"  she said presently, "you'll see something that will surprise you."
 
He  cast her a questioning glance, then obeyed with a shrug of his massive  shoulders. Clinging to the spirelike pinnacle, he stared out over the  forest roof.
 
He stood a long moment in silence, posed like a bronze statue on the rock.
 
"It's  a walled city, right enough," he muttered presently. "Was that where  you were going, when you tried to send me off alone to the coast?"
 
"I saw it before you came. I knew nothing of it when I left Sukhmet."
 
"Who'd  have thought to find a city here? I don't believe the Stygians ever  penetrated this far. Could black people build a city like that? I see no  herds on the plain, no signs of cultivation, or people moving about."
 
"How can you hope to see all that, at this distance?" she demanded.
 
He shrugged his shoulders and dropped down on the shelf.
 
"Well,  the folk of the city can't help us just now. And they might not, if  they could. The people of the Black Countries are generally hostile to  strangers. Probably stick us full of spears--"
 
He  stopped short and stood silent, as if he had forgotten what he was  saying, frowning down at the crimson spheres gleaming among the leaves.
 
"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 are you talking about?" she inquired.
 
Without  answering her question, he descended to the belt of leaves and looked  down through them. The great brute squatted below, watching the crag  with the frightful patience of the reptile folk. So might one of his  breed have glared up at their troglodyte ancestors, treed on a  high-flung rock, in the dim dawn ages. Conan cursed him without heat,  and began cutting branches, reaching out and severing them as far from  the end as he could reach. The agitation of the leaves made the monster  restless. He rose from his haunches and lashed his hideous tail,  snapping off saplings as if they had been toothpicks. Conan watched him  warily from the corner of his eye, and just as Valeria believed the  dragon was about to hurl himself up the crag again, the Cimmerian drew  back and climbed up to the ledge with the branches he had cut. There  were three of these, slender shafts about seven feet long, but not  larger than his thumb. He had also cut several strands of tough, thin  vine.
 
"Branches too light for  spear-hafts, and creepers no thicker than cords," he remarked,  indicating the foliage about the crag. "It won't hold our weight--but  there's strength in union. That's what the Aquilonian renegades used to  tell us Cimmerians when they came into the hills to raise an army to  invade their own country. But we always fight by clans and tribes."
 
"What the devil has that got to do with those sticks?" she demanded.
 
"You wait and see."
 
Gathering  the sticks in a compact bundle, he wedged his poniard hilt between them  at one end. Then with the vines he bound them together and, when he had  completed his task, he had a spear of no small strength, with a sturdy  shaft seven feet in length.
 
"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.  Presently he withdrew the blade and showed her the blue steel stained a  dull purplish crimson.
 
"I don't know  whether it will do the job or not," quoth he. "There's enough poison  there to kill an elephant, but--well, we'll see."
 
Valeria  was close behind him as he let himself down among the leaves.  Cautiously holding the poisoned pike away from him, he thrust his head  through the branches and addressed the monster.
 
"What  are you waiting down there for, you misbegotten offspring of  questionable parents?" was one of his more printable queries. "Stick  your ugly head up here again, you long-necked brute--or do you want me  to come down there and kick you loose from your illegitimate spine?"
 
There  was more of it--some of it crouched in eloquence that made Valeria  stare, in spite of her profane education among the seafarers. And it had  its effect on the monster. Just as the incessant yapping of a dog  worries and enrages more constitutionally silent animals, so the  clamorous voice of a man rouses fear in some bestial bosoms and insane  rage in others. Suddenly and with appalling quickness, the mastodonic  brute reared up on its mighty hind legs and elongated its neck and body  in a furious effort to reach this vociferous pigmy whose clamor was  disturbing the primeval silence of its ancient realm.
 
But  Conan had judged his distance with precision. Some five feet below him  the mighty head crashed terribly but futilely through the leaves. And as  the monstrous mouth gaped like that of a great snake, Conan drove his  spear into the red angle of the jawbone hinge. He struck downward with  all the strength of both arms, driving the long poniard blade to the  hilt in flesh, sinew and bone.
 
Instantly  the jaws clashed convulsively together, severing the triple-pieced  shaft and almost precipitating Conan from his perch. He would have  fallen but for the girl behind him, who caught his sword-belt in a  desperate grasp. He clutched at a rocky projection, and grinned his  thanks back at her.
 
Down on the ground  the monster was wallowing like a dog with pepper in its eyes. He shook  his head from side to side, pawed at it, and opened his mouth repeatedly  to its widest extent. Presently he got a huge front foot on the stump  of the shaft and managed to tear the blade out. Then he threw up his  head, jaws wide and spouting blood, and glared up at the crag with such  concentrated and intelligent fury that Valeria trembled and drew her  sword. The scales along his back and flanks turned from rusty brown to a  dull lurid red. Most horribly the monster's silence was broken. The  sounds that issued from his blood-streaming jaws did not sound like  anything that could have been produced by an earthly creation.
 
With  harsh, grating roars, the dragon hurled himself at the crag that was  the citadel of his enemies. Again and again his mighty head crashed  upward through the branches, snapping vainly on empty air. He hurled his  full ponderous weight against the rock until it vibrated from base to  crest. And rearing upright he gripped it with his front legs like a man  and tried to tear it up by the roots, as if it had been a tree.
 
This  exhibition of primordial fury chilled the blood in Valeria's veins, but  Conan was too close to the primitive himself to feel anything but a  comprehending interest. To the barbarian, no such gulf existed between  himself and other men, and the animals, as existed in the conception of  Valeria. The monster below them, to Conan, was merely a form of life  differing from himself mainly in physical shape. He attributed to it  characteristics similar to his own, and saw in its wrath a counterpart  of his rages, in its roars and bellowings merely reptilian equivalents  to the curses he had bestowed upon it. Feeling a kinship with all wild  things, even dragons, it was impossible for him to experience the sick  horror which assailed Valeria at the sight of the brute's ferocity.
 
He sat watching it tranquilly, and pointed out the various changes that were taking place in its voice and actions.
 
"The poison's taking hold," he said with conviction.
 
"I  don't believe it." To Valeria it seemed preposterous to suppose that  anything, however lethal, could have any effect on that mountain of  muscle and fury.
 
"There's pain in his  voice," declared Conan. "First he was merely angry because of the  stinging in his jaw. Now he feels the bite of the poison. Look! He's  staggering. He'll be blind in a few more minutes. What did I tell you?"
 
For suddenly the dragon had lurched about and went crashing off through the bushes.
 
"Is he running away?" inquired Valeria uneasily.
 
"He's  making for the pool!" Conan sprang up, galvanized into swift activity.  "The poison makes him thirsty. Come on! He'll be blind in a few moments,  but he can smell his way back to the foot of the crag, and if our  scent's here still, he'll sit there until he dies. And others of his  kind may come at his cries. Let's go!"
 
"Down there?" Valeria was aghast.
 
"Sure!  We'll make for the city! They may cut our heads off there, but it's our  only chance. We may run into a thousand more dragons on the way, but  it's sure death to stay here. If we wait until he dies, we may have a  dozen more to deal with. After me, in a hurry!"
 
He  went down the ramp as swiftly as an ape, pausing only to aid his less  agile companion, who, until she saw the Cimmerian climb, had fancied  herself the equal of any man in the rigging of a ship or on the sheer  face of a cliff.
 
They descended into the  gloom below the branches and slid to the ground silently, though  Valeria felt as if the pounding of her heart must surely be heard from  far away. A noisy gurgling and lapping beyond the dense thicket  indicated that the dragon was drinking at the pool.
 
"As soon as his belly is full he'll be back," muttered Conan. "It may take hours for the poison to kill him--if it does at all."
 
Somewhere  beyond the forest the sun was sinking to the horizon. The forest was a  misty twilight place of black shadows and dim vistas. Conan gripped  Valeria's wrist and glided away from the foot of the crag. He made less  noise than a breeze blowing among the tree trunks, but Valeria felt as  if her soft boots were betraying their flight to all the forest.
 
"I don't think he can follow a trail," muttered Conan. "But if a wind blew our body scent to him, he could smell us out."
 
"Mitra, grant that the wind blow not!" Valeria breathed.
 
Her  face was a pallid oval in the gloom. She gripped her sword in her free  hand, but the feel of the shagreen-bound hilt inspired only a feeling of  helplessness in her.
 
They were still  some distance from the edge of the forest when they heard a snapping and  crashing behind them. Valeria bit her lip to check a cry.
 
"He's on our trail!" she whispered fiercely.
 
Conan shook his head.
 
"He  didn't smell us at the rock, and he's blundering about through the  forest trying to pick up our scent. Come on! It's the city or nothing  now! He could tear down any tree we'd climb. If only the wind stays  down--"
 
They stole on until the trees  began to thin out ahead of them. Behind them the forest was a black  impenetrable ocean of shadows. The ominous crackling still sounded  behind them, as the dragon blundered in his erratic course.
 
"There's the plain ahead," breathed Valeria. "A little more and we'll--"
 
"Crom!" swore Conan.
 
"Mitra!" whispered Valeria.
 
Out of the south a wind had sprung up.
 
It  blew over them directly into the black forest behind them. Instantly a  horrible roar shook the woods. The aimless snapping and crackling of the  bushes changed to a sustained crashing as the dragon came like a  hurricane straight toward the spot from which the scent of his enemies  was wafted.
 
"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.
 
Conan's iron arm about the  woman's waist half lifted her; her feet scarcely touched the earth as  she was borne along at a speed she could never have attained herself. If  he could keep out of the beast's way for a bit, perhaps that betraying  wind would shift--but the wind held, and a quick glance over his  shoulder showed Conan that the monster was almost upon them, coming like  a war-galley in front of a hurricane. He thrust Valeria from him with a  force that sent her reeling a dozen feet to fall in a crumpled heap at  the foot of the nearest tree, and the Cimmerian wheeled in the path of  the thundering titan.
 
Convinced that his  death was upon him, the Cimmerian acted according to his instinct, and  hurled himself full at the awful face that was bearing down on him. He  leaped, slashing like a wildcat, felt his sword cut deep into the scales  that sheathed the mighty snout--and then a terrific impact knocked him  rolling and tumbling for fifty feet with all the wind and half the life  battered out of him.
 
How the stunned  Cimmerian regained his feet, not even he could have ever told. But the  only thought that filled his brain was of the woman lying dazed and  helpless almost in the path of the hurtling fiend, and before the breath  came whistling back into his gullet he was standing over her with his  sword in his hand.
 
She lay where he had  thrown her, but she was struggling to a sitting posture. Neither tearing  tusks nor trampling feet had touched her. It had been a shoulder or  front leg that struck Conan, and the blind monster rushed on, forgetting  the victims whose scent it had been following, in the sudden agony of  its death throes. Headlong on its course it thundered until its low-hung  head crashed into a gigantic tree in its path. The impact tore the tree  up by the roots and must have dashed the brains from the misshapen  skull. Tree and monster fell together, and the dazed humans saw the  branches and leaves shaken by the convulsions of the creature they  covered--and then grow quiet.
 
Conan  lifted Valeria to her feet and together they started away at a reeling  run. A few moments later they emerged into the still twilight of the  treeless plain.
 
Conan paused an instant  and glanced back at the ebon fastness behind them. Not a leaf stirred,  nor a bird chirped. It stood as silent as it must have stood before Man  was created.
 
"Come on," muttered Conan,  taking his companion's hand. "It's touch and go now. If more dragons  come out of the woods after us--"
 
He did not have to finish the sentence.
 
The  city looked very far away across the plain, farther than it had looked  from the crag. Valeria's heart hammered until she felt as if it would  strangle her. At every step she expected to hear the crashing of the  bushes and see another colossal nightmare bearing down upon them. But  nothing disturbed the silence of the thickets.
 
With  the first mile between them and the woods, Valeria breathed more  easily. Her buoyant self-confidence began to thaw out again. The sun had  set and darkness was gathering over the plain, lightened a little by  the stars that made stunted ghosts out of the cactus growths.
 
"No cattle, no plowed fields," muttered Conan. "How do these people live?"
 
"Perhaps  the cattle are in pens for the night," suggested Valeria, "and the  fields and grazing-pastures are on the other side of the city."
 
"Maybe," he grunted. "I didn't see any from the crag, though."
 
The  moon came up behind the city, etching walls and towers blackly in the  yellow glow. Valeria shivered. Black against the moon the strange city  had a somber, sinister look.
 
Perhaps  something of the same feeling occurred to Conan, for he stopped, glanced  about him, and grunted: "We'll stop here. No use coming to their gates  in the night. They probably wouldn't let us in. Besides, we need rest,  and we don't know how they'll receive us. A few hours' sleep will put us  in better shape to fight or run."
 
He  led the way to a bed of cactus which grew in a circle--a phenomenon  common to the southern desert. With his sword he chopped an opening, and  motioned Valeria to enter.
 
"We'll be safe from the snakes here, anyhow."
 
She glanced fearfully back toward the black line that indicated the forest some six miles away.
 
"Suppose a dragon comes out of the woods?"
 
"We'll  keep watch," he answered, though he made no suggestion as to what they  would do in such an event. He was staring at the city, a few miles away.  Not a light shone from spire or tower. A great black mass of mystery,  it reared cryptically against the moonlit sky.
 
"Lie down and sleep. I'll keep the first watch."
 
She  hesitated, glancing at him uncertainly, but he sat down cross-legged in  the opening, facing toward the plain, his sword across his knees, his  back to her. Without further comment she lay down on the sand inside the  spiky circle.
 
"Wake me when the moon is at its zenith," she directed.
 
He  did not reply nor look toward her. Her last impression, as she sank  into slumber, was of his muscular figure, immobile as a statue hewn out  of bronze, outlined against the low-hanging stars.
 
== By the Blaze of the Fire Jewels ==
 
Valeria awoke with a start, to the realization that a grey dawn was stealing over the plain.
 
She  sat up, rubbing her eyes. Conan squatted beside the cactus, cutting off  the thick pears and dexterously twitching out the spikes.
 
"You didn't awake me," she accused. "You let me sleep all night!"
 
"You  were tired," he answered. "Your posterior must have been sore, too,  after that long ride. You pirates aren't used to horseback."
 
"What about yourself?" she retorted.
 
"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."
 
And  indeed the giant barbarian seemed as much refreshed as if he had slept  the whole night on a golden bed. Having removed the thorns, and peeled  off the tough skin, he handed the girl a thick, juicy cactus leaf.
 
"Skin  your teeth in that pear. It's food and drink to a desert man. I was a  chief of the Zuagirs once--desert men who live by plundering the  caravans."
 
"Is there anything you haven't done?" inquired the girl, half in derision and half in fascination.
 
"I've  never been king of an Hyborean kingdom," he grinned, taking an enormous  mouthful of cactus. "But I've dreamed of being even that. I may be too,  some day. Why shouldn't I?"
 
She shook  her head in wonder at his calm audacity, and fell to devouring her pear.  She found it not unpleasing to the palate, and full of cool and  thirst-satisfying juice. Finishing his meal, Conan wiped his hands in  the sand, rose, ran his fingers through his thick black mane, hitched up  his sword belt and said:
 
"Well, let's  go. If the people in that city are going to cut our throats they may as  well do it now, before the heat of the day begins."
 
His  grim humor was unconscious, but Valeria reflected that it might be  prophetic. 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.
 
"You  walk more like a hillman than a sailor," he said. "You must be an  Aquilonian. The suns of Darfar never burnt your white skin brown. Many a  princess would envy you."
 
"I am from  Aquilonia," she replied. His compliments no longer irritated her. His  evident admiration pleased her. For another man to have kept her watch  while she slept would have angered her; she had always fiercely resented  any man's attempting to shield or protect her because of her sex. But  she found a secret pleasure in the fact that this man had done so. And  he had not taken advantage of her fright and the weakness resulting from  it. After all, she reflected, her companion was no common man.
 
The sun rose up behind the city, turning the towers to a sinister crimson.
 
"Black  last night against the moon," grunted Conan, his eyes clouding with the  abysmal superstition of the barbarian. "Blood-red as a threat of blood  against the sun this dawn. I do not like this city."
 
But they went on, and as they went Conan pointed out the fact that no road ran to the city from the north.
 
"No  cattle have trampled the plain on this side of the city," said he. "No  plowshare has touched the earth for years, maybe centuries. But look:  once this plain was cultivated."
 
