Conan of Aquilonia

ONE: Visions in Smoke

A wisp of green smoke crawled from the bed of glowing coals whereon Rimush, the royal soothsayer of Zembabwei, had cast the throbbing heart of an ibis, the blood of a bull ape, and the forked tongue of an adder.

The coals shed a wavering crimson glow. This dim light turned the grim, heavy features of Conan, king of Aquilonia, into a brooding copper mask. As for the black visage of his companion, Mbega, the newly crowned king of the jungle city, the ruddy, flickering luminance transformed his features into the face of a primitive idol of polished ebony.

There was no sound in the dank, stone-walled chamber, save for the hiss and crackle of the coals and the mumblings of the gaunt old Shemitish conjurer. Rimush huddled in his worn, patched astrologer’s robe, embroidered with the mystic symbols of his craft, above the brazier. The firelight gave his aged head the semblance of a white-bearded skull wherein only the deep-set eyes lived and moved.

Conan stirred restlessly. He disliked all meddling with magic and divination and witchery. His simple faith was long since given to the grim, barbaric god of his distant northern home: Crom, who made few demands upon his followers but who breathed into them the strength to slay their enemies.

“Enough of this mummery!” he growled to Mbega. “Give me a legion of your warriors and I’ll comb the jungles for Thoth-Amon myself, without wizardry!”

The giant black warningly touched Conan’s shoulder, nodding at the aged astrologer. The soothsayer convulsively stiffened, champing his jaws. The whorl of green vapor climbed, eddied, and formed an arabesque the color of jade. Beads of foam appeared at the corners of Rimush’s mouth.

“Any moment, now,” grunted Mbega.

A whisper came from the old Shemite, in which words gradually became audible: “South…south…beating wings in the jungle night… to the great waterfall… then east, to the Land Of No Return… to the great mountains… to the Great Stone Skull…”

The whisper was cut off short as the soothsayer stiffened as if stabbed.

“You will find him at the end of the world, where the serpent-folk ruled of old, ere the coming of men,” said the Shemite in a clear voice. Then he crumpled, sprawling lifelessly at the foot of the smoldering brazier.

“Crom!” growled Conan, the flesh on his corded forearms creeping.

Mbega knelt and fumbled at the old man’s breast. After a moment he stood up, brow wrinkled.

“What’s wrong?” demanded Conan, glimpsing a somber fear in the black monarch whom he had helped to raise to sole rulership after Zembabwei had for centuries been ruled by pairs of twins.

“Dead,” said Mbega slowly. “As if struck by lightning—or as if bitten by a deadly serpent.”

Pallantides was as near to open defiance of his lord as he had ever come in his many years of service to the king of Aquilonia. The old soldier cursed luridly as he struggled to rise from the silken couch whereon he lay with his left leg swathed in bandages.

“Head of Nergal, sire, I’ll not have you larking off into the jungles alone without a company of stout Aquilonians at your back! Guts of Dagon, how can you trust these blacks not to break and run at the first flash of steel? Or not to roast and eat you the first time the provisions run short? If I cannot march with this damned leg I can at least ride …”

Conan caught the general of his host by the shoulder and thrust him back on the couch.

“Crom’s blood, old friend, I like it none too well myself,” he growled. “But what is, is; and what must be, must! My Aquilonians are worn out from hacking a road through leagues of stinking jungle. Half are out of action from wounds got in taking the city, and the other half from fever and dysentery. I can wait no longer. King Mbega offers me the pick of his troops. If I stay here in Zembabwei waiting for my own lads to get back on their feet, Thoth-Amon may have crept back to his Stygian lair by then—or perchance fled to Vendhya or Khitai, or the World’s Edge, for aught I know! The old sorcerer hasn’t lost all his magic, you know. So I can wait no longer!”

“But, sire, these black savages …”

“Are mighty warriors, Pallantides, and let none tell you otherwise!” Conan growled in irritation. “I’ve lived amongst them, fought with them, and fought against them, until they call me ’the black king with a white skin.’ None surpasses them in manhood; my old comrade Juma could take on three of your Aquilonian knights with his bare hands and come out of it grinning. Besides, there are the Amazons.”

Pallantides grunted, too wise to argue further. Two weeks before, a company of black women warriors had appeared at the gates of Great Zembabwei to represent Queen Nzinga at the enthronement of Mbega. They were led by Nzinga’s daughter, a handsome, swaggering, full-breasted brown girl of twenty, lithe as a lioness and half a head taller than the tallest of the Aquilonians.

Pallantides knew that more than twenty years before, when Conan had been a Zingaran buccaneer, he had visited the country of the Amazons. There he had known Queen Nzinga—in all senses of the word. Pallantides also knew that Conan suspected the Amazonian princess (who bore the name Nzinga, like all the queens and heirs apparent of her line) of being his own daughter. So the general, wise in the ways of kings and knowing Conan’s temper, held his tongue.

Hearing of Conan’s plan for an expedition to the remotest regions of the unknown south, where the world came to an end, the younger Nzinga threw down her feather-tufted spear at Conan’s feet, offering herself and her woman warriors as allies. Conan had readily accepted.

“But,” said Pallantides, trying another tack, “it might be a thousand leagues ere you reach this land of no return, whereof the old astrologer told you. Even Mbega has no maps of that region, nor has any of his folk gone thither and returned to tell about it.”

