The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane

But the most curious feature of this curious creature was on its back. A pair of great wings, shaped much like the wings of a moth but with a bony frame and of leathery substance, grew from its shoulders, beginning at a point just back and above where the arms joined the shoulders, and extending half-way to the narrow hips. These wings, Kane reckoned, would measure some eighteen feet from tip to tip.

He laid hold on the creature, involuntarily shuddering at the slick, hard leather-like feel of the skin, and half lifted it. The weight was little more than half as much as it would have been in a man the same height – some six and a half feet. Evidently the bones were of a peculiar bird-like structure and the flesh consisted almost entirely of stringy muscles.

Kane stepped back, surveying the thing again. Then his dream had been no dream after all – that foul thing or another like it had in grisly reality lighted in the tree beside him – a whir of mighty wings! A sudden rush through the sky! Even as Kane whirled he realized he had committed the jungle-farer's unpardonable crime – he had allowed his astonishment and curiosity to throw him off guard. Already a winged fiend was at his throat and there was no time to draw and fire his other pistol. Kane saw, in a maze of thrashing wings, a devilish, semi-human face – he felt those wings battering at him – he felt cruel talons sink deep into his breast; then he was dragged off his feet and felt empty space beneath him.

The winged man had wrapped his limbs about the Englishman's legs, and the talons he had driven into Kane's breast muscles held like fanged vises. The wolf-like fangs drove at Kane's throat but the Puritan gripped the bony throat and thrust back the grisly head, while with his right hand he strove to draw his dirk. The bird-man was mounting slowly and a fleeting glance showed Kane that they were already high above the trees. The Englishman did not hope to survive this battle in the sky, for even if he slew his foe, he would be dashed to death in the fall. But with the innate ferocity of the fighting Anglo-Saxon he set himself grimly to take his captor with him.

Holding those keen fangs at bay, Kane managed to draw his dirk and he plunged it deep into the body of the monster. The bat-man veered wildly and a rasping, raucous screech burst from his half-throttled throat. He floundered wildly, beating frantically with his great wings, bowing his back and twisting his head fiercely in a vain effort to free it and sink home his deadly fangs. He sank the talons of one hand agonizingly deeper and deeper into Kane's breast muscles, while with the other he tore at his foe's head and body. But the Englishman, gashed and bleeding, with the silent and tenacious savagery of a bulldog sank his fingers deeper into the lean neck and drove his dirk home again and again, while far below awed eyes watched the fiendish battle that was raging at that dizzy height.

They had drifted out over the plateau, and the fast-weakening wings of the bat-man barely supported their weight. They were sinking earthward swiftly, but Kane, blinded with blood and battle- fury, knew nothing of this. With a great piece of his scalp hanging loose, his chest and shoulders cut and ripped, the world had become a blind, red thing in which he was aware of but one sensation – the bulldog urge to kill his foe. Now the feeble and spasmodic beating of the dying monster's wings held them hovering for an instant above a thick grove of gigantic trees, while Kane felt the grip of claws and twining limbs grow weaker and the slashing of the talons become a futile flailing.

With a last burst of power he drove the reddened dirk straight through the breastbone and felt a convulsive tremor run through the creature's frame. The great wings fell limp – and victor and vanquished dropped headlong and plummet-like earthward.

Through a red wave Kane saw the waving branches rushing up to meet them – he felt them flail his face and tear at his clothing, as still locked in that death-clinch he rushed downward through leaves which eluded his vainly grasping hand; then his head crashed against a great limb and an endless abyss of blackness engulfed him.

III THE PEOPLE IN THE SHADOW

Through colossal, black basaltic corridors of night, Solomon Kane fled for a thousand years. Gigantic winged demons, horrific in the utter darkness, swept over him with a rush of great bat-like pinions and in the blackness he fought with them as a cornered rat fights a vampire-bat, while fleshless jaws drooled fearful blasphemies and horrid secrets in his ears, and the skulls of men rolled under his groping feet.

Solomon Kane came back suddenly from the land of delirium and his first sight of sanity was that of a fat, kindly black face bending over him. Kane saw he was in a roomy, clean and well-ventilated hut, while from a cooking-pot bubbling outside wafted savory scents. Kane realized he was ravenously hungry. And he was strangely weak, and the hand he lifted to his bandaged head shook and its bronze was dimmed.

The fat man and another, a tall, gaunt, grim-faced warrior, bent over him, and the fat man said: “He is awake, Kuroba, and of sound mind.” The gaunt man nodded and called something which was answered from without.

“What is this place?” asked Kane, in a language he had learned, akin to the dialect the black had used. “How long have I lain here?”

“This is the last village of Bogonda.” The fat black pressed him back with hands gentle as a woman's. “We found you lying beneath the trees on the slopes, badly wounded and senseless. You have raved in delirium for many days. Now eat.”

A lithe young warrior entered with a wooden bowl full of steaming food and Kane ate ravenously.

“He is like a leopard, Kuroba,” said the fat man admiringly. “Not one in a thousand would have lived with his wounds.”

“Aye,” returned the other. “And he slew the akaana that rent him, Goru.”

Kane struggled to his elbows. “Goru?” he cried fiercely. “The priest who binds men to stakes for devils to eat?”

And he strove to rise so that he could strangle the fat man, but his weakness swept over him like a wave, the hut swam dizzily to his eyes and he sank back panting, where he soon fell into a sound, natural sleep.

Later he awoke and found a slim young girl, named Nayela, watching him. She fed him, and feeling much stronger, Kane asked questions which she answered shyly but intelligently. This was Bogonda, ruled by Kuroba the chief and Goru the priest. None in Bogonda had ever seen or heard of a white man before. She counted the days Kane had lain helpless, and he was amazed. But such a battle as he had been through was enough to kill an ordinary man. He wondered that no bones had been broken, but the girl said the branches had broken his fall and he had landed on the body of the akaana. He asked for Goru, and the fat priest came to him, bringing Kane's weapons.

“Some we found with you where you lay,” said Goru, “some by the body of the akaana you slew with the weapon which speaks in fire and smoke. You must be a god – yet the gods bleed not and you have just all but died. Who are you?”

“I am no god,” Kane answered, “but a man like yourself, albeit my skin be white. I come from a far land amid the sea, which land, mind ye, is the fairest and noblest of all lands. My name is Solomon Kane and I am a landless wanderer. From the lips of a dying man I first heard your name. Yet your face seemeth kindly.”

A shadow crossed the eyes of the shaman and he hung his head.

“Rest and grow strong, oh man, or god or whatever you be,” said he, “and in time you will learn of the ancient curse that rests upon this ancient land.”

And in the days that followed, while Kane recovered and grew strong with the wild beast vitality that was his, Goru and Kuroba sat and spoke to him at length, telling him many curious things.

Their tribe was not aboriginal here, but had come upon the plateau a hundred and fifty years before, giving it the name of their former home. They had once been a powerful tribe in Old Bogonda, on a great river far to the south. But tribal wars broke their power, and at last before a concerted uprising, the whole tribe gave way, and Goru repeated legends of that great flight of a thousand miles through jungle and swampland harried at every step by cruel foes.

At last, hacking their way through a country of ferocious cannibals, they found themselves safe from man's attack – but prisoners in a trap from which neither they nor their descendants could ever escape. They were in the horror-country of Akaana, and Goru said his ancestors came to understand the jeering laughter of the man-eaters who had hounded them to the very borders of the plateau.

The Bogondi found a fertile country with good water and plenty of game. There were numbers of goats and a species of wild pig that throve here in great abundance. At first the black people ate these pigs, but later they spared them for a very good reason. The grasslands between plateau and jungle swarmed with antelopes, buffaloes and the like, and there were many lions. Lions also roamed the plateau, but Bogonda meant “Lion-slayer” in their tongue and it was not many moons before the remnants of the great cats took to the lower levels. But it was not lions they had to fear, as Goru's ancestors soon learned.

Finding that the cannibals would not come past the savannas, they rested from their long trek and built two villages – Upper and Lower Bogonda. Kane was in Upper Bogonda; he had seen the ruins of the lower village. But soon they found that they had strayed into a country of nightmares with dripping fangs and talons. They heard the beat of mighty wings at night, and saw horrific shadows cross the stars and loom against the moon. Children began to disappear and at last a young hunter strayed off into the hills, where night overtook him. And in the gray light of dawn a mangled, half-devoured corpse fell from the skies into the village street and a whisper of ogreish laughter from high above froze the horrified onlookers. Then a little later the full horror of their position burst upon the Bogondi.

At first the winged men were afraid of the black people. They hid themselves and ventured from their caverns only at night. Then they grew bolder. In the full daylight, a warrior shot one with an arrow, but the fiends had learned they could slay a human and its death scream brought a score of the devils dropping from the skies, who tore the slayer to pieces in full sight of the tribe.

The Bogondi then prepared to leave that devil's country and a hundred warriors went up into the hills to find a pass. They found steep walls, up which a man must climb laboriously, and they found the cliffs honeycombed with caves where the winged men dwelt.

Then was fought the first pitched battle between men and bat-men and it resulted in a crushing victory for the monsters. The bows and spears of the black people proved futile before the swoops of the taloned fiends, and of all that hundred that went up into the hills, not one survived; for the akaanas hunted down those that fled and dragged down the last one within bowshot of the upper village.

Then it was that the Bogondi, seeing they could not hope to win through the hills, sought to fight their way out again the way they had come. But a great horde of cannibals met them in the grasslands and in a great battle that lasted nearly all day, hurled them back, broken and defeated. And Goru said while the battle raged, the skies were thronged with hideous shapes, circling above and laughing their fearful mirth to see men die wholesale.

So the survivors of those two battles, licking their wounds, bowed to the inevitable with the fatalistic philosophy of the black man. Some fifteen hundred men, women and children remained, and they built their huts, tilled the soil and lived stolidly in the shadow of the nightmare.

In those days there were many of the bird-people, and they might have wiped out the Bogondi utterly, had they wished. No one warrior could cope with an akaana, for he was stronger than a human, he struck as a hawk strikes, and if he missed, his wings carried him out of reach of a counter-blow. Here Kane interrupted to ask why the blacks did not make war on the demons with arrows. But Goru answered that it took a quick and accurate archer to strike an akaana in midair at all and so tough were their hides that unless the arrow struck squarely it would not penetrate. Kane knew that the blacks were very indifferent bowmen and that they pointed their shafts with chipped stone, bone or hammered iron almost as soft as copper; he thought of Poitiers and Agincourt and wished grimly for a file of stout English archers – or a rank of musketeers.

But Goru said the akaanas did not seem to wish to destroy the Bogondi utterly. Their chief food consisted of the little pigs which then swarmed the plateau, and young goats. Sometimes they went out on the savannas for antelope, but they distrusted the open country and feared the lions. Nor did they haunt the jungles beyond, for the trees grew too close for the spread of their wings. They kept to the hills and the plateau – and what lay beyond those hills none in Bogonda knew.

