Conan of Aquilonia

ONE: Place of Skulls

Night lay like an ebon pall on the trampled, blood-soaked earth of Zingara. Through flying tatters of mist, as through a ragged shroud, the cold white skull of the moon leered down on a scene of horror. For the rolling, barren plain that sloped down to the shallow Alimane was encumbered with the sprawled, gore-splashed corpses of men and their mounts. In silent hundreds dead knights and yeomen lay, some face-down in pools of congealing blood, others on their backs, with dead eyes staring up into the grinning jaws of the mocking moon. The hideous mirth of hyenas rang weirdly through the still air as the scavengers crunched and gobbled.

Few dwelt in this dreary northeastern corner of Zingara, and those few had been further thinned by centuries of war with and raids from Poitain, across the Alimane. The land had been largely abandoned to the prowling wolf and the slinking leopard. Some whispered that the semi-human ghouls, legended to haunt certain hills in central Zingara, had recently been seen in this region also. Tonight there were the makings of a feast for both ghouls and hyenas.

The Zingarans called this grim region the Place of Skulls. Never before had it so well earned its name; never had the bitter sands drunk so deeply of hot blood. Never before had so many hacked and shaft-pierced men gone wailing down.the red road to Hell, to litter the bleak waste with their bones.

And here the bright imperial dreams of Pantho, duke of Guarralid, had been drowned in darkness, and the fires of his vaulting ambition had been quenched in blood. The throne of Zingara was vacant. For that prize, Pantho had gambled all. He had led his band of adventurers into Argos and made himself master of its western provinces. Old King Milo of Argos and his elder son had fallen in battle before him.

Then Duke Pantho had suddenly thrust his army deep into sunny Poitain, across the Alimane. Men supposed that he had done this to secure his rear before striking for the Zingaran capital of Kordava. But they could only guess, since none knew for certain, and Pantho’s tongue had been silenced forever by an Aquilonian sword.

Some whispered over flickering candles in southern taverns that a demon had taken possession.of the great duke, or a sorcerer had sent a spell of madness upon him, goading him into this foolhardy venture. For, as everyone knew, the leopards of Poitain crouched between the paws of the mighty lion of Aquilonia. King Conan, ruler of the mightiest kingdom of the West, had instantly hurled his iron legions against Pantho in retaliation for this breach of the border.

The armies had first clashed on the green plains of Poitain. The wild Zingaran charge had broken like surf against the stolid pikemen of Gunderland, while the shafts of the Bossonian archers mowed the Zingaran knights down, nailing helmet to head and thigh to horse. As Pantho withdrew his mounted knights to regroup for a second charge, Conan had unleashed his own cavalry. Conan’s own guard, the Black Dragons, had led the charge. Conan himself rode in the van, a warrior so heroic that a thousand legends clung like a cloak of glory about his towering frame.

The Zingarans faltered and broke. They fled in a mad scramble back across the marches of Poitain to Zingara. But Conan was angry, and his anger was such as to shake thrones and make princes turn pale. Leaving his foot to follow as best it could, Conan had hurled his horse across the Alimane in pursuit. On the desolate Place of Skulls, a few leagues south of the Alimane, Conan had caught up with the battered Zingaran host and cut it to ribbons. Many Zingarans died, some yielded. Few escaped. Pantho’s bright dream had drowned in a crimson sea.

On a knoll commanding a view of the desolate, corpse-strewn battlefield stood a great tent. Above it flew a black banner charged with a golden lion, the ensign of King Conan. About the base of this hillock stood the tents of the lesser nobility, including one surmounted by the banerole of Poitain. Here old Count Trocero of Poitain gulped wine and cursed his surgeons as they dressed his wounds.

The army itself camped on the plain roundabout. Weary warriors snored in their blanket rolls or squatted by guttering fires. They diced for prizes: gold-inlaid shields, plumed helms, swords with gems twinkling in their hilts. With dawn they would drive deeper into Zingara to set a puppet on Ferdrugo’s throne and end the dynastic squabbles that for years had roiled the peace of this contentious land.

Before the king’s tent, guardsmen of the Black Dragons stood with naked broadswords, guarding the rest of their lord. But there was little sleep for Conan that night. Inside the tent, lanterns glowed and flickered in their wrought-iron cages. Weary, battle scarred commanders sat or stood about. At a folding table inlaid with precious ivory from distant Vendhya, the great king brooded over maps of crackling parchment as he planned the morrow’s march.

Conan had seen over half a century of battle and bloodshed, and the years had left their mark on even so mighty a king. Time had laid its silver in the coarse black hair of his square-cut mane and had grizzled the heavy black mustache that swept out from either side of his long upper lip. Strange suns had burnt his flesh to a leathery hue, and weary years had etched furrows among the scars of war and conquest. But power still lay in the massive thews, and the vitality of his barbarian heritage still blazed in the deep-set eyes of volcanic blue that glared beneath scowling black brows.

Shifting his massive limbs and growling for wine, Conan stared at the maps. The sting of several small wounds annoyed him no more than the bite of a gnat, although a softer, city-bred man might have been stretched groaning on his pallet had he shed the blood that the Cimmerian had lost that day. While Conan pondered and consulted with his officers, his squires fussed about him, unbuckling the many straps of his harness, gently removing plate after plate, while the surgeon gingerly washed and bandaged his cuts and salved his bruises.

“This one needs must be sewn, sire,” said the surgeon.

“Ouch!” grunted Conan. “Go ahead, man, and pay no heed to my plaints. Pallantides, which were the quickest route hence to Stygia?”

“That one, sire,” said the general, drawing a forefinger across the parchment.

“Aye; I followed it to here when I fled from Xaltotun’s sorcery…”

Conan’s voice trailed off. With his chin on his massive fist, he stared unseeing into space and time. A shadow of suspicion crossed his brain, evoked by the memory of his struggle with the dread Acheronian sorcerer, Xaltotun, a decade and a half before.

There was something about this mad invasion by Duke Pantho that did not fit what he had heard of that astute and crafty adventurer. Only a fool or a madman would have hurled his army against one of Conan’s most loyal and warlike provinces. Conan, who had matched steel with Pantho that day and split the duke’s skull with one terrific stroke, did not think that the man had been either mad or foolish.

He suspected an unseen hand behind that addle-pated expedition, a shadowy figure lurking at Pantho’s back. He smelled a plot. In fact, he smelled sorcery.

TWO: Destiny in White

The captain of the king’s guard that night was one Amric, an adventurer out of Koth, drawn to golden Tarantia years before by the magic of Conan’s name and the legend of his prowess. “Amric the Bull,” his fellow Black Dragons called him—as much for his amatory prowess as for his headlong onset in battle. He was barrel chested and deep voiced. Like many Kothians, he was olive of skin, with perhaps a trace of Shemitish blood, as suggested by his thick, ringleted black beard. When a quiet little man in dirty white robes came gliding through the murk to the king’s tent, Amric alone knew him for what he was.

“Fires of Moloch!” Amric swore. “A druid out of Pictland, or I’m a eunuch!” He shifted his sword to his left hand so as to sketch a protective sign on the night air with his right.

The small man laughed and lurched; Amric suspected that he was drunk. “Your sins have found you out, Amric of Khorshemish!” he said.

Amric swore heartily, invoking the nether organs of several of the more disreputable eastern demon-gods. He paled, and sweat beaded his brow. His fellow guards looked curiously at him, for never in the fiercest battle had they seen their captain show fear. They eyed the little man with curiosity and suspicion.

He was a harmless-looking person, well past middle years. Save for a few straggling wisps of thin white hair, he was bald as an egg. He had watery blue eyes in a pale, loose-wattled face. His legs, where they showed beneath his robe, were as scrawny as a fowl’s. All in all, he was a most unlikely person to find on a battlefield.