Conan flashed a somber smile. “Right enough, but we’re not only marching. We shall ride the wyverns —myself, Conn, and the pick of Mbega’s royal guard. When Thoth-Amon escaped on one of the brutes, not all were turned loose; enough of the flying devils were left behind in the topless towers to bear a score of us. We’ll fly ahead on wyvern-back while Nzinga leads her war-women and Trocero commands a company of Mbega’s regular spearmen on foot. We’ll scout ahead for the best routes. When we sight this Great Stone Skull whereof the Shemite spoke, we’ll turn back, await the arrival of our ground force, and strike at once from the sky and the jungle.”

Pallantides chewed his beard. “You can’t ride those winged devils.”

Conan grinned. “I can try. I’ve ridden horses and camels and even, once, an elephant. So a mere dragon should not daunt me!”

TWO: A Flight of Dragons

Conan soon learned that there was much in what Pallantides had said. The giant pterodactyls, reared and trained by the warriors of Zembabwei, were not the most tractable steeds. They were bad-tempered, quarrelsome, and stupid. They had a dismaying tendency to forget their riders and swoop down to the surface of clearings and rivers in pursuit of prey. They also stank.

Conan had snorted indignantly when the grinning black beast-keepers had tied him securely to the high-backed saddle, a stout affair of tough leather stretched over a bamboo frame. But, on his first flight, his grisly mount abruptly tumbled into a headlong dive after a fleeing gazelle. Then Conan realized the need for the thongs that held him to his seat.

The Zembabwans carried stout teakwood clubs, fastened to a loop of the saddle, wherewith to beat the wyverns into obedience whenever their predatory instincts got the better of their training. Conan battered his flying dragon into groggy flight again. He would, he thought, prefer to take his chances afoot in the jungle, with the warriors of Nzinga and Mbega.

Still, there was no denying that the wyverns moved at a speed that left those on the ground far behind. While the black fighters hacked their way through the dense growth below, Conan and his scouting force ranged far ahead, spying out the best routes. Once they sighted a black army, posting itself for an ambush of the ground force. A simultaneous swoop of the wyverns close over the heads of the hostile spearmen sent them into headlong, screaming flight.

After a time, the jungle thinned out to parkland, and the ground force speeded up. Their progress was still snail-like compared to that of the wyvern squadron, which could travel at several times the speed of even a mounted man. And there were no horses in these parts. Conan was told that they were crossing a belt in which a wasting disease slew all horses. Now and then a cluster of black specks on the savanna indicated a herd of antelope, buffalo, or other grass-eaters.

Day after day, Conan soared far ahead of his army. Then he returned to meet his ground force: Nzinga’s Amazons, Mbega’s warriors under Count Trocero’s command, and a train of women bearing food and supplies on their heads. From his height, they looked like a column of black ants. Unable by reason of age to keep up with the brisk marching pace of the warriors, Trocero most of the time was carried in a litter borne on the shoulders of four stalwart blacks.

Each day Conan fumed with impatience when he saw how little ground the force had covered since dawn, although he well knew that these folk were marching at a rate that even his tough Aquilonian veterans would have had a hard time to keep up with.

The moon had been full the night when Conan and his son had overthrown Mbega’s usurping co-king Nenaunir, who had seized sole power for himself and imprisoned his twin brother. The moon had dwindled to a silver sliver when Conan and his little army had set out in pursuit of Thoth-Amon.

During this journey, the moon twice waxed to full and shrank again to a slim silver crescent. Now it was again broadening toward the full. To Conan’s right, in the west, the haze-reddened sun was sinking toward the jagged peaks that fenced the horizon. In the east, to his left, the pallid moon, in her first quarter, stood well up in the sky.

Five hundred feet below where Conan sat his wyvern, the land was rolling and rough, cut up by many ravines and gullies. It was clad in golden dry grass with patches of scrubby, thorny herbage and trees, now mostly dry, brown, leafless, and deadlooking because the country was in its dry season. Ahead, the hummocks swelled to a range of hills. From the information croaked out by old Rimush before his mysterious death, and from the words of natives queried along the way, he should be approaching the giant waterfall of which Rimush had spoken.

Ere long, his heart leaped with fierce joy as he sighted the misty plume that rose from a cleft in the hills ahead. A few more beats of the reptile’s ponderous wings brought him within sight of the white glitter of the fall itself. There a small river, winding out of the hills, plunged over an escarpment half as high as Conan’s own altitude.

Conan wondered whether he ought to return to the ground force, now far behind. No, he thought; he would make a cast of a few leagues eastward, as he had been directed by the Shemitish astrologer, and then swing north again. He should be able to rejoin his troops before dark.

So Conan tugged on his reins and turned the flapping monster to the left. Behind him, Prince Conn and Mbega’s guardsmen followed his lead.

Conan turned, the wind whipping his gray-shot mane across his face, and peered through watering eyes to where his son rode. Young Conn was grinning. His square-jawed face was eager and his fierce blue eyes were alive and sparkling. Conan, his hard face softening, growled an affectionate curse under his breath.

The lad was obviously having the time of his life. Since he had joined the expedition at Nebthu on the River Styx, he had been through desert warfare, a jungle trek, and the siege of Zembabwei. By now he ought to have learned a few things about the task of being a warrior-king. His experience on this hazardous march into the Far South could never have been gained from tutors or books. Conan decided that he had been right to ignore the advice of his councilors and bring his son on this expedition.

By late afternoon, the craggy hills rose into bleak plateaus and rugged mountains. This must be the Land of No Return of which old Rimush had spoken. Conan meant to fly briefly over the near side of the mountains, to scout the passes, and then to turn north to rejoin Nzinga, Count Trocero, and their armies. He whacked his wyvern to hasten its flight, since he did not wish to be caught aloft by darkness and perchance miss his rendezvous with the ground force.

The thunder of vast wings sounded on his left. He glanced about to see Conn, his face flushed with excitement, reining up beside him. The lad’s dragon, carrying less weight, was less fatigued than Conan’s. Conn pointed ahead and to the right.