The akaanas allowed the black folk to inhabit the plateau much as men allow wild animals to thrive, or stock lakes with fish – for their own pleasure. The bat-people, said Goru, had a strange and grisly sense of humor which was tickled by the sufferings of a howling human. Those grim hills had echoed to cries that turned men's hearts to ice.

But for many years, Goru said, once the Bogondi learned not to resist their masters, the akaanas were content to snatch up a baby from time to time, or devour a young girl strayed from the village or a youth whom night caught outside the walls. The bat-folk distrusted the village; they circled high above it but did not venture within. There the Bogondi were safe until late years.

Goru said that the akaanas were fast dying out; once there had been hope that the remnants of his race would outlast them – in which event, he said fatalistically, the cannibals would undoubtedly come up from the jungle and put the survivors in the cooking-pots. Now he doubted if there were more than a hundred and fifty akaanas altogether. Kane asked him why did not the warriors then sally forth on a great hunt and destroy the devils utterly, and Goru smiled a bitter smile and repeated his remarks about the prowess of the bat-people in battle. Moreover, said he, the whole tribe of Bogonda numbered only about four hundred souls now, and the bat-people were their only protection against the cannibals to the west.

Goru said the tribe had thinned more in the past thirty years than in all the years previous. As the numbers of the akaanas dwindled, their hellish savagery increased. They seized more and more of the Bogondi to torture and devour in their grim black caves high up in the hills, and Goru spoke of sudden raids on hunting-parties and toilers in the plantain fields and of the nights made ghastly by horrible screams and gibberings from the dark hills, and blood-freezing laughter that was half human; of dismembered limbs and gory grinning heads flung from the skies to fall in the shuddering village, and of grisly feasts among the stars.

Then came drouth, Goru said, and a great famine. Many of the springs dried up and the crops of rice and yams and plantains failed. The gnus, deer and buffaloes which had formed the main part of Bogonda's meat diet withdrew to the jungle in quest of water, and the lions, their hunger overcoming their fear of man, ranged into the uplands. Many of the tribe died and the rest were driven by hunger to eat the pigs which were the natural prey of the bat-people. This angered the akaanas and thinned the pigs. Famine, Bogondi and the lions destroyed all the goats and half the pigs.

At last the famine was past, but the damage was done. Of all the great droves which once swarmed the plateau, only a remnant was left and these were wary and hard to catch. The Bogondi had eaten the pigs, so the akaanas ate the Bogondi. Life became a hell for the black people, and the lower village, numbering now only some hundred and fifty souls, rose in revolt. Driven to frenzy by repeated outrages, they turned on their masters. An akaana lighting in the very streets to steal a child was set on and shot to death with arrows. And the people of Lower Bogonda drew into their huts and waited for their doom.

And in the night, said Goru, it came. The akaanas had overcome their distrust of the huts. The full flock of them swarmed down from the hills, and Upper Bogonda awoke to hear the fearful cataclysm of screams and blasphemies that marked the end of the other village. All night Goru's people had lain sweating in terror, not daring to move, harkening to the howling and gibbering that rent the night; at last these sounds ceased, Goru said, wiping the cold sweat from his brow, but sounds of grisly and obscene feasting still haunted the night with demon's mockery.

In the early dawn Goru's people saw the hell-flock winging back to their hills, like demons flying back to hell through the dawn, and they flew slowly and heavily, like gorged vultures. Later the people dared to steal down to the accursed village, and what they found there sent them shrieking away; and to that day, Goru said, no man passed within three bowshots of that silent horror. And Kane nodded in understanding, his cold eyes more somber than ever.

For many days after that, Goru said, the people waited in quaking fear, and finally in desperation of fear, which breeds unspeakable cruelty, the tribe cast lots and the loser was bound to a stake between the two villages, in hopes the akaanas would recognize this as a token of submission so that the people of Bogonda might escape the fate of their kinsmen. This custom, said Goru, had been borrowed from the cannibals who in old times worshipped the akaanas and offered a human sacrifice at each moon. But chance had shown them that the akaana could be killed, so they ceased to worship him – at least that was Goru's deduction, and he explained at much length that no mortal thing is worthy of real adoration, however evil or powerful it may be.

His own ancestors had made occasional sacrifices to placate the winged devils, but until lately it had not been a regular custom. Now it was necessary; the akaanas expected it, and each moon they chose from their waning numbers a strong young man or a girl whom they bound to the stake. Kane watched Goru's face closely as he spoke of his sorrow for this unspeakable necessity, and the Englishman realized the priest was sincere. Kane shuddered at the thought of a tribe of human beings thus passing slowly but surely into the maws of a race of monsters.

Kane spoke of the wretch he had seen, and Goru nodded, pain in his soft eyes. For a day and a night he had been hanging there, while the akaanas glutted their vile torture-lust on his quivering, agonized flesh. Thus far the sacrifices had kept doom from the village. The remaining pigs furnished sustenance for the dwindling akaanas, together with an occasional baby snatched up, and they were content to have their nameless sport with the single victim each moon.

A thought came to Kane.

“The cannibals never come up into the plateau?”

Goru shook his head; safe in their jungle, they never raided past the savannas.

“But they hunted me to the very foot of the hills.”

Again Goru shook his head. There was only one cannibal; they had found his footprints. Evidently a single warrior, bolder than the rest, had allowed his passion for the chase to overcome his fear of the grisly plateau and had paid the penalty. Kane's teeth came together with a vicious snap which ordinarily took the place of profanity with him. He was stung by the thought of fleeing so long from a single enemy. No wonder that enemy had followed so cautiously, waiting until dark to attack. But, asked Kane, why had the akaana seized the black man instead of himself – and why had he not been attacked by the bat-man who alighted in his tree that night?

The cannibal was bleeding, Goru answered; the scent called the bat-fiend to attack, for they scented raw blood as far as vultures. And they were very wary. They had never seen a man like Kane, who showed no fear. Surely they had decided to spy on him, take him off guard before they struck.

Who were these creatures? Kane asked. Goru shrugged his shoulders. They were there when his ancestors came, who had never heard of them before they saw them. There was no intercourse with the cannibals, so they could learn nothing from them. The akaanas lived in caves, naked like beasts; they knew nothing of fire and ate only fresh raw meat. But they had a language of a sort and acknowledged a king among them. Many died in the great famine when the stronger ate the weaker. They were vanishing swiftly; of late years no females or young had been observed among them. When these males died at last, there would be no more akaanas; but Bogonda, observed Goru, was doomed already, unless – he looked strangely and wistfully at Kane. But the Puritan was deep in thought.

Among the swarm of native legends he had heard on his wanderings, one now stood out. Long, long ago, an old, old ju-ju man had told him, winged devils came flying out of the north and passed over his country, vanishing in the maze of the jungle-haunted south. And the ju-ju man related an old, old legend concerning these creatures – that once they had abode in myriad numbers far on a great lake of bitter water many moons to the north, and ages and ages ago a chieftain and his warriors fought them with bows and arrows and slew many, driving the rest into the south. The name of the chief was N'Yasunna and he owned a great war canoe with many oars driving it swiftly through the bitter water.

And now a cold wind blew suddenly on Solomon Kane, as if from a Door opened suddenly on Outer gulfs of Time and Space. For now he realized the truth of that garbled myth, and the truth of an older, grimmer legend. For what was the great bitter lake but the Mediterranean Ocean and who was the chief N'Yasunna but the hero Jason, who conquered the harpies and drove them – not alone into the Strophades Isles but into Africa as well? The old pagan tale was true then, Kane thought dizzily, shrinking aghast from the strange realm of grisly possibilities this opened up. For if this myth of the harpies were a reality, what of the other legends – the Hydra, the centaurs, the chimera, Medusa, Pan and the satyrs? All those myths of antiquity – behind them did there lie and lurk nightmare realities with slavering fangs and talons steeped in shuddersome evil? Africa, the Dark Continent, land of shadows and horror, of bewitchment and sorcery, into which all evil things had been banished before the growing light of the western world!

Kane came out of his reveries with a start. Goru was tugging gently and timidly at his sleeve.

“Save us from the akaanas!” said Goru. “If you be not a god, there is the power of a god in you! You bear in your hand the mighty ju-ju stave which has in times gone by been the scepter of fallen empires and the staff of mighty priests. And you have weapons which speak death in fire and smoke – for our young men watched and saw you slay two akaanas. We will make you king – god – what you will! More than a moon has passed since you came into Bogonda and the time for the sacrifice is gone by, but the bloody stake stands bare. The akaanas shun the village where you lie; they steal no more babes from us. We have thrown off their yoke because our trust is in you!”

Kane clasped his temples with his hands. “You know not what you ask!” he cried. “God knoweth it is in my deepest heart to rid the land of this evil, but I am no god. With my pistols I can slay a few of the fiends, but I have but a little powder left. Had I great store of powder and ball, and the musket I shattered in the vampire-haunted Hills of the Dead, then indeed would there be a rare hunting. But even if I slew all these fiends, what of the cannibals?”

“They too will fear you!” cried old Kuroba, while the girl Nayela and the lad, Loga, who was to have been the next sacrifice, gazed at him with their souls in their eyes. Kane dropped his chin on his fist and sighed.

“Yet will I stay here in Bogonda all the rest of my life if ye think I be protection to the people.”

So Solomon Kane stayed at the village of Bogonda of the Shadow. The people were a kindly folk, whose natural sprightliness and fun-loving spirits were subdued and saddened by long dwelling in the Shadow. But now they had taken new heart by the white man's coming and it wrenched Kane's heart to note the pathetic trust they placed in him. Now they sang in the plantain fields and danced about the fires, and gazed at him with adoring faith in their eyes. But Kane, cursing his own helplessness, knew how futile would be his fancied protection if the winged fiends swept suddenly out of the skies.

But he stayed in Bogonda. In his dreams the gulls wheeled above the cliffs of old Devon carved in the clean, blue, wind-whipped skies, and in the day the call of the unknown lands beyond Bogonda clawed at his heart with fierce yearning. But he abode in Bogonda and racked his brains for a plan. He sat and gazed for hours at the ju-ju stave, hoping in desperation that black magic would aid him, where the white man's mind failed. But N'Longa's ancient gift gave him no aid. Once he had summoned the Slave Coast shaman to him across leagues of intervening space – but it was only when confronted with supernatural manifestations that N'Longa could come to him, and these harpies were not supernatural.

The germ of an idea began to grow at the back of Kane's mind, but he discarded it. It had to do with a great trap – and how could the akaanas be trapped? The roaring of lions played a grim accompaniment to his brooding meditations. As man dwindled on the plateau, the hunting beasts who feared only the spears of the hunters were beginning to gather. Kane laughed bitterly. It was not lions, that might be hunted down and slain singly, that he had to deal with.