“He knows you, Bull,” rumbled a blond Vanr. “Is’t a daughter, old man, with an unexpectedly black-avised babe, or an unpaid wineshop bill the size of a duke’s treasury?”

The others laughed loudly, but Amric scowled. “Keep civil tongues in your heads, you northern heathen,” he rumbled. Turning to the small man, who leaned on his staff with a faint, cherubic smile, he bowed and pulled off his dragon-crested helm.

“What can I do for you, Holy Father?” he asked with more civility than was his wont.

Amric had learned the wisdom of such politeness years before, when he had served on the Bossonian Marches. There he had seen the terrific power wielded by mild-seeming white-robed men like this, who walked with oaken staves and with golden sickles thrust through their girdles as emblems of their rank. For they were the druids, the priests of the Ligureans. The Ligureans, a race of light-skinned barbarians who dwelt in small clans in Pictland, intermingled with the shorter, darker, and more savage Picts. Those bloody savages, who feared neither god, man, beast, nor devil, still cowered before the authority of the druids.

“I am fain to see your king ere taking a bit of rest,” said the little man. Casually, he added: “I am Diviatix, chief druid of Pictland. Pray tell your king Conan that I am come from the Great Grove with a message. The Lords of Light have given me a command for their servant, Conan, and I bear his destiny in my hand.”

Amric the Bull shivered, signed himself with the sign of Mitra, and meekly turned to obey the behest of the White Druid.

Conan sent his commanders away, ordered hot spiced wine, and sat back. He ignored the sting of his bandaged wounds to listen to the spindle-shanked little messenger from Pictland.

The king of Aquilonia cared little for the priests of any god. His own shadowy Cimmerian god, Crom, was indifferent to the woe or weal of mankind, as befitted one of the Old Gods who one day chanced playfully to mold the earth from a lump of mud and set it spinning amid the stars for an idle jest—thereafter paying it little heed, perhaps forgetful they had wrought it at all. But, like Amric, Conan had borne a blade against the howling Pictish hordes and deeply respected their prowess. Not even the mighty warriors of the frozen North, in their berserker madness, could long stand against the inhuman ferocity of the Picts, whose neighbors and allies the Ligureans were only a shade less fierce.

As for the mystic wizard-priests of the Ligureans—Conan’s long, bloody career had brought him into contact with half the cults and creeds of the world. Of them all, he thought, none stood so near the blinding flame of ultimate truth as did the quiet, smiling, white-robed men who wore the oak-leaf crown.

It took several cups of mulled vintage to get the whole message out of Diviatix. Conan had heard of the priest, for he was first among the world’s druids. More than once had the gods spoken to the men of his age through the lips of this unimpressive sleepy-looking old man, notoriously fond of the juice of the grape. Even the bloodthirsty war chief of the Pictish Confederation, Dekanawatha Blood-Ax, who knelt to no man or devil, groveled in the dirt as Diviatix ambled past his palace-hut, its mud-bricks dyed russet with the blood of countless foes.

From the Great Grove at Nuadwyddon had the chief druid come, obeying the Lord of the Great Abyss, Nuadens Argatlam of the Silver Hand. Diviatix bore a message from the Lords of Creation to the grim giant they had brought out of wintry Cimmeria long years before to crush evil in the world’s West. The token they bade the White Druid bring was a small tablet of nameless stone, slick and heavy as jade but as purple as the towers of age-forgotten Valusia. Conan knew of that stone, albeit ’not even the iron-bound Book of Skelos dared whisper of it.

For an hour by the ringed time candle, Conan listened to the White Druid’s sleepy, wine-befuddled discourse. The moon sank; dawn ensanguined the east. The heir to the throne of Zingara, daughter of the late King Ferdrugo, had come out of exile with her husband to beg the king of Aquilonia for help in regaining the crown. But Conan kept Princess Chabela, with her consort Olivero and their highborn entourage, waiting on the slope below his tent while he queried the sleepy little man in tattered robes that had once been white.

With dawn, the trumpets sang. The tents were struck, and the knights of Aquilonia mounted up. Conan settled the problem of the Zingaran royal succession in ten minutes. He had known Chabela twenty years before, when she had been a buxom lass still in her teens and he, captain of a Zingaran privateer. Then Conan had saved the throne and fortunes of old King Ferdrugo from the villainous schemes of the Stygian master-sorcerer, Thoth-Amon.

In the intervening years Chabela had put on weight. She was still a handsome woman but in a plump, matronly fashion. The graying king kissed her heartily, asked after her eleven children, but did not linger to hear her account of their inches and illnesses. He bade her harried consort kneel, slapped Olivero on both shoulders with the flat of his nicked broadsword, and heard his oath of allegiance and fealty. Conan issued a curt fiat proclaiming the flustered couple rightful king and queen of Zingara under the overlordship of Aquilonia. He dispatched them in haste to Kordava, with a troop of Aquilonian knights to see them safely installed.

Then, stifling a prodigious yawn, Conan swung up on his black stallion, and the lion banner moved southeast to the tread of six thousand horses and foot. Southeast to the Argossean border and beyond that toward Stygia.

THREE: The March to the Styx

They marched southeast by stages often hours each. The steady stride of the strong Aquilonian yeomen ate up the leagues, and the army was across the border of Argos before the Argosseans learned that Duke Pantho, whose incursions had shattered their peace, was no more. Conan sent a message to Milo’s second son, young Ariostro, who was trying to rally the scattered Argossean forces in the South. This princeling was told that the Zingaran menace had been dissipated, so that nought prevented Ariostro from proclaiming himself king of Argos. Meanwhile, King Conan would count it a courtesy if Ariostro would graciously permit the Aquilonian force to pass through his dominion on their way to Stygia.

Then Conan dispatched heralds in black-and-gold tabards to his vassal-kings, Ludovic of Ophir and Balardus of Koth. He curtly bade them each to raise a force of two thousand horse and foot. These forces were to rendezvous with the Aquilonians at the ford of Bubastes on the Styx, between the green meadows of Shem and the tawny sands of Stygia.

League after league, Conan drove deeper southeast in grim silence, pressing his men hard. With them came the little druid in a rattling mule cart. Conan told none why he had sent the senior herald, Black Wyvern King at Arms, back to Tarantia guarded by a troop of light horse. Even Prospero and Trocero dared not ask him about his intentions. His old comrades knew better than to question him when he was in one of these dour, secretive, taciturn moods.

Conan descended upon Shem like a steel whirlwind. By forced marches, he drove his army across the meadow-lands in fifteen days. From time to time they passed one or another of the Shemitish cities, each of which raised its drawbridge and locked its gates in alarm, rousing archers to man the walls.

Conan dispatched Trocero with heralds to pacify each agitated Shemitish kinglet in turn. The old Count, a silver-tongued master diplomat, soothed the tempers ruffled by this unexpected intrusion. To the ruler of each petty city-state he explained that the Aquilonian army was but passing peacefully through, with—it was hoped—the kind permission of the Shemitish princelings. A token tribute of good Aquilonian silver was paid over, each thick coin stamped with Conan’s square-jawed, scowling profile. Relieved, their ruffled pride sleeked by Trocero’s oratory, the kinglets beamed graciously and waved the Aquilonian host on with their blessings.

The army, of course, had meant to go on anyway. But it is better, Conan had learned, to do these things with official blessing when possible. To be fair, Conan saw that his troops observed his laws against looting and raping. The few of his soldiers who turned aside to chase a dark-eyed Shemitish wench into a thicket or to leaven their field rations with some peasant’s fat pig were promptly hanged in view of their comrades. It went against Conan’s grain to deprive the poor fools of their lives, for as a young mercenary, he, too, had done the same offenses many times.