Valeria  saw the ancient irrigation ditches he indicated, half filled in places,  and overgrown with cactus. She frowned with perplexity as her eyes  swept over the plain that stretched on all sides of the city to the  forest edge, which marched in a vast, dim ring. Vision did not extend  beyond that ring.
 
She looked uneasily at  the city. No helmets or spearheads gleamed on battlements, no trumpets  sounded, no challenge rang from the towers. A silence as absolute as  that of the forest brooded over the walls and minarets.
 
The  sun was high above the eastern horizon when they stood before the great  gate in the northern wall, in the shadow of the lofty rampart. Rust  flecked the iron bracings of the mighty bronze portal. Spiderwebs  glistened thickly on hinge and sill and bolted panel.
 
"It hasn't been opened for years!" exclaimed Valeria.
 
"A dead city," grunted Conan. "That's why the ditches were broken and the plain untouched."
 
"But who built it? Who dwelt here? Where did they go? Why did they abandon it?"
 
"Who  can say? Maybe an exiled clan of Stygians built it. Maybe not. It  doesn't look like Stygian architecture. Maybe the people were wiped out  by enemies, or a plague exterminated them."
 
"In  that case their treasures may still be gathering dust and cobwebs in  there," suggested Valeria, the acquisitive instincts of her profession  waking in her; prodded, too, by feminine curiosity. "Can we open the  gate? Let's go in and explore a bit."
 
Conan  eyed the heavy portal dubiously, but placed his massive shoulder  against it and thrust with all the power of his muscular calves and  thighs. With a rasping screech of rusty hinges the gate moved  ponderously inward, and Conan straightened and drew his sword. Valeria  stared over his shoulder, and made a sound indicative of surprise.
 
They  were not looking into an open street or court as one would have  expected. The opened gate, or door, gave directly into a long, broad  hall which ran away and away until its vista grew indistinct in the  distance. It was of heroic proportions, and the floor of a curious red  stone, cut in square tiles, that seemed to smolder as if with the  reflection of flames. The walls were of a shiny green material.
 
"Jade, or I'm a Shemite!" swore Conan.
 
"Not in such quantity!" protested Valeria.
 
"I've looted enough from the Khitan caravans to know what I'm talking about," he asserted. "That's jade!"
 
The vaulted ceiling was of lapis lazuli, adorned with clusters of great green stones that gleamed with a poisonous radiance.
 
"Green  fire-stones," growled Conan. "That's what the people of Punt call them.  They're supposed to be the petrified eyes of those prehistoric snakes  the ancients called Golden Serpents. They glow like a cat's eyes in the  dark. At night this hall would be lighted by them, but it would be a  hellishly weird illumination. Let's look around. We might find a cache  of jewels."
 
"Shut the door," advised Valeria. "I'd hate to have to outrun a dragon down this hall."
 
Conan grinned, and replied: "I don't believe the dragons ever leave the forest."
 
But he complied, and pointed out the broken bolt on the inner side.
 
"I  thought I heard something snap when I shoved against it. That bolt's  freshly broken. Rust has eaten nearly through it. If the people ran  away, why should it have been bolted on the inside?"
 
"They undoubtedly left by another door," suggested Valeria.
 
She  wondered how many centuries had passed since the light of outer day had  filtered into that great hall through the open door. Sunlight was  finding its way somehow into the hall, and they quickly saw the source.  High up in the vaulted ceiling skylights were set in slot-like  openings--translucent sheets of some crystalline substance. 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.
 
"A  four-storied house," grunted Conan, "and this hall extends to the roof.  It's long as a street. I seem to see a door at the other end."
 
Valeria shrugged her white shoulders.
 
"Your eyes are better than mine, then, though I'm accounted sharp-eyed among the sea-rovers."
 
They  turned into an open door at random, and traversed a series of empty  chambers, floored like the hall, and with walls of the same green jade,  or of marble or ivory or chalcedony, adorned with friezes of bronze,  gold, or silver. In the ceilings the green fire-gems were set, and their  light was as ghostly and illusive as Conan had predicted. Under the  witch-fire glow the intruders moved like specters.
 
Some  of the chambers lacked this illumination, and their doorways showed  black as the mouth of the Pit. These Conan and Valeria avoided, keeping  always to the lighted chambers.
 
Cobwebs  hung in the corners, but there was no perceptible accumulation of dust  on the floor, or on the tables and seats of marble, jade, or carnelian  which occupied the chambers. Here and there were rugs of that silk known  as Khitan which is practically indestructible. Nowhere did they find  any windows, or doors opening into streets or courts. Each door merely  opened into another chamber or hall.
 
"Why  don't we come to a street?" grumbled Valeria. "This palace or whatever  we're in must be as big as the king of Turan's seraglio."
 
"They  must not have perished of plague," sad Conan, meditating upon the  mystery of the empty city. "Otherwise we'd find skeletons. Maybe it  became haunted, and everybody got up and left. Maybe--"
 
"Maybe,  hell!" broke in Valeria rudely. "We'll never know. Look at these  friezes. They portray men. What race do they belong to?"
 
Conan scanned them and shook his head.
 
"I never saw people exactly like them. But there's the smack of the East about them--Vendhya, maybe, or Kosala."
 
"Were you a king in Kosala?" she asked, masking her keen curiosity with derision.
 
"No.  But I was a war chief of the Afghulis who live in the Himelian  mountains above the borders of Vendhya. These people favor the Kosalans.  But why should Kosalans be building a city this far to the west?"
 
The  figures portrayed were those of slender, olive-skinned men and women,  with finely chiseled, exotic features. They wore filmy robes and many  delicate jeweled ornaments, and were depicted mostly in attitudes of  feasting, dancing, or lovemaking.
 
"Easterners,  all right," grunted Conan, "but from where I don't know. They must have  lived a disgustingly peaceful life, though, or they'd have scenes of  wars and fights. Let's go up those stairs."
 
It  was an ivory spiral that wound up from the chamber in which they were  standing. They mounted three flights and came into a broad chamber on  the fourth floor, which seemed to be the highest tier in the building.  Skylights in the ceiling illuminated the room, in which light the  fire-gems winked pallidly. Glancing through the doors they saw, except  on one side, a series of similarly lighted chambers. This other door  opened upon a balustraded gallery that overhung a hall much smaller than  the one they had recently explored on the lower floor.
 
"Hell!"  Valeria sat down disgustedly on a jade bench. "The people who deserted  this city must have taken all their treasures with them. I'm tired of  wandering through these bare rooms at random."
 
"All  these upper chambers seem to be lighted," said Conan. "I wish we could  find a window that overlooked the city. Let's have a look through that  door over there."
 
"You have a look," advised Valeria. "I'm going to sit here and rest my feet."
 
Conan  disappeared through the door opposite that one opening upon the  gallery, and Valeria leaned back with her hands clasped behind her head,  and thrust her booted legs out in front of her. These silent rooms and  halls with their gleaming green clusters of ornaments and burning  crimson floors were beginning to depress her. She wished they could find  their way out of the maze into which they had wandered and emerge into a  street. She wondered idly what furtive, dark feet had glided over those  flaming floors in past centuries, how many deeds of cruelty and mystery  those winking ceiling-gems had blazed down upon.
 
It  was a faint noise that brought her out of her reflections. She was on  her feet with her sword in her hand before she realized what had  disturbed her. Conan had not returned, and she knew it was not he that  she had heard.
 
The sound had come from  somewhere beyond the door that opened on to the gallery. Soundlessly in  her soft leather boots she glided through it, crept across the balcony  and peered down between the heavy balustrades.
 
A man was stealing along the hall.
 
The  sight of a human being in this supposedly deserted city was a startling  shock. Crouching down behind the stone balusters, with every nerve  tingling, Valeria glared down at the stealthy figure.
 
The  man in no way resembled the figures depicted on the friezes. He was  slightly above middle height, very dark, though not Negroid. He was  naked but for a scanty silk clout that only partly covered his muscular  hips, and a leather girdle, a hand's breadth broad, about his lean  waist. His long black hair hung in lank strands about his shoulders,  giving him a wild appearance. He was gaunt, but knots and cords of  muscles stood out on his arms and legs, without that fleshy padding that  presents a pleasing symmetry of contour. He was built with an economy  that was almost repellent.
 
Yet it was  not so much his physical appearance as his attitude that impressed the  woman who watched him. He slunk along, stooped in a semi-crouch, his  head turning from side to side. He grasped a wide-tipped blade in his  right hand and she saw it shake with the intensity of the emotion that  gripped him. He was afraid, trembling in the grip of some dire terror.  When he turned his head she caught the blaze of wild eyes among the lank  strands of black hair.
 
He did not see  her. On tiptoe he glided across the hall and vanished through an open  door. A moment later she heard a choking cry, and then silence fell  again.
 
Consumed with curiosity, Valeria  glided along the gallery until she came to a door above the one through  which the man had passed. It opened into another, smaller gallery that  encircled a large chamber.
 
This chamber  was on the third floor, and its ceiling was not so high as that of the  hall. It was lighted only by the fire-stones, and their weird green glow  left the spaces under the balcony in shadows.
 
Valeria's eyes widened. The man she had seen was still in the chamber.
 
He  lay face down on a dark crimson carpet in the middle of the room. His  body was limp, his arms spread wide. His curved sword lay near him.
 
She  wondered why he should lie there so motionless. Then her eyes narrowed  as she stared down at the rug on which he lay. Beneath and about him the  fabric showed a slightly different color, a deeper, brighter crimson.
 
Shivering  slightly, she crouched down closer behind the balustrade, intently  scanning the shadows under the overhanging gallery. They gave up no  secret.
 
Suddenly another figure entered  the grim drama. He was a man similar to the first, and he came in by a  door opposite that which gave upon the hall.
 
His  eyes glared at the sight of the man on the floor, and he spoke  something in a staccato voice that sounded like "Chicmec!" The other did  not move.
 
The man stepped quickly  across the floor, bent, gripped the fallen man's shoulder and turned him  over. A choking cry escaped him as the head fell back limply,  disclosing a throat that had been severed from ear to ear.
 
The  man let the corpse fall back upon the blood-stained carpet, and sprang  to his feet, shaking like a windblown leaf. His face was an ashy mask of  fear. But with one knee flexed for flight, he froze suddenly, became as  immobile as an image, staring across the chamber with dilated eyes.
 
In  the shadows beneath the balcony a ghostly light began to glow and grow,  a light that was not part of the fire-stone gleam. Valeria felt her  hair stir as she watched it; for, dimly visible in the throbbing  radiance, there floated a human skull, and it was from this skull--human  yet appallingly misshapen--that the spectral light seemed to emanate.  It hung there like a disembodied head, conjured out of night and the  shadows, growing more and more distinct; human, and yet not human as she  knew humanity.
 
The man stood  motionless, an embodiment of paralyzed horror, staring fixedly at the  apparition. The thing moved out from the wall and a grotesque shadows  moved with it. Slowly the shadow became visible as a man-like figure  whose naked torso and limbs shone whitely, with the hue of bleached  bones. The bare skull on its shoulders grinned eyelessly, in the midst  of its unholy nimbus, and the man confronting it seemed unable to take  his eyes from it. He stood still, his sword dangling from nerveless  fingers, on his face the expression of a man bound by the spells of a  mesmerist.
 
Valeria realized that it was  not fear alone that paralyzed him. Some hellish quality of that  throbbing glow had robbed him of his power to think and act. She  herself, safely above the scene, felt the subtle impact of a nameless  emanation that was a threat to sanity.
 
The  horror swept toward its victim and he moved at last, but only to drop  his sword and sink to his knees, covering his eyes with his hands.  Dumbly he awaited the stroke of the blade that now gleamed in the  apparition's hand as it reared above him like Death triumphant over  mankind.
 
Valeria acted according to the  first impulse of her wayward nature. With one tigerish movement she was  over the balustrade and dropping to the floor behind the awful shape. It  wheeled at the thud of her soft boots on the floor, but even as it  turned, her keen blade lashed down and a fierce exultation swept her as  she felt the edge cleave solid flesh and mortal bone.
 
The  apparition cried out gurglingly and went down, severed through the  shoulder, breastbone and spine, and as it fell the burning skull rolled  clear, revealing a lank mop of black hair and a dark face twisted in the  convulsions of death. Beneath the horrific masquerade there was a human  being, a man similar to the one kneeling supinely on the floor.
 
The  latter looked up at the sound of the blow and the cry, and now he  glared in wild-eyed amazement at the whiteskinned woman who stood over  the corpse with a dripping sword in her hand.
 
He  staggered up, yammering as if the sight had almost unseated his reason.  She was amazed to realize that she understood him. He was gibbering in  the Stygian tongue, though in a dialect unfamiliar to her.
 
"Who  are you? Whence come you? What do you in Xuchotl?" Then rushing on,  without waiting for her to reply: "But you are a friend--goddess or  devil, it makes no difference! You have slain the Burning Skull! It was  but a man beneath it, after all! We deemed it a demon they conjured up  out of the catacombs! Listen!"
 
He stopped short in his ravings and stiffened, straining his ears with painful intensity. The girl heard nothing.
 
"We  must hasten!" he whispered. "They are west of the Great Hall! They may  be all around us here! They may be creeping upon us even now!"
 
He seized her wrist in a convulsive grasp she found hard to break.
 
"Whom do you mean by 'they'?" she demanded.
 
He stared at her uncomprehendingly for an instant, as if he found her ignorance hard to understand.
 
"They?"  he stammered vaguely. "Why--why, the people of Xotalanc! The clan of  the man you slew. They who dwell by the eastern gate."
 
"You mean to say this city is inhabited?" she exclaimed.
 
"Aye! Aye!" He was writhing in the impatience of apprehension. "Come away! Come quick! We must return to Tecuhltli!"
 
"Where is that?" she demanded.
 
"The  quarter by the western gate!" He had her wrist again and was pulling  her toward the door through which he had first come. Great beads of  perspiration dripped from his dark forehead, and his eyes blazed with  terror.
 
"Wait a minute!" she growled,  flinging off his hand. "Keep your hands off me, or I'll split your  skull. What's all this about? Who are you? Where would you take me?"
 
He took a firm grip on himself, casting glances to all sides, and began speaking so fast his words tripped over each other.
 
"My  name is Techotl. I am of Techultli. I and this man who lies with his  throat cut came into the Halls of Silence to try and ambush some of the  Xotalancas. But we became separated and I returned here to find him with  his gullet slit. The Burning Skull did it, I know, just as he would  have slain me had you not killed him. But perhaps he was not alone.  Others may be stealing from Xotalanc! The gods themselves blench at the  fate of those they take alive!"
 
At the  thought he shook as with an ague and his dark skin grew ashy. Valeria  frowned puzzledly at him. She sensed intelligence behind this rigmarole,  but it was meaningless to her.
 
She  turned toward the skull, which still glowed and pulsed on the floor, and  was reaching a booted toe tentatively toward it, when the man who  called himself Techotl sprang forward with a cry.
 
"Do  not touch it! Do not even look at it! Madness and death lurk in it. The  wizards of Xotalanc understand its secret--they found it in the  catacombs, where lie the bones of terrible kings who ruled in Xuchotl in  the black centuries of the past. To gaze upon it freezes the blood and  withers the brain of a man who understands not its mystery. To touch it  causes madness and destruction."
 
She  scowled at him uncertainly. He was not a reassuring figure, with his  lean, muscle-knotted frame, and snaky locks. In his eyes, behind the  glow of terror, lurked a weird light she had never seen in the eyes of a  man wholly sane. Yet he seemed sincere in his protestations.
 
"Come!"  he begged, reaching for her hand, and then recoiling as he remembered  her warning. "You are a stranger. How you came here I do not know, but  if you were a goddess or a demon, come to aid Tecuhltli, you would know  all the things you have asked me. You must be from beyond the great  forest, whence our ancestors came. But you are our friend, or you would  not have slain my enemy. Come quickly, before the Xotalancas find us and  slay us!"
 
From his repellent,  impassioned face she glanced to the sinister skull, smoldering and  glowing on the floor near the dead man. It was like a skull seen in a  dream, undeniably human, yet with disturbing distortions and  malformations of contour and outline. In life the wearer of that skull  must have presented an alien and monstrous aspect. Life? It seemed to  possess some sort of life of its own. Its jaws yawned at her and snapped  together. Its radiance grew brighter, more vivid, yet the impression of  nightmare grew too; it was a dream; all life was a dream--it was  Techotl's urgent voice which snapped Valeria back from the dim gulfs  whither she was drifting.
 