At some little distance from the village stood the great hut of Goru, once a council hall. This hut was full of many strange fetishes which, Goru said with a helpless wave of his fat hands, were strong magic against evil spirits but scant protection against winged hellions of gristle and bone and flesh.

IV THE MADNESS OF SOLOMON

Kane woke suddenly from a dreamless sleep. A hideous medley of screams burst horrific in his ears. Outside his hut, people were dying in the night, horribly, as cattle die in the shambles. He had slept, as always, with his weapons buckled on him. Now he bounded to the door, and something fell mouthing and slavering at his feet to grasp his knees in a convulsive grip and gibber incoherent pleas. In the faint light of a smoldering fire near by, Kane in horror recognized the face of the youth Loga, now frightfully torn and drenched in blood, already freezing into a death mask. The night was full of fearful sounds, inhuman howlings mingled with the whisper of mighty wings, the tearing of thatch and a ghastly demon-laughter. Kane freed himself from the locked dead arms and sprang to the dying fire. He could make out only a confused and vague maze of fleeing forms, and darting shapes, the shift and blur of dark wings against the stars.

He snatched up a brand and thrust it against the thatch of his hut – and as the flame leaped up and showed him the scene he stood frozen and aghast. Red, howling doom had fallen on Bogonda. Winged monsters raced screaming through her streets, wheeled above the heads of the fleeing people, or tore apart the hut thatches to get at the gibbering victims within.

With a choked cry the Englishman woke from his trance of horror, drew and fired at a darting flame-eyed shadow which fell at his feet with a shattered skull. And Kane gave tongue to one deep, fierce roar and bounded into the melee, all the berserk fury of his heathen Saxon ancestors bursting into terrible being.

Dazed and bewildered by the sudden attack, cowed by long years of submission, the Bogondi were incapable of combined resistance and for the most part died like sheep. Some, maddened by desperation, fought back, but their arrows went wild or glanced from the tough wings while the devilish agility of the creatures made spear-thrust and ax-stroke uncertain. Leaping from the ground they avoided the blows of their victims and sweeping down upon their shoulders dashed them to earth, where fang and talon did their crimson work.

Kane saw old Kuroba, gaunt and blood-stained, at bay against a hut wall with his foot on the neck of a monster who had not been quick enough. The grim-faced old chief wielded a two-handed ax in great sweeping blows that for the moment held back the screeching onset of half a dozen of the devils. Kane was leaping to his aid when a low, pitiful whimper checked him. The girl Nayela writhed weakly, prone in the bloody dust, while on her back a vulture-like thing crouched and tore. Her dulling eyes sought the face of the Englishman in anguished appeal. Kane ripped out a bitter oath and fired point-blank. The winged devil pitched backward with an abhorrent screeching and a wild flutter of dying wings and Kane bent to the dying girl, who whimpered and kissed his hands with uncertain lips as he cradled her head in his arms. Her eyes set.

Kane laid the body gently down, looking for Kuroba. He saw only a huddled cluster of grisly shapes that sucked and tore at something between them. And Kane went mad. With a scream that cut through the inferno he bounded up, slaying even as he rose. Even in the act of lunging up from bent knee he drew and thrust, transfixing a vulture-like throat. Then whipping out his rapier as the thing floundered and twitched in its death struggles, the raging Puritan charged forward seeking new victims.

On all sides of him the people of Bogonda were dying hideously. They fought futilely or they fled and the demons coursed them down as a hawk courses a hare. They ran into the huts and the fiends rent the thatch or burst the door, and what took place in those huts was mercifully hidden from Kane's eyes. And to the frantic white man's horror-distorted brain it seemed that he alone was responsible. The black folk had trusted him to save them. They had withheld the sacrifice and defied their grim masters and now they were paying the horrible penalty and he was unable to save them. In the agony-dimmed eyes turned toward him Kane quaffed the black dregs of the bitter cup. It was not anger or the vindictiveness of fear. It was hurt and a stunned reproach. He was their god and he had failed them.

Now he ravened through the massacre and the fiends avoided him, turning to the easy black victims. But Kane was not to be denied. In a red haze that was not of the burning hut, he saw a culminating horror; a harpy gripped a writhing naked thing that had been a woman and the wolfish fangs gorged deep. As Kane sprang, thrusting, the bat-man dropped his yammering, mowing prey and soared aloft. But Kane dropped his rapier and with the bound of a blood-mad panther caught the demon's throat and locked his iron legs about its lower body.

Again he found himself battling in midair, but this time only above the roofs of the huts. Terror had entered the cold brain of the harpy. He did not fight to hold and slay; he wished only to be rid of this silent, clinging thing that stabbed so savagely for his life. He floundered wildly, screaming abhorrently and thrashing with his wings, then as Kane's dirk bit deeper, dipped suddenly sidewise and fell headlong.

The thatch of a hut broke their fall, and Kane and the dying harpy crashed through to land on a writhing mass on the hut floor. In the lurid flickering of the burning hut outside, that vaguely lighted the hut into which he had fallen, Kane saw a deed of brain-shaking horror being enacted – red dripping fangs in a yawning gash of a mouth, and a crimson travesty of a human form that still writhed with agonized life. Then in the maze of madness that held him, his steel fingers closed on the fiend's throat in a grip that no tearing of talons or hammering of wings could loosen, until he felt the horrid life flow out from under his fingers and the bony neck hung broken.

And still outside the red madness of slaughter continued. Kane bounded up, his hand closing blindly on the haft of some weapon, and as he leaped from the hut a harpy soared from under his very feet. It was an ax that Kane had snatched up, and he dealt a stroke that spattered the demon's brains like water. He sprang forward, stumbling over bodies and parts of bodies, blood streaming from a dozen wounds, and then halted baffled and screaming with rage.

The bat-people were taking to the air. No longer would they face this white-skinned madman who in his insanity was more terrible than they. But they went not alone into the upper regions. In their lustful talons they bore writhing, screaming forms, and Kane, raging to and fro with his dripping ax, found himself alone in a corpse-choked village.

He threw back his head to shriek his hate at the fiends above him and he felt warm, thick drops fall into his face, while the shadowy skies were filled with screams of agony and the laughter of monsters. And Kane's last vestige of reason snapped as the sounds of that ghastly feast in the skies filled the night and the blood that rained from the stars fell into his face. He gibbered to and fro, screaming chaotic blasphemies.

And was he not a symbol of Man, staggering among the tooth-marked bones and severed grinning heads of humans, brandishing a futile ax, and screaming incoherent hate at the grisly, winged shapes of Night that make him their prey, chuckling in demoniac triumph above him and dripping into his mad eyes the pitiful blood of their human victims?

V THE WHITE-SKINNED CONQUEROR

A shuddering, white-faced dawn crept over the black hills to shiver above the red shambles that had been the village of Bogonda. The huts stood intact, except for the one which had sunk to smoldering coals, but the thatches of many were torn. Dismembered bones, half or wholly stripped of flesh, lay in the streets, and some were splintered as though they had been dropped from a great height.

It was a realm of the dead where was but one sign of life. Solomon Kane leaned on his blood-clotted ax and gazed upon the scene with dull, mad eyes. He was grimed and clotted with half-dried blood from long gashes on chest, face and shoulders, but he paid no heed to his hurts.

The people of Bogonda had not died alone. Seventeen harpies lay among the bones. Six of these Kane had slain. The rest had fallen before the frantic dying desperation of the black people. But it was poor toll to take in return. Of the four-hundred-odd people of Upper Bogonda, not one had lived to see the dawn. And the harpies were gone – back to their caves in the black hills, gorged to repletion.

With slow, mechanical steps Kane went about gathering up his weapons. He found his sword, dirk, pistols and the ju-ju stave. He left the main village and went up the slope to the great hut of Goru. And there he halted, stung by a new horror. The ghastly humor of the harpies had prompted a delicious jest. Above the hut door stared the severed head of Goru. The fat cheeks were shrunken, the lips lolled in an aspect of horrified idiocy, and the eyes stared like a hurt child. And in those dead eyes Kane saw wonder and reproach.

Kane looked at the shambles that had been Bogonda, and he looked at the death mask of Goru. And he lifted his clenched fists above his head, and with glaring eyes raised and writhing lips flecked with froth, he cursed the sky and the earth and the spheres above and below. He cursed the cold stars, the blazing sun, the mocking moon and the whisper of the wind. He cursed all fates and destinies, all that he had loved or hated, the silent cities beneath the seas, the past ages and the future eons. In one soul-shaking burst of blasphemy he cursed the gods and devils who make mankind their sport, and he cursed Man who lives blindly on and blindly offers his back to the iron-hoofed feet of his gods.

Then as breath failed he halted, panting. From the lower reaches sounded the deep roaring of a lion and into the eyes of Solomon Kane came a crafty gleam. He stood long, as one frozen, and out of his madness grew a desperate plan. And he silently recanted his blasphemy, for if the brazen-hoofed gods made Man for their sport and plaything, they also gave him a brain that holds craft and cruelty greater than any other living thing.

“There you shall bide,” said Solomon Kane to the head of Goru. “The sun will wither you and the cold dews of night will shrivel you. But I will keep the kites from you and your eyes shall see the fall of your slayers. Aye, I could not save the people of Bogonda, but by the God of my race, I can avenge them. Man is the sport and sustenance of titanic beings of Night and Horror whose giant wings hover ever above him. But even evil things may come to an end – and watch ye, Goru.”

In the days that followed Kane labored mightily, beginning with the first gray light of dawn and toiling on past sunset, into the white moonlight till he fell and slept the sleep of utter exhaustion. He snatched food as he worked and he gave his wounds absolutely no heed, scarcely being aware that they healed of themselves. He went down into the lower levels and cut bamboo, great stacks of long, tough stalks. He cut thick branches of trees, and tough vines to serve as ropes. And with this material he reinforced the walls and roof of Goru's hut. He set the bamboos deep in the earth, hard against the wall, and interwove and twined them, binding them fast with the vines that were pliant and tough as cords. The long branches he made fast along the thatch, binding them close together. When he had finished, an elephant could scarcely have burst through the walls.

The lions had come into the plateau in great quantities and the herds of little pigs dwindled fast. Those the lions spared, Kane slew, and tossed to the jackals. This racked Kane's heart, for he was a kindly man and this wholesale slaughter, even of pigs who would fall prey to hunting beasts anyhow, grieved him. But it was part of his plan of vengeance and he steeled his heart.

The days stretched into weeks. Kane toiled by day and by night, and between his stints he talked to the shriveled, mummied head of Goru, whose eyes, strangely enough, did not change in the blaze of the sun or the haunt of the moon, but retained their life-like expression. When the memory of those lunacy-haunted days had become only a vague nightmare, Kane wondered if, as it had seemed to him, Goru's dried lips had moved in answer, speaking strange and mysterious things.