But the law is the law. The last thing Conan wanted when he reached the borders of ominous, hostile Stygia with his modest force was to leave an aroused countryside at his back buzzing with outraged petty kings and swarming with vengeful soldiery. Ordinarily the Shemitish city-states did not bother the neighboring nations, being occupied with their internal royal feuds and theological bickerings. The one thing that would unite them, however, was the passage of a marauding, murdering foreign army. Conan had fought with Shemites before, both at their side and against them. He knew that the hooknosed, black-bearded, mailed asshuri were, man for man, as tough and ferocious as any soldiers in the world.

One weary afternoon, white with road dust, they reached the shores of the Styx and camped behind a screen of willows. An hour’s march away lay the Ford of Bubastes. They sat for a day and a half, resting men and horses and honing and oiling weapons, while the troops from Koth and Ophir arrived to join them.

Next morning young Prince Conn, elder of Conan’s two legitimate sons, rode into camp at the head of a troop on lathered horses. At thirteen, the crown prince of Aquilonia was the spit and image of his mighty sire. Almost as tall as even the towering knights of Aquilonia, he had Conan’s broad shoulders, deep-arched chest, square-cut mane of coarse black hair, and strong, square-jawed face.

The boy had ridden across Shem in six days but looked as if he had been out for an afternoon’s canter. His fierce blue eyes sparkled with excitement, and fresh color blazed in his cheeks. He galloped into camp on a big gelding, acknowledging the roar of welcome from the troops with a grin and a flip of his hand. The youth was a favorite with the men, and the Black Dragons would have ridden into the jaws of Hell for him as readily as for his mighty sire.

The prince reined his horse to a halt before the royal tent, vaulted out of the saddle, and knelt grinning before the king. Conan kept his face grave although he was bursting with pride and affection. He acknowledged the prince’s salute, but as soon as they were inside the tent he crushed the boy in a rough bear-hug that might have snapped the ribs of a frailer lad.

“How fares your lady mother?” he demanded.

“She is well,” Conn replied—then, with a mischievous grin: “but she shrieked and wailed like a wounded buffalo to hear that you wanted me in the field. Her last words were to keep warm at night and not to get my feet wet!”

“How like a woman!” grunted Conan. “I remember my old mother, back in Cimmeria… But you should not compare your lady mother to a buffalo, boy! That’s impertinent!”

“Yes, sire,” said the youth contritely. Then, eyes sparkling, “But are we really going to cross over into Stygia, father? Do you really want me with you in battle?”

“Crom, boy, how can you learn the art of war without a little fighting? When you ascend the throne, you’ll have to hold it against war and revolution. The exercise yard is all very well, but the battlefield is the schoolyard of future kings. Just see to it that you hold the place in ranks to which I assign you; no galloping alone against the foe, trying to rout them singlehanded! Come, how are your brother and sister?”

Conn relayed reports on his younger brother, seven-year-old Taurus, and baby sister, Radegund.

“Good!” said Conan. “Did the priests come with you as commanded?”

“Aye. They bear a little box of orichalc covered with strange glyphs, and they would not tell me what was in it. Do you know, father?”

Conan nodded. “That’s what you might call our ’secret weapon.’ Now get a good repast and a good night’s sleep. Ere dawn we shall cross into Stygia!”

FOUR: Beyond Death River

The dark, gliding waters of the Styx mark the border between Shem and Stygia. Some call it the River of Death, saying that the clammy vapors that rise from the marshes are hostile; others, that the muddy waters are inimical to all forms of life, so that no fish or other creatures swim in them. This last is untrue, for at night along the banks one can hear the harsh grunt of the scaly cocodrill and the thunderous snort of the burly hippopotamus. But certain it is that the waters are hostile to human life, and he who bathes in those waters is soon stricken with a wasting and incurable disease.

Where the headwaters of the Styx rise, no man can say. It originates somewhere far to the south of the tawny sands of Stygia, in the jungled lands beyond Keshan and Punt. Some whisper that it rises in Hell itself, to flow through the lands of living men like a gliding black serpent.

Before dawn crimsoned the eastern horizon, Conan was on the move. The king, on his big black, led the way across the Ford of Bubastes to the low, reedy shore beyond. On the far side stood a half-ruined blockhouse of crumbled mud brick. Once it had guarded the crossing, but disturbances in the sinister kingdom of Stygia had led to its neglect, and it had not been repaired. The Stygians depended upon swift-moving mounted patrols along their borders to keep strangers at bay, but none of these was now to be seen.

To the right and left of the blockhouse stretched fields of yellow winter wheat, rippling in the dawn breeze. In the middle distance to the right, barely visible against the dun-colored background, a small village of mud-brick huts crouched on the edge of the river. Ahead, as the ground sloped gently up from the Styx, the palms, shrubs, and cultivation that lined the river gradually gave way to a scattering of camel-thorn and other desert plants.

Conan, flanked by Trocero and Pallantides, commander of the Black Dragons and second in command Conan, kicked his horse up the slope of a knoll. He watched gloomily as, company by company, the Aquilonian host splashed through the ford in a long double column. As each unit of infantry emerged from the water, its captain led it to a vacant spot along the marge. There the men were made to sit, pull off their boots, and dry their feet and footgear. The king had so commanded. The men muttered at this strange proceeding. But Conan, who had been in these parts before, deemed it a vital precaution against the disease that lurked in the black waters of Death River.

Meanwhile a few troops of light horse cantered up and down the river and inland to scout for possible trouble. Sitting in his saddle beside Conan, Count Trocero chewed his mustache. At last he spoke:

“Sire, isn’t it time you shared your thoughts with us?”

Conan grunted moodily and nodded. “Aye, my friend, I have kept you in the dark long enough.”

“Then why in Mitra’s name are we in accursed Stygia?” asked Pallantides.

“Because this is the land of our secret enemy, Thoth-Amon the sorcerer.”

Conn, sitting his gelding nearby, pricked up his ears. “Thoth-Amon!” he exclaimed. “The one that got the old witch of Pohiola to kidnap me last year, trying to get you into her clutches?”

“There is only one Thoth-Amon,” said Conan broodingly, “and Crom knows the earth will be cleaner without him. The White Druid bore warning of his schemes.”

“Do you mean that spindle-shanked little old winesop, Diviatix?”

“That spindle-shanked old winesop is the greatest white magician alive on earth in our age,” said Conan. Trocero gulped and shuddered, remembering the times he had snarled at the staggering old tosspot to get out of his way. Conan continued grimly:

“The oracle of the Great Grove in Pictland reveals that the Stygian wizard was behind Pantho’s crazy thrust. The sorcerer either bribed Pantho or seized command of his mind through his black arts.”

“But to what purpose?” asked Trocero. Pallantides had ridden away down the hill to get the army into formation for the next march. Conan continued:

“Merely a diversion, to get me away from Tarantia. The Stygian knew I would ride to join you against the Zingarans. He hoped that Pantho and I should play hide-and-seek in the hills for a fortnight or two, keeping me so busy I should not have time to worry about Tarantia …”

“Tarantia! Not the queen?”

“Be calm, man. Zenobia and the royal heirs are safe. But there’s something in Tarantia that Thoth-Amon desires more than anything on earth—even more than my life. He hoped to get it in my absence. He hired the world’s cleverest thieves—the High Guild of Arenjun—to steal that thing.

“But Thoth-Amon miscalculated. He never dreamed that I should smash Pantho so quickly, nor that the oracle of Nuadwyddon would send the White Druid to apprise me of the plot. Nor did he know that the spring rains would block the mountain passes out of Zamora, delaying the master thieves and ruining his delicate timing.