Following his son’s indication, Conan peered through the haze and saw a curious thing. This was a mountain of chalkwhite stone, the lower slope of which had been rudely carved into the shape of an immense grinning death’s head.

Conan’s barbarian heritage of superstition rose within him, bringing a gasp of awe to his lips and a prickling of premonition to his skin. The Great Stone Skull, whereof Rimush had spoken!

Conan’s blazing blue eyes stabbed through the murk. Ahead, a flat, barren strip of dead earth stretched to the foot of the cliff. There, the black arch of a portal yawned. Its lintel was carved like the fanged upper jaw of a skull. From the upper works peered two round ports, like the eye sockets of a skull. It was an eerie thing to see.

Then terror struck!

A shock ran through Conan’s burly frame, leaving him gasping and trembling with unaccustomed weakness. His senses swam; his heart labored, as if he had flown into an invisible cloud of poisonous vapor.

The same weird force affected his reptilian mount. The wyvern staggered, slipped to one side, and hurtled toward the sterile plain below, where the white skull brooded starkly over a haunted, shadowy land.

THREE:Land of Illusions

Conan jerked back the reins with a heave that would have broken a horse’s jaw. The wyvern responded sluggishly, red eyes dimmed, snaky tail hanging limply. But respond it did, as its ribbed wings opened to catch the rushing wind and brake its headlong fall.

The groggy reptile came to earth with a thunder of batlike wings. Conan hastily untied the thongs that bound him to the saddle and sprang to the grassy ground below, shaking his head to clear his groggy wits. Had the wyvern flown through some updraft of noxious gas?

He peered aloft. The others of his scouting force had encountered the same aerial barrier. One by one, their stunned mounts tumbled from the sky. Foremost among these was Prince Conn. He dangled limply from the saddle-thongs, white face blank and senseless.

Conan’s gut muscles tightened. The taste of fear was like vile brass on his tongue, oily and sour. Sweat started in cold globules from his brows as he watched his son plummet with his steed towards the ground. The aging king growled a wordless, beseeching cry, scarred fist clutching and closing helplessly on empty air.

Then the rush of clean air seemed to rouse the fainting lad; his dulled eyes took in the blurred vista of dead earth swooping up towards him, then they blazed with the unquenchable fires that flamed in the gaze of his mighty sire. Recognizing his danger in an instant, the boy flung every ounce of vigor his lithe young thews contained, jerking back the reins, snapping the winged reptile to semi-alertness even as Conan had done a moment earlier.

Relief gusted through the king of Aquilonia as he watched his son bring the reptile lurching drunkenly—but safely—to earth. He sprinted to where Conn slumped in the saddle, shaken but safe. Conan ripped loose the thongs, helped Conn to earth, and crushed the boy in a fierce, inarticulate embrace.

Not all of the aerial party were so fortunate. Two of Mbega’s guardsmen failed to recover from the effects of the wizardly sky barrier. They crashed to earth with a sickening crunch of snapping bones. The rest, however, managed to bring their numbed reptiles floundering to earth, though sometimes with bone-shaking impacts.

Conan’s wits sharpened as the lingering effects of the uncanny barrier faded. He became aware of something wrong. Conn sensed the strangeness, too, and pointed in wordless amazement.

From aloft they had seen a dead plain of sterile earth or sand stretching to meet the face of the white mountain which was grotesquely hewn into the likeness of a grinning skull. Now they stood knee-deep in the lush grass of a velvety meadow, spangled with small flowers, white and blue and scarlet. In the middle distance, a herd of long-horned cattle placidly cropped the herbage. The meadow sloped away up to the cliff as before.

But now that cliff presented a wholly different aspect. Conan’s volcanic gaze narrowed and a tingle of supernatural awe prickled his nape. For the cliff, which from the air seemed to have been carven into the form of a skull, now appeared as the facade of a splendid, ornate palace.

Across the front of the cliff marched a row of slender pilasters. These upheld a broad architrave carved in reliefs of nymphs and satyrs and many-headed gods. From the center of this architectural mass jutted a shady portico, in back of which a tall portal led into the interior of the cliff.

Conan’s face mirrored his disbelief. The burly barbarian trusted his senses; but now he wondered which was the illusion: the skull-shape seen from aloft, or the exotic, ornate splendor that now confronted him. He asked himself whether the barrier into which he had flown might not have been made of some mephitic gas, which blurred his sight or cast illusions upon his mind.

Behind him, Mbega’s blacks, having recovered from the effects of the aerial barrier, were dismounting and hobbling their reptilian mounts.

Still doubtful, Conan bent to touch the swaying grasses, his massive scarred hands awkwardly gentle with the small, starry flowers. He lifted his head, drawing the clean air deeply into his lungs. The heavy smell of perfumed flowers and of lush grass was strong in his nostrils.

He peered at the cliff. In the ruddy light of the setting sun, veins of quartz sparkled; the ornate white-marble facade was clear and distinct to his eyes. Every detail was sharp and unambiguous.

He shrugged. It may have been a zone of poisonous vapor that had stimulated fantastic visions; or else…But nothing was to be gained by standing here in speculation. Conan’s bent was to resolve such puzzles not by arguing theories with himself, but by investigating the source of the enigma at first hand.

As he started forward, a sharp cry of “Angalia!” made him turn. It was Mkwawa, the officer in command of the guardsmen, pointing. Spear points came up, their blades flashing redly in the setting sun as the warriors snapped to alertness.