Kane saw the akaanas wheeling against the sky at a distance, but they did not come near, even when he slept in the great hut, pistols at hand. They feared his power to deal death with smoke and thunder. At first he noted that they flew sluggishly, gorged with the flesh they had eaten on that red night, and the bodies they had borne to their caves. But as the weeks passed they appeared leaner and leaner and ranged far afield in search of food. And Kane laughed, deeply and madly. This plan of his would never have worked before, but now there were no humans to fill the bellies of the harpy-folk. And there were no more pigs. In all the plateau there were no creatures for the bat-people to eat. Why they did not range east of the hills, Kane thought he knew. That must be a region of thick jungle like the country to the west. He saw them fly into the grassland for antelopes and he saw the lions take toll of them. After all, the akaanas were weak beings among the hunters, strong enough only to slay pigs and deer – and humans.

At last they began to soar close to him at night and he saw their greedy eyes glaring at him through the gloom. He judged the time was ripe. Huge buffaloes, too big and ferocious for the bat-people to slay, had strayed up into the plateau to ravage the deserted fields of the dead black people. Kane cut one of these out of the herd and drove him, with shouts and volleys of stones, to the hut of Goru. It was a tedious, dangerous task, and time and again Kane barely escaped the surly bull's sudden charges, but persevered and at last shot the beast before the hut.

A strong west wind was blowing and Kane flung handfuls of blood into the air for the scent to waft to the harpies in the hills. He cut the bull to pieces and carried its quarters into the hut, then managed to drag the huge trunk itself inside. Then he retired into the thick trees near by and waited.

He had not long to wait. The morning air filled suddenly with the beat of many wings and a hideous flock alighted before the hut of Goru. All of the beasts – or men – seemed to be there, and Kane gazed in wonder at the tall, strange creatures, so like to humanity and yet so unlike – the veritable demons of priestly legend. They folded their wings like cloaks about them as they walked upright and they talked to one another in a strident crackling voice that had nothing of the human in it. No, these things were not men, Kane decided. They were the materialization of some ghastly jest of Nature – some travesty of the world's infancy when Creation was an experiment. Perhaps they were the offspring of a forbidden and obscene mating of man and beast; more likely they were a freakish offshoot on the branch of evolution – for Kane had long ago dimly sensed a truth in the heretical theories of the ancient philosophers, that Man is but a higher beast. And if Nature made many strange beasts in the past ages, why should she not have experimented with monstrous forms of mankind? Surely Man as Kane knew him was not the first of his breed to walk the earth, nor yet to be the last.

Now the harpies hesitated, with their natural distrust for a building, and some soared to the roof and tore at the thatch. But Kane had builded well. They returned to earth and at last, driven beyond endurance by the smell of raw blood and the sight of the flesh within, one of them ventured inside. In an instant all were crowded into the great hut, tearing ravenously at the meat, and when the last one was within, Kane reached out a hand and jerked a long vine which tripped the catch that held the door he had built. It fell with a crash and the bar he had fashioned dropped into place. That door would hold against the charge of a wild bull.

Kane came from his covert and scanned the sky. Some hundred and forty harpies had entered the hut. He saw no more winging through the skies, and believed it safe to suppose he had the whole flock trapped. Then with a cruel, brooding smile, Kane struck flint and steel to a pile of dead leaves next the wall. Within sounded an uneasy mumbling as the creatures realized that they were prisoners. A thin wisp of smoke curled upward and a flicker of red followed it; the whole heap burst into flame and the dry bamboo caught.

A few moments later the whole side of the wall was ablaze. The fiends inside scented the smoke and grew restless. Kane heard them cackling wildly and clawing at the walls. He grinned savagely, bleakly and without mirth. Now a veer of the wind drove the flames around the wall and up over the thatch – with a roar the whole hut caught and leaped into flame. From within sounded a fearful pandemonium. Kane heard bodies crash against the walls, which shook to the impact but held. The horrid screams were music to his soul, and brandishing his arms, he answered them with screams of fearful, soul-shaking laughter. The cataclysm of horror rose unbearably, paling the tumult of the flames. Then it dwindled to a medley of strangled gibbering and gasps as the flames ate in and the smoke thickened. An intolerable scent of burning flesh pervaded the atmosphere, and had there been room in Kane's brain for aught else than insane triumph, he would have shuddered to realize that the scent was of that nauseating and indescribable odor that only human flesh emits when burning.

From the thick cloud of smoke Kane saw a mowing, gibbering thing emerge through the shredding roof and flap slowly and agonizingly upward on fearfully burned wings. Calmly he aimed and fired, and the scorched and blinded thing tumbled back into the flaming mass just as the walls crashed in. To Kane it seemed that Goru's crumbling face, vanishing in the smoke, split suddenly in a wide grin and a sudden shout of exultant human laughter mingled eerily in the roar of the flames. But the smoke and an insane brain play queer tricks.

Kane stood with the ju-ju stave in one hand and the smoking pistol in the other, above the smoldering ruins that hid forever from the sight of man the last of those terrible, semi-human monsters whom another white-skinned hero had banished from Europe in an unknown age. Kane stood, an unconscious statue of triumph – the ancient empires fall, the dark-skinned peoples fade and even the demons of antiquity gasp their last, but over all stands the Aryan barbarian, white-skinned, cold-eyed, dominant, the supreme fighting man of the earth, whether he be clad in wolf-hide and horned helmet, or boots and doublet – whether he bear in his hand battle-ax or rapier – whether he be called Dorian, Saxon or Englishman – whether his name be Jason, Hengist or Solomon Kane.

Kane stood and the smoke curled upward into the morning sky, the roaring of foraging lions shook the plateau, and slowly, like light breaking through mists, sanity returned to him.

“The light of God's morning enters even into dark and lonesome lands,” said Solomon Kane somberly. “Evil rules in the waste lands of the earth, but even evil may come to an end. Dawn follows midnight and even in this lost land the shadows shrink. Strange are Thy ways, oh God of my people, and who am I to question Thy wisdom? My feet have fallen in evil ways but Thou hast brought me forth scatheless and hast made me a scourge for the Powers of Evil. Over the souls of men spread the condor wings of colossal monsters and all manner of evil things prey upon the heart and soul and body of Man. Yet it may be in some far day the shadows shall fade and the Prince of Darkness be chained forever in his hell. And till then mankind can but stand up stoutly to the monsters in his own heart and without, and with the aid of God he may yet triumph.”

And Solomon Kane looked up into the silent hills and felt the silent call of the hills and the unguessed distances beyond; and Solomon Kane shifted his belt, took his staff firmly in his hand and turned his face eastward.

The Footfalls Within

Solomon Kane gazed somberly at the black woman who lay dead at his feet. Little more than a girl she was, but her wasted limbs and staring eyes showed that she had suffered much before death brought her merciful relief. Kane noted the chain galls on her limbs, the deep crisscrossed scars on her back, the mark of the yoke on her neck. His cold eyes deepened strangely, showing chill glints and lights like clouds passing across depths of ice.

“Even into this lonesome land they come,” he muttered. “I had not thought –”

He raised his head and gazed eastward. Black dots against the blue wheeled and circled.

“The kites mark their trail,” muttered the tall Englishman. “Destruction goeth before them and death followeth after. Wo unto ye, sons of iniquity, for the wrath of God is upon ye. The cords be loosed on the iron necks of the hounds of hate and the bow of vengeance is strung. Ye are proud-stomached and strong, and the people cry out beneath your feet, but retribution cometh in the blackness of midnight and the redness of dawn.”

He shifted the belt that held his heavy pistols and the keen dirk, instinctively touched the long rapier at his hip, and went stealthily but swiftly eastward. A cruel anger burned in his deep eyes like blue volcanic fires burning beneath leagues of ice, and the hand that gripped his long, cat-headed stave hardened into iron.

After some hours of steady striding, he came within hearing of the slave train that wound its laborious way through the jungle. The piteous cries of the slaves, the shouts and curses of the drivers, and the cracking of the whips came plainly to his ears. Another hour brought him even with them, and gliding along through the jungle parallel to the trail taken by the slavers, he spied upon them safely. Kane had fought Indians in Darien and had learned much of their woodcraft.

More than a hundred blacks, young men and women, staggered along the trail, stark naked and made fast together by cruel yoke-like affairs of wood. These yokes, rough and heavy, fitted over their necks and linked them together, two by two. The yokes were in turn fettered together, making one long chain. Of the drivers there were fifteen Arabs and some seventy black warriors, whose weapons and fantastic apparel showed them to be of some eastern tribe – one of those tribes subjugated and made Moslems and allies by the conquering Arabs.

Five Arabs walked ahead of the train with some thirty of their warriors, and five brought up the rear with the rest of the black Moslems. The rest marched beside the staggering slaves, urging them along with shouts and curses and with long, cruel whips which brought spurts of blood at almost every blow. These slavers were fools as well as rogues, reflected Kane – not more than half of the slaves would survive the hardships of that trek to the coast. He wondered at the presence of these raiders, for this country lay far to the south of the districts usually frequented by the Moslems. But avarice can drive men far, as the Englishman knew. He had dealt with these gentry of old. Even as he watched, old scars burned in his back – scars made by Moslem whips in a Turkish galley. And deeper still burned Kane's unquenchable hate.

He followed, shadowing his foes like a ghost, and as he stole through the jungle, he racked his brain for a plan. How might he prevail against that horde? All the Arabs and many of the blacks were armed with guns – long, clumsy firelock affairs, it is true, but guns just the same, enough to awe any tribe of natives who might oppose them. Some carried in their wide girdles long, silver-chased pistols of more effective pattern – flintlocks of Moorish and Turkish make.

Kane followed like a brooding ghost and his rage and hatred ate into his soul like a canker. Each crack of the whips was like a blow on his own shoulders. The heat and cruelty of the tropics play queer tricks with white men. Ordinary passions become monstrous things; irritation turns to a berserker rage; anger flames into unexpected madness and men kill in a red mist of passion, and wonder, aghast, afterward.

The fury Solomon Kane felt would have been enough at any time and in any place to shake a man to his foundation; now it assumed monstrous proportions, so that Kane shivered as if with a chill, iron claws scratched at his brain and he saw the slaves and the slavers through a crimson mist. Yet he might not have put his hate-born insanity into action had it not been for a mishap.

One of the slaves, a slim young girl, suddenly faltered and slipped to the earth, dragging her yoke-mate with her. A tall, hook-nosed Arab yelled savagely and lashed her viciously. Her yoke-mate staggered partly up, but the girl remained prone, writhing weakly beneath the lash, but evidently unable to rise. She whimpered pitifully between her parched lips, and the other slavers came about, their whips descending on her quivering flesh in slashes of red agony.