"Do not look at the skull! Do not look at the skull!" It was a far cry from across unreckoned voids.
 
Valeria  shook herself like a lion shaking his mane. Her vision cleared. Techotl  was chattering: "In life it housed the awful brain of a king of  magicians! It holds still the life and fire of magic drawn from outer  spaces!"
 
With a curse Valeria leaped,  lithe as a panther, and the skull crashed to flaming bits under her  swinging sword. Somewhere in the room, or in the void, or in the dim  reaches of her consciousness, an inhuman voice cried out in pain and  rage.
 
Techotl's hand was plucking at her  arm and he was gibbering: "You have broken it! You have destroyed it!  Not all the black arts of Xotalanc can rebuild it! Come away! Come away  quickly, now!"
 
"But I can't go," she protested. "I have a friend somewhere near by--"
 
The  flare of his eyes cut her short as he stared past her with an  expression grown ghastly. She wheeled just as four men rushed through as  many doors, converging on the pair in the center of the chamber.
 
They  were like the others she had seen, the same knotted muscles bulging on  otherwise gaunt limbs, the same lank blue-black hair, the same mad glare  in their wild eyes. They were armed and clad like Techotl, but on the  breast of each was painted a white skull.
 
There  were no challenges or war cries. Like blood-mad tigers the men of  Xotalanc sprang at the throats of their enemies. Techotl met them with  the fury of desperation, ducked the swipe of a wide-headed blade, and  grappled with the wielder, and bore him to the floor where they rolled  and wrestled in murderous silence.
 
The other three swarmed on Valeria, their weird eyes red as the eyes of mad dogs.
 
She  killed the first who came within reach before he could strike a blow,  her long straight blade splitting his skull even as his own sword lifted  for a stroke. She side-stepped a thrust, even as she parried a slash.  Her eyes danced and her lips smiled without mercy. Again she was Valeria  of the Red Brotherhood, and the hum of her steel was like a bridal song  in her ears.
 
Her sword darted past a  blade that sought to parry, and sheathed six inches of its point in a  leather-guarded midriff. The man gasped agonizedly and went to his  knees, but his tall mate lunged in, in ferocious silence, raining blow  on blow so furiously that Valeria had no opportunity to counter. She  stepped back coolly, parrying the strokes and watching for her chance to  thrust home. He could not long keep up that flailing whirlwind. His arm  would tire, his wind would fail; he would weaken, falter, and then her  blade would slide smoothly into his heart. A sidelong glance showed her  Techotl kneeling on the breast of his antagonist and striving to break  the other's hold on his wrist and to drive home a dagger.
 
Sweat  beaded the forehead of the man facing her, and his eyes were like  burning coals. Smite as he would, he could not break past nor beat down  her guard. His breath came in gusty gulps, his blows began to fall  erratically. She stepped back to draw him out--and felt her thighs  locked in an iron grip. She had forgotten the wounded man on the floor.
 
Crouching  on his knees, he held her with both arms locked about her legs, and his  mate croaked in triumph and began working his way around to come at her  from the left side. Valeria wrenched and tore savagely, but in vain.  She could free herself of this clinging menace with a downward flick of  her sword, but in that instant the curved blade of the tall warrior  would crash through her skull. The wounded man began to worry at her  bare thigh with his teeth like a wild beast.
 
She  reached down with her left hand and gripped his long hair, forcing his  head back so that his white teeth and rolling eyes gleamed up at her.  The tall Xotalanc cried out fiercely and leaped in, smiting with all the  fury of his arm. Awkwardly she parried the stroke, and it beat the flat  of her blade down on her head so that she saw sparks flash before her  eyes, and staggered. Up went the sword again, with a low, beast-like cry  of triumph--and then a giant form loomed behind the Xotalanc and steel  flashed like a jet of blue lightning. The cry of the warrior broke short  and he went down like an ox beneath the pole-ax, his brains gushing  from his skull that had been split to the throat.
 
"Conan!"  gasped Valeria. In a gust of passion she turned on the Xotalanc whose  long hair she still gripped in her left hand. "Dog of Hell!" Her blade  swished as it cut the air in an upswinging arc with a blur in the  middle, and the headless body slumped down, spurting blood. She hurled  the severed head across the room.
 
"What  the devil's going on here?" Conan bestrode the corpse of the man he had  killed, broadsword in hand, glaring about him in amazement.
 
Techotl  was rising from the twitching figure of the last Xotalanc, shaking red  drops from his dagger. He was bleeding from the stab deep in the thigh.  He stared at Conan with dilated eyes.
 
"What  is all this?" Conan demanded again, not yet recovered from the stunning  surprise of finding Valeria engaged in a savage battle with this  fantastic figures in a city he had thought empty and uninhabited.  Returning from an aimless exploration of the upper chambers to find  Valeria missing from the room where he had left her, he had followed the  sounds of strife that burst on his dumfounded ears.
 
"Five  dead dogs!" exclaimed Techotl, his flaming eyes reflecting a ghastly  exultation. "Five slain! Five crimson nails for the black pillar! The  gods of blood be thanked!"
 
He lifted  quivering hands on high, and then, with the face of a fiend, he spat on  the corpses and stamped on their faces, dancing in his ghoulish glee.  His recent allies eyed him in amazement, and Conan asked, in the  Aquilonian tongue: "Who is this madman?"
 
Valeria shrugged her shoulders.
 
"He  says his name's Techotl. From his babblings I gather that his people  live at one end of this crazy city, and these others at the other end.  Maybe we'd better go with him. He seems friendly, and it's easy to see  that the other clan isn't."
 
Techotl had  ceased his dancing and was listening again, his head tilted sidewise,  dog-like, triumph struggling with fear in his repellent countenance.
 
"Come  away, now!" he whispered. "We have done enough! Five dead dogs! My  people will welcome you! They will honor you! But come! It is far to  Tecuhltli. At any moment the Xotalancs may come on us in numbers too  great even for your swords."
 
"Lead the way," grunted Conan.
 
Techotl  instantly mounted a stair leading up to the gallery, beckoning them to  follow him, which they did, moving rapidly to keep on his heels. Having  reached the gallery, he plunged into a door that opened toward the west,  and hurried through chamber after chamber, each lighted by skylights or  green fire-jewels.
 
"What sort of place can this be?" muttered Valeria under her breath.
 
"Crom  knows!" answered Conan. "I've seen his kind before, though. They live  on the shores of Lake Zuad, near the border of Kush. They're a sort of  mongrel Stygians, mixed with another race that wandered into Stygia from  the east some centuries ago and were absorbed by them. They're called  Tlazitlans. I'm willing to bet it wasn't they who built this city,  though."
 
Techotl's fear did not seem to  diminish as they drew away from the chamber where the dead men lay. He  kept twisting his head on his shoulder to listen for sounds of pursuit,  and stared with burning intensity into every doorway they passed.
 
Valeria  shivered in spite of herself. She feared no man. But the weird floor  beneath her feet, the uncanny jewels over her head, dividing the lurking  shadows among them, the stealth and terror of their guide, impressed  her with a nameless apprehension, a sensation of lurking, inhuman peril.
 
"They may be between us and Tecuhltli!" he whispered once. "We must beware lest they be lying in wait!"
 
"Why don't we get out of this infernal palace, and take to the streets?" demanded Valeria.
 
"There  are no streets in Xuchotl," he answered. "No squares nor open courts.  The whole city is built like one giant palace under one great roof. The  nearest approach to a street is the Great Hall which traverses the city  from the north gate to the south gate. The only doors opening into the  outer world are the city gates, through which no living man has passed  for fifty years."
 
"How long have you dwelt here?" asked Conan.
 
"I  was born in the castle of Tecuhltli thirty-five years ago. I have never  set foot outside the city. For the love of the gods, let us go  silently! These halls may be full of lurking devils. Olmec shall tell  you all when we reach Tecuhltli."
 
So in  silence they glided on with the green fire-stones blinking overhead and  the flaming floors smoldering under their feet, and it seemed to Valeria  as if they fled through Hell, guided by a dark-faced lank-haired  goblin.
 
Yet it was Conan who halted them  as they were crossing an unusually wide chamber. His wilderness-bred  ears were keener even than the ears of Techotl, whetted though his were  by a lifetime of warfare in this silent corridors.
 
"You think some of your enemies may be ahead of us, lying in ambush?"
 
"They  prowl through these rooms at all hours," answered Techotl, "as do we.  The halls and chambers between Tecuhltli and Xotalanc are a disputed  region, owned by no man. We call it the Halls of Silence. Why do you  ask?"
 
"Because men are in the chambers ahead of us," answered Conan. "I heard steel clink against stone."
 
Again a shaking seized Techotl, and he clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering.
 
"Perhaps they are your friends," suggested Valeria.
 
"We  dare not chance it," he panted, and moved with frenzied activity. He  turned aside and glided through a doorway on the left which led into a  chamber from which an ivory staircase wound down into darkness.
 
"This  leads to an unlighted corridor below us!" he hissed, great beads of  perspiration standing out on his brow. "They may be lurking there, too.  It may all be a trick to draw us into it. But we must take the chance  that they have laid their ambush in the rooms above. Come swiftly now!"
 
Softly  as phantoms they descended the stair and came to the mouth of a  corridor black as night. They crouched there for a moment, listening,  and then melted into it. As they moved along, Valeria's flesh crawled  between her shoulders in momentary expectation of a sword-thrust in the  dark. But for Conan's iron fingers gripping her arm she had no physical  cognizance of her companions. Neither made as much noise as a cat would  have made. The darkness was absolute. One hand, outstretched, touched a  wall, and occasionally she felt a door under her fingers. The hallway  seemed interminable.
 
Suddenly they were  galvanized by a sound behind them. Valeria's flesh crawled anew, for she  recognized it as the soft opening of a door. Men had come into the  corridor behind them. Even with the thought she stumbled over something  that felt like a human skull. It rolled across the floor with an  appalling clatter.
 
"Run!" yelped Techotl, a note of hysteria in his voice, and was away down the corridor like a flying ghost.
 
Again  Valeria felt Conan's hand bearing her up and sweeping her along as they  raced after their guide. Conan could see in the dark no better than  she, but he possessed a sort of instinct that made his course unerring.  Without his support and guidance she would have fallen or stumbled  against the wall. Down the corridor they sped, while the swift patter of  flying feet drew closer and closer, and then suddenly Techotl panted:  "Here is the stair! After me, quick! Oh, quick!"
 
His  hand came out of the dark and caught Valeria's wrist as she stumbled  blindly on the steps. She felt herself half dragged, half lifted up the  winding stair, while Conan released her and turned on the steps, his  ears and instincts telling him their foes were hard at their backs. And  the sounds were not all those of human feet.
 
Something  came writhing up the steps, something that slithered and rustled and  brought a chill in the air with it. Conan lashed down with his great  sword and felt the blade shear through something that might have been  flesh and bone, and cut deep into the stair beneath. Something touched  his foot that chilled like the touch of frost, and then the darkness  beneath him was disturbed by a frightful thrashing and lashing, and a  man cried out in agony.
 
The next moment Conan was racing up the winding staircase, and through a door that stood open at the head.
 
Valeria  and Techotl were already through, and Techotl slammed the door and shot  a bolt across it--the first Conan had seen since they had left the  outer gate.
 
Then he turned and ran  across the well-lighted chamber into which they had come, and as they  passed through the farther door, Conan glanced back and saw the door  groaning and straining under heavy pressure violently applied from the  other side.
 
Though Techotl did not abate  either his speed or his caution, he seemed more confident now. He had  the air of a man who had come into familiar territory, within call of  friends.
 
But Conan renewed his terror by asking: "What was that thing I fought on the stairs?"
 
"The men of Xotalanc," answered Techotl, without looking back. "I told you the halls were full of them."
 
"This  wasn't a man," grunted Conan. "It was something that crawled, and it  was as cold as ice to the touch. I think I cut it asunder. It fell back  on the men who were following us, and must have killed one of them in  its death throes."
 
Techotl's head jerked back, his face ashy again. Convulsively he quickened his pace.
 
"It  was the Crawler! A monster they have brought out of the catacombs to  aid them! What it is, we do not know, but we have found our people  hideously slain by it. In Set's name, hasten! If they put it on our  trail, it will follow us to the very doors of Tecuhltli!"
 
"I doubt it," grunted Conan. "That was a shrewd cut I dealt it on the stair."
 
"Hasten! Hasten!" groaned Techotl.
 
They ran through a series of green-lit chambers, traversed a broad hall, and halted before a giant bronze door.
 
Techotl said: "This is Tecuhltli!"
 
== The People of the Feud ==
 
Techotl smote on the bronze door with his clenched hand, and then turned sidewise, so that he could watch back along the hall.
 
"Men have been smitten down before this door, when they thought they were safe," he said.
 
"Why don't they open the door?" asked Conan.
 
"They  are looking at us through the Eye," answered Techotl. "They are puzzled  at the sight of you." He lifted his voice and called: "Open the door,  Excelan! It is I, Techotl, with friends from the great world beyond the  forest!--They will open," he assured his allies.
 
"They'd better do it in a hurry, then," said Conan grimly. "I hear something crawling along the floor beyond the hall."
 
Techotl went ashy again and attacked the door with his fists, screaming: "Open, you fools, open! The Crawler is at our heels!"
 
Even  as he beat and shouted, the great bronze door swung noiselessly back,  revealing a heavy chain across the entrance, over which spearheads  bristled and fierce countenances regarded them intently for an instant.  Then the chain was dropped and Techotl grasped the arms of his friends  in a nervous frenzy and fairly dragged them over the threshold. A glance  over his shoulder just as the door was closing showed Conan the long  dim vista of the hall, and dimly framed at the other end an ophidian  shape that writhed slowly and painfully into view, flowing in a  dull-hued length from a chamber door, its hideous bloodstained head  wagging drunkenly. Then the closing door shut off the view.
 
Inside  the square chamber into which they had come heavy bolts were drawn  across the door, and the chain locked into place. The door was made to  stand the battering of a siege. Four men stood on guard, of the same  lank-haired, dark-skinned breed as Techotl, with spears in their hands  and swords at their hips. In the wall near the door there was a  complicated contrivance of mirrors which Conan guessed was the Eye  Techotl had mentioned, so arranged that a narrow, crystal-paned slot in  the wall could be looked through from within without being discernible  from without. The four guardsmen stared at the strangers with wonder,  but asked no question, nor did Techotl vouchsafe any information. He  moved with easy confidence now, as if he had shed his cloak of  indecision and fear the instant he crossed the threshold.
 
"Come!" he urged his new-found friends, but Conan glanced toward the door.
 
"What about those fellows who were following us? Won't they try to storm that door?"
 
Techotl shook his head.
 
"They  know they cannot break down the Door of the Eagle. They will flee back  to Xotalanc, with their crawling fiend. Come! I will take you to the  rulers of Tecuhltli."
 
One of the four  guards opened the door opposite the one by which they had entered, and  they passed through into a hallway which, like most of the rooms on that  level, was lighted by both the slot-like skylights and the clusters of  winking fire-gems. But unlike the other rooms they had traversed, this  hall showed evidences of occupation. Velvet tapestries adorned the  glossy jade walls, rich rugs were on the crimson floors, and the ivory  seats, benches and divans were littered with satin cushions.
 
The  hall ended in an ornate door, before which stood no guard. Without  ceremony Techotl thrust the door open and ushered his friends into a  broad chamber, where some thirty dark-skinned men and women lounged on  satin-covered couches sprang up with exclamations of amazement.
 
The  men, all except one, were of the same type as Techotl, and the women  were equally dark and strange-eyed, though not unbeautiful in a weird  dark way. They wore sandals, golden breastplates, and scanty silk skirts  supported by gem-crusted girdles, and their black manes, cut square at  their naked shoulders, were bound with silver circlets.
 
On  a wide ivory seat on a jade dais sat a man and a woman who differed  subtly from the others. He was a giant, with an enormous sweep of breast  and the shoulders of a bull. Unlike the others, he was bearded, with a  thick, blue-black beard which fell almost to his broad girdle. He wore a  robe of purple silk which reflected changing sheens of color with his  every movement, and one wide sleeve, drawn back to his elbow, revealed a  forearm massive with corded muscles. The band which confined his  blue-black locks was set with glittering jewels.
 