Figures were drifting through the pillar-fronted palace, coming toward them through the swaying grass. They were women: dusky, sinuous, with smiling red lips and eyes like black jewels. Little crystal bells were woven through the coils of their hair, so that each lithe figure was surrounded by a faintly chiming music. They were young, well formed, and thinly veiled.

Mkwawa looked a question at Conan. The king frowned, then shrugged.

“The beasts are still groggy from the bad air we flew through,” he said. “Let us give them a rest ere we venture aloft again. Meanwhile, perchance we can learn something from these women, who do not seem dangerous. Tell half your men to go with me as a guard, whilst the rest care for the wyverns. Detail one man to fly back to the army, to set them on our trail.”

The black officer snapped out his orders. Presently Conan, Conn, and their dozen guardsmen started for the enigmatic cliffside palace. Conan tugged the ends of his fierce mustache in thought. His face settled into an impassive bronzen mask, but inwardly he was troubled. Was this an elaborate trap? He had not lived to reach his late fifties without acquiring a strong vein of wary suspiciousness. Something, certainly, was wrong about a place that changed its entire appearance in a few heartbeats.

FOUR: Golden Wine

It was the evening of the third day after Conan’s arrival at the rock-cut palace—actually, a small cave-city. Its name, he had learned, was Yanyoga. Queen Lilit had promised the visitors a splendid feast as soon as she could make the arrangements, and the time of the feast had come.

On the marble floor of a great hall, among a select company of the queen’s kinsmen and ministers, Conan sprawled on a nest of silken cushions and worked away at a horn of honey-hearted wine. The barbarian felt curiously lazy and relaxed. His belly was filled with subtly flavored viands. The golden wine was thin and cold, and through his veins it sang its heady song. To one side of the hall, Conan’s black guardsmen also feasted.

Beyond, wearing his meticulously polished cuirass, young Conn sprawled on the cushions. He ogled a troop of dancing girls whose sinuous bodies wove a graceful sequence of suggestive postures. Their only garments were strings of beads about their waists and loins. Conan grinned indulgently at his son’s fixed gaze but said nothing. ’Twould be only a matter of time before the lad broached his first maidenhead. Conan had not been much older when he began his roamings, in the course of which he had quickly shed the grim puritanism of a Cimmerian village.

The queen of this cavern-palace, Lilit, sat apart from her guests on an onyx dais. Although Conan had questioned her at length, she professed to know nothing of Thoth-Amon or of the skull-like appearance of the cliff as seen from the air. This land, she explained, had many geysers and fumaroles, whence noxious vapors seeped into the air from underground chambers.

That explanation, Conan thought, would have to serve for the time being, albeit his suspicions were not altogether lulled. Still, Queen Lilit, speaking the Shemish trade language current among the black nations, had told a plausible story of how she and her subjects came to be there.

A few centuries before, she said, a mighty king in Vendhya had sent forth a fleet on a trading mission to Iranistan. A typhoon had blown this fleet far off its course across the Southern Ocean, and the battered survivors had made landfall not many leagues from where they now were. They had found a race of small, yellow-skinned aborigines, whom they had enslaved and who now served them as serfs. The men of the expedition had wedded the slave girls who had been sent from Vendhya as part of the cargo. These folk and their descendants had carved Yanyoga out of the soft, chalky rock of this cliff face.

The palace, Conan thought, was really too ostentatious and exotic for his taste, for he preferred a more austere style of: life. The royal palace in Tarantia, built on a magnificent scale by his unlamented predecessor Numedides, was itself too showy for his liking. From his private apartments in the palace he had long ago banished the silken draperies and carpets and the bejewled sculptures, preferring bare stonewalls and rush-strewn floors like those he had known as a boy in his rugged Cimmerian homeland.

This place savored of those he had known in his early manhood: the palace of King Yildiz of Turan, whom he had served as a mercenary, at Aghrapur; that at Shamballah, the capital of the mysterious valley of Meru, beyond the lonely steppes of Hyrkania; and that of King Shu of Kusan, in far Khitai. Here, too, were lavishly ornamented, fantastically carven walls, columns, and lintels. Remembering his brief enslavement in Shamballah, the City of Skulls, Conan lost himself in a reverie over old times and lost comrades and distant wars. Or was the honey-flavored wine befuddling his wits?

He fell into a light doze. Thus he did not notice when Conn, after stealing a quick glance at his nodding sire, slipped from his place and quietly left the hall.

Nor did he see the gaunt, grim-faced, swarthy man who observed all with gloating eyes from the shadow of a column. This man’s wasted form was swathed in faded emerald green. Although this man had, to the eye of the beholder, aged by decades since their last meeting, Conan would have known him at once as his ancient foe Thoth-Amon.

Conn was young and lusty, and his blood ran hot. One dancing girl in particular had caught his eyes. She was some years older than he, with full breasts like golden fruit and red lips ripe for kissing. Her jewel-bright gaze held his, and her gliding body was all warm animal flesh. When the dance ended, the boy observed how the girl lingered, looking back at him from the shadow of a distant pillar. Catching his eye from across the hall, she had licked her lips and run her hand over her belly and thighs in a suggestive manner.

Inwardly trembling, Conn wove through the feasters after the dancing girl. It was now or never, he thought.

He was not altogether ignorant of women. Back in Aquilonia, more than one buxom kitchen maid or serving girl had sought to catch the eye of the king’s son. Beyond a few inexpert caresses and flustered kisses, however, none of these liaisons had culminated in what Conn, like most boys, regarded as the ultimate test of manhood. Well, this was his chance to prove his masculinity at last!

The girl was still standing in the shadow of the column.

He slid his strong young arm around her slender waist and drew her to him, trying to plant a kiss, but she laughed and eluded his efforts.