A half-hour of rest and a little water would have revived her, but the Arabs had no time to spare. Solomon, biting his arm until his teeth met in the flesh as he fought for control, thanked God that the lashing had ceased and steeled himself for the swift flash of the dagger that would put the child beyond torment. But the Arabs were in a mood for sport. Since the girl would fetch them no profit on the market block, they would utilize her for their pleasure – and the humor of their breed is such as to turn men's blood to icy water.

A shout from the first whipper brought the rest crowding around, their bearded faces split in grins of delighted anticipation, while the black warriors edged nearer, their brutish eyes gleaming. The wretched slaves realized their masters' intentions and a chorus of pitiful cries rose from them.

Kane, sick with horror, realized, too, that the girl's was to be no easy death. He knew what the tall Moslem intended to do, as he stooped over her with a keen dagger such as the Arabs used for skinning game. Madness overcame the Englishman. He valued his own life little; he had risked it without thought for the sake of a negro baby or a small animal. Yet he would not have premeditatedly thrown away his one hope of succoring the wretches in the train. But he acted without conscious thought. A pistol was smoking in his hand and the tall butcher was down in the dust of the trail with his brains oozing out, before Kane realized what he had done.

He was almost as astonished as the Arabs, who stood frozen for a moment and then burst into a medley of yells. Several threw up their clumsy firelocks and sent their heavy balls crashing through the trees, and the rest, thinking no doubt that they were ambushed, led a reckless charge into the jungle. The bold suddenness of that move was Kane's undoing. Had they hesitated a moment longer he might have faded away unobserved, but as it was he saw no choice but to meet them openly and sell his life as highly as he could.

And indeed it was with a certain ferocious satisfaction that he faced his howling attackers. They halted in sudden amazement as the tall, grim Englishman stepped from behind his tree, and in that instant one of them died with a bullet from Kane's remaining pistol in his heart. Then with yells of savage rage they flung themselves on their lone defier. Kane placed his back against a huge tree and his long rapier played a shining wheel about him. Three blacks and an Arab were hacking at him with their heavy curved blades while the rest milled about, snarling like wolves, as they sought to drive in blade or ball without maiming one of their own number.

The flickering rapier parried the whistling simitars and the Arab died on its point, which seemed to hesitate in his heart only an instant before it pierced the brain of a black swordsman. Another ebon warrior, dropping his sword and leaping in to grapple at close quarters, was disemboweled by the dirk in Kane's left hand, and the others gave back in sudden fear. A heavy ball smashed against the tree close to Kane's head and he tensed himself to spring and die in the thick of them. Then their sheikh lashed them on with his long whip and Kane heard him shouting fiercely for his warriors to take the infidel alive. Kane answered the command with a sudden cast of his dirk, which hummed so close to the sheikh's head that it slit his turban and sank deep in the shoulder of one behind him.

The sheikh drew his silver-chased pistols, threatening his own men with death if they did not take the white man, and they charged in again desperately. One of the black men ran full upon Kane's sword and an Arab behind the fellow, with the craft of his race, thrust the screaming wretch suddenly forward on the weapon, driving it hilt-deep in his writhing body, fouling the blade. Before Kane could wrench it clear, with a yell of triumph the pack rushed in on him and bore him down by sheer weight of numbers. As they grappled him from all sides, the Puritan wished in vain for the dirk he had thrown away. But even so, his taking was none too easy.

Blood spattered and faces caved in beneath his iron-hard fists that splintered teeth and shattered bone. A black warrior reeled away disabled from a vicious drive of knee to groin. Even when they had him stretched out and piled man-weight on him until he could no longer strike with fists or foot, his long lean fingers sank fiercely through a black beard to lock about a corded throat in a grip that took the power of three strong men to break and left the victim gasping and green-faced.

At last, panting from the terrific struggle, they had him bound hand and foot and the sheikh, thrusting his pistols back into his silken sash, came striding to stand and look down at his captive. Kane glared up at the tall, lean frame, at the hawk-like face with its black curled beard and arrogant brown eyes.

“I am the sheikh Hassim ben Said,” said the Arab. “Who are you?”

“My name is Solomon Kane,” growled the Puritan in the sheikh's own language. “I am an Englishman, you heathen jackal.”

The dark eyes of the Arab flickered with interest.

“Sulieman Kahani,” said he, giving the Arabesque equivalent of the English name, “I have heard of you – you have fought the Turks betimes and the Barbary corsairs have licked their wounds because of you.”

Kane deigned no reply. Hassim shrugged his shoulders.

“You will bring a fine price,” said he. “Mayhap I will take you to Stamboul, where there are shahs who would desire such a man among their slaves. And I mind me now of one Kemal Bey, a man of ships, who wears a deep scar across his face of your making and who curses the name of Englishman. He will pay me a high price for you. And behold, oh Frank, I do you the honor of appointing you a separate guard. You shall not walk in the yoke-chain but free save for your hands.”

Kane made no answer, and at a sign from the sheikh, he was hauled to his feet and his bonds loosened except for his hands, which they left bound firmly behind him. A stout cord was looped about his neck and the other end of this was given into the hand of a huge black warrior who bore in his free hand a great curved simitar.

“And now what think ye of my favor to you, Frank?” queried the sheikh.

“I am thinking,” answered Kane in a slow, deep voice of menace, “that I would trade my soul's salvation to face you and your sword, alone and unarmed, and to tear the heart from your breast with my naked fingers.”

Such was the concentrated hate in his deep resounding voice, and such primal, unconquerable fury blazed from his terrible eyes, that the hardened and fearless chieftain blanched and involuntarily recoiled as if from a maddened beast.

Then Hassim recovered his poise and with a short word to his followers, strode to the head of the cavalcade. Kane noted, with thankfulness, that the respite occasioned by his capture had given the girl who had fallen a chance to rest and revive. The skinning knife had not had time to more than touch her; she was able to reel along. Night was not far away. Soon the slavers would be forced to halt and camp.

The Englishman perforce took up the trek, his black guard remaining a few paces behind with his huge blade ever ready. Kane also noted with a touch of grim vanity, that three more blacks marched close behind, muskets ready and matches burning. They had tasted his prowess and they were taking no chances. His weapons had been recovered and Hassim had promptly appropriated all except the cat-headed ju-ju staff. This had been contemptuously cast aside by him and taken up by one of the blacks.

The Englishman was presently aware that a lean, gray-bearded Arab was walking along at his side. This Arab seemed desirous of speaking but strangely timid, and the source of his timidity seemed, curiously enough, the ju-ju stave which he had taken from the black man who had picked it up, and which he now turned uncertainly in his hands.

“I am Yussef the Hadji,” said this Arab suddenly. “I have naught against you. I had no hand in attacking you and would be your friend if you would let me. Tell me, Frank, whence comes this staff and how comes it into your hands?”

Kane's first inclination was to consign his questioner to the infernal regions, but a certain sincerity of manner in the old man made him change his mind and he answered: “It was given me by my blood-brother – a black magician of the Slave Coast, named N'Longa.”

The old Arab nodded and muttered in his beard and presently sent a black running forward to bid Hassim return. The tall sheikh presently came striding back along the slow-moving column, with a clank and jingle of daggers and sabers, with Kane's dirk and pistols thrust into his wide sash.

“Look, Hassim,” the old Arab thrust forward the stave, “you cast it away without knowing what you did!”

“And what of it?” growled the sheikh. “I see naught but a staff – sharp-pointed and with the head of a cat on the other end – a staff with strange infidel carvings upon it.”

The older man shook it at him in excitement: “This staff is older than the world! It holds mighty magic! I have read of it in the old iron-bound books and Mohammed – on whom peace! – himself hath spoken of it by allegory and parable! See the cat-head upon it? It is the head of a goddess of ancient Egypt! Ages ago, before Mohammed taught, before Jerusalem was, the priests of Bast bore this rod before the bowing, chanting worshippers! With it Musa did wonders before Pharaoh and when the Yahudi fled from Egypt they bore it with them. And for centuries it was the scepter of Israel and Judah and with it Sulieman ben Daoud drove forth the conjurers and magicians and prisoned the efreets and the evil genii! Look! Again in the hands of a Sulieman we find the ancient rod!”

Old Yussef had worked himself into a pitch of almost fanatic fervor but Hassim merely shrugged his shoulders.

“It did not save the Jews from bondage nor this Sulieman from our captivity,” said he; “so I value it not as much as I esteem the long thin blade with which he loosed the souls of three of my best swordsmen.”

Yussef shook his head. “Your mockery will bring you to no good end, Hassim. Some day you will meet a power that will not divide before your sword or fall to your bullets. I will keep the staff, and I warn you – abuse not the Frank. He has borne the holy and terrible staff of Sulieman and Musa and the Pharaohs, and who knows what magic he has drawn therefrom? For it is older than the world and has known the terrible hands of strange, dark pre-Adamite priests in the silent cities beneath the seas, and has drawn from an Elder World mystery and magic unguessed by humankind. There were strange kings and stranger priests when the dawns were young, and evil was, even in their day. And with this staff they fought the evil which was ancient when their strange world was young, so many millions of years ago that a man would shudder to count them.”

Hassim answered impatiently and strode away with old Yussef following him persistently and chattering away in a querulous tone. Kane shrugged his mighty shoulders. With what he knew of the strange powers of that strange staff, he was not one to question the old man's assertions, fantastic as they seemed. This much he knew – that it was made of a wood that existed nowhere on earth today. It needed but the proof of sight and touch to realize that its material had grown in some world apart. The exquisite workmanship of the head, of a pre-pyramidal age, and the hieroglyphics, symbols of a language that was forgotten when Rome was young – these, Kane sensed, were additions as modern to the antiquity of the staff itself, as would be English words carved on the stone monoliths of Stonehenge.

As for the cat-head – looking at it sometimes Kane had a peculiar feeling of alteration; a faint sensing that once the pommel of the staff was carved with a different design. The dust-ancient Egyptian who had carved the head of Bast had merely altered the original figure, and what that figure had been, Kane had never tried to guess. A close scrutiny of the staff always aroused a disquieting and almost dizzy suggestion of abysses of eons, unprovocative to further speculation.

The day wore on. The sun beat down mercilessly, then screened itself in the great trees as it slanted toward the horizon. The slaves suffered fiercely for water and a continual whimpering rose from their ranks as they staggered blindly on. Some fell and half crawled, and were half dragged by their reeling yoke-mates. When all were buckling from exhaustion, the sun dipped, night rushed on, and a halt was called. Camp was pitched, guards thrown out, and the slaves were fed scantily and given enough water to keep life in them – but only just enough. Their fetters were not loosened but they were allowed to sprawl about as they might. Their fearful thirst and hunger having been somewhat eased, they bore the discomforts of their shackles with characteristic stoicism.