The  woman beside him sprang to her feet with a startled exclamation as the  strangers entered, and her eyes, passing over Conan, fixed themselves  with burning intensity on Valeria. She was tall and lithe, by far the  most beautiful woman in the room. She was clad more scantily even than  the others; for instead of a skirt she wore merely a broad strip of  gilt-worked purple cloth fastened to the middle of her girdle which fell  below her knees. Another strip at the back of her girdle completed that  part of her costume, which she wore with a cynical indifference. Her  breast-plates and the circlet about her temples were adorned with gems.  In her eyes alone of all the dark-skinned people there lurked no  brooding gleam of madness. She spoke no word after her first  exclamation; she stood tensely, her hands clenched, staring at Valeria.
 
The man on the ivory seat had not risen.
 
"Prince  Olmec," spoke Techotl, bowing low, with arms outspread and the palms of  his hands turned upward, "I bring allies from the world beyond the  forest. In the Chamber of Techotl the Burning Skull slew Chicmec, my  companion--"
 
"The Burning Skull!" It was a shuddering whisper of fear from the people of Tecuhltli.
 
"Aye!  Then came I, and found Chicmec lying with his throat cut. Before I  could flee, the Burning Skull came upon me, and when I looked upon it my  blood became as ice and the marrow of my bones melted. I could neither  fight nor run. I could only await the stroke. Then came this  white-skinned woman and struck him down with her sword; and lo, it was  only a dog of Xotalanc with white paint upon his skin and the living  skull of an ancient wizard upon his head! Now that skull lies in many  pieces, and the dog who wore it is a dead man!"
 
An  indescribably fierce exultation edged the last sentence, and was echoed  in the low, savage exclamations from the crowding listeners.
 
"But  wait!" exclaimed Techotl. "There is more! While I talked with the  woman, four Xotalancs came upon us! One I slew--there is the stab in my  thigh to prove how desperate was the fight. Two the woman killed. But we  were hard pressed when this man came into the fray and split the skull  of the fourth! Aye! Five crimson nails there are to be driven into the  pillar of vengeance!"
 
He pointed to a  black column of ebony which stood behind the dais. Hundreds of red dots  scarred its polished surface--the bright scarlet heads of heavy copper  nails driven into the black wood.
 
"Five  red nails for five Xotalanca lives!" exulted Techotl, and the horrible  exultation in the faces of the listeners made them inhuman.
 
"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."
 
The woman on the dais spoke loudly, her words tripping in her haste.
 
"You can never reach the coast! There is no escape from Xuchotl! You will spend the rest of your lives in this city!"
 
"What  do you mean," growled Conan, clapping his hand to his hilt and stepping  about so as to face both the dais and the rest of the room. "Are you  telling us we're prisoners?"
 
"She did  not mean that," interposed Olmec. "We are your friends. We would not  restrain you against your will. But I fear other circumstances will make  it impossible for you to leave Xuchotl."
 
His eyes flickered to Valeria, and he lowered them quickly.
 
"This  woman is Tascela," he said. "She is a princess of Tecuhltli. But let  food and drink be brought our guests. Doubtless they are hungry, and  weary from their long travels."
 
He  indicated an ivory table, and after an exchange of glances, the  adventurers seated themselves. The Cimmerian was suspicious. His fierce  blue eyes roved about the chamber, and he kept his sword close to his  hand. But an invitation to eat and drink never found him backward. His  eyes kept wandering to Tascela, but the princess had eyes only for his  white-skinned companion.
 
Techotl, who  had bound a strip of silk about his wounded thigh, placed himself at the  table to attend to the wants of his friends, seeming to consider it a  privilege and honor to see after their needs. He inspected the food and  drink the others brought in gold vessels and dishes, and tasted each  before he placed it before his guests. While they ate, Olmec sat in  silence on his ivory seat, watching them from under his broad black  brows. Tascela sat beside him, chin cupped in her hands and her elbows  resting on her knees. Her dark, enigmatic eyes, burning with a  mysterious light, never left Valeria's supple figure. Behind her seat a  sullen handsome girl waved an ostrich-plume fan with a slow rhythm.
 
The  food was fruit of an exotic kind unfamiliar to the wanderers, but very  palatable, and the drink was a light crimson wine that carried a heady  tang.
 
"You have come from afar," said  Olmec at last. "I have read the books of our fathers. Aquilonia lies  beyond the lands of the Stygians and the Shemites, beyond Argos and  Zingara; and Cimmeria lies beyond Aquilonia."
 
"We have each a roving foot," answered Conan carelessly.
 
"How  you won through the forest is a wonder to me," quoth Olmec. "In bygone  days a thousand fighting men scarcely were able to carve a road through  its perils."
 
"We encountered a  bench-legged monstrosity about the size of a mastodon," said Conan  casually, holding out his wine goblet which Techutl filled with evident  pleasure. "But when we'd killed it we had no further trouble."
 
The  wine vessel slipped from Techotl's hand to crash on the floor. His  dusky skin went ashy. Olmec started to his feet, an image of stunned  amazement, and a low gasp of awe or terror breathed up from the others.  Some slipped to their knees as if their legs would not support them.  Only Tascela seemed not to have heard. Conan glared about him  bewilderedly.
 
"What's the matter? What are you gaping about?"
 
"You--you slew the dragon-god?"
 
"God? I killed a dragon. Why not? It was trying to gobble us up."
 
"But  dragons are immortal!" exclaimed Olmec. "They slay each other, but no  man ever killed a dragon! The thousand fighting men of our ancestors who  fought their way to Xuchotl could not prevail against them! Their  swords broke like twigs against their scales!"
 
"If  your ancestors had thought to dip their spears in the poisonous juice  of Derketa's Apples," quoth Conan, with his mouth full, "and jab them in  the eyes or mouth or somewhere like that, they'd have seen that dragons  are no more immortal than any other chunk of beef. The carcass lies at  the edge of the trees, just within the forest. If you don't believe me,  go and look for yourself."
 
Olmec shook his head, not in disbelief but in wonder.
 
"It  was because of the dragons that our ancestors took refuge in Xuchotl,"  said he. "They dared not pass through the plain and plunge into the  forest beyond. Scores of them were seized and devoured by the monsters  before they could reach the city."
 
"Then your ancestors didn't build Xuchotl?" asked Valeria.
 
"It was ancient when they first came into the land. How long it had stood here, not even its degenerate inhabitants knew."
 
"Your people came from Lake Zuad?" questioned Conan.
 
"Aye.  More than half a century ago a tribe of the Tlazitlans rebelled against  the Stygian king, and, being defeated in battle, fled southward. For  many weeks they wandered over grasslands, desert and hills, and at last  they came into the great forest, a thousand fighting men with their  women and children.
 
"It was in the  forest that the dragons fell upon them and tore many to pieces; so the  people fled in a frenzy of fear before them, and at last came into the  plain and saw the city of Xuchotl in the midst of it.
 
"They  camped before the city, not daring to leave the plain, for the night  was made hideous with the noise of the battling monsters through the  forest. They made war incessantly upon one another. Yet they came not  into the plain.
 
"The people of the city  shut their gates and shot arrows at our people from the walls. The  Tlazitlans were imprisoned on the plain, as if the ring of the forest  had been a great wall; for to venture into the woods would have been  madness.
 
"That night there came secretly  to their camp a slave from the city, one of their own blood, who with a  band of exploring soldiers had wandered into the forest long before,  when he was a young man. The dragons had devoured all his companions,  but he had been taken into the city to dwell in servitude. His name was  Tolkemec." A flame lighted the dark eyes at mention of the name, and  some of the people muttered obscenely and spat. "He promised to open the  gates to the warriors. He asked only that all captives taken be  delivered into his hands.
 
"At dawn he  opened the gates. The warriors swarmed in and the halls of Xuchotl ran  red. Only a few hundred folk dwelt there, decaying remnants of a once  great race. Tolkemec said they came from the east, long ago, from Old  Kosala, when the ancestors of those who now dwell in Kosala came up from  the south and drove forth the original inhabitants of the land. They  wandered far westward and finally found this forest-girdled plain,  inhabited then by a tribe of black people.
 
"These  they enslaved and set to building a city. From the hills to the east  they brought jade and marble and lapis lazuli, and gold, silver, and  copper. Herds of elephants provided them with ivory. When their city was  completed, they slew all the black slaves. And their magicians made a  terrible magic to guard the city; for by their necromantic arts they  re-created the dragons which had once dwelt in this lost land, and whose  monstrous bones they found in the forest. Those bones they clothed in  flesh and life, and the living beasts walked the earth as they walked it  when time was young. But the wizards wove a spell that kept them in the  forest and they came not into the plain.
 
"So  for many centuries the people of Xuchotl dwelt in their city,  cultivating the fertile plain, until their wise men learned how to grow  fruit within the city--fruit which is not planted in soil, but obtains  its nourishment out of the air--and then they let the irrigation ditches  run dry and dwelt more and more in luxurious sloth, until decay seized  them. They were a dying race when our ancestors broke through the forest  and came into the plain. Their wizards had died, and the people had  forgot their ancient necromancy. They could fight neither by sorcery nor  the sword.
 
"Well, our fathers slew the  people of Xuchotl, all except a hundred which were given living into the  hands of Tolkemec, who had been their slave; and for many days and  nights the halls re-echoed to their screams under the agony of his  tortures.
 
"So the Tlazitlans dwelt here,  for a while in peace, ruled by the brothers Tecuhltli and Xotalanc, and  by Tolkemec. Tolkemec took a girl of the tribe to wife, and because he  had opened the gates, and because he knew many of the arts of the  Xuchotlans, he shared the rule of the tribe with the brothers who had  led the rebellion and the flight.
 
"For a  few years, then, they dwelt at peace within the city, doing little but  eating, drinking, and making love, and raising children. There was no  necessity to till the plain, for Tolkemec taught them how to cultivate  the air-devouring fruits. Besides, the slaying of the Xuchotlans broke  the spell that held the dragons in the forest, and they came nightly and  bellowed about the gates of the city. The plain ran red with the blood  of their eternal warfare, and it was then that--" He bit his tongue in  the midst of the sentence, then presently continued, but Valeria and  Conan felt that he had checked an admission he had considered unwise.
 
"Five  years they dwelt in peace. Then"--Olmec's eyes rested briefly on the  silent woman at his side--"Xotalanc took a woman to wife, a woman whom  both Tecuhltli and old Tolkemec desired. In his madness, Tecuhltli stole  her from her husband. Aye, she went willingly enough. Tolkemec, to  spite Xotalanc, aided Tecuhltli. Xotalanc demanded that she be given  back to him, and the council of the tribe decided that the matter should  be left to the woman. She chose to remain with Tecuhltli. In wrath  Xotalanc sought to take her back by force, and the retainers of the  brothers came to blows in the Great Hall.
 
"There  was much bitterness. Blood was shed on both sides. The quarrel became a  feud, the feud an open war. From the welter three factions  emerged--Tecuhltli, Xotalanc, and Tolkemec. Already, in the days of  peace, they had divided the city between them. Tecuhltli dwelt in the  western quarter of the city, Xotalanc in the eastern, and Tolkemec with  his family by the southern gate.
 
"Anger  and resentment and jealousy blossomed into bloodshed and rape and  murder. Once the sword was drawn there was no turning back; for blood  called for blood, and vengeance followed swift on the heels of atrocity.  Tecuhltli fought with Xotalanc, and Tolkemec aided first one and then  the other, betraying each faction as it fitted his purposes. Tecuhltli  and his people withdrew into the quarter of the western gate, where we  now sit. Xuchotl is built in the shape of an oval. Tecuhltli, which took  its name from its prince, occupies the western end of the oval. The  people blocked up all doors connecting the quarter with the rest of the  city, except one on each floor, which could be defended easily. They  went into the pits below the city and built a wall cutting off the  western end of the catacombs, where lie the bodies of the ancient  Xuchotlans, and of those Tlazitlans slain in the feud. They dwelt as in a  besieged castle, making sorties and forays on their enemies.
 
"The  people of Xotalanc likewise fortified the eastern quarter of the city,  and Tolkemec did likewise with the quarter by the southern gate. The  central part of the city was left bare and uninhabited. Those empty  halls and chambers became a battleground, and a region of brooding  terror.
 
"Tolkemec warred on both clans.  He was a fiend in the form of a human, worse than Xotalanc. He knew many  secrets of the city he never told the others. From the crypts of the  catacombs he plundered the dead of their grisly secrets--secrets of  ancient kings and wizards, long forgotten by the degenerate Xuchotlans  our ancestors slew. But all his magic did not aid him the night we of  Tecuhltli stormed his castle and butchered all his people. Tolkemec we  tortured for many days."
 
His voice sank  to a caressing slur, and a faraway look grew in his eyes, as if he  looked back over the years to a scene which caused him intense pleasure.
 
"Aye,  we kept the life in him until he screamed for death as for a bride. At  last we took him living from the torture chamber and cast him into a  dungeon for the rats to gnaw as he died. From that dungeon, somehow, he  managed to escape, and dragged himself into the catacombs. There without  doubt he died, for the only way out of the catacombs beneath Tecuhltli  is through Tecuhltli, and he never emerged by that way. His bones were  never found and the superstitious among our people swear that his ghost  haunts the crypts to this day, wailing among the bones of the dead.  Twelve years ago we butchered the people of Tolkemec, but the feud raged  on between Tecuhltli and Xotalanc, as it will rage until the last man,  the last woman is dead.
 
"It was fifty  years ago that Tecuhltli stole the wife of Xotalanc. Half a century the  feud has endured. I was born in it. All in this chamber, except Tascela,  were born in it. We expect to die in it.
 
"We  are a dying race, even as were those Xuchotlans our ancestors slew.  When the feud began there were hundreds in each faction. Now we of  Tecuhltli number only these you see before you, and the men who guard  the four doors: forty in all. How many Xotalancas there are we do not  know, but I doubt if they are much more numerous than we. For fifteen  years no children have been born to us, and we have seen none among the  Xotalancas.
 
"We are dying, but before we die we will slay as many of the men of Xotalanc as the gods permit."
 
And  with his weird eyes blazing, Olmec spoke long of that grisly feud,  fought out in silent chambers and dim halls under the blaze of the green  fire-jewels, on floors smoldering with the flames of hell and splashed  with deeper crimson from severed veins. In that long butchery a whole  generation had perished. Xotalanc was dead, long ago, slain in a grim  battle on an ivory stair. Tecuhltli was dead, flayed alive by the  maddened Xotalancas who had captured him.
 
Without  emotion Olmec told of hideous battles fought in black corridors, of  ambushes on twisting stairs, and red butcheries. With a redder, more  abysmal gleam in his deep dark eyes he told of men and women flayed  alive, mutilated and dismembered, of captives howling under tortures so  ghastly that even the barbarous Cimmerian grunted. No wonder Techotl had  trembled with the terror of capture! Yet he had gone forth to slay if  he could, driven by hate that was stronger than his fear. Olmec spoke  further, of dark and mysterious matters, of black magic and wizardry  conjured out of the black night of the catacombs, of weird creatures  invoked out of darkness for horrible allies. In these things the  Xotalancas had the advantage, for it was in the eastern catacombs where  lay the bones of the greatest wizards of the ancient Xuchotlans, with  their immemorial secrets.
 
Valeria  listened with morbid fascination. The feud had become a terrible  elemental power driving the people of Xuchotl inexorably on to doom and  extinction. It filled their whole lives. They were born in it, and they  expected to die in it. They never left their barricaded castle except to  steal forth into the Halls of Silence that lay between the opposing  fortresses, to slay and be slain. Sometimes the raiders returned with  frantic captives, or with grim tokens of victory in fight. Sometimes  they did not return at all, or returned only as severed limbs cast down  before the bolted bronze doors. It was a ghastly, unreal nightmare  existence these people lived, shut off from the rest of the world,  caught together like rabid rats in the same trap, butchering one another  through the years, crouching and creeping through the sunless corridors  to maim and torture and murder.
 
While  Olmec talked, Valeria felt the blazing eyes of Tascela fixed upon her.  The princess seemed not to hear what Olmec was saying. Her expression,  as he narrated victories or defeats, did not mirror the wild rage or  fiendish exultation that alternated on the faces of the other Tecuhltli.  The feud that was an obsession to her clansmen seemed meaningless to  her. Valeria found her indifferent callousness more repugnant than  Olmec's naked ferocity.
 