“Not here!” she breathed. “The queen…”

“Where, then?”

“Come …”

Slipping out of his embrace but sliding her fingers into his, the girl led Conn through the entrance of the hall into the dim wilderness of corridors and chambers beyond. Without even thinking of a possible trap, since his brain teemed with images of quite another sort, the boy followed her into the darkness.

One by one, the other feasters also rose and departed, leaving Conan dozing alone on his cushions. The honey wine made a puddle on the marble floor where the great buffalo horn had fallen from his lax fingers.

Slender, swarthy serving men appeared in the almost empty hall. On silent feet they glided among the cushions abandoned by the absent feasters. The black guardsmen had left their spears and bronze battle-axes and hardwood clubs behind, not thinking to need these in the amorous encounters they expected. One by one, the serving men gathered these up, passing them out of the hall. Two went to where Conan lay snoring on his cushions. Supple hands relieved him, too, of his Aquilonian longsword and dagger.

The serving men glanced up to where Queen Lilit sat enthroned, observing all with a small; secret smile. In a sibilant, whispering language very different from that wherein they had conversed with their guests, the queen and her servants spoke. They and Conan were the only persons left in the hall.

Lilit rose and glided gracefully down the steps to where Conan sprawled, drunkenly snoring. From the servant who held the Cimmerian’s weapons, she selected the long poniard. Drawing the weapon from its sheath, she smiled down at the oblivious Cimmerian.

Then, quick as the flick of a serpent’s tongue, the blade flashed towards his heart.

FIVE: Children of the Serpent

In the dimness of a secluded apartment, lit by a pair of flickering rushlights, Conn caught the slave girl in his arms. His hot panting kisses fell on her neck and shoulders as he forced her down upon a divan draped with silken stuffs.

Pausing above the reclining dancer, the prince cast off his girdle and tugged impatiently at the fastenings of his cuirass. This armor was a back-and-breast of highly polished steel. It was a little tight, since Conn had grown in the twelvemonth since the royal armorer had hammered it out to his measure. It was the first piece of plate armor that Conan had owned. His pride in that cuirass had led him to spend many hours, when the rest of the Aquilonian force was resting from its arduous trek, in polishing it free of any trace of rust.

While the naked girl writhed languidly, purring, on the divan, Conn at last got the straps unbuckled. He squirmed out of the cuirass. Too fond of the armor to drop it carelessly on the floor and mar its silvery surface, even in this moment of passion, he set it down carefully.

As he did, in the feeble illumination of the rushlights, he saw the reflection of the girl in the polished surface of the breastplate. And in this mirror he saw the girl as she really was.

The girl’s body was still human—though less so than it had appeared to his direct vision. But atop that body, where a smiling face should have been, was a mask of spine-chilling horror. For the head of the girl was the scaled, slope-browed, wedge-shaped head of a snake, with lidless, slit-pupiled eyes, fanged jaws, and flickering, forked tongue.

Conn acted without thought. Millions of years of primitive instinct lay in the deeper, dormant layers of his mind. One look into those soulless eyes, and a thousand aeons of primordial instinct were triggered into life.

The boy sprang away from the couch to where his girdle lay. Steel rasped against leather as he tore his sword from the scabbard and sprang forward again. Light winked on the gleaming steel as Conn, white-faced with horror, drove the blade between the soft, round breasts of the serpent-woman.

He drew the sword out, dripping blood, and drove it in again and again.

The girl died, but not easily. She died in long, writhing spasms. As life ebbed, her body lost much of the human semblance it had worn. Dull gray scales took the place of warm brown skin. Conn turned his eyes away, revolted, before the final revelation. Dropping his sword with a clatter, he stumbled to a corner and was suddenly sick, in an uncontrollable spasm of revulsion.

When it was over, he felt weak but purged. His mind cleared. Now he knew what it was all about. The girl-thing had lured him outside, as others of its kind had doubtless lured away Mbega’s blacks and perhaps his father as well. They had lured them into an amorous embrace, in order to open their serpentine jaws and sink envenomed fangs into their deluded would-be lovers.

Perhaps he alone had escaped the toils of this uncanny trap, all because the magical illusion could not be reproduced in a reflecting surface. This illusion was like a meticulously detailed mirage superimposed on reality.

Conn’s brain reeled as he strove to understand these revelations. He knew the ancient myths of the serpent-folk. The god of the Aquilonians was Mitra the Light-Bringer, who in the legends of the West had slain Set the Old Serpent. But the reality behind the legend was older and grimmer.

It had not been the sword of an immortal god that had crushed down the Snake of Old Night, but ordinary men, battling the hissing minions of Set in a million-year war. The first men, newly sprung from their apelike forebears, had at first groveled beneath the lash of their serpentine masters. From this state of thralldom the heroes of the dawn had risen to break their shackles and to lead their people to many hard-fought victories.

The serpent-folk, the old myths whispered, had received from their father, Set, the power to becloud the minds of men, so that to human eyes they looked like ordinary human beings. Kull, the hero-king of ancient Valusia, had narrowly triumphed over the arisen serpent, when he discovered that the reptile folk were living unsuspected amidst the very cities of men.

Now, it seemed, the last survivors of this age-old war had fled the length of the world to its uttermost rim. Here, in the unknown mountains between the jungle and the sea, they had bided their time unmolested.

The boy’s eyes flashed with the realization that he, alone of all men living, had guessed the secret.

SIX: The Skull-Faced Man

“Hold!” thundered a deep voice.

Lilit’s hand was arrested in midair as the resonant command rolled through the incense-misted hall. The point of the dagger halted inches from Conan’s breast.