Kane was fed without his hands being untied and he was given all the water he wished. The patient eyes of the slaves watched him drink, silently, and he was sorely ashamed to guzzle what others suffered for; he ceased before his thirst was fully quenched. A wide clearing had been selected, on all sides of which rose gigantic trees. After the Arabs had eaten and while the black Moslems were still cooking their food, old Yussef came to Kane and began to talk about the staff again. Kane answered his questions with admirable patience, considering the hatred he bore the whole race to which the Hadji belonged, and during their conversation, Hassim came striding up and looked down in contempt. Hassim, Kane ruminated, was the very symbol of militant Islam – bold, reckless, materialistic, sparing nothing, fearing nothing, as sure of his own destiny and as contemptuous of the rights of others as the most powerful Western king.

“Are you maundering about that stick again?” he gibed. “Hadji, you grow childish in your old age.”

Yussef's beard quivered in anger. He shook the staff at his sheikh like a threat of evil.

“Your mockery little befits your rank, Hassim,” he snapped. “We are in the heart of a dark and demon-haunted land, to which long ago were banished the devils from Arabia. If this staff, which any but a fool can tell is no rod of any world we know, has existed down to our day, who knows what other things, tangible or intangible, may have existed through the ages? This very trail we follow – know you how old it is? Men followed it before the Seljuk came out of the East or the Roman came out of the West. Over this very trail, legends say, the great Sulieman came when he drove the demons westward out of Asia and prisoned them in strange prisons. And will you say –”

A wild shout interrupted him. Out of the shadows of the jungle a black came flying as if from the hounds of Doom. With arms flinging wildly, eyes rolling to display the whites and mouth wide open so that all his gleaming teeth were visible, he made an image of stark terror not soon forgotten. The Moslem horde leaped up, snatching their weapons, and Hassim swore: “That's Ali, whom I sent to scout for meat – perchance a lion –”

But no lion followed the black man who fell at Hassim's feet, mouthing gibberish, and pointing wildly back at the black jungle whence the nerve-strung watchers expected some brain-shattering horror to burst.

“He says he found a strange mausoleum back in the jungle,” said Hassim with a scowl, “but he cannot tell what frightened him. He only knows a great horror overwhelmed him and sent him flying. Ali, you are a fool and a rogue.”

He kicked the groveling black viciously, but the other Arabs drew about him in some uncertainty. The panic was spreading among the black warriors.

“They will bolt in spite of us,” muttered a bearded Arab, uneasily watching the blacks who milled together, jabbered excitedly and flung fearsome glances over the shoulders. “Hassim, 'twere better to march on a few miles. This is an evil place after all, and though 'tis likely the fool Ali was frighted by his own shadow – still –”

“Still,” jeered the sheikh, “you will all feel better when we have left it behind. Good enough; to still your fears I will move camp – but first I will have a look at this thing. Lash up the slaves; we'll swing into the jungle and pass by this mausoleum; perhaps some great king lies there. The blacks will not be afraid if we all go in a body with guns.”

So the weary slaves were whipped into wakefulness and stumbled along beneath the whips again. The black warriors went silently and nervously, reluctantly obeying Hassim's implacable will but huddling close to their white masters. The moon had risen, huge, red and sullen, and the jungle was bathed in a sinister silver glow that etched the brooding trees in black shadow. The trembling Ali pointed out the way, somewhat reassured by his savage master's presence.

And so they passed through the jungle until they came to a strange clearing among the giant trees – strange because nothing grew there. The trees ringed it in a disquieting symmetrical manner and no lichen or moss grew on the earth, which seemed to have been blasted and blighted in a strange fashion. And in the midst of the glade stood the mausoleum. A great brooding mass of stone it was, pregnant with ancient evil. Dead with the death of a hundred centuries it seemed, yet Kane was aware that the air pulsed about it, as with the slow, unhuman breathing of some gigantic, invisible monster.

The black Moslems drew back, muttering, assailed by the evil atmosphere of the place. The slaves stood in a patient, silent group beneath the trees. The Arabs went forward to the frowning black mass, and Yussef, taking Kane's cord from his ebon guard, led the Englishman with him like a surly mastiff, as if for protection against the unknown.

“Some mighty sultan doubtless lies here,” said Hassim, tapping the stone with his scabbard-end.

“Whence come these stones?” muttered Yussef uneasily. “They are of dark and forbidding aspect. Why should a great sultan lie in state so far from any habitation of man? If there were ruins of an old city hereabouts it would be different –”

He bent to examine the heavy metal door with its huge lock, curiously sealed and fused. He shook his head forebodingly as he made out the ancient Hebraic characters carved on the door.

“I can not read them,” he quavered, “and belike it is well for me I can not. What ancient kings sealed up, is not good for men to disturb. Hassim, let us hence. This place is pregnant with evil for the sons of men.”

But Hassim gave him no heed. “He who lies within is no son of Islam,” said he, “and why should we not despoil him of the gems and riches that undoubtedly were laid to rest with him? Let us break open this door.”

Some of the Arabs shook their heads doubtfully but Hassim's word was law. Calling to him a huge black who bore a heavy hammer, he ordered him to break open the door.

As the black swung up his sledge, Kane gave a sharp exclamation. Was he mad? The apparent antiquity of this brooding mass of stone was proof that it had stood undisturbed for thousands of years. Yet he could have sworn that he heard the sound of footfalls within. Back and forth they padded, as if something paced the narrow confines of that grisly prison in a never-ending monotony of movement. A cold hand touched the spine of Solomon Kane. Whether the sounds registered on his conscious ear or on some unsounded deep of soul or sub-feeling, he could not tell, but he knew that somewhere within his consciousness there re-echoed the tramp of monstrous feet from within that ghastly mausoleum.

“Stop!” he exclaimed. “Hassim, I may be mad, but I hear the tread of some fiend within that pile of stone.”

Hassim raised his hand and checked the hovering hammer. He listened intently, and the others strained their ears in a silence that had suddenly become tense.

“I hear nothing,” grunted a bearded giant.

“Nor I,” came a quick chorus. “The Frank is mad!”

“Hear ye anything, Yussef?” asked Hassim sardonically.

The old Hadji shifted nervously. His face was uneasy.

“No, Hassim, no, yet –”

Kane decided he must be mad. Yet in his heart he knew he was never saner, and he knew somehow that this occult keenness of the deeper senses that set him apart from the Arabs came from long association with the ju-ju staff that old Yussef now held in his shaking hands.

Hassim laughed harshly and made a gesture to the black. The hammer fell with a crash that re-echoed deafeningly and shivered off through the black jungle in a strangely altered cachinnation. Again – again – and again the hammer fell, driven with all the power of the rippling black muscles and the mighty ebon body. And between the blows Kane still heard that lumbering tread, and he who had never known fear as men know it, felt the cold hand of terror clutching at his heart.

This fear was apart from earthly or mortal fear, as the sound of the footfalls was apart from mortal tread. Kane's fright was like a cold wind blowing on him from outer realms of unguessed Darkness, bearing him the evil and decay of an outlived epoch and an unutterably ancient period. Kane was not sure whether he heard those footfalls or by some dim instinct sensed them. But he was sure of their reality. They were not the tramp of man or beast; but inside that black, hideously ancient mausoleum some nameless thing moved with soul-shaking and elephantine tread.

The great black sweated and panted with the difficulty of his task. But at last, beneath the heavy blows the ancient lock shattered; the hinges snapped; the door burst inward. And Yussef screamed. From that black gaping entrance no tiger-fanged beast or demon of solid flesh and blood leaped forth. But a fearful stench flowed out in billowing, almost tangible waves and in one brain-shattering, ravening rush, whereby the gaping door seemed to gush blood, the Horror was upon them. It enveloped Hassim, and the fearless chieftain, hewing vainly at the almost intangible terror, screamed with sudden, unaccustomed fright as his lashing simitar whistled only through stuff as yielding and unharmable as air, and he felt himself lapped by coils of death and destruction.

Yussef shrieked like a lost soul, dropped the ju-ju stave and joined his fellows who streamed out into the jungle in mad flight, preceded by the howling black warriors. Only the black slaves fled not, but stood shackled to their doom, wailing their terror. As in a nightmare of delirium Kane saw Hassim swayed like a reed in the wind, lapped about by a gigantic pulsing red Thing that had neither shape nor earthly substance. Then as the crack of splintering bones came to him, and the sheikh's body buckled like a straw beneath a stamping hoof, the Englishman burst his bonds with one volcanic effort and caught up the ju-ju stave.

Hassim was down, crushed and dead, sprawled like a broken toy with shattered limbs awry, and the red pulsing Thing was lurching toward Kane like a thick cloud of blood in the air, that continually changed its shape and form, and yet somehow trod lumberingly as if on monstrous legs!

Kane felt the cold fingers of fear claw at his brain but he braced himself, and lifting the ancient staff, struck with all his power into the center of the Horror. And he felt an unnamable, immaterial substance meet and give way before the falling staff. Then he was almost strangled by the nauseous burst of unholy stench that flooded the air, and somewhere down the dim vistas of his soul's consciousness re-echoed unbearably a hideous formless cataclysm that he knew was the death-screaming of the monster. For it was down and dying at his feet, its crimson paling in slow surges like the rise and receding of red waves on some foul coast. And as it paled, the soundless screaming dwindled away into cosmic distances as though it faded into some sphere apart and aloof beyond human ken.

Kane, dazed and incredulous, looked down on a shapeless, colorless, all but invisible mass at his feet which he knew was the corpse of the Horror, dashed back into the black realms from whence it had come, by a single blow of the staff of Solomon. Aye, the same staff, Kane knew, that in the hands of a mighty king and magician had ages ago driven the monster into that strange prison, to bide until ignorant hands loosed it again upon the world.

The old tales were true then, and King Solomon had in truth driven the demons westward and sealed them in strange places. Why had he let them live? Was human magic too weak in those dim days to more than subdue the devils? Kane shrugged his shoulders in wonderment. He knew nothing of magic, yet he had slain where that other Solomon had but imprisoned.

And Solomon Kane shuddered, for he had looked on Life that was not Life as he knew it, and had dealt and witnessed Death that was not Death as he knew it. Again the realization swept over him, as it had in the dust-haunted halls of Atlantean Negari, as it had in the abhorrent Hills of the Dead, as it had in Akaana – that human life was but one of a myriad forms of existence, that worlds existed within worlds, and that there was more than one plane of existence. The planet men call the earth spun on through the untold ages, Kane realized, and as it spun it spawned Life, and living things which wriggled about it as maggots are spawned in rot and corruption. Man was the dominant maggot now – why should he in his pride suppose that he and his adjuncts were the first maggots – or the last to rule a planet quick with unguessed life?

He shook his head, gazing in new wonder at the ancient gift of N'Longa, seeing in it at last, not merely a tool of black magic, but a sword of good and light against the powers of inhuman evil forever. And he was shaken with a strange reverence for it that was almost fear. Then he bent to the Thing at his feet, shuddering to feel its strange mass slip through his fingers like wisps of heavy fog. He thrust the staff beneath it and somehow lifted and levered the mass back into the mausoleum and shut the door.