“He thinks me still in the North, chasing Pantho over the hilltops of Poitain. Believing me ignorant of his plan, he has no cause to suspect otherwise. The White Druid has kept our descent into Stygia invisible to the magical vision of the Stygian, or as invisible as possible. With luck, we shall be at his gates ere he knows we are within a hundred leagues of him.”

“What is this thing he so desperately wants?” asked Trocero.

“I know, Count!” said the boy. “It is …”

Pallantides cantered up and saluted. “The baggage is over the river, O King!” said the general. “The men are ready to march.”

Conan nodded. “Give the signal: east along the river for three leagues, till we come to a small tributary, the Bakhr. Then south, ascending that stream for half a league. I am coming shortly.”

Conan glared inland, into the dawn-reddened reaches of shadow-haunted Stygia.

“Twice in as many years,” he mused, “a plot has struck at my throne out of this accursed land of crumbling tombs and crawling sands. This time I will carry the battle to the enemy’s doorstep. Mayhap his sorcery will strike us dead, but I think not. The Gods of Light fight on our side. And, come death or victory, I shall beard Thoth-Amon in his lair and see if he can magic away a yard of good Aquilonian steel through his guts!”

The bugles blew and they rode down the slope to join the host.

FIVE: The City of Tombs

A curse seemed to overhang Stygia. The further the Aquilonian warriors marched into it, the more they became aware of it. It was a subtle thing: mocking whispers in an eerie wind, muttering voices that spoke too low to be understood. Small, whispering winds slunk among the dunes and rattled the palm fronds. The soldiers had the haunting sensation of unseen eyes at their backs. The sun glared pitilessly from behind a thin veil of white cirrus, and the dry air gave the marchers a feeling of constant thirst.

They passed another village—a jumble of low, dun-colored mud huts whose brown-skinned inhabitants fled yammering over the waste at the sight of the mailed host. The Bakhr proved to be a small, stagnant, muddy watercourse, from whose banks several monstrous cocodrills slithered ponderously into the water at the approach of the force.

The army turned inland—south—and marched up the tributary, skirting the reed banks and thickets that flanked it. The men muttered uneasily and fingered amulets or mumbled litanies and mantras under their breath. But the force strode on, ever deeper into shadow-haunted Stygia.

Prince Conn cast an eye at the sun and cantered forward to come up with his sire. “Father, are we not riding due south?”

Conan grunted assent.

“But,” persisted the boy, “I have always heard that this Thoth-Amon dwelt in an oasis called Khajar, far to the west of here!”

Conan shrugged. “At least, lad, your tutors have taught you to read maps. But Thoth-Amon dwells no more in that scarlet sink of iniquity. Now he makes his lair in Nebthu.”

“Nebthu?”

“A ruined city to the south; we shall be there soon. Years ago, lad, Thoth-Amon rose to power in this land and became prince of the Black Ring, the world-wide guild of black magicians, whose secret headquarters, I am told, lies at Nebthu. The better to keep this unholy brotherhood under his governance, he removed from his lair in the west to Nebthu.

“Once he lost his magical ring of power, and his enemies among the sorcerers cast him out. He fell into the hands of slavers and was brought as far from his home as Aquilonia.”

“Was it he who sent the demon that would have slain you, but for the sign of the phoenix on your sword?”

“The same. By happenstance, Thoth-Amon recovered his ring and returned to Khajar. Meanwhile a rival sorcerer, Thutothmes, had risen to command of the Black Ring, making his headquarters in Khemi. Thutothmes based his power upon a mighty talisman called the Heart of Ahriman.

“For a time, the Black Ring was riven into two factions, that of Thutothmes and that of Thoth-Amon. But, ere the battle between them was fairly joined, Thutothmes perished in combat with a crew of Khitan wizards who had followed me thither to slay me.The Khitans died also, and I bore the Heart back to Tarantia.

“Now however, Thoth-Amon has again seized control of the Black Ring, seeking to draw all the black magicians of the world into his circle of confederates. The oracle tells me that he is at Nebthu.”

Conn nodded thoughtfully. Count Trocero, who had been listening closely, asked:

“Is this city well guarded?”

Conan shrugged. “Mitra knows. The last rumor I heard was that it was long since abandoned and crumbling into ruin. Perchance the wizards have rebuilt it and patched its walls. But even if they have, with ten thousand sharp swords at our backs I am sure we can storm it.”

“We shall be doing just that, belike.” said the shrill voice of the druid, bumping along behind them in his mule cart.

Trocero turned in his saddle to look at the little man, who seemed to be drunk as usual. The count forced a polite smile and muttered:

“It likes me not, this empty, accursed land.” Conan made no answer; they rode on in silence.

The sun was declining when scouts came galloping back to the column to report. Nebthu was dead.

Soon the army came within sight of the ruin. The huge wall that had once encircled the city had crumbled, leaving upright only the great pylons that once flanked the gate. These pylons, carved with the leering gargoyle masks of grinning monsters, still rose above the drifted sands.

Save for a few birds that rose from the ruins and whirred away, there was no sign of life. No plume of smoke rose from cooking hearth or guardhouse Fire. Roofs had fallen in; buildings had decayed into mere mounds of crumbling mud brick.

Conan’s horse shied at a round white stone in the roadway. As the black’s hoof grazed it, the thing rolled a little way before halting. Black holes peered up. It was a skull, fit emblem of Nebthu, city of immemorial tombs. Naught moved here save the scuttling scorpion, the gliding sand viper, or perhaps the wandering ghosts of long-buried Stygian kings.

“Now what do we do?” murmured the count of Poitain.

“Make camp and fetch water from the Bakhr,” growled the king. “After that, we shall see.” The skull grinned up at them in silent mockery.

SIX: The Thing That Crouched in the Waste

They made camp outside the broken walls of the ruined city. Conan knew that his warriors would not sleep easily in the sand-drifted streets or rubble-choked squares of the Stygian metropolis. Magical influences often lingered about any ancient ruin, and this was all the more true of age-accursed Stygia than of other, more wholesome, lands.

While a detachment of soldiers cut armfuls of the feathery reeds that grew along the Bakhr, for fodder for the horses, scouts explored the desert about the walls of Nebthu. Soon the scouts rode back to report that nothing lived or moved amidst the dunes. They had, however, found one thing in the waste: a gigantic idol or monument. As the afternoon waned, Conan led a party to investigate, while the cooking fires were lit in the camp. Conan’s big black shied, rolled its eyes, and laid back its ears as they approached the stone monster.

“Crom, Mitra, and Varuna!” said Conan as he gazed upon the stone titan that loomed before them against lurid sunset skies. Trocero cursed; as for the White Druid, he called on Nuadens, Danu, and Epona and took a hasty swig from his wineskin as if to fortify himself.

The statue crouched amid the waste like some primal monster. It was made of some smooth, lustrous black stone, like jet or basalt. Its form was sphinxlike, but its head was neither that of a lion nor that of a man, but of some beast of prey with a long skull, round ears, and massive jaws. It crouched doglike, as if it were some gaunt jackal.

“I thought the black magicians of this hellish land all worshiped Set the Old Serpent,” said Trocero. “What hell-spawned devil-thing is that?”

Diviatix rubbed his eyes. “By the horns of Cernunnos, ’tis the ghoul-hyena of Chaos!” he said. “I had not thought ever to see its likeness wrought by human hands.”