Queen Lilit turned to confront the gaunt, stooped figure, swathed in robes of faded and spotted emerald-green, who had interrupted her slaying of the unconscious Cimmerian. Her lips writhed back, exposing sharp white teeth. Eyes like dark gems lashed malignant fires. The pointed tip of a pink tongue flickered between her teeth.

“Who commands here, Stygian? You or I?”

Thoth-Amon faced the queen unblinkingly. Age had come upon the archimage since Conan had smashed the Black Ring in the battle at Nebthu months before. With the loss of his power base, the earth’s mightiest sorcerer had been harried south before the iron legions of Aquilonia—south to Zembabwei, where his last human ally reigned on a bloody throne.

Now the sanguinary reign of the wizard-king Nenaunir had been toppled in flame and thunder. Again Thoth-Amon fled before the Cimmerian’s vengeance. Conan had pursued him to the world’s uttermost edge.

With each defeat, Thoth-Amon’s centuries bore more heavily upon him. Now his form was old, shrunken, and frail. His face was like a skull, the dusky skin wrinkled and leathery. But still his burning gaze held terrific power; still his voice, backed by the unyielding iron of a disciplined will, was an insidious tool of persuasion.

Hither he had fled to take refuge with his last allies, the prehuman serpent-folk. For centuries he had held them pent in this southern realm. He held them back by bribe and division and magical spell; for, though he and they both worshiped mighty Set, he had no intention of letting them regain their rule over the human race. The empire of evil he dreamed of rearing over the West, he intended to rule alone.

Now, however, he had lost all his human confederates. In desperation had he sought the homeland of the serpent-folk, offering himself as an ally instead of an opponent. They had taken him in—not, he knew, from friendship or compassion, for these sentiments were alien to their kind—but to use him in rebuilding their long-vanished empire. His sovereignty over the servants of Set he had lost; but Conan of Aquilonia he was determined not to lose.

“Vengeance is mine, Lilit,” he said, his somber gaze unreadable. “In all else, I yield to you; but in this I am adamant. The Cimmerian is my captive.”

The serpent-woman eyed him obliquely. “I know your cunning heart, jackal of Stygia,” she hissed. “You think to sacrifice him to Father Set and thus, by offering the greatest champion of Mitra on earth, to regain the favored position your failures in the past have lost to you. But I, too, have plans for the Cimmerian …”

Those plans, however, were never revealed. Even as the queen opened her mouth to utter them, she staggered from a sudden blow from behind. With unbelieving eyes, she stared down at the point of a bronze-bladed spear protruding… scarlet and dripping… from between her breasts.

Her spine arched, while her frozen features blurred and dissolved into the head of a serpent. She fell forward on the dais, writhing in slow, undulant spasms of death. Thoth-Amon turned quickly to confront the band of gigantic black women who had burst suddenly into the shadowy hall.

“By Mamajambo’s war club!” exclaimed the princess Nzinga, wrenching out the spear she had thrown. “We have come just in time!”

The gray-bearded Trocero, followed by a file of Mbega’s warriors, crowded into the hall, to see Nzinga bending over the slowly writhing body of the dying serpent-queen.

“What monstrous sorcery is this?” she demanded of him fiercely. “We see from a distance a cliff like a great skull; but when we come nigh, it changes to a gorgeous palace, and the dry soil changes to a lush meadow. Now we find the lord Conan snoring like a besotted drunkard, and this woman-thing bending over him with a knife, and an old man in green …”

“Thoth-Amon, by all the gods!” gasped the count.

“Oh, aye?” the black girl murmured, absently, her gaze turning again to the figure that writhed slowly in its death spasms on the steps before them. “And what hell-spawned devil is this?”

Trocero’s fine features were drawn and harrowed. His voice sank to a thin whisper.

“The—snake—that—speaks!” he muttered.

The girl turned fierce eyes on him, her hand flashing to hilt of her broadsword.

“Old man, you speak of that which no man should name aloud! Can it be, though, that the old black myths were—true?”

“The proof of it lies wriggling at your feet,” the Aquilonian noble said quietly. “Look! Even as we fence with words, it… changes …”

The Amazon girl watched as long as she could, then turned away and shut her eyes as if to blot the very memory from her mind. On the steps before them, the unthinkable monstrosity that had been a queenly, radiant, voluptuous woman, died.

And then it was that the hissing hordes fell on them, quite suddenly, from the shadows of the colonnade. And Trocero and Nzinga had work to do with spear and knife and sword, and were too busy for further speech.

In the swift succession of inexplicable events, neither the Aquilonian nobleman nor the Amazonian warrior-girl had noticed the strangest and most inexplicable of all.

For Conan and Thoth-Amon were nowhere to be seen.

Both the sprawling, unconscious Cimmerian and his sorcerous arch-enemy had vanished, as if they had melted into thin air.

SEVEN: At the Edge of the World

Conan awoke suddenly from his drugged slumber. He came awake all at once, like a cat whose delicate senses have been roused to alertness by the presence of a foe. The Cimmerian had retained this savage trait through all the long years from his boyhood in the northern wastes. Decades of kingship over a sophisticated realm had laid but a thin veneer of civilization over his primitive soul.

He lay still while his keen senses tested his surroundings. To his ears came the dull boom of waves pounding a rocky shore .His nostrils tasted the air and detected the salt tang of the open sea.

Opening his eyes to slits, he saw that he lay sprawled on damp sand amidst huge boulders. Above him arched the purple skies of night, ablaze with huge stars; among these the moon, nearly full, shone like a silver shield. The moonlight silvered the billows of an unknown sea.