Then he stood gazing down at the strangely mutilated body of Hassim, noting how it was smeared with foul slime and how it had already begun to decompose. He shuddered again, and suddenly a low timid voice aroused him from his somber cogitations. The slaves knelt beneath the trees and watched with great patient eyes. With a start he shook off his strange mood. He took from the moldering corpse his own pistols, dirk and rapier, making shift to wipe off the clinging foulness that was already flecking the steel with rust. He also took up a quantity of powder and shot dropped by the Arabs in their frantic flight. He knew they would return no more. They might die in their flight, or they might gain through the interminable leagues of jungle to the coast; but they would not turn back to dare the terror of that grisly glade.

Kane came to the black slaves and after some difficulty released them.

“Take up these weapons which the warriors dropped in their haste,” said he, “and get you home. This is an evil place. Get ye back to your villages and when the next Arabs come, die in the ruins of your huts rather than be slaves.”

Then they would have knelt and kissed his feet, but he, in much confusion, forbade them roughly. Then as they made preparations to go, one said to him: “Master, what of thee? Wilt thou not return with us? Thou shalt be our king!”

But Kane shook his head.

“I go eastward,” said he. And so the tribespeople bowed to him and turned back on the long trail to their own homeland. And Kane shouldered the staff that had been the rod of the Pharaohs and of Moses and of Solomon and of nameless Atlantean kings behind them, and turned his face eastward, halting only for a single backward glance at the great mausoleum that other Solomon had built with strange arts so long ago, and which now loomed dark and forever silent against the stars.

The Children of Asshur

(Fragment)

I

Solomon Kane started up in the darkness, snatching at the weapons which lay on the pile of skins that served him as a crude pallet. It was not the mad drum of the tropic rain on the leaves of the hut-roof which had wakened him, nor the bellowing of the thunder. It was the screams of human agony, the clash of steel that cut through the din of the tropical storm. Some sort of a conflict was taking place in the native village in which he had sought refuge from the storm, and it sounded much like a raid in force. As Solomon groped for his sword, he wondered what bushmen would raid a village in the night and in such a storm as this. His pistols lay beside his sword but he did not take them up, knowing that they would be useless in such a torrent of rain, which would wet their priming instantly.

He had laid down fully clad, save for his slouch hat and cloak, and without stopping for them, he ran to the door of the hut. A ragged streak of lightning which seemed to rip the sky open showed him a chaotic glimpse of struggling figures in the spaces between the huts, dazzlingly glinting back from flashing steel. Above the storm he heard the shrieks of the black people and deep-toned shouts in a language unfamiliar to him. Springing from the hut he sensed the presence of one in front of him, and even then another thunderous burst of fire ripped across the sky, limning all in a weird blue light. In that flashing instant Solomon thrust savagely, felt the blade bend double in his hand and saw a heavy sword swinging for his head. A burst of sparks, brighter than the lightning, exploded before his eyes, then blackness darker than the jungle night engulfed him.

Dawn was spreading pallidly over the dripping jungle reaches when Solomon Kane stirred and sat up in the ooze before the hut. Blood had caked on his scalp and his head ached slightly. Shaking off a slight grogginess, he rose. The rain had long ceased, the skies were clear. Silence lay over the village, and Kane saw that it was in truth a village of the dead. Corpses of men, women and children lay strewn everywhere – in the streets, in the doorways of the huts, inside the huts, some of which had been literally ripped to pieces, either in search of cowering victims, or in sheer wantonness of destruction. They had not taken many prisoners, Solomon decided, whoever the unknown raiders might be. Nor had they taken the spears, axes, cooking pots and plumed head-pieces of their victims, this fact seeming to argue a raid by a race superior in culture and artizanship to the crude villagers. But they had taken all the ivory they could find, and they had taken, Kane discovered, his rapier, and his dirk, pistols and powder-and-shot pouches. And they had taken his staff, the sharp-pointed strangely carved, cat-headed stave, which his friend, N'Longa, the West Coast witch-man, had given him, as well as his hat and cloak.

Kane stood in the center of the desolated village, brooding over the matter, strange speculations running at random through his mind. His conversation with the natives of the village, into which he had made his way the night before out of the storm-beaten jungle, gave him no clue as to the nature of the raiders. The natives themselves had known little about the land into which they had but recently come, driven over a long trek by a rival, more powerful tribe. They had been a simple, good-natured people, who had welcomed him into their huts and given him freely of their humble goods. Kane's heart was hot with wrath against their unknown destroyers, but even deeper than that burned his unquenchable curiosity, the curse of the white man.

For Kane had looked on mystery in the night and the storm. That vivid flame of lightning had showed him, etched momentarily in its glare, a fierce, black-bearded face – the face of a white man. Yet according to sanity there could be no white men, not even Arab raiders, within hundreds and hundreds of miles. Kane had had no time to observe the man's dress, but he had a vague impression that the figure was clad strangely and bizarrely. And that sword which, striking glancingly and flat, had struck him down, surely that had been no crude native weapon.

Kane glanced at the crude mud wall which surrounded the village, at the bamboo gates which now lay in ruins, hewn to pieces by the raiders. The storm had apparently greatly abated when the raiders marched forth, for he made out a broad trampled track leading out of the broken gate and into the jungle.

Kane picked up a crude native axe that lay nearby. If any of the unknown slayers had fallen in the battle, their bodies had been carried away by their companions. Leaves pieced together made him a makeshift hat to protect his head from the force of the sun. Then Solomon Kane went through the broken gate and into the dripping jungle, following the spoor of the unknown.

Under the giant trees the tracks became clearer, and Kane made out that most of them were of sandals – a type of sandal, likewise, that was strange to him. The rest were of bare feet, showing that some prisoners had been taken. They must have had a long start of him, for though he travelled without pause, swinging along tirelessly on his rangy legs, he never sighted the column that day.

He ate of the food he had brought from the ruined village, and pressed on without halting, consumed by anger and by desire to solve the mystery of that lightning-limned face – more, the raiders had taken his weapons, and in that dark land, a man's weapons were his life. The day wore on. As the sun sank, the jungle gave way to forest-land, and at twilight Kane came out on a rolling, grass-grown, tree-dotted plain, and saw, far across it, what appeared to be a low-lying range of hills. The tracks led straight out across the plain, and Kane believed the raiders' goal was those low, even hills.

He hesitated; across the grass-lands came the thunderous roaring of lions, echoed and re-echoed from a score of different points. The great cats were beginning to stalk their prey, and it would be suicide to venture across that vast open space, armed with only an axe. Kane found a giant tree and, clambering into it, settled himself in a crotch as comfortably as he might. Far out across the plain he saw a point of light twinkling among the hills. Then on the plain, approaching the hills, he saw other lights, a twinkling fire-set serpentine that moved toward the hills, now scarcely visible against the stars along the horizons. It was the column of raiders and their slaves, he realized, bearing torches and travelling swiftly. The torches were no doubt to keep off the lions, and Kane decided that their goal must be very near at hand if they risked a night march on those carnivora-haunted grass-lands. As he watched, he saw the twinkling fire-points move upward, and for awhile they glittered among the hills, then he saw them no more.

Speculating on the mystery of it all, Kane slept, while the night winds whispered dark secrets of ancient Africa among the leaves, and lions roared beneath his tree, lashing their tufted tails as they gazed upward with hungry fire-lit eyes.

Again dawn lighted the land with rose and gold, and Solomon descended from his perch and took up his journey. He ate the last of the food he had brought, drank from a stream that looked fairly pure, and speculated on the chance of finding food among the hills. If he did not find it, he might be in a precarious position, but Kane had been hungry before – aye, and starving, and freezing and weary. His rangy, broad-shouldered frame was hard as iron, pliant as steel.

So he swung boldly out across the savannas, watching warily for lurking lions, but slackening not his pace. The sun climbed to the zenith and dipped westward. As he approached the low range, it began to grow in distinctness. He saw that instead of rugged hills, he was approaching a low plateau that rose abruptly from the surrounding plain and appeared to be level. He saw trees and tall grass on the edges, but the cliffs seemed barren and rough. However, they were at no point more than seventy or eighty feet in height, as far as he could see, and he anticipated no great difficulty in surmounting them.

As he came up to them he saw that they were almost solid rock, though overlaid by a fairly thick stratum of soil. Boulders had tumbled down in many places and he saw that an active man could scale the cliffs in many places. But he saw something else – a broad road which wound up the steep pitch of the precipice, and up which led the spoors he was following.

He went up, and noted the excellent workmanship of the road, which was no mere animal path, or even a native trail, but had been cut into the cliff with consummate skill, and was paved and balustraded with smoothly cut blocks of stone.

Wary as a wolf, he avoided the road, and further on found a less steep slope, up which he went. It was unstable footing, and boulders that seemed to poise on the slope threatened to roll down upon him, but he accomplished the task without undue hazard and came out over the edge of the cliff.

He stood on a rugged, boulder-strewn slope, which pitched off rather steeply onto a flat expanse. From where he stood, he saw the broad plateau spread out beneath his feet, carpeted with green lush grass. And in the midst – he blinked his eyes and shook his head, thinking he looked on some mirage or hallucination. No! It was still there! A massive walled city, rearing in the midst of the grassy plain! He saw the battlements, the towers beyond, and small figures moving about on the battlements. On the other side of the city he saw a small lake, on the shores of which stretched luxuriant gardens and fields, and meadow-like expanses filled with grazing cattle.

Amazement at the sight held him frozen for an instant, then the clink of an iron heel on a stone brought him quickly about to face the man who had come from among the boulders. This man was broad-built and powerful, almost as tall as Kane, and heavier. His bare arms bulged with muscles and his legs were like knotted iron pillars. His face was a duplicate of that Kane had seen in the lightning flash – fierce, black-bearded, the face of a white man, with arrogant intolerant eyes and a predatory hooked nose. From his bull-throat to his knees he was clad in a corselet of iron scales, and on his head was an iron helmet. A metal-braced shield of hardwood and leather was on his left arm, a dagger in his girdle, a short heavy iron mace in his hand.

All this Kane saw in a glance as the man roared and leaped. The Englishman realized in that instant that there was to be no such thing as a parley. It was to be a battle to the death. As a tiger leaps, he sprang to meet the warrior, launching his axe with all the power of his rangy frame. The warrior caught the blow on his shield, the axe-edge turned, the haft splintered in Kane's hand, and the buckler shattered. Carried by the momentum of his savage lunge, Kane's body crashed against his foe, who dropped the useless shield and, staggering, grappled with the Englishman. Straining and gasping they reeled on hard-braced feet, and Kane snarled like a wolf as he felt the full power of his foe's strength. The armor hampered the Englishman, and the warrior had shortened his grasp on the iron mace and was ferociously striving to crash it on Kane's bare head.