As Conan peered more closely in the fading dusk, he saw that the sculptor of the hyena-sphinx had achieved an extraordinary fidelity to life. The loose lips of the beast were slightly drawn back to reveal its blunt, bone-crushing fangs, as if it would rise up any moment and hurl itself, slobbering and snapping, upon them. Conan’s nape hairs stirred and a cold breath of ominous foreboding chilled his blood.

“Let us begone,” growled the king, “or that black abortion will haunt our dreams tonight…”

The coals of sunset smoldered out; gloom enshrouded the sands of Stygia. The new moon closely followed the sun down the sky and out of sight, leaving the vault of heaven to a vast multitude of brilliant stars which glowed and twinkled red and green and white in strangely unfamiliar constellations.

A town of tents sprang up in the desert near Nebthu. Cookfires blazed, casting a cheerful orange glow over the dim sands. A subdued host ate its rations and lay down, wrapped in blankets, to seek an uneasy slumber. Sentries—twice the usual number—alertly paced the perimeter. The desert night was empty, dark, and silent; but alive—and waiting.

Weary from many days of forced marching, Conan was too restless to sleep. After midnight, he rose and called a squire to light an oil lamp. He poured himself a small stoup of wine and sat on his camp stool, senses tingling with alertness, as if his barbarian instincts had roused him to some unseen danger.

Growling a curse, he pulled on breeches and padded haqueton. “My armor,” he told the squire. “Nay, nay, not the plate; the chain shirt. We wend afoot tonight.”

He disregarded his full knightly panoply because it would have taken too long for the squire to buckle the many straps and because its great weight would have slowed him down on foot. Donning boots, steel cap, and baldric, he stood for a moment, brooding. Then he unlocked his strongbox and took out the small box of orichalc, which the priests of Mitra had brought from Tarantia.

Entering the nearest tents, Conan shook Trocero and Conn awake. Then he went in to rouse the White Druid. He found the little man wide awake, wrapped in a blanket and huddled shivering before a brazier. Diviatix seemed like one in a daze, like the Khitans whom Conan had seen bemused on the fumes of the poppy.

“Rouse yourself, druid!” he said. “I sense danger.”

The flabby jowls of the Ligurean priest were pale, his eyes vacant and haunted. He stared into the darkness with a black, unseeing stare.

“Eyes,” he whispered. “Shadows with eyes. There is evil in the night…”

Conan shook the hunched figure by the shoulder. “Up, priest! Is it drunk that you are again?”

Diviatix blinked and laughed weakly. “Drunk? By the breasts of Mother Danu, King, I have swilled enough wine to send half this host staggering, but I am cold sober!” Conan shivered and whirled, peering into the darkness. But there was nothing there—nothing but shadows.

SEVEN: Shadows with Eyes

Conan strode out into the dim, star-filled night. The bemused druid, bearing his oaken staff, trotted at his heels. Trocero, armed and alert, awaited his coming with the yawning prince. Pallantides hastened up.

“What is it, sire?” asked the general.

“I know not, but something,” grumbled Conan. “Crom curse it, I can’t put a name to it, but something’s wrong…”

“Shall I rouse the host?”

“Not yet. Let the men get what sleep they can while they may. But double the sentries again. Let us make our own sentry-round; perchance the guards have seen something. Pallantides, lend me two stout men-at-arms who fear neither god, man, nor devil.”

A pair of yawning Gundermen presently approached with a clink of mail. They were big men, deep-chested with impassive faces and hard eyes. Conan looked them over, and liked what he saw. Then the king jerked his head. “Come.”

They strode down the sandy lane between rows of tents and out toward the edge of the encampment. But there, the sentries had seen nothing, although they had vigilantly prowled and peered. Amric, who commanded that sentry watch, said:

“Nothing at all. Lord King, save the far-off yapping of jackals. But some complain of… well, shadows’.”

“What kind of shadows?” demanded Conan.

The burly Kothian scratched his beard. “Well, sire, the men say—foolishness, I know!—that they see shadows where no shadows should be, not cast by any visible shape. The fools complain that the shadows watched them!”

“Shadows with eyes! My vision was true,” Diviatix moaned.

Conan chewed a tuft of his mustache. “Shadows, eh? They’ll be starting at mice next! Well, these lords and I will pace on sentry-go for a time, to see if we can find your prowling shadows.”

Loosening his blade in its scabbard, Conan led Trocero, Conn, the druid and the two soldiers around the camp. His boots squealed and crunched in the dry sand. The torches in the hands of the soldiers hissed and sputtered. Their flames streamed in the uneasy wind, sending shadows scurrying before and behind them as they trudged about the perimeter.

Young Conn stopped short, seized his father’s arm, and pointed. Conan looked in the direction of the pointing finger and grunted.

“Footprints! It seems we have a spy, after all! For never yet have I heard tell of shadows that leave footprints in soft sand.”

Trocero fingered his hilt. “Sire, shall I sound the horn and rouse the guard?”

“For one skulking spy? Nonsense, man! We’ll track the rogue to his lair ourselves. Time enough to summon the watch if we stumble upon a nest of Thoth-Amon’s Set-worshipers.” Conan drew his steel. “You!” he said to one of the Gundermen. “Go back and tell Pallantides whither we have gone. Tell him to send a squad of stout rogues on our track, but that they shall not come up with us unless we get into trouble. I hope to catch the slinker unawares, and their clatter would alert him a league away.”

Without further ado, the Cimmerian plunged off in the direction the footprints led. The long march without opposition had made the king restless and reckless. The others crowded after. Soon the track had led them over the dunes beyond the sight of the camp.

“Look, sire!” Trocero hissed, pointing.

Conan stifled a grunt. Was it a blur of strained eyes, a trick of shadows, or did he glimpse a form, hooded and cloaked in black, flitting before them toward the Black Sphinx?

“Follow me!” Conan whispered, plodding after the form.

EIGHT: That Which Fled in the Night

As glittering stars wheeled slowly overhead, Conan and his companions crunched through the hissing sand on the track of the fleeing form. Ever it stayed just beyond the range of their vision, flitting ahead like a desert phantom.

Now the stony monster that dominated these wastes loomed up before them, blotting out the stars which outlined its hyena’s head. The black-cloaked form flitted silently between the outstretched paws of the gigantic monster. For an instant they dimly discerned it against the breast of the towering sphinx; then it merged with the stone and vanished.

“Crom!” breathed Conan, his nape hairs rising with a barbarian’s awe of the supernatural.

The mystery, however, was soon solved. As they neared the stony breast, they observed, barely visible in the starlight, a black crack in the smooth stone. It was a huge doorway, thrice the height of a man, cunningly made so that when shut, it would blend with the solid stone of the monster. As they approached, the door was slowly closing on unseen hinges, and the black crack was narrowing to a hairline.

Conan sprinted forward and jammed his sword hilt into the crack. The closing stopped. Then the king inserted his fingers into the crack and heaved. Sweat burst out on his brow, and the massive muscles of his arms, back, and shoulders stood out beneath his mail.

The portal opened with a squeal. Conan snatched up his sword from where it had fallen and, brandishing naked steel, sprang without a moment’s hesitation into the gaping black maw. The others followed, although the druid hesitated.

To the remaining Gunderman, Conan said: “Give me your torch, what’s your name—Thorus, is it not? Plant your pike so it holds this door open, and run back to the camp. Tell Pallantides to send a whole company after us. Yare, now! The rest of you, follow me!”

Within the sphinx they followed a high, wide corridor of solid stone. The torch guttered, stretching misshapen black shadows over the rough stone walls. Wary of traps and pitfalls, Conan and his companions traced the corridor, descending by a broad stone stair to the second level, beneath the sands of the desert.

“By Mitra, no wonder we found no one in the city,” breathed Trocero. “The black magicians were all hiding down in this maze!”