From a brief glance at the starry skies, Conan knew that this sea stretched away to the south. But as far as his smoldering gaze could penetrate the murk of night, he could see no land. It was as if he lay at the world’s very edge, and the shore thereof was washed by the endless seas of eternity. How had he come hither?

He rose to his feet and peered around him. Then his gaze was riveted by a figure that stood on a massive rock above him.

The man, once tall and commanding, had dwindled and become bent and shrunken. His shaven pate and strong-boned, hawklike face had been stern and kingly; now the flesh had fallen away, leaving his head as gaunt and grim as a skull. His faded, tattered green robe showed gray in the moonlight.

A hand like a withered claw clutched a talisman in the form of a carven gem against the bony breast of the silent figure. Around the middle finger of this hand was coiled a massive ring of copper, in the form of a serpent holding its tail in its jaws. Weird fires in the heart of the gem cast a flickering light on his sunken features. From sunken sockets, Thoth-Amon’s dark eyes burned into Conan’s, who had felt the force of these probing, uncanny orbs before.

“We meet again, dog of Cimmeria!” said Thoth-Amon in a thin voice.

“For the last time, jackal of Stygia!” growled Conan.

He had been disarmed, but the strength that slept along his massive arms and shoulders was enough to break the gaunt, bent, weary figure of his ancient foe. Conan, however, made no move against the other. He knew the powers that Thoth-Amon could command with a word, a gesture, an effort of will, and he respected these powers.

He was curious to learn why Thoth-Amon had brought him to this beach at the brink of the known world. While he lay in drugged slumber, the master-magician could easily have slain him. But he had permitted him to live and had borne him away to this unknown place with the aid of the unseen demons that still served him. Why?

As if in answer to Conan’s unspoken query, Thoth-Amon began speaking slowly, in a weary, listless voice, as if the fires of life burned low in the wasted figure. As he spoke, however, his voice gained in strength, until it recalled the masterful, resonant tones of the Thoth-Amon of old. Conan listened quietly, his arms folded on his mighty breast and his mustachioed face impassive.

“You have hounded me down the length of the world, barbarian dog,” said Thoth-Amon. “One by one, you have sundered from me my most powerful allies. At Nebthu, aided by that drunken fool of a druid, you broke the Black Ring and scattered the wizards of the South —even as you broke the White Hand in dank and wintry Hyperborea. By luck and fate, you toppled the throne of Nenaunir. Now there is no further realm to which I can fly for refuge.”

Conan said nothing. Thoth-Amon sighed, shrugged, and continued:

“Here at the world’s edge dwell the remnants of the ancient serpent-folk who ruled the world before the coming of men. The earliest human kingdoms strove with them and broke their power. When by magical illusions they sought to prolong their existence in disguise among men, your own ancestor, Kull the Conqueror, discovered their secret and crushed them once more.

“Long have I known that the last of the primal rulers of the elder world dwelt here in secret, never relinquishing their hope of regaining what they view as their rightful place in the cosmos. From them I gained the knowledge that enabled me to become vicar of Set in the West, charged with the mighty mission of overthrowing the abominable worships of Mitra and Ishtar and Asura. At the same time, I held the serpent-folk in check, knowing their insatiable ambition and having no wish to share my own rule with the children of the Serpent.

“My splendid plans you alone have thwarted—how, I know not. You are no priest or prophet or wizard. You are but a crude, ignorant, blundering, boorish adventurer, for the moment tossed high by the waves of fate. Mayhap your degenerate, effeminate Western gods have helped you in subtle ways. In any case, you have frustrated all my hopes and driven me from my throne at the center of a world-wide league of magicians, transforming the would-be conqueror of the West into a harried fugitive.

“But all is not yet lost! For unto Set himself I shall offer up your immortal soul in sacrifice. The Slithering God will feast well on the living soul of Conan the Cimmerian. Restored to his favor, I shall unleash the uncanny powers of the serpent-folk in one last, great crusade …”

Then Conan struck. His grim features contorted into a snarling mask, he took two running steps, bounded high, and caught Thoth-Amon’s scrawny throat in his massive hands. The impact of his charge hurled the pair off the rock on the other side, to fall locked together to the damp sand below.

Strange was the battle between the champion of light and the champion of darkness, as they fought at the very edge of the world under the blazing stars.

EIGHT: Requiem for a Sorcerer

Conan’s tigerish charge had taken the gaunt Stygian by surprise. Little strength remained in Thoth-Amon’s withered form, and Conan should have been able to break his neck like a dry twig. The Stygian’s wizardly powers, however, lent him unearthly resources. Even as Conan’s fingers locked on Thoth-Amon’s fragile neck, one fleshless claw struck Conan’s brow with the glimmering gem that the sorcerer had clutched to his breast.

The light, feeble blow glanced from Conan’s brow, but its touch was like cold fire. The Cimmerian gasped, his senses swimming as a numbing paralysis spread along his nerves. Cold waves of blackness engulfed his consciousness. It seemed to the barbarian that he sank through black waters whose bite benumbed his flesh, until his naked spirit alone rose from the vortex of nameless forces on the darkling sands.

Still was Thoth-Amon held helpless in Conan’s grip. It was as though the sorcerer, too, had left his fleshly integument behind. Two impalpable spirits, locked in conflict, rose from the vortex into a dim region beyond the world. About them, mist swirled and billowed, gray and colorless. Above them, black stars burned against natural skies; the light from them was as cold as the breath of arctic winds.

To Conan it seemed that the gaunt body of the Stygian had turned into a writhing coil of vapor. His own body had become much the same: a thick, curling tendril of some fiery mist. Without limbs, they somehow clung together in bodiless combat, drifting under the gaze of the black stars.