"And we can never leave the city," said Olmec. "For fifty years on one has left it except those--" Again he checked himself.
 
"Even  without the peril of the dragons," he continued, "we who were born and  raised in the city would not dare leave it. We have never set foot  outside the walls. We are not accustomed to the open sky and the naked  sun. No; we were born in Xuchotl, and in Xuchotl we shall die."
 
"Well,"  said Conan, "with your leave we'll take our chances with the dragons.  This feud is none of our business. If you'll show us to the west gate  we'll be on our way."
 
Tascela's hands  clenched, and she started to speak, but Olmec interrupted her: "It is  nearly nightfall. If you wander forth into the plain by night, you will  certainly fall prey to the dragons."
 
"We crossed it last night, and slept in the open without seeing any," returned Conan.
 
Tascela smiled mirthlessly. "You dare not leave Xuchotl!"
 
Conan glared at her with instinctive antagonism; she was not looking at him, but at the woman opposite him.
 
"I  think they dare," stated Olmec. "But look you, Conan and Valeria, the  gods must have sent you to us, to cast victory into the laps of the  Tecuhltli! You are professional fighters--why not fight for us? We have  wealth in abundance--precious jewels are as common in Xuchotl as  cobblestones are in the cities of the world. Some the Xuchotlans brought  with them from Kosala. Some, like the firestones, they found in the  hills to the east. Aid us to wipe out the Xotalancas, and we will give  you all the jewels you can carry."
 
"And  will you help us destroy the dragons?" asked Valeria. "With bows and  poisoned arrows thirty men could slay all the dragons in the forest."
 
"Aye!"  replied Olmec promptly. "We have forgotten the use of the bow, in years  of hand-to-hand fighting, but we can learn again."
 
"What do you say?" Valeria inquired of Conan.
 
"We're both penniless vagabonds," he grinned hardily. "I'd as soon kill Xotalancas as anybody."
 
"Then you agree?" exclaimed Olmec, while Techotl fairly hugged himself with delight.
 
"Aye. And now suppose you show us chambers where we can sleep, so we can be fresh tomorrow for the beginning of the slaying."
 
Olmec  nodded, and waved a hand, and Techotl and a woman led the adventurers  into a corridor which led through a door off to the left of the jade  dais. A glance back showed Valeria Olmec sitting on his throne, chin on  knotted fist, staring after them. His eyes burned with a weird flame.  Tascela leaned back in her seat, whispering to the sullen-faced maid,  Yasala, who leaned over her shoulder, her ear to the princess's moving  lips.
 
The hallway was not so broad as  most they had traversed, but it was long. Presently the woman halted,  opened a door, and drew aside for Valeria to enter.
 
"Wait a minute," growled Conan. "Where do I sleep?"
 
Techotl  pointed to a chamber across the hallway, but one door farther down.  Conan hesitated, and seemed inclined to raise an objection, but Valeria  smiled spitefully at him and shut the door in his face. He muttered  something uncomplimentary about women in general, and strode off down  the corridor after Techotl.
 
In the  ornate chamber where he was to sleep, he glanced up at the slot-like  skylights. Some were wide enough to admit the body of a slender man,  supposing the glass were broken.
 
"Why don't the Xotalancas come over the roofs and shatter those skylights?" he asked.
 
"They  cannot be broken," answered Techotl. "Besides, the roofs would be hard  to clamber over. They are mostly spires and domes and steep ridges."
 
He  volunteered more information about the "castle" of Tecuhltli. Like the  rest of the city it contained four stories, or tiers of chambers, with  towers jutting up from the roof. Each tier was named; indeed, the people  of Xuchotl had a name for each chamber, hall, and stair in the city, as  people of more normal cities designate streets and quarters. In  Tecuhltli the floors were named The Eagle's Tier, The Ape's Tier, The  Tiger's Tier and The Serpent's Tier, in the order as enumerated, The  Eagle's Tier being the highest, or fourth, floor.
 
"Who is Tascela?" asked Conan. "Olmec's wife?"
 
Techotl shuddered and glanced furtively about him before answering.
 
"No. She is--Tascela! She was the wife of Xotalanc--the woman Tecuhltli stole, to start the feud."
 
"What  are you talking about?" demanded Conan. "That woman is beautiful and  young. Are you trying to tell me that she was a wife fifty years ago?"
 
"Aye!  I swear it! She was a full-grown woman when the Tlazitlans journeyed  from Lake Zuad. It was because the king of Stygia desired her for a  concubine that Xotalanc and his brother rebelled and fled into the  wilderness. She is a witch, who possesses the secret of perpetual  youth."
 
"What's that?" asked Conan.
 
Techotl shuddered again.
 
"Ask me not! I dare not speak. It is too grisly, even for Xuchotl!"
 
And touching his finger to his lips, he glided from the chamber.
 
== Scent of Black Lotus ==
 
Valeria  unbuckled her sword belt and laid it with the sheathed weapon on the  couch where she meant to sleep. She noted that the doors were supplied  with bolts, and asked where they led.
 
"Those  lead to adjoining chambers," answered the woman, indicating the doors  on right and left. "That one?"--pointing to a copper-bound door opposite  that which opened into the corridor--"leads to a corridor which runs to  a stair that descends into the catacombs. Do not fear; naught can harm  you here."
 
"Who spoke of fear?" snapped  Valeria. "I just like to know what sort of harbor I'm dropping anchor  in. No, I don't want you to sleep at the foot of my couch. I'm not  accustomed to being waited on--not by women, anyway. You have my leave  to go."
 
Alone in the room, the pirate  shot the bolts on all the doors, kicked off her boots and stretched  luxuriously out on the couch. She imagined Conan similarly situated  across the corridor, but her feminine vanity prompted her to visualize  him as scowling and muttering with chagrin as he cast himself on his  solitary couch, and she grinned with gleeful malice as she prepared  herself for slumber.
 
Outside, night had  fallen. In the halls of Xuchotl the green fire-jewels blazed like the  eyes of prehistoric cats. Somewhere among the dark towers, a night wind  moaned like a restless spirit. Through the dim passages, stealthy  figures began stealing, like disembodied shadows.
 
Valeria  awoke suddenly on her couch. In the dusky emerald glow of the fire-gems  she saw a shadowy figure bending over her. For a bemused instant the  apparition seemed part of the dream she had been dreaming. She had  seemed to lie on the couch in the chamber as she was actually lying,  while over her pulsed and throbbed a gigantic black blossom so enormous  that it hid the ceiling. Its exotic perfume pervaded her being, inducing  a delicious, sensuous languor that was something more and less than  sleep. She was sinking into scented billows of insensible bliss, when  something touched her face. So supersensitive were her drugged senses,  that the light touch was like a dislocating impact, jolting her rudely  into full wakefulness. Then it was that she saw, not a gargantuan  blossom, but a dark-skinned woman standing above her.
 
With  the realization came anger and instant action. The woman turned  lithely, but before she could run Valeria was on her feet and had caught  her arm. She fought like a wildcat for an instant, and then subsided as  she felt herself crushed by the superior strength of her captor. The  pirate wrenched the woman around to face her, caught her chin with her  free hand and forced her captive to meet her gaze. It was the sullen  Yasala, Tascela's maid.
 
"What the devil were you doing bending over me? What's that in your hand?"
 
The  woman made no reply, but sought to cast away the object. Valeria  twisted her arm around in front of her, and the thing fell to the  floor--a great black exotic blossom on a jade-green stem, large as a  woman's head, to be sure, but tiny beside the exaggerated vision she had  seen.
 
"The black lotus!" said Valeria  between her teeth. "The blossom whose scent brings deep sleep. You were  trying to drug me! If you hadn't accidentally touched my face with the  petals, you'd have--why did you do it? What's your game?"
 
Yasala  maintained a sulky silence, and with an oath Valeria whirled her  around, forced her to her knees and twisted her arm up behind her back.
 
"Tell me, or I'll tear your arm out of its socket!"
 
Yasala  squirmed in anguish as her arm was forced excruciatingly up between her  shoulder blades, but a violent shaking of her head was the only answer  she made.
 
"Slut!" Valeria cast her from  her to sprawl on the floor. The pirate glared at the prostrate figure  with blazing eyes. Fear and the memory of Tascela's burning eyes stirred  in her, rousing all her tigerish instincts of self-preservation. These  people were decadent; any sort of perversity might be expected to be  encountered among them. But Valeria sensed here something that moved  behind the scenes, some secret terror fouler than common degeneracy.  Fear and revulsion of this weird city swept her. These people were  neither sane nor normal; she began to doubt if they were even human.  Madness smoldered in the eyes of them all--all except the cruel, cryptic  eyes of Tascela, which held secrets and mysteries more abysmal than  madness.
 
She lifted her head and  listened intently. The halls of Xuchotl were as silent as if it were in  reality a dead city. The green jewels bathed the chamber in a nightmare  glow, in which the eyes of the woman on the floor glittered eerily up at  her. A thrill of panic throbbed through Valeria, driving the last  vestige of mercy from her fierce soul.
 
"Why  did you try to drug me?" she muttered, grasping the woman's black hair,  and forcing her head back to glare into her sullen, long-lashed eyes.  "Did Tascela send you?"
 
No answer.  Valeria cursed venomously and slapped the woman first on one cheek and  then the other. The blows resounded through the room, but Yasala made no  outcry.
 
"Why don't you scream?" demanded Valeria savagely. "Do you fear someone will hear you? Whom do you fear? Tascela? Olmec? Conan?"
 
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 near-by hanging.
 
"You  sulky slut!" she said between her teeth. "I'm going to strip you stark  naked and tie you across that couch and whip you until you tell me what  you were doing here, and who sent you!"
 
Yasala  made no verbal protest, nor did she offer any resistance, as Valeria  carried out the first part of her thereat with a fury that her captive's  obstinacy only sharpened. Then for a space there was no sound in the  chamber except the whistle and crackle of hard-woven silken cords on  naked flesh. Yasala could not move her fast-bound hands or feet. Her  body writhed and quivered under the chastisement, her head swayed from  side to side in rhythm with the blows. Her teeth were sunk into her  lower lip and a trickle of blood began as the punishment continued. But  she did not cry out.
 
The pliant cords  made no great sound as they encountered the quivering body of the  captive; only a sharp crackling snap, but each cord left a red streak  across Yasala's dark flesh. Valeria inflicted the punishment with all  the strength of her war-hardened arm, with all the mercilessness  acquired during a life where pain and torment were daily happenings, and  with all the cynical ingenuity which only a woman displays toward a  woman. Yasala suffered more, physically and mentally, than she would  have suffered under a lash wielded by a man, however strong.
 
It was the application of this feminine cynicism which at last tamed Yasala.
 
A low whimper escaped from her lips, and Valeria paused, arm lifted, and raked back a damp yellow lock. "Well, are you going to talk?" she demanded. "I can keep this up all night, if necessary."
 
"Mercy!" whispered the woman. "I will tell."
 
Valeria  cut the cords from her wrists and ankles, and pulled her to her feet.  Yasala sank down on the couch, half reclining on one bare hip,  supporting herself on her arm, and writhing at the contact of her  smarting flesh with the couch. She was trembling in every limb.
 
"Wine!"  she begged, dry-lipped, indicating with a quivering hand a gold vessel  on an ivory table. "Let me drink. I am weak with pain. Then I will tell  you all."
 
Valeria picked up the vessel,  and Yasala rose unsteadily to receive it. She took it, raised it toward  her lips--then dashed the contents full into the Aquilonian's face.  Valeria reeled backward, shaking and clawing the stinging liquid out of  her eyes. Through a smarting mist she saw Yasala dart across the room,  fling back a bolt, throw open the copper-bound door and run down the  hall. The pirate was after her instantly, sword out and murder in her  heart.
 
But Yasala had the start, and she  ran with the nervous agility of a woman who has just been whipped to  the point of hysterical frenzy. She rounded a corner in the corridor,  yards ahead of Valeria, and when the pirate turned it, she saw only an  empty hall, and at the other end a door that gaped blackly. A damp moldy  scent reeked up from it, and Valeria shivered. That must be the door  that led to the catacombs. Yasala had taken refuge among the dead.
 
Valeria  advanced to the door and looked down a flight of stone steps that  vanished quickly into utter blackness. Evidently it was a shaft that led  straight to the pits below the city, without opening upon any of the  lower floors. She shivered slightly at the thought of the thousands of  corpses lying in their stone crypts down there, wrapped in their  moldering cloths. She had no intention of groping her way down those  stone steps. Yasala doubtless knew every turn and twist of the  subterranean tunnels.
 
She was turning  back, baffled and furious, when a sobbing cry welled up from the  blackness. It seemed to come from a great depth, but human words were  faintly distinguishable, and the voice was that of a woman. "Oh, help!  Help, in Set's name! Ahhh!" It trailed away, and Valeria thought she  caught the echo of a ghostly tittering.
 
Valeria  felt her skin crawl. What had happened to Yasala down there in the  thick blackness? There was no doubt that it had been she who had cried  out. But what peril could have befallen her? Was a Xotalanca lurking  down there? Olmec had assured them that the catacombs below Tecuhltli  were walled off from the rest, too securely for their enemies to break  through. Besides, that tittering had not sounded like a human being at  all.
 
Valeria hurried back down the  corridor, not stopping to close the door that opened on the stair.  Regaining her chamber, she closed the door and shot the bolt behind her.  She pulled on her boots and buckled her sword-belt about her. She was  determined to make her way to Conan's room and urge him, if he still  lived, to join her in an attempt to fight their way out of that city of  devils.
 
But even as she reached the door  that opened into the corridor, a long-drawn scream of agony rang  through the halls, followed by the stamp of running feet and the loud  clangor of swords.
 
== Twenty Red Nails ==
 
Two  warriors lounged in the guardroom on the floor known as the Tier of the  Eagle. Their attitude was casual, though habitually alert. An attack on  the great bronze door from without was always a possibility, but for  many years no such assault had been attempted on either side.
 
"The strangers are strong allies," said one. "Olmec will move against the enemy tomorrow, I believe."
 
He  spoke as a soldier in a war might have spoken. In the miniature world  of Xuchotl each handful of feudists was an army, and the empty halls  between the castles was the country over which they campaigned.
 
The other meditated for a space.
 
"Suppose with their aid we destroy Xotalanc," he said. "What then, Xatmec?"
 
"Why," returned Xatmec, "we will drive red nails for them all. The captives we will burn and flay and quarter."
 
"But  afterward?" pursued the other. "After we have slain them all? Will it  not seem strange to have no foe to fight? All my life I have fought and  hated the Xotalancas. With the feud ended, what is left?"
 
Xatmec shrugged his shoulders. His thoughts had never gone beyond the destruction of their foes. They could not go beyond that.
 
Suddenly both men stiffened at a noise outside the door.
 
"To the door, Xatmec!" hissed the last speaker. "I shall look through the Eye--"
 
Xatmec,  sword in hand, leaned against the bronze door, straining his ear to  hear through the metal. His mate looked into the mirror. He started  convulsively. Men were clustered thickly outside the door; grim,  dark-faced men with swords gripped in their teeth--and their fingers  thrust into their ears. One who wore a feathered headdress had a set of  pipes which he set to his lips, and even as the Tecuhltli started to  shout a warning, the pipes began to skirl.
 
The  cry died in the guard's throat as the thin, weird piping penetrated the  metal door and smote on his ears. Xatmec leaned frozen against the  door, as if paralyzed in that position. His face was that of a wooden  image, his expression one of horrified listening. The other guard,  farther removed from the source of the sound, yet sensed the horror of  what was taking place, the grisly threat that lay in that demoniac  fifing. He felt the weird strains plucking like unseen fingers at the  tissues of his brain, filling him with alien emotions and impulses of  madness. But with a soul-tearing effort he broke the spell, and shrieked  a warning in a voice he did not recognize as his own.
 
But  even as he cried out, the music changed to an unbearable shrilling that  was like a knife in the eardrums. Xatmec screamed in sudden agony, and  all the sanity went out of his face like a flame blown out in a wind.  Like a madman he ripped loose the chain, tore open the door and rushed  out into the hall, sword lifted before his mate could stop him. A dozen  blades struck him down, and over his mangled body the Xotalancas surged  into the guardroom, with a long-drawn, blood-mad yell that sent the  unwonted echoes reverberating.
 