The Englishman was striving to pinion the warrior's arm, but his clutching fingers missed, and the mace crashed sickeningly against his bare head; again it fell, as a fire-shot mist clouded Kane's vision, but his instinctive wrench avoided it, though it half-numbed his shoulder, ripping the skin so that the blood started in streams.

Maddened, Kane lunged fiercely against the stalwart body of the mace-wielder, and one blindly grasping hand closed on the dagger-hilt at the warrior's girdle – ripped it forth and stabbed blindly and savagely.

Close-locked, the fighters staggered backward, the one stabbing in venomous silence, the other striving to tear his arm free so that he might crash home one destroying blow. The warrior's short half-hindered blows glanced from Kane's head and shoulders, ripping the skin and bringing blood in streams, sending red lances of agony across the Englishman's clouding brain. And still the dagger in his lunging hand glanced from the iron scales that guarded his foe's body.

Blinded, dazed, fighting on instinct alone as a wounded wolf fights, Kane's teeth snapped fang-like into the great bull's throat of his foe, tearing the flesh horrifyingly, and bringing a burst of flooding blood and an agonized roar from his victim. The lashing mace faltered as the warrior flinched back, and then they reeled on the edge of a low precipice and pitched, rolling headlong close-clinched. At the foot of the slope they brought up, Kane uppermost. The dagger in his hand glittered high above his head and flashed downward, sinking hilt-deep in the warrior's throat, and Kane's body pitched forward with the blow and he lay senseless above his slain enemy.

They lay in a widening pool of blood, and in the sky specks appeared, black against the blue, wheeling and circling and dropping lower.

Then from among the defiles appeared men similar in apparel and appearance to he who lay dead beneath Kane's senseless body. They had been attracted by the sound of the battle, and now they stood about discussing the matter in harsh guttural tones. Their black servants stood about silent.

They dragged the forms apart and discovered that one was dead, one probably dying. Then after some discussion, they made a litter of their spears and sword-slings, made their blacks lift the bodies and carry them. Then all set out toward the city which gleamed in the midst of the grassy plain.

II

Again consciousness returned to Solomon Kane. He was lying on a couch covered with finely dressed skins and furs, in a large chamber, whose floor, walls and ceiling were of stone. There was one window, heavily barred, and one doorway, outside which Kane saw standing a stalwart warrior much like the man he had slain. Then Kane discovered another thing; golden chains were on his wrists, neck and ankles. These were linked together in an intricate pattern, and were made fast to a ring set in the wall, with a strong silver lock.

Kane found that his wounds had been bandaged, and as he pondered over his situation, a black man entered with food and a kind of purple wine. Kane made no attempt at conversation, but ate the food offered and drank deeply. Then he slept, and the wine must have been drugged, for when he wakened, hours later, he found that the bandages had been changed, and there was a different guard outside the door – a man of the same type as the former soldier, however – muscular, black-bearded and clad in armor.

This time, when he awakened, he felt strong and refreshed, and decided that when the black entered again, he would seek to learn something of the curious environs into which he had fallen. The scruff of leather sandals on the tilings announced the approach of someone, and Kane sat up on his couch as a group of figures entered the chamber.

There were a clump of men with robes, inscrutable, shaven faces and shaven heads in the background, behind them the rangy black who had brought the food; these stayed in the background. Before them stood a figure which dominated the whole scene – a tall man whose garments were of silk, bound by a golden-scaled girdle. His blue-black hair and beard were curiously curled, his hawk-nosed face cruel and predatory; the arrogance of the eyes, which Kane had noticed as characteristic of the unknown race, was in this man much more strongly evident than in the others. On his head was a curiously carved circlet of gold, in his hand a golden wand. The attitude of the rest toward him was one of cringing servility, and Kane believed that he looked upon either the king or the high priest of the city.

Beside this personage stood a shorter, fatter man, with shaven face and head, clad in robes much like those worn by the lesser persons in the background, but much more costly. In his hand he bore a scourge composed of six thongs made fast to a jewel-set handle. The thongs ended in triangular shaped bits of metal, and the whole represented as savage an implement of punishment as Kane had ever looked upon. The man who bore this had small shifty, crafty eyes, and his whole attitude was a mixture of fawning servility toward the man with the sceptre, and intolerant despotism toward lesser beings.

Kane gave back their stare, trying to place an elusive sense of familiarity. There was something in the features of these people which vaguely suggested the Arab, yet they were strangely unlike any Arabs he had ever seen. They spoke together, and their language, at times, had a fantastically familiar sound. But he could not define these faint stirrings of half-memory.

At last the tall man with the sceptre turned and strode majestically forth, followed by his slavish companions, and Kane was left alone. After a time the fat shaven man returned with half a dozen soldiers and acolytes. Among these was the young black man who brought Kane's food, and a tall sombre figure, naked but for a loin cloth, who bore a great key at his girdle. The soldiers ringed Kane, javelins ready, while this man unlocked the chains from the ring in the wall. Then they surrounded him and, holding to his chains, indicated that he was to march with them. Surrounded by his captors, Kane emerged from the chamber into what appeared to be a series of wide galleries winding about the interior of the vast structure. Tier by tier they mounted, and turned at last into a chamber much like that he left, and similarly furnished. Kane's chains were made fast to a ring in the stone wall near the single window. He could stand upright or lie or sit on the skin-piled couch, but he could not move half a dozen steps in any direction. Wine and food were placed at his disposal, then they left him, and Kane noticed that neither was the door bolted nor a guard placed before it. He decided that they considered his chains sufficient to keep him safe, and after testing them, he realized that they were right. Yet there was another reason for their apparent carelessness, as he was to learn.

Kane looked out the window, which was larger than the other had been, and not so thickly barred. He was looking out over the city from a considerable height. He looked down on narrow streets, broad avenues flanked by what seemed to be columns and carven stone lions, and on wide expanses of flat-roofed houses, on many of which canopies seemed to argue that people basked under their shade. Much of the buildings seemed to be of stone, much of sun-dried bricks. There was a massiveness about their architecture that was vaguely repellent – a sombre heavy motif that seemed to suggest a sullen and slightly inhuman character of the builders.

He saw that the wall which surrounded the city was tall, thick and upheld towers spaced at regular intervals. He saw armored figures moving sentinel-like along the wall, and meditated upon the war-like aspect of this people. The streets and market-places below him offered a colorful maze as the richly clad people moved in an ever-shifting panorama.

As for the building which was his prison, Kane naturally could make out but little of its nature. Yet below him he saw a series of massive tiers descending like giant stair-steps. It must be, he decided, with a rather unpleasant sensation, built much like the fabled Tower of Babel, one tier above another.

He turned his attention back to his chamber. The walls were rich in mural decorations, carvings painted in various colors, well-tinted and blended. Indeed the art was of as high standard as any Kane had ever seen in Asia or Europe. Most of the scenes were of war or the hunt – powerful men with black beards, often curled, in armor, slaying lions and driving other warriors before them. Some of these other warriors were naked black men, others somewhat like their conquerors. The human figures were not as well depicted as those of the beasts, seemingly conventionalized to a point that often lent them a somewhat wooden aspect. But the lions were portrayed with vivid realism. Some of the scenes showed the black-bearded slayers in chariots, drawn by fire-breathing steeds, and Kane felt again that strange sense of familiarity, as if he had seen these scenes, or similar scenes, before. These chariots and horses, he noted, were inferior in life-likeness to the lions; the fault was not in conventionalizing but in the artist's ignorance of his subject, Kane decided, noting mistakes that seemed extremely incongruous, considering the skill with which they were portrayed.

Time passed swiftly as he pored over the carvings, and presently the silent black man entered with food and wine.

As he set down the viands, Kane spoke to him in a dialect of the bush-tribes, to one of the divisions of which he believed the man belonged, noting the tribal scars on his features. The dull face lighted slightly and the man answered in a tongue similar enough for Kane to understand him.

“What city is this?”

“Ninn, bwana.”

“Who are these people?”

The dull black shook his head in doubt.

“They be very old people, bwana. They have dwelt here very long time.”

“Was that their king who came to my chamber with his men?”

“Yes, bwana, that be King Asshur-ras-arab.”

“And the man with the lash?”

“Yamen, the priest, bwana Persian.”

“Why do you call me that?” asked Kane, nonplussed.

“So the masters name you, bwana –” The black shrank back and his black skin turned ashy as the shadow of a tall figure fell across the doorway. The shaven-headed half-naked giant Shem entered and the black man fell to his knees, wailing his terror. Shem's mighty fingers closed about the black throat and Kane saw the wretched black's eyes protruding, his tongue thrust from his gaping mouth. His body writhed and threshed unavailingly, his hands clawed weakly and more weakly at the iron wrists. Then he went limp in his slayer's hands and as Shem released him, his corpse slumped loosely to the floor. Shem smote his hands together and a pair of giant blacks entered. Their faces turned ashy at the sight of their companion's corpse, but at a gesture from Shem, they callously laid hold of the dead man's feet and dragged him forth.

Shem turned at the door and his opaque implacable eyes met Kane's gaze, as if in warning. Hate drummed in Kane's temples, and it was the grim eyes of the murderer which fell before the cold fury in the Englishman's glare. Shem went noiselessly forth, leaving Kane to his meditations.

When food was next brought to Kane, it was brought by a rangy young black of genial and intelligent appearance. Kane made no effort to speak to him; apparently the masters did not wish for their slave to learn anything about them, for some reason or another.

How many days Kane remained in the high-flung chamber, he did not know; each day was exactly like the last and he lost count of time. Sometimes Yamen the priest came and looked upon him with a satisfied air that made Kane's eyes turn red with the killer's lust; sometimes Shem noiselessly appeared and as noiselessly disappeared. Kane's eyes were riveted to the key that swung from the silent giant's girdle. Could he but once get within reach of the fellow – but Shem was careful to stay out of his reach unless Kane was surrounded by warriors with ready javelins.

Then one night to his chamber came Yamen the priest with Shem and some fifty acolytes and soldiers. Shem unlocked Kane's chains from the wall, and between two columns of soldiers and priests the Englishman was escorted along the winding galleries, lighted by flaring torches set in the niches along the walls, and borne in the hands of the priests.

By the light Kane observed again the carven figures marching everlastingly around the massive walls of the galleries. Many were life-size, some dimmed and somewhat defaced as with age. Most of these, Kane noted, portrayed men in chariots drawn by horses, and he decided that the later, imperfect figures of steeds and chariots had been copied from these older carvings. Apparently there were no horses or chariots in the city now. Various racial distinctions were evident in the human figures – the hooked noses and curled black beards of the dominant race were plainly distinguished. Their opponents were sometimes black men, sometimes men somewhat like themselves, and occasionally tall rangy men with unmistakable Arab features. Kane was startled to note, too, that in some of the older scenes, men were depicted whose apparel and features