Conan fought as never before—not with the iron grip of massive thews, but with some impalpable force within his very spirit. Perhaps it was the essence of his strength and courage and manhood that burned in his heart.

In spirit form, Thoth-Amon, too, had strength beyond that which his withered flesh possessed. His blows were like the blast of cold fires of hatred. Beneath them Conan gasped. His strength ebbed; his consciousness dimmed.

Locked in battle, the two drifted beneath the black stars, and ever the power of Thoth-Amon grew while that of Conan waned. Still the Cimmerian clung to his foe with a remorseless grip. He fought on doggedly, although he now clutched the very limits of consciousness. Blackness gathered about his dimming mind.

Then the coil of writhing vapor that was Thoth-Amon’s spirit stiffened and writhed in Conan’s impalpable clutch. Thoth-Amon shrieked soundlessly—an awful, hollow cry of agony and despair. The bodiless thing melted in his grasp. It disintegrated and faded into the cold mists of the void.

Conan floated for a time, panting as it were, while strength seeped back into his exhausted spirit. Somehow he knew that the life force of Thoth-Amon no longer existed.

After a time, Conan came to himself on the sandy shore by the nameless sea. A weeping boy clung to him, begging him to live. He blinked down at the dead thing that lay beneath him, still in the mechanical grip of his aching hands. Then he looked at what the boy had used, and then flung aside:

The sword, soaked to its hilt in black blood. The sword he had given to Conn for his latest birthday. The sword on whose blade, in an idle moment, the old White Druid, Diviatix, had scratched the Sign of Protection… the looped cross of Mitra, Lord of Light. . .the Cross of Life!

And thus it was that the Last Battle ended. For forty years, Conan of Cimmeria and Thoth-Amon of Stygia had faced each other across the great gaming-board of the western world. And now, at the world’s edge, the long duel was over and done.

“He was killing you, Father! I didn’t know what to do, so I stabbed him… And then I th-thought you were dead, you lay so still!” the boy stammered through his tears.

Conan embraced his son. “It’s all right, son. I yet live, though Crom knows I was close to the Black Gates of Death. But they have opened to swallow another’s soul, not mine. Look!”

He nodded at the dead man sprawled on the sands. As they watched, the years at last took their vengeance on the remains of the mightiest magician of shadow-haunted Stygia. Thoth-Amon’s flesh dried, withered, and flaked away into impalpable dust, till a fleshless skull grinned up at them. Then the skull itself became cracked and pitted, while the bones beneath the empty green robe crumbled to powder.

Conan climbed to his feet, turning his back on the remains. He picked up the glimmering gem with which Thoth-Amon had struck him and pitched it far out to sea.

“So end all magical mummery!” he growled. “May it stay at the bottom of the sea for a hundred thousand years!”

NINE: Swords Against Shadows

“The girl turned into a snake-headed monster and would have bitten me to death with her poison fangs,” Conn was explaining, “but I put my blade into her and she died. And when I came back into the hall to tell you, Thoth-Amon was there and the Queen was bending over you, and you were asleep. And then the Amazons came in. and the Princess threw a spear through the Queen, and she turned into a snake-thing, too. But Thoth-Amon and a servant—I couldn’t see him very well, but he had horns and was strong as a bull—carried you from the hall, and no one seemed to be able to see it except me, as if there was a spell on them that hid what was happening from their eyes.

“They took you through a secret panel behind a tapestry and down a long black tunnel cut right through the mountain. Then the other serpent-folk came pouring into the hall. I followed as soon as I could, but when I got outside under the stars I couldn’t tell where you were, because there were big rocks all around and I had to search and search… and then I found you, fighting Thoth-Amon on the sand, and it was like you were asleep, like you were fighting in your sleep…”

Conan nodded somberly, letting the boy talk it all out, while they retraced the way Conn had come. They found the entrance to the secret tunnel that led through the mountain and back into the skull-palace where the eerie powers of the serpent-folk had beclouded their minds with shadows and illusions. A distant clamor echoed faintly down the black length of the tunnel; a furious battle was being waged there in the hall of feasting.

Conan’s grim lips lightened in a huge grin, and his heart rose lustily within his burly breast. After these uncanny magical battles beyond the world, under the watchful gaze of strange black stars, it would be like food and drink to him to face a foe of flesh and blood, with clean steel in his hands!

Back there, he knew, Nzinga and her Amazons, with Trocero and the black warriors of Zembabwei, were battling the last of the serpent-people. They were few enough, Crom knew; but the Amazon girl was spoiling for a good fight, and so was he. And the serpent-folk, old and weary, had not fought mortal foes for untold ages, secure and confident in their remoteness from the lands of men.

With their Queen slain and with Thoth-Amon at last gone down to the cold hells of the unresting dead, they were few, and weaker than they might otherwise have been. No doubt it would be a good, long, hard fight, but Conan grinned at the thought of standing beside the black Amazons in one last battle against world-old foes. He glanced back briefly toward where Thoth-Amon had fallen, thinking: He was the greatest of all the foes I have overcome. I shall miss the old scoundrel, in a way.

“Do you still have your sword?” Conan growled.

“No, father, I left it on the beach.”

“Give me your dagger and go back and get it, then; I’ll wait for you here.” While the boy scampered off, Conan hunted around for a good-sized rock. He found a small, egg-shaped boulder about the size of a human skull, hard and flinty. He hefted it, a gleam of approval in his eyes. He hungered to smash in the heads of a few snake-men with it. Snakes die slow and hard, he knew. But they die at last.

Conn rejoined him, the sword gleaming in his capable young fist. Together, father and son entered the black tunnel and went to join their friends in the last battle against man’s oldest enemies.

The end.