His brain  reeling from the shock of it all, the remaining guard leaped to meet  them with goring spear. The horror of the sorcery he had just witnessed  was submerged in the stunning realization that the enemy were in  Tecuhltli. And as his spearhead ripped through a dark-skinned belly he  knew no more, for a swinging sword crushed his skull, even as wild-eyed  warriors came pouring in from the chambers behind the guardroom.
 
It  was the yelling of men and the clanging of steel that brought Conan  bounding from his couch, wide awake and broadsword in hand. In an  instant he had reached the door and flung it open, and was glaring out  into the corridor just as Techotl rushed up it, eyes blazing madly.
 
"The Xotalancas!" he screamed, in a voice hardly human. "They are within the door!"
 
Conan ran down the corridor, even as Valeria emerged from her chamber.
 
"What the devil is it?" she called.
 
"Techotl says the Xotalancas are in," he answered hurriedly. "That racket sounds like it."
 
With  the Tecuhltli on their heels they burst into the throne room and were  confronted by a scene beyond the most frantic dream of blood and fury.  Twenty men and women, their black hair streaming, and the white skulls  gleaming on their breasts, were locked in combat with the people of  Tecuhltli. The women on both sides fought as madly as the men, and  already the room and the hall beyond were strewn with corpses.
 
Olmec,  naked but for a breech-clout, was fighting before his throne, and as  the adventurers entered, Tascela ran from an inner chamber with a sword  in her hand.
 
Xatmec and his mate were  dead, so there was none to tell the Tecuhltli how their foes had found  their way into their citadel. Nor was there any to say what had prompted  that mad attempt. But the losses of the Xotalancas had been greater,  their position more desperate, than the Tecuhltli had known. The maiming  of their scaly ally, the destruction of the Burning Skull, and the  news, gasped by a dying man, that mysterious white-skin allies had  joined their enemies, had driven them to the frenzy of desperation and  the wild determination to die dealing death to their ancient foes.
 
The  Tecuhltli, recovering from the first stunning shock of the surprise  that had swept them back into the throne room and littered the floor  with their corpses, fought back with an equally desperate fury, while  the doorguards from the lower floors came racing to hurl themselves into  the fray. It was the deathfight of rabid wolves, blind, panting,  merciless. Back and forth it surged, from door to dais, blades  whickering and striking into flesh, blood spurting, feet stamping the  crimson floor where redder pools were forming. Ivory tables crashed  over, seats were splintered, velvet hangings torn down were stained red.  It was the bloody climax of a bloody half-century, and every man there  sensed it.
 
But the conclusion was  inevitable. The Tecuhltli outnumbered the invaders almost two to one,  and they were heartened by that fact and by the entrance into the melee  of their light-skinned allies.
 
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. Where Conan beat down  opposition by the sheer weight and power of his blows, breaking spears,  splitting skulls and cleaving bosoms to the breastbone, Valeria brought  into action a finesse of swordplay that dazzled and bewildered her  antagonists before it slew them. Again and again a warrior, heaving high  his heavy blade, found her point in his jugular before he could strike.  Conan, towering above the field, strode through the welter smiting  right and left, but Valeria moved like an illusive phantom, constantly  shifting, and thrusting and slashing as she shifted. Swords missed her  again and again as the wielders flailed the empty air and died with her  point in their hearts or throats, and her mocking laughter in their  ears.
 
Neither sex nor condition was  considered by the maddened combatants. The five women of the Xotalancas  were down with their throats cut before Conan and Valeria entered the  fray, and when a man or woman went down under the stamping feet, there  was always a knife ready for the helpless throat, or a sandaled foot  eager to crush the prostrate skull.
 
From  wall to wall, from door to door rolled the waves of combat, spilling  over into adjoining chambers. And presently only Tecuhltli and their  white-skinned allies stood upright in the great throne room. The  survivors stared bleakly and blankly at each other, like survivors after  Judgement Day or the destruction of the world. On legs wide-braced,  hands gripping notched and dripping swords, blood trickling down their  arms, they stared at one another across the mangled corpses of friends  and foes. They had no breath left to shout, but a bestial mad howling  rose from their lips. It was not a human cry of triumph. It was the  howling of a rabid wolf-pack stalking among the bodies of its victims.
 
Conan caught Valeria's arm and turned her about.
 
"You've got a stab in the calf of your leg," he growled.
 
She  glanced down, for the first time aware of a stinging in the muscles of  her leg. Some dying man on the floor had fleshed his dagger with his  last effort.
 
"You look like a butcher yourself," she laughed.
 
He shook a red shower from his hands.
 
"Not mine. Oh, a scratch here and there. Nothing to bother about. But that calf ought to be bandaged."
 
Olmec  came through the litter, looking like a ghoul with his naked massive  shoulders splashed with blood, and his black beard dabbled in crimson.  His eyes were red, like the reflection of flame on black water.
 
"We  have won!" he croaked dazedly. "The feud is ended! The dogs of Xotalanc  lie dead! Oh, for a captive to flay alive! Yet it is good to look upon  their dead faces. Twenty dead dogs! Twenty red nails for the black  column!"
 
"You'd best see to your wounded," grunted Conan, turning away from him. "Here, girl, let me see that leg."
 
"Wait  a minute!" she shook him off impatiently. The fire of fighting still  burned brightly in her soul. "How do we know these are all of them?  These might have come on a raid of their own."
 
"They  would not split the clan on a foray like this," said Olmec, shaking his  head, and regaining some of his ordinary intelligence. Without his  purple robe the man seemed less like a prince than some repellent beast  of prey. "I will stake my head upon it that we have slain them all.  There were less of them than I dreamed, and they must have been  desperate. But how came they in Tecuhltli?"
 
Tascela  came forward, wiping her sword on her naked thigh, and holding in her  other hand an object she had taken from the body of the feathered leader  of the Xotalancas.
 
"The pipes of  madness," she said. "A warrior tells me that Xatmec opened the door to  the Xotalancas and was cut down as they stormed into the guardroom. This  warrior came to the guardroom from the inner hall just in time to see  it happen and to hear the last of a weird strain of music which froze  his very soul. Tolkemec used to talk of these pipes, which the  Xuchotlans swore were hidden somewhere in the catacombs with the bones  of the ancient wizard who used them in his lifetime. Somehow the dogs of  Xotalanc found them and learned their secret."
 
"Somebody ought to go to Xotalanc and see if any remain alive," said Conan. "I'll go if somebody will guide me."
 
Olmec  glanced at the remnants of his people. There were only twenty left  alive, and of these several lay groaning on the floor. Tascela was the  only one of the Tecuhltli who had escaped without a wound. The princess  was untouched, though she had fought as savagely as any.
 
"Who will go with Conan to Xotalanc?" asked Olmec.
 
Techotl limped forward. The wound in his thigh had started bleeding afresh, and he had another gash across his ribs.
 
"I will go!"
 
"No, you won't," vetoed Conan. "And you're not going either, Valeria. In a little while that leg will be getting stiff."
 
"I will go," volunteered a warrior, who was knotting a bandage about a slashed forearm.
 
"Very  well, Yanath. Go with the Cimmerian. And you, too, Topal." Olmec  indicated another man whose injuries were slight. "But first aid to lift  the badly wounded on these couches where we may bandage their hurts."
 
This  was done quickly. As they stooped to pick up a woman who had been  stunned by a warclub, Olmec's beard brushed Topal's ear. Conan thought  the prince muttered something to the warrior, but he could not be sure. A  few moments later he was leading his companions down the hall.
 
Conan  glanced back as he went out the door, at that shambles where the dead  lay on the smoldering floor, blood-stained dark limbs knotted in  attitudes of fierce muscular effort, dark faces frozen in masks of hate,  glassy eyes glaring up at the green fire-jewels which bathed the  ghastly scene in a dusky emerald witchlight. Among the dead the living  moved aimlessly, like people moving in a trance. Conan heard Olmec call a  woman and direct her to bandage Valeria's leg. The pirate followed the  woman into an adjoining chamber, already beginning to limp slightly.
 
Warily  the two Tecuhltli led Conan along the hall beyond the bronze door, and  through chamber after chamber shimmering in the green fire. They saw no  one, heard no sound. After they crossed the Great Hall which bisected  the city from north to south, their caution was increased by the  realization of their nearness to enemy territory. But chambers and halls  lay empty to their wary gaze, and they came at last along a broad dim  hallway and halted before a bronze door similar to the Eagle Door of  Tecuhltli. Gingerly they tried it, and it opened at silently under their  fingers. Awed, they started into the green-lit chambers beyond. For  fifty years no Tecuhltli had entered those halls save as a prisoner  going to a hideous doom. To go to Xotalanc had been the ultimate horror  that could befall a man of the western castle. The terror of it had  stalked through their dreams since earliest childhood. To Yanath and  Topol that bronze door was like the portal of hell.
 
They cringed back, unreasoning horror in their eyes, and Conan pushed past them and strode into Xotalanc.
 
Timidly  they followed him. As each man set foot over the threshold he stared  and glared wildly about him. But only their quick, hurried breathing  disturbed the silence.
 
They had come  into a square guardroom, like that behind the Eagle Door of Tecuhltli,  and, similarly, a hall ran away from it to a broad chamber that was a  counterpart of Olmec's throne room.
 
Conan  glanced down the hall with its rugs and divans and hangings, and stood  listening intently. He heard no noise, and the rooms had an empty feel.  He did not believe there were any Xotalancas left alive in Xuchotl.
 
"Come on," he muttered, and started down the hall.
 
He  had not gone far when he was aware that only Yanath was following him.  He wheeled back to see Topal standing in an attitude of horror, one arm  out as if to fend off some threatening peril, his distended eyes fixed  with hypnotic intensity on something protruding from behind a divan.
 
"What  the devil?" Then Conan saw what Topal was staring at, and he felt a  faint twitching of the skin between his giant shoulders. A monstrous  head protruded from behind the divan, a reptilian head, broad as the  head of a crocodile, with down-curving fangs that projected over the  lower jaw. But there was an unnatural limpness about the thing, and the  hideous eyes were glazed.
 
Conan peered  behind the couch. It was a great serpent which lay there limp in death,  but such a serpent as he had never seen in his wanderings. The reek and  chill of the deep black earth were about it, and its color was an  indeterminable hue which changed with each new angle from which he  surveyed it. A great wound in the neck showed what had caused its death.
 
"It is the Crawler!" whispered Yanath.
 
"It's  the thing I slashed on the stair," grunted Conan. "After it trailed us  to the Eagle Door, it dragged itself here to die. How could the  Xotalancas control such a brute?"
 
The Tecuhltli shivered and shook their heads.
 
"They brought it up from the black tunnels below the catacombs. They discovered secrets unknown to Tecuhltli."
 
"Well, it's dead, and if they'd had any more of them, they'd have brought them along when they came to Tecuhltli. Come on."
 
They crowded close at his heels as he strode down the hall and thrust on the silver-worked door at the other end.
 
"If  we don't find anybody on this floor," he said, "we'll descend into the  lower floors. We'll explore Xotalanc from the roof to the catacombs. If  Xotalanc is like Tecuhltli, all the rooms and halls in this tier will be  lighted--what the devil!"
 
They had come  into the broad throne chamber, so similar to that one in Tecuhltli.  There were the same jade dais and ivory seat, the same divans, rugs and  hangings on the walls. No black, red-scarred column stood behind the  throne-dais, but evidences of the grim feud were not lacking.
 
Ranged  along the wall behind the dais were rows of glass-covered shelves. And  on those shelves hundreds of human heads, perfectly preserved, stared at  the startled watchers with emotionless eyes, as they had stared for  only the gods knew how many months and years.
 
Topal  muttered a curse, but Yanath stood silent, the mad light growing in his  wide eyes. Conan frowned, knowing that Tlazitlan sanity was hung on a  hair-trigger.
 
Suddenly Yanath pointed to the ghastly relics with a twitching finger.
 
"There  is my brother's head!" he murmured. "And there is my father's younger  brother! And there beyond them is my sister's eldest son!"
 
Suddenly  he began to weep, dry-eyed, with harsh, loud sobs that shook his frame.  He did not take his eyes from the heads. His sobs grew shriller,  changed to frightful, high-pitched laughter, and that in turn became an  unbearable screaming. Yanath was stark mad.
 
Conan  laid a hand on his shoulder, and as if the touch had released all the  frenzy in his soul, Yanath screamed and whirled, striking at the  Cimmerian with his sword. Conan parried the blow, and Topal tried to  catch Yanath's arm. But the madman avoided him and with froth flying  from his lips, he drove his sword deep into Topal's body. Topal sank  down with a groan, and Yanath whirled for an instant like a crazy  dervish; then he ran at the shelves and began hacking at the glass with  his sword, screeching blasphemously.
 
Conan  sprang at him from behind, trying to catch him unaware and disarm him,  but the madman wheeled and lunged at him, screaming like a lost soul.  Realizing that the warrior was hopelessly insane, the Cimmerian  side-stepped, and as the maniac went past, he swung a cut that severed  the shoulder-bone and breast, and dropped the man dead beside his dying  victim.
 
Conan bent over Topal, seeing  that the man was at his last gasp. It was useless to seek to stanch the  blood gushing from the horrible wound.
 
"You're done for, Topal," grunted Conan. "Any word you want to send to your people?"
 
"Bend  closer," gasped Topal, and Conan complied--and an instant later caught  the man's wrist as Topal struck at his breast with a dagger.
 
"Crom!" swore Conan. "Are you mad, too?"
 
"Olmec  ordered it!" gasped the dying man. "I know not why. As we lifted the  wounded upon the couches he whispered to me, bidding me to slay you as  we returned to Tecuhltli--" And with the name of his clan on his lips,  Topal died.
 
Conan scowled down at him in  puzzlement. This whole affair had an aspect of lunacy. Was Olmec mad,  too? Were all the Tecuhltli madder than he had realized? With a shrug of  his shoulders he strode down the hall and out of the bronze door,  leaving the dead Tecuhltli lying before the staring dead eyes of their  kinsmen's heads.
 
Conan needed no guide  back through the labyrinth they had traversed. His primitive instinct of  direction led him unerringly along the route they had come. He  traversed it as warily as he had before, his sword in his hand, and his  eyes fiercely searching each shadowed nook and corner; for it was his  former allies he feared now, not the ghosts of the slain Xotalancas.
 
He  had crossed the Great Hall and entered the chambers beyond when he  heard something moving ahead of him--something which gasped and panted,  and moved with a strange, floundering, scrambling noise. A moment later  Conan saw a man crawling over the flaming floor toward him--a man whose  progress left a broad bloody smear on the smoldering surface. It was  Techotl and his eyes were already glazing; from a deep gash in his  breast blood gushed steadily between the fingers of his clutching hand.  With the other he clawed and hitched himself along.
 
"Conan," he cried chokingly, "Conan! Olmec has taken the yellow-haired woman!"
 
"So  that's why he told Topal to kill me!" murmured Conan, dropping to his  knee beside the man, who his experienced eye told him was dying. "Olmec  isn't as mad as I thought."
 
Techotl's  groping fingers plucked at Conan's arm. In the cold, loveless, and  altogether hideous life of the Tecuhltli, his admiration and affection  for the invaders from the outer world formed a warm, human oasis,  constituted a tie that connected him with a more natural humanity that  was totally lacking in his fellows, whose only emotions were hate, lust,  and the urge of sadistic cruelty.
 
"I  sought to oppose him," gurgled Techotl, blood bubbling frothily to his  lips. "But he struck me down. He thought he had slain me, but I crawled  away. Ah, Set, how far I have crawled in my own blood! Beware, Conan!  Olmec may have set an ambush for your return! Slay Olmec! He is a beast.  Take Valeria and flee! Fear not to traverse the forest. Olmec and  Tascela lied about the dragons. They slew each other years ago, all save  the strongest. For a dozen years there has been only one dragon. If you  have slain him, there is naught in the forest to harm you. He was the  god Olmec worshipped; and Olmec fed human sacrifices to him, the very  old and the very young, bound and hurled from the wall. Hasten! Olmec  has taken Valeria to the Chamber of the--"
 
His head slumped down and he was dead before it came to rest on the floor.
 
Conan  sprang up, his eyes like live coals. So that was Olmec's game, having  first used the strangers to destroy his foes! He should have known that  something of the sort would be going on in that black-bearded  degenerate's mind.
 