In truth, it was a maze. Corridors branched off at intervals, multiplying until they became a labyrinth. Conan smeared a dab of pitch from the hissing torch at every change of direction, so that they could retrace their steps and regain the surface. But all the chambers they searched were untenanted and bare of furnishings. Where were the wizards of the Black Ring?

“Crom!” Conan wondered aloud. “Are there levels even deeper than this? If that philosophers’ notion be true, that the world is round, meseems we shall soon come out the other side!”

As they descended another stair, Trocero urged: “Sire, should we not go back for help?”

“Mayhap; but I’ve a notion to search this place first,” Conan growled. “The lads should be coming up behind us soon, and thus far we’ve found nought to beware of. Let us go on!”

At the foot of that last flight of stone stairs, they entered a gigantic chamber, huge as an arena, ringed with tiers of stone benches. Lifting his torch, Conan searched the nearby benches with its wavering light which illumined only a small fraction of the vast area. The place reminded Conan of the great hippodrome of Tarantia, save that the latter was out in the clean open air, not buried deep down in the fetid blackness below the world’s crust.

“What do you suppose they use this place for?” he muttered.

Trocero opened his mouth to reply, but another voice broke in. It was a deep, strong, quiet voice, informed with the ring of triumph.

“We use it to dispose of our enemies, Conan of Aquilonia!”

Conan tensed. Before he could move, cold artificial light flared up, filling the vast arena with an uncanny and sourceless illumination almost as brilliant as daylight. By this illumination, the Cimmerian saw that the circling stone benches, on the further side, were occupied by hundreds of human figures, robed and cowled in black. To the right yawned a huge open portal, a yawning gulf of darkness, as large as that in the breast of the sphinx far above.

Directly before them, enthroned in a great chair of black stone above the lower rows of magicians, sat a tall, strongly built figure wearing a simple, unadorned green robe. This man had the shaven pate, swarthy skin, slitted dark eyes and hawklike features of a pure-blooded Stygian.

“Welcome to my empire,” said Thoth-Amon, laughing.

Meanwhile, the second Gunderman, Thorus, whom Conan had dispatched to fetch reinforcements from the camp, lay silently on the sands beneath the wheeling stars, a bare hundred paces from the Sphinx of Nebthu, with a Stygian arrow through his throat.

NINE: Red Swords of Stygia

Pallantides yelled commands at running men. Trumpets brayed and hoofbeats thudded on the hissing sands.

Things had started going wrong at just the time that Conan and his companions entered the black sphinx. First came the desertion of the troops levied from Koth and Ophir. They had encamped on the far side of the site, and sentries came flying to the general to report that the entire force had fled under cover of darkness, either in mass panic or by some prearranged plan.

Pallantides swore sulfurously. He ordered a squadron of horse to pursue the runaways, but then it transpired that the Aquilonians had no horses. The mounted Kothians and Ophireans had taken their own horses, while the Kothian and Ophidian foot had commandeered the mounts of the Aquilonians. The few remaining animals had been turned loose and had galloped off into the desert with the deserters.

Then the first of the two soldiers who had accompanied Conan arrived, to pass on the king’s request for a squad of troopers to follow on his track. Pallantides was picking his squad and giving them the news to pass to the king, when another sentry rushed in to cry:

“To arms, my lord! We are beset! The hordes of Stygia are upon us!”

All around the camp, the somber dunes began erupting men, mostly archers on horse and camel. The darkness made it impossible to ascertain their number. They rode round the camp in a vast swirl, plying their bows. Although the darkness prevented accurate archery, the Aquilonians still suffered a rain of arrows, discharged at random into the camp. Here and there a man yelled or cursed as a shaft found him.

Atop the dunes, other Stygian soldiery appeared, shooting fire arrows into the camp. The missiles tore cometlike paths through the dark; a tent blazed up, and another.

Most of the Aquilonian soldiers had already been aroused by the commotion caused by the desertion of the auxiliaries. Summoned by the trumpets’ blare and the war cries of the Stygians, they stumbled out of their tents, red faced and coughing from the smoke, pulling on helmets and buckling baldrics and chin straps.

“Put out the fires!” shouted Pallantides. “Strike the tents! Cenwulf! Where in hell are you?”

“Here,” said the captain of the Bossonian archers, staggering up to the general. “Where is the king?”

“Mitra knows; he went off into the desert, tracking a spy. Spread your men around the perimeter and pick off some of these flitting black-cloaks. Detail a squad to beat down those bastards on the dune, with the fire arrows. Amric!”

“Here, general.”

“Spread the men around in a circle outside the Bossonians, kneeling with pikes ready to stop a charge. Pile baggage before them and heap sand upon it for a breastwork…”

Thoth-Amon smiled grimly down from his place of power in the underground arena.

“For too long, Cimmeria… have you stood in my path,” said the earth’s greatest black magician. “I saw you venture into these southern lands from your frozen north, forty years ago. I ought to have crushed you then, when you were small and weak. Had I but known how your power would grow, I should have struck you down with a blast of magic—that first time, when you meddled in my affairs in the house of Kallian Publico; or again when you spoiled my schemes to wrest the kingdom of Zingara from King Ferdrugo’s feeble grasp; or when I first glimpsed you in Count Valenso’s stronghold on the Western Ocean; or in your early years of kinging it in Aquilonia when I was Ascalante’s slave in Tarantia. These lapses, however, shall now be corrected.”

Conan handed his guttering torch to Trocero and folded his mighty arms upon his chest. His face impassive, he bent his lionlike glowering gaze upon Thoth-Amon.

“Speak your piece, Stygian,” he rumbled. “You have gone to immense effort and exhausted your cunning to trick me into this trap. You might as well have your say.”

A susurration, like the hissing of a nest of angry serpents, ran through the black-robed throng. Thoth-Amon laughed sardonically.

“Well said, dog of a northlander savage! I admire your coolness as much as my fellow sorcerers deplore your effrontery! But now, neither will help you to escape your long overdue punishment. You have crossed my path once too often, and this is the last act of our little drama. I have trapped Aquilonia’s host as well as its king. As we exchange pleasantries, my warriors beleaguer your camp. Aquilonia’s tall knights are falling to our swords like ripe wheat before the scythe. More than a dynasty ends here tonight; the armed might of a kingdom perishes as well.”

Conan shrugged. “Mayhap. But I fear your slinking serpents little, and my tall knights will draw their crooked fangs with ease. My warriors, I doubt me not, are reaping a red harvest this hour …”

“I do not fight with swords alone …”

Thoth-Amon smiled, gesturing with the fingers of one hand. A bolt of emerald fire sprang from his fingertips. It lanced across the arena and struck the naked sword in the hand of Trocero. The steel, bathed in the green ray, glowed red. Trocero dropped the smoking sword with an oath and put his blistered fingers in his mouth.

”—but with sorcery as well,” Thoth-Amon concluded.

Conan continued to hold the glinting eyes of Thoth-Amon with his own somber gaze. “The only way to fight sorcery,” he grunted, “is with sorcery.”

The slight, hooded figure at Conan’s side stepped forth, throwing off its dark cloak to reveal a white robe and an oakleaf chaplet. The black magicians recoiled, hissing.

“It is a White Druid out of Pictland!” said a voice above the murmur.

“It is indeed,” said Thoth-Amon grimly. “Unless my senses deceive me, it is none other than Diviatix.”

“Diviatix!” The cry arose from a hundred throats. At a signal from the prince of sorcerers, they fell silent. The pressure of hundreds of eyes poured down upon Conan and his companions. The silent, concentrated power of those black, glittering eyes was unnerving.