The Cimmerian started  toward Tecuhltli with reckless speed. Rapidly he reckoned the numbers  of his former allies. Only twenty-one, counting Olmec, had survived that  fiendish battle in the throne room. Three had died since, which left  seventeen enemies with which to reckon. In his rage Conan felt capable  of accounting for the whole clan single-handed.
 
But  the innate craft of the wilderness rose to guide his berserk rage. He  remembered Techotl's warning of an ambush. It was quite probable that  the prince would make such provisions, on the chance that Topal might  have failed to carry out his order. Olmec would be expecting him to  return by the same route he had followed in going to Xotalanc.
 
Conan  glanced up at a skylight under which he was passing and caught the  blurred glimmer of stars. They had not yet begun to pale for dawn. The  events of the night had been crowded into a comparatively short space of  time.
 
He turned aside from his direct  course and descended a winding staircase to the floor below. He did not  know where the door was to be found that let into the castle on that  level, but he knew he could find it. How he was to force the locks he  did not know; he believed that the doors of Tecuhltli would all be  locked and bolted, if for no other reason than the habits of half a  century. But there was nothing else but to attempt it.
 
Sword  in hand, he hurried noiselessly on through a maze of green-lit or  shadowy rooms and halls. He knew he must be near Tecuhltli, when a sound  brought him up short. He recognized it for what it was--a human being  trying to cry out through a stifling gag. It came from somewhere ahead  of him, and to the left. In those deathly-still chambers a small sound  carried a long way.
 
Conan turned aside  and went seeking after the sound, which continued to be repeated.  Presently he was glaring through a doorway upon a weird scene. In the  room into which he was looking a low rack-like frame of iron lay on the  floor, and a giant figure was bound prostrate upon it. His head rested  on a bed of iron spikes, which were already crimson-pointed with blood  where they had pierced his scalp. A peculiar harness-like contrivance  was fastened about his head, though in such a manner that the leather  band did not protect his scalp from the spikes. This harness was  connected by a slender chain to the mechanism that upheld a huge iron  ball which was suspended above the captive's hairy breast. As long as  the man could force himself to remain motionless the iron ball hung in  its place. But when the pain of the iron points caused him to lift his  head, the ball lurched downward a few inches. Presently his aching neck  muscles would no longer support his head in its unnatural position and  it would fall back on the spikes again. It was obvious that eventually  the ball would crush him to a pulp, slowly and inexorably. The victim  was gagged, and above the gag his great black ox-eyes rolled wildly  toward the man in the doorway, who stood in silent amazement. The man on  the rack was Olmec, prince of Tecuhltli.
 
== The Eyes of Tascela ==
 
"Why  did you bring me into this chamber to bandage my leg?" demanded  Valeria. "Couldn't you have done it just as well in the throne room?"
 
She  sat on a couch with her wounded leg extended upon it, and the Tecuhltli  woman had just bound it with silk bandages. Valeria's red-stained sword  lay on the couch beside her.
 
She  frowned as she spoke. The woman had done her task silently and  efficiently, but Valeria liked neither the lingering, caressing touch of  her slim fingers nor the expression in her eyes.
 
"They  have taken the rest of the wounded into the other chambers," answered  the woman in the soft speech of the Tecuhltli women, which somehow did  not suggest either softness or gentleness in the speakers. A little  while before, Valeria had seen this same woman stab a Xotalanca woman  through the breast and stamp the eyeballs out of a wounded Xotalanca  man.
 
"They will be carrying the corpses  of the dead down into the catacombs," she added, "lest the ghosts escape  into the chambers and dwell there."
 
"Do you believe in ghosts?" asked Valeria.
 
"I  know the ghost of Tolkemec dwells in the catacombs," she answered with a  shiver. "Once I saw it, as I crouched in a crypt among the bones of a  dead queen. It passed by in the form of an ancient man with flowing  white beard and locks, and luminous eyes that blazed in the darkness. It  was Tolkemec; I saw him living when I was a child and he was being  tortured."
 
Her voice sank to a fearful  whisper: "Olmec laughs, but I know Tolkemec's ghost dwells in the  catacombs! They say it is rats which gnaw the flesh from the bones of  the newly dead--but ghosts eat flesh. Who knows but that--"
 
She  glanced up quickly as a shadow fell across the couch. Valeria looked up  to see Olmec gazing down at her. The prince had cleansed his hands,  torso, and beard of the blood that had splashed them; but he had not  donned his robe, and his great dark-skinned hairless body and limbs  renewed the impression of strength bestial in its nature. His deep black  eyes burned with a more elemental light, and there was the suggestion  of a twitching in the fingers that tugged at his thick blue-black beard.
 
He  stared fixedly at the woman, and she rose and glided from the chamber.  As she passed through the door she cast a look over her shoulder at  Valeria, a glance full of cynical derision and obscene mockery.
 
"She has done a clumsy job," criticized the prince, coming to the divan and bending over the bandage. "Let me see--"
 
With  a quickness amazing in one of his bulk he snatched her sword and threw  it across the chamber. His next move was to catch her in his giant arms.
 
Quick  and unexpected as the move was, she almost matched it; for even as he  grabbed her, her dirk was in her hand and she stabbed murderously at his  throat. More by luck than skill he caught her wrist, and then began a  savage wrestling-match. She fought him with fists, feet, knees, teeth,  and nails, with all the strength of her magnificent body and all the  knowledge of hand-to-hand fighting she had acquired in her years of  roving and fighting on sea and land. It availed her nothing against his  brute strength. She lost her dirk in the first moment of contact, and  thereafter found herself powerless to inflict any appreciable pain on  her giant attacker.
 
The blaze in his  weird black eyes did not alter, and their expression filled her with  fury, fanned by the sardonic smile that seemed carved upon his bearded  lips. Those eyes and that smile contained all the cruel cynicism that  seethes below the surface of a sophisticated and degenerate race, and  for the first time in her life Valeria experienced fear of a man. It was  like struggling against some huge elemental force; his iron arms  thwarted her efforts with an ease that sent panic racing through her  limbs. He seemed impervious to any pain she could inflict. Only once,  when she sank her white teeth savagely into his wrist so that the blood  started, did he react. And that was to buffet her brutally upon the side  of the head with his open hand, so that stars flashed before her eyes  and her head rolled on her shoulders.
 
Her  shirt had been torn open in the struggle, and with cynical cruelty he  rasped his thick beard across her bare breasts, bringing the blood to  suffuse the fair skin, and fetching a cry of pain and outraged fury from  her. Her convulsive resistance was useless; she was crushed down on a  couch, disarmed and panting, her eyes blazing up at him like the eyes of  a trapped tigress.
 
A moment later he  was hurrying from the chamber, carrying her in his arms. She made no  resistance, but the smoldering of her eyes showed that she was  unconquered in spirit, at least. She had not cried out. She knew that  Conan was not within call, and it did not occur to her that any in  Tecuhltli would oppose their prince. But she noticed that Olmec went  stealthily, with his head on one side as if listening for sounds of  pursuit, and he did not return to the throne chamber. He carried her  through a door that stood opposite that through which he had entered,  crossed another room and began stealing down a hall. As she became  convinced that he feared some opposition to the abduction, she threw  back her head and screamed at the top of her lusty voice. 
 
She was rewarded by a slap that half-stunned her, and Olmec quickened his pace to a shambling run.
 
But  her cry had been echoed and, twisting her head about, Valeria, through  the tears and stars that partly blinded her, saw Techotl limping after  them.
 
Olmec turned with a snarl,  shifting the woman to an uncomfortable and certainly undignified  position under one huge arm, where he held her writhing and kicking  vainly, like a child.
 
"Olmec!" protested  Techotl. "You cannot be such a dog as to do this thing! She is Conan's  woman! She helped us slay the Xotalancas, and--"
 
Without  a word Olmec balled his free hand into a huge fist and stretched the  wounded warrior senseless at his feet. Stooping, and hindered not at all  by the struggles and imprecations of his captive, he drew Techotl's  sword from its sheath and stabbed the warrior in the breast. Then  casting aside the weapon, he fled on along the corridor. He did not see a  woman's dark face peer cautiously after him from behind a hanging. It  vanished, and presently Techotl groaned and stirred, rose dazedly and  staggered drunkenly away, calling Conan's name.
 
Olmec  hurried on down the corridor, and descended a winding ivory staircase.  He crossed several corridors and halted at last in a broad chamber whose  doors were veiled with heavy tapestries, with one exception--a heavy  bronze door similar to the Door of the Eagle on the upper floor.
 
He  was moved to rumble, pointing to it: "That is one of the outer doors of  Tecuhltli. For the first time in fifty years it is unguarded. We need  not guard it now, for Xotalanc is no more."
 
"Thanks  to Conan and me, you bloody rogue!" sneered Valeria, trembling with  fury and the shame of physical coercion. "You treacherous dog! Conan  will cut your throat for this!"
 
Olmec  did not bother to voice his belief that Conan's own gullet had already  been severed according to his whispered command. He was too utterly  cynical to be at all interested in her thoughts or opinions. His  flame-lit eyes devoured her, dwelling burningly on the generous expanses  of clear white flesh exposed where her shirt and breeches had been torn  in the struggle.
 
"Forget Conan," he  said thickly. "Olmec is lord of Xuchotl. Xotalanc is no more. There will  be no more fighting. We shall spend our lives in drinking and  love-making. First let us drink!"
 
He  seated himself on an ivory table and pulled her down on his knees, like a  dark-skinned satyr with a white nymph in his arms. Ignoring her  un-nymphlike profanity, he held her helpless with one great arm about  her waist while the other reached across the table and secured a vessel  of wine.
 
"Drink!" he commanded, forcing it to her lips, as she writhed her head away.
 
The liquor slopped over, stinging her lips, splashing down on her naked breasts.
 
"Your guest does not like your wine, Olmec," spoke a cool, sardonic voice.
 
Olmec  stiffened; fear grew in his flaming eyes. Slowly he swung his great  head about and stared at Tascela, who paused negligently in the  curtained doorway, one hand on her smooth hip. 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.
 
"I feared she would not like  your wine, Olmec," purred the princess, "so I brought some of mine, some  I brought with me long ago from the shores of Lake Zuad--do you  understand, Olmec?"
 
Beads of sweat stood  out suddenly on Olmec's brow. His muscles relaxed, and Valeria broke  away and put the table between them. But though reason told her to dart  from the room, some fascination she could not understand held her rigid,  watching the scene.
 
Tascela came toward  the seated prince with a swaying, undulating walk that was mockery in  itself. Her voice was soft, slurringly caressing, but her eyes gleamed.  Her slim fingers stroked his beard lightly.
 
"You  are selfish, Olmec," she crooned, smiling. "You would keep our handsome  guest to yourself, though you knew I wished to entertain her. You are  much at fault, Olmec!"
 
The mask dropped  for an instant; he eyes flashed, her face was contorted and with an  appalling show of strength her hand locked convulsively in his beard and  tore out a great handful. This evidence of unnatural strength was no  more terrifying than the momentary baring of the hellish fury that raged  under her bland exterior.
 
Olmec lurched up with a roar, and stood swaying like a bear, his mighty hands clenching and unclenching.
 
"Slut!"  His booming voice filled the room. "Witch! She-devil! Tecuhltli should  have slain you fifty years ago! Begone! I have endured too much from  you! This white-skinned wench is mine! Get hence before I slay you!"
 
The  princess laughed and dashed the blood-stained strands into his face.  Her laughter was less merciful than the ring of flint on steel.
 
"Once  you spoke otherwise, Olmec," she taunted. "Once, in your youth, you  spoke words of love. Aye, you were my lover once, years ago, and because  you loved me, you slept in my arms beneath the enchanted lotus--and  thereby put into my hands the chains that enslaved you. You know you  cannot withstand me. You know I have but to gaze into your eyes, with  the mystic power a priest of Stygia taught me, long ago, and you are  powerless. You remember the night beneath the black lotus that waved  above us, stirred by no worldly breeze; you scent again the unearthly  perfumes that stole and rose like a cloud about you to enslave you. You  cannot fight against me. You are my slave as you were that night--as you  shall be so long as you live, Olmec of Xuchotl!"
 
Her  voice had sunk to a murmur like the rippling of a stream running  through starlit darkness. She leaned close to the prince and spread her  long tapering fingers upon his giant breast. His eyes glared, his great  hands fell limply to his sides.
 
With a smile of cruel malice, Tascela lifted the vessel and placed it to his lips.
 
"Drink!"
 
Mechanically  the prince obeyed. And instantly the glaze passed from his eyes and  they were flooded with fury, comprehension and an awful fear. His mouth  gaped, but no sound issued. For an instant he reeled on buckling knees,  and then fell in a sodden heap on the floor.
 
His  fall jolted Valeria out of her paralysis. She turned and sprang toward  the door, but with a movement that would have shamed a leaping panther,  Tascela was before her. Valeria struck at her with her clenched fist,  and all the power of her supple body behind the blow. It would have  stretched a man senseless on the floor. But with a lithe twist of her  torso, Tascela avoided the blow and caught the pirate's wrist. The next  instant Valeria's left hand was imprisoned and, holding her wrists  together with one hand, Tascela calmly bound them with a cord she drew  from her girdle. 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.
 
Casually  stepping over Olmec, Tascela walked to the bronze door and shot the bolt  and threw it open, revealing a hallway without.
 
"Opening  upon this hall," she remarked, speaking to her feminine captive for the  first time, "there is a chamber which in old times was used as a  torture room. When we retired into Tecuhltli, we brought most of the  apparatus with us, but there was one piece too heavy to move. It is  still in working order. I think it will be quite convenient now."
 
An understanding flame of terror rose in Olmec's eyes. Tascela strode back to him, bent and gripped him by the hair.
 
"He  is only paralyzed temporarily," she remarked conversationally. "He can  hear, think, and feel--aye, he can feel very well indeed!"
 
With  which sinister observation she started toward the door, dragging the  giant bulk with an ease that made the pirate's eyes dilate. She passed  into the hall and moved down it without hesitation, presently  disappearing with her captive into a chamber that opened into it, and  whence shortly thereafter issued the clank of iron.
 
Valeria  swore softly and tugged vainly, with her legs braced against the chair.  The cords that confined her were apparently unbreakable.
 
Tascela  presently returned alone; behind her a muffled groaning issued from the  chamber. She closed the door but did not bolt it. Tascela was beyond  the grip of habit, as she was beyond the touch of other human instincts  and emotions.
 
Valeria sat dumbly, watching the woman in whose slim hands, the pirate realized, her destiny now rested.
 
Tascela  grasped her yellow locks and forced back her head, looking impersonably  down into her face. But the glitter in her dark eyes was not  impersonable.
 
"I have chosen you for a  great honor," she said. "You shall restore the youth of Tascela. Oh, you  stare at that! My appearance is that of youth, but through my veins  creeps the sluggish chill of approaching age, as I have felt it a  thousand times before. I am old, so old I do not remember my childhood.  But I was a girl once, and a priest of Stygia loved me, and gave me the  secret of immortality and youth everlasting. He died, then--some said by  poison. But I dwelt in my palace by the shores of Lake Zuad and the  passing years touched me not. So at last a king of Stygia desired me,  and my people rebelled and brought me to this land. Olmec called me a  princess. I am not of royal blood. I am greater than a princess. I am  Tascela, whose youth your own glorious youth shall restore."
 
Valeria's tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. She sensed here a mystery darker than the degeneracy she had anticipated.
 
The  taller woman unbound the Aquilonian's wrists and pulled her to her  feet. It was not fear of the dominant strength that lurked in the  princess' limbs that made Valeria a helpless, quivering captive in her  hands. It was the burning, hypnotic, terrible eyes of Tascela.
 
 
 
== He Comes from the Dark ==
 
"Well, I'm a Kushite!"
 
Conan glared down at the man on the iron rack.
 
"What the devil are you doing on that thing?"
 
Incoherent  sounds issued from behind the gag and Conan bent and tore it away,  evoking a bellow of fear from the captive; for his action caused the  iron ball to lurch down until it nearly touched the broad breast.
 
"Be careful, for Set's sake!" begged Olmec.
 
"What  for?" demanded Conan. "Do you think I care what happens to you? I only  wish I had time to stay here and watch that chunk of iron grind your  guts out. But I'm in a hurry. Where's Valeria?"
 
"Loose me!" urged Olmec. "I will tell you all!"
 
"Tell me first."
 
"Never!" The prince's heavy jaws set stubbornly.
 
"All  right." Conan seated himself on a near-by bench. "I'll find her myself,  after you've been reduced to a jelly. I believe I can speed up that  process by twisting my sword-point around in your ear," he added,  extending the weapon experimentally.
 
"Wait!"  Words came in a rush from the captive's ashy lips. "Tascela took her  from me. I've never been anything but a puppet in Tascela's hands."
 
"Tascela?" snorted Conan, and spat. "Why, the filthy--"
 
"No,  no!" panted Olmec. "It's worse than you think. Tascela is  old--centuries old. She renews her life and her youth by the sacrifice  of beautiful young women. That's one thing that has reduced the clan to  its present state. She will draw the essence of Valeria's life into her  own body, and bloom with fresh vigor and beauty."
 
"Are the doors locked?" asked Conan, thumbing his sword edge.
 
"Aye!  But I know a way to get into Tecuhltli. Only Tascela and I know, and  she thinks me helpless and you slain. Free me and I swear I will help  you rescue Valeria. Without my help you cannot win into Tecuhltli; for  even if you tortured me into revealing the secret, you couldn't work it.  Let me go, and we will steal on Tascela and kill her before she can  work magic--before she can fix her eyes on us. A knife thrown from  behind will do the work. I should have killed her thus long ago, but I  feared that without her to aid us the Xotalancas would overcome us. She  needed my help, too; that's the only reason she let me live this long.  Now neither needs the other, and one must die. I swear that when we have  slain the witch, you and Valeria shall go free without harm. My people  will obey me when Tascela is dead."
 
Conan  stooped and cut the ropes that held the prince, and Olmec slid  cautiously from under the great ball and rose, shaking his head like a  bull and muttering imprecations as he fingered his lacerated scalp.  Standing shoulder to shoulder the two men presented a formidable picture  of primitive power. Olmec was as tall as Conan, and heavier; but there  was something repellent about the Tlazitlan, something abysmal and  monstrous that contrasted unfavorably with the clean-cut, compact  hardness of the Cimmerian. Conan had discarded the remnants of his  tattered, blood-soaked shirt, and stood with his remarkable muscular  development impressively revealed. 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.
 
"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."
 
Olmec turned and stalked on ahead of him, one hand twitching slightly as it plucked at his matted beard.
 
Olmec  did not lead Conan back to the bronze door, which the prince naturally  supposed Tascela had locked, but to a certain chamber on the border of  Tecuhltli.
 
"This secret has been guarded  for half a century," he said. "Not even our own clan knew of it, and  the Xotalancas never learned. Tecuhltli himself built this secret  entrance, afterwards slaying the slaves who did the work for he feared  that he might find himself locked out of his own kingdom some day  because of the spite of Tascela, whose passion for him soon changed to  hate. But she discovered the secret, and barred the hidden door against  him one day as he fled back from an unsuccessful raid, and the  Xotalancas took him and flayed him. But once, spying upon her, I saw her  enter Tecuhltli by this route, and so learned the secret."
 
He pressed upon a gold ornament in the wall, and a panel swung inward, disclosing an ivory stair leading upward.
 
"This  stair is built within the wall," said Olmec. "It leads up to a tower  upon the roof, and thence other stairs wind down to the various  chambers. Hasten!"
 
"After you, comrade!"  retorted Conan satirically, swaying his broadsword as he spoke, and  Olmec shrugged his shoulders and stepped onto the staircase. Conan  instantly followed him, and the door shut behind them. Far above a  cluster of fire-jewels made the staircase a well of dusky dragon-light.
 
They  mounted until Conan estimated that they were above the level of the  fourth floor, and then came out into a cylindrical tower, in the domed  roof of which was set the bunch of fire-jewels that lighted the stair.  Through gold-barred windows, set with unbreakable crystal panes, the  first windows he had seen in Xuchotl, Conan got a glimpse of high  ridges, domes and more towers, looming darkly against the stars. He was  looking across the roofs of Xuchotl.
 
Olmec  did not look through the windows. He hurried down one of the several  stairs that wound down from the tower, and when they had descended a few  feet, this stair changed into a narrow corridor that wound tortuously  on for some distance. It ceased at a steep flight of steps leading  downward. There Olmec paused.
 
Up from  below, muffled, but unmistakable, welled a woman's scream, edged with  fright, fury, and shame. And Conan recognized Valeria's voice.
 
In  the swift rage roused by that cry, and the amazement of wondering what  peril could wring such a shriek from Valeria's reckless lips, Conan  forgot Olmec. He pushed past the prince and started down the stair.  Awakening instinct brought him about again, just as Olmec strruck with  his great mallet-like fist. The blow, fierce and silent, was aimed at  the base of Conan's brain. But the Cimmerian wheeled in time to receive  the buffet on the side of his neck instead. The impact would have  snapped the vertebrae of a lesser man. As it was, Conan swayed backward,  but even as he reeled he dropped his sword, useless at such close  quarters, and grasped Olmec's extended arm, dragging the prince with him  as he fell. Headlong they went down the steps together, in a revolving  whirl of limbs and heads and bodies. And as they went, Conan's iron  fingers found and locked in Olmec's bull-throat.
 
The  barbarian's neck and shoulder felt numb from the sledge-like impact of  Olmec's huge fist, which had carried all the strength of the massive  forearm, thick triceps and great shoulder. But this did not affect his  ferocity to any appreciable extent. Like a bulldog he hung on grimly,  rolled, until at last they struck an ivory panel-door at the bottom with  such and impact that they splintered it its full length and crashed  through its ruins. But Olmec was already dead, for those iron fingers  had crushed out his life and broken his neck as they fell.
 
Conan rose, shaking the splinters from his great shoulders, blinking blood and dust out of his eyes.
 
He  was in the great throne room. There were fifteen people in that room  besides himself. The first person he saw was Valeria. A curious black  altar stood before the throne-dais. Ranged about it, seven black candles  in golden candlesticks sent up oozing spirals of thick green smoke,  disturbingly scented. These spirals united in a cloud near the ceiling,  forming a smoky arch above the altar. On that altar lay Valeria, stark  naked, her white flesh gleaming in shocking contrast to the glistening  ebon stone. She was not bound. She lay at full length, her arms  stretched out above her head to their fullest extent. At the head of the  altar knelt a young man, holding her wrists firmly. A young woman knelt  at the other end of the altar, grasping her ankles. Between them she  could neither rise nor move.
 
Eleven men and women of Tecuhltli knelt dumbly in a semicircle, watching the scene with hot, lustful eyes.
 
On  the ivory throne-seat Tascela lolled. Bronze bowls of incense rolled  their spirals about her; the wisps of smoke curled about her naked limbs  like caressing fingers. She could not sit still; she squirmed and  shifted about with sensuous abandon, as if finding pleasure in the  contact of the smooth ivory with her sleek flesh.
 
The  crash of the door as it broke beneath the impact of the hurtling bodies  caused no change in the scene. The kneeling men and women merely  glanced incuriously at the corpse of their prince and at the man who  rose from the ruins of the door, then swung their eyes greedily back to  the writhing white shape on the black altar. Tascela looked insolently  at him, and sprawled back on her seat, laughing mockingly.
 
"Slut!"  Conan saw red. His hands clenched into iron hammers as he started for  her. With his first step something clanged loudly and steel bit savagely  into his leg. He stumbled and almost fell, checked in his headlong  stride. The jaws of an iron trap had closed on his leg, with teeth that  sank deep and held. Only the ridged muscles of his calf saved the bone  from being splintered. The accursed thing had sprung out of the  smoldering floor without warning. He saw the slots now, in the floor  where the jaws had lain, perfectly camouflaged.
 
"Fool!"  laughed Tascela. "Did you think I would not guard against your possible  return? Every door in this chamber is guarded by such traps. Stand  there and watch now, while I fulfill the destiny of your handsome  friend! Then I will decide your own."
 
Conan's  hand instinctively sought his belt, only to encounter an empty  scabbard. His sword was on the stair behind him. His poniard was lying  back in the forest, where the dragon had torn it from his jaw. The steel  teeth in his leg were like burning coals, but the pain was not as  savage as the fury that seethed in his soul. He was trapped, like a  wolf. If he had had his sword he would have hewn off his leg and crawled  across the floor to slay Tascela. Valeria's eyes rolled toward him with  mute appeal, and his own helplessness sent red waves of madness surging  through his brain.
 
Dropping on the knee  of his free leg, he strove to get his fingers between the jaws of the  trap, to tear them apart by sheer strength. Blood started from beneath  his fingernails, but the jaws fitted close about his leg in a circle  whose segments jointed perfectly, contracted until there was no space  between his mangled flesh and the fanged iron. The site of Valeria's  naked body added flame to the fire of his rage.
 
Tascela  ignored him. Rising languidly from her seat she swept the ranks of her  subjects with a searching glance, and asked: "Where are Xamec, Zlanath  and Tachic?"
 
"They did not return from  the catacombs, princess," answered a man. "Like the rest of us, they  bore bodies of the slain into the crypts, but they have not returned.  Perhaps the ghost of Tolkemec took them."
 
"Be silent, fool!" she ordered harshly. "The ghost is a myth."
 
She  came down from her dais, playing with a thin gold-hilted dagger. Her  eyes burned like nothing on the hither side of hell. She paused beside  the altar and spoke in the tense stillness.
 
"Your  life shall make me young, white woman!" she said. "I shall lean upon  your bosom and place my lips over yours, and slowly--ah, slowly!--sink  this blade through your heart, so that your life, fleeing your  stiffening body, shall enter mine, making me bloom again with youth and  with life everlasting!"
 
Slowly, like a  serpent arching toward its victim, she bent down through the writhing  smoke, closer and closer over the now motionless woman who stared up  into her glowing dark eyes--eyes that grew larger and deeper, blazing  like black moons in the swirling smoke.
 
The  kneeling people gripped their hands and held their breath, tense for  the bloody climax, and the only sound was Conan's fierce panting as he  strove to tear his leg from the trap.
 
All  eyes were glued on the altar and the white figure there; the crash of a  thunderbolt could hardly have broken the spell, yet it was only a low  cry that shattered the fixity of the scene and bought all whirling  about--a low cry, yet one to make the hair stand up stiffly on the  scalp. They looked, and they saw.
 
Framed  in the door to the left of the dais stood a nightmare figure. It was a  man, with a tangle of white hair and a matted white beard that fell over  his breast. Rags only partly covered his gaunt frame, revealing  half-naked limbs strangely unnatural in appearance. The skin was not  like that of a normal human. There was a suggestion of scaliness about  it, as if the owner had dwelt long under conditions almost antithetical  to those conditions under which human life ordinarily thrives. And there  was nothing at all human about the eyes that blazed from the tangle of  white hair. They were great gleaming disks that started unwinkingly,  luminous, whitish, and without a hint of normal emotion or sanity. The  mouth gaped, but no coherent words issued--only a high-pitched  tittering.
 
"Tolkemec!" whispered  Tascela, livid, while the others crouched in speechless horror. "No  myth, then, no ghost! Set! You have dwelt for twelve years in darkness!  Twelve years among the bones of the dead! What grisly food did you find?  What mad travesty of life did you live, in the stark blackness of that  eternal night? I see now why Xamec and Zlanath and Tachic did not return  from the catacombs--and never will return. But why have you waited so  long to strike? Were you seeking something, in the pits? Some secret  weapon you knew was hidden there? And have you found it at last?"
 
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. Only that thin string had kept him from racing and  prancing off for ever into the black corridors and realms of the  subterranean world he had discovered, long ago.
 
"You  sought something hidden!" whispered Tascela, cringing back. "And you  have found it! You remember the feud! After all these years of  blackness, you remember!"
 
For in the  lean hand of Tolkemec now waved a curious jade-hued wand, on the end of  which glowed a knob of crimson shaped like a pomegranate. She sprang  aside as he thrust it out like a spear, and a beam of crimson fire  lanced from the pomegranate. It missed Tascela, but the woman holding  Valeria's ankles was in the way. It smote between her shoulders. There  was a sharp crackling sound and the ray of fire flashed from her bosom  and struck the black altar, with a snapping of blue sparks. The woman  toppled sidewise, shriveling and withering like a mummy even as she  fell.
 
Valeria rolled from the altar on  the other side, and started for the opposite wall on all fours. For hell  had burst loose in the throne room of dead Olmec.
 
The  man who had held Valeria's hands was the next to die. He turned to run,  but before he had taken half a dozen steps, Tolkemec, with an agility  appalling in such a frame, bounded around to a position that placed the  man between him and the altar. Again the red fire-beam flashed and the  Tecuhltli rolled lifeless to the floor, as the beam completed its course  with a burst of blue sparks against the altar.
 
Then  began the slaughter. Screaming insanely the people rushed about the  chamber, caroming from one another, stumbling and falling. And among  them Tolkemec capered and pranced, dealing death. They could not escape  by the doors; for apparently the metal of the portals served like the  metal veined stone altar to complete the circuit for whatever hellish  power flashed like thunderbolts from the witch-wand the ancient waved in  his hand. When he caught a man or a woman between him and a door or the  altar, that one died instantly. He chose no special victim. He took  them as they came, with his rags flapping about his wildly gyrating  limbs, and the gusty echoes of his tittering sweeping the room above the  screams. And bodies fell like falling leaves about the altar and at the  doors. One warrior in desperation rushed at him, lifting a dagger, only  to fall before he could strike. But the rest were like crazed cattle,  with no thought for resistance, and no chance of escape.
 
The  last Tecuhltli except Tascela had fallen when the princess reached the  Cimmerian and the girl who had taken refuge beside him. Tascela bent and  touched the floor, pressing a design upon it. Instantly the iron jaws  released the bleeding limb and sank back into the floor.
 
"Slay him if you can!" she panted, and pressed a heavy knife into his hand. "I have no magic to withstand him!"
 
With  a grunt he sprang before the woman, not heeding his lacerated leg in  the heat of the fighting lust. Tolkemec was coming toward him, his weird  eyes ablaze, but he hesitated at the gleam of the knife in Conan's  hand. Then began a grim game, as Tolkemec sought to circle about Conan  and get the barbarian between him and the altar or a metal door, while  Conan sought to avoid this and drive home his knife. The women watched  tensely, holding their breath.
 
There was  no sound except the rustle and scrape of quick-shifting feet. Tolkemec  pranced and capered no more. He realized that grimmer game confronted  him than the people who had died screaming and fleeing. In the elemental  blaze of the barbarian's eyes he read an intent deadly as his own. Back  and forth they weaved, and when one moved the other moved as if  invisible threads bound them together. But all the time Conan was  getting closer and closer to his enemy. Already the coiled muscles of  his thighs were beginning to flex for a spring, when Valeria cried out.  For a fleeting instant a bronze door was in line with Conan's moving  body. The red line leaped, searing Conan's flank as he twisted aside,  and even as he shifted he hurled the knife. Old Tolkemec went down,  truly slain at last, the hilt vibrating on his breast.
 
Tascela  sprang--not toward Conan, but toward the wand where it shimmered like a  live thing on the floor. But as she leaped, so did Valeria, with a  dagger snatched from a dead man; and the blade, driven with all the  power of the pirate's muscles, impaled the princess of Tecuhltli so that  the point stood out between her breasts. Tascela screamed once and fell  dead, and Valeria spurned the body with her heel as it fell.
 
"I had to do that much, for my own self-respect!" panted Valeria, facing Conan across the limp corpse.
 
"Well, this cleans up the feud," he grunted. "It's been a hell of a night! Where did these people keep their food? I'm hungry."
 
"You  need a bandage on that leg." Valeria ripped a length of silk from a  hanging and knotted it about her waist, then tore off some smaller  strips which she bound efficiently about the barbarian's lacerated limb.
 
"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!"
| width="10px" style="text-align: center;" |
|}
|style="vertical-align:top;"|
{| border="0" width="100%" height="300px" class="simple" style="margin: 0em; border: 1px solid #6495ED;"
| bgcolor="#6495ED" width="1px" | <br>
| width="10px" style="text-align: center;" |
| width="200px" height="300px" style="vertical-align:top;"|
=«Гвозди с красными шляпками»=
| width="10px" style="text-align: center;" |
|}
|}
{{Шаблон:Texts}}
{{Шаблон:Main}}