Conan’s skin crept. A coldness like a small, bleak wind from one of his frozen northern hells blew upon his heart. He felt a numbness creeping through his flesh. His vision blurred; his heart faltered. Behind him, young Conn gasped and staggered.

“S-sorcery!” breathed Conan. A malignant power beat down upon him from those intense, glittering eyes. His head swam. In a moment, he thought, the iron would drain from his muscles and he would slump to the floor of the arena.

TEN: White Druid and Black Magician

Then tine druid broke the spell. He spread his arms and brandished his oaken staff. Conan was astounded to see fresh young leaves sprout from the dead wood of the staff. Diviatix stood at the center of a pulsing aura of golden light. From his staff wafted the smell of healthy earth and green growing things. The warm light and the good smell beat back the artificial witchlight and the dank, moldering stench that permeated these subterranean labyrinths of ancient stone.

The wizards of the Black Ring sagged back, their concentration broken. Some mopped sweat from their brows. Diviatix swayed, chuckling, as if all the wine he had drunk that night had at last caught up with him. But small and unprepossessing though he was, there was no question but that he dominated this assembly.

Thoth-Amon laughed no longer; his wrinkled brow was drawn together in a scowl of concentration. Drawing himself up to his full regal height, he smote the White Druid with a second beam of crackling green flames. Diviatix fended it off with his staff, and it broke into a shower of hissing sparks.

Thoth-Amon hurled another, and another, and another. Taking heart from their leader, the prime sorcerers of the Black Ring came to their feet, adding their own beams of green force to the shower of deadly bolts that beat down upon Conan’s party. For a few moments, the pulsing aura staved them off like a golden shield. Then Diviatix began to weaken. While he still held the golden glow intact, some shafts of cold green fire leaked through to plow smoking furrows in the sand near where Conan and his comrades stood.

“White magic fails in the contest of strength, Cimmerian!” Thoth-Amon called.

“Well, then, perhaps it is time to strengthen it.”

Conan drew from his girdle the small box of gleaming orichalc. From the box he took a great red many-faceted jewel. From it emanated a dazzling glow which pulsed and shimmered and seemed to drip flakes of quivering golden fire on the trampled sands. This sparkling gem Conan handed to Diviatix, who seized it as a drowning man might grasp at a helping hand.

As the druid took the jewel, the protective shield of golden light about them strenghened; a golden fire like that of the sun itself blazed up and smote the black magicians. They fell back shrieking; some pawed at their eyes, while others slumped in unconsciousness or death. The golden glory beat about the white-robed druid, who now seemed superhumanly tall and commanding. A wailing cry arose from the benches. Some black-clad forms struggled madly with each other, while some sought to flee by the smaller portals on the far side.

“The Heart!” gasped Thoth-Amon, sinking back in his black throne with his face pale, drawn, and gaunt. Suddenly the great sorcerer looked like an old, old man.

“The Heart of Ahriman!” he croaked.

Conan laughed heartily. “Thought you that I would venture into your den without the world’s mightiest talisman? You must deem me still that raw, reckless, foolish youth who came out of the North forty years ago!

“For all these years, the Heart has slumbered in the vault of the Mitraeum. When the druid apprised me of your plot against it, I sent heralds to fetch both it and my son. With this amulet, old Diviatix has the power of a thousand of your wizards.

“That is why you so lusted for the gem—not to augment your own great magic, but to keep another from using it against you. That is why the Gods of the West drew this druid from his grove, hither across the wide world to the sandy wastes of shadow-haunted Stygia. No other white magician could stand against the temptation such power holds out to him who wields it—the power to make oneself a very god—save this drink-befuddled little man, this sanctified and holy vessel of the will of the gods!”

His visage curiously shrunken and pale, skull-like in the fierce golden fire that shone up from the figure of the druid, Thoth-Amon wilted. Of the lesser mages of the Black Ring, some lay dead or senseless; some gibbered and frothed in madness; some jammed the exits, clawing at one another in their frenzy to be gone. Diviatix held up the mighty arch-talisman, which focused stupendous forces like a lens. Beam after beam of glory flashed across the arena, and with each bolt a wizard died.

By now, Thoth-Amon alone still lived and had full possession of his faculties. Conan’s nape prickled as he saw a shadow gathering about the Stygian—a clot of gloom, which wound about the sorcerer like the coils of a gigantic serpent. Had Father Set himself come to claim his chief votary? Thoth-Amon panted:

“You force me, against will and prudence, to play my masterstroke, dog of a Cimmerian!”

The shadowy coils about him darkened until he stood cloaked in utter gloom. Through this cloak of shadow, Thoth-Amon’s eyes burned like glittering stars of dark fire. A chill passed over Conan as the Stygian uttered an enigmatic command in an unknown, guttural tongue. The human throat was never shaped to speak aloud that uncanny, bestial speech. The alien words re-echoed back and forth across the shadowy immensity of the arena.

AH eyes were drawn to the huge open portal at the farther end of the arena. Now something hulking and monstrous and unthinkable stirred to wakefulness beyond that yawning gulf of darkness. And Thoth-Amon laughed.

ELEVEN: From the Black Gate

It came forth slowly from the abyss of darkness. At first Conan could not make it out, for it seemed but an extension of the darkness. But it was no insubstantial shadow, for the earth trembled beneath its ponderous tread.

“Crom!” muttered Conan between his teeth. His companions shrank back after one horrific glimpse of the moving shape.

“Gods, help us!” groaned Diviatix, “It is the living prototype of the Black Sphinx above! Earth was never meant to bear the weight of such a hell-spawned abomination . Think of the ages the accursed thing has dwelt here in the bowels of the black underworld! Now may the Lords of Light aid us, for not even the Heart of Ahriman can give me power over the Black Beast, the very child of Chaos itself!”

Conan raked the corpse-strewn benches with his eyes. None lived there; even Thoth-Amon had fled the coming forth of the beast that his prayers had roused from its aeons of slumber.

“Back up the stair behind us!” Conan barked. “Give me that torch, Trocero! Stir yourselves, for the beast is upon us!”

They raced back the way they had come, up the broad stairway and along the lofty corridor that they had traversed before. As they ran, Conan looked about for narrow passages through which the black beast could not pursue them—but found none. This vast hall would not delay the beast in the slightest; indeed, it might have been hewn from the rock for the monster’s convenience.

Their only hope of escape lay at the further end, where they might or might not find a narrow exit. Sword in hand and boot heels thudding, the king of Aquilonia ran down the immense hallway, breathing a prayer to the cold, indifferent gods of his northern homeland.

The camp had been crudely fortified with an embankment of baggage and sand, behind which crouched the spearmen of Gunderland, the knights of Aquilonia and Poitain, and the Bossonian archers. Whenever the swirling horde of Stygians came too close, the archers on signal rose and sent a volley of clothyard shafts whistling across the sands, now littered with corpses. The Bossonian longbows outranged the shorter weapons borne by the mounted Stygian archers. When the heavy Aquilonian shafts struck home, they pierced through mail and cloth and flesh to the vitals.

Pallantides, however, did not deceive himself about the desperate plight of his host. In the east the faint glow of false morning paled the stars. It would fade, but then the real dawn would arise. Without their horses, the Aquilonians could not defeat the mobile, mounted, and overwhelmingly more numerous Stygians. For the men to try to come to grips with their foes by toiling through the sand after them on foot would merely earn them all a quick demise.

The Aquilonians could hold their present position as long as their supplies held out, for the Stygians had no heavily armored men to break through the perimeter. But, with dawn, the Stygians would acquire a mighty ally: the desert sun. Even with the most careful rationing, the existing supplies of water would soon be drunk up, and men could not be sent down to the banks of the Bakhr to fetch more in the face of the foe.

Nor would the arrows of the Bossonians last forever. At the present rate, their quivers would be exhausted in an hour or two. The Stygians had only to keep circling the trapped army, showering its camp with their light but deadly shafts, and by the end of the day the Aquilonian force would be reduced to helplessness.

But the Stygians, it seemed, had other ideas. Unit by unit, the mounted archers drew off toward the Black Sphinx. They became mere bobbing black dots against the faintly paling sky and then disappeared behind the dunes.

When all had vanished from around the camp, Pallantides sent a soldier noted for his fleetness of foot out to scout. Stripped to shoes and breechclout, the man climbed the highest dune between the camp and the monument and ran back to report:

“Nay, general they be not retreating. They be all gathered around that great ugly black statue, and their general’s standing up on the rump of the critter, giving ’em a speech. Methinks they’re getting ready for a grand charge; I seen what looks like a company of armored horsemen in that black mail they wear.”

Pallantides turned to where his men, relaxing for the first time in hours, were eating hasty bites of cold breakfast.

“We can stop some with our shafts and some with our pikes,” he told Cenwulf and Amric, “but there are plenty more to take the place of these. We shall put our knights in the front rank, using their lances as pikes, since their armor is the best…”

But even as he spoke he heard the hollowness of his own words and knew their chances were few.

And where was Conan?

TWELVE: The Black Beast Slays

Stone grated. The mighty portal swung open in the breast of the Black Sphinx. Upon the threshold towered Conan of Cimmeria, the light from the torch in his hand winking on his tunic of chain mail and flashing on the mirror surface of his naked sword. Behind him crowded Prince Conn, Count Trocero, and the druid Diviatix, who still bore the Heart of Ahriman in his fist.

Outside, the stars had dimmed in the east and the sky had visibly lightened. The colossal, doglike forelimbs of the stony monster stretched away at slightly diverging angles from the body, each forepaw being twice the height of a man. Beyond them lay the dunes, sparsely spotted with camel-thorn and tufts of dry grass.

Nothing moved in the angle between the forelimbs of the statue or in the visible desert beyond. From another direction, however, came the sounds of a large armed host: the creak of saddles, the clink of weapons, the nickering and stamping of horses, the grunts and bubblings of camels, the murmur of men. Over all these noises sounded the voice of the Stygian general, giving his units their orders and exhorting them to be valiant and destroy the filthy foreign worshipers of unclean gods. His harsh, guttural voice resounded through the lightening gloom.

Conan cocked an ear back towards the portal. “It’s after us,” he breathed, as the ground trembled to the tread of the hyena-headed monster. “Thoth-Amon must have summoned the whole damned Stygian army. If we run for the camp, and they see us, ’twill be the last…”

The vibrations grew stronger. From the unseen host gathered around the rear of the Black Sphinx came trumpet calls and the rumble of kettle drums. The Stygians were on the move.

“Follow me,” murmured Conan, thrusting his torch, which now bore only a small, smoky flame, into the sand to extinguish it.

The king led his comrades along the path between the diverging forelimbs of the statue. Behind them, a moving shape of darkness appeared in the opening in the sphinx’s breast. At the mouth of the great shaft that led down to immemorial crypts appeared a shape of living horror, leering and slavering. Huge as half a hundred lions, it peered into the darkness and sniffed the pre-dawn air.

A glance behind them sent Conan and his comrades scurrying. “That gully! Over there!” growled Conan, pointing. “Mayhap it won’t see us.”

They dashed to the gully that he had indicated and crouched, scarcely daring to breathe. The monster shambled out on their track just as the Stygian host, with much drumming and trumpeting, began to move. The first units passed the left paw of the statue—to find themselves riding parallel to the monster and only a few yards from it.

One Stygian uttered an exclamation; then others; then shouts of terror and amazement filled the night. Bowstrings twanged and a shower of arrows and javelins fell about the monster. These missiles were mere pin pricks to so vast a creature, but they stuck in its hide and roused it to fury.

It wheeled ponderously toward the host and for an instant towered over them, like the living cub of the stone monster it resembled.

Then it was among them! Its great paws swept right and left, dashing men and mounts head over heels in a welter of gore. The Black Beast waded through the slaughter, dipping its huge head with every stride to snatch up a Stygian and crunch him to jelly with one bite. The air was hideous with the shrieking of mangled horses, the agony and terror of broken men.

The Stygians did not lack courage. Horrified though he was, their general ordered one desperate charge. The beast swept his men to earth with its slashing paws and snapping jaws as fast as they came within reach. At last the Stygians went mad with terror, clawing and trampling one another in their haste to flee. Most of them were dismounted by the frantic leaps and buckings of their terrified horses and camels and had to slog through the sand afoot. And after them came the Black Beast, trampling and crunching. Ever it slew… and slew… and slew.

As the sun’s golden disc lifted above the desert beyond the Bakhr, the monster returned from its slaughter. It moved with haste, shivering as the sun’s inimical rays struck it, and squeezed through the great portal in the sphinx’s breast. Then it was gone, and the vast stone door boomed shut behind it.

From a distance, Conan and his companions watched the disappearing monster. Then they trudged back to the camp. There the Aquilonians, drawn up in ranks of archers and spearmen determined to sell their lives dearly, could hardly believe their deliverance.

Some of the baggage had been lost in tent fires. A few men had died from Stygian arrows but many more were wounded, for those light, long-range shafts were designed to cripple rather than to kill. Everywhere, surgeons were cleaning and binding minor wounds.

Soon Conan and Pallantides organized the recovery. A few of the masterless horses and camels which wandered disconsolately around the camp were captured and then used to round up more of the Stygians’ mounts. In the course of this work, the Aquilonians discovered the Stygians’ abandoned baggage train, by which they soon made good their own losses of material.

His powers augmented by the Heart of Ahriman, the White Druid searched the spirit plane with his astral senses. He awoke from his trance to say that Thoth-Amon had fled the destruction of the Black Ring and was on his way southeast, toward the mysterious black kingdom of Zembabwei.

The host was drawn up, awaiting orders. There had been changes. Most of the horses were now wiry Stygian ponies. Their riders had put away their plate armor as too heavy for such small steeds to bear; they wore light tunics of chain mail instead. There was a newly formed camel corps, whose members looked uneasily upon their angular, irascible mounts.

Conan sat easily on his camel, his legs locked together in front of the hump. He grinned at a remark by Trocero.

“Of course I know how to ride a camel!” he chuckled. Wasn’t I once a chief of the Zuagir nomads of the eastern deserts? If you treat a camel well and know its limitations, ’tis no harder to manage than any other beast.”

He stared at the distant, dun-colored horizon, his blue eyes fierce under scowling brows. Beside him, Diviatix smiled up from his mule cart. He had been drinking again, but his voice was steady enough.

“The Lords of Light are still with you, O King!” he said. He turned to where Prince Conn sat a Stygian pony. “Lend me your brand, O Prince!”

Conn handed over the sword. With his forefinger, Diviatix sketched a series of runes on the blade. The characters showed black on the bright steel.

“What’s that?” asked Conn, taking back the sword and looking curiously at it.

Diviatix smiled crookedly. “Ask no question, lad. Suffice it to say that in a vision last night, one of the powers told me to write those words. It was said that they would prove of use to you. And now, farewell!”

Pallantides cantered up, reining in a restive Stygian gray. “We are ready to march, sire.”

“Give the order, then,” growled Conan.

“Whither away?” asked Trocero.

Conan grinned, white teeth flashing in his bronzed, impassive face. “Southeast, to Zembabwei and the jungle lands—and to the end of the earth, if need be!”

And the trumpets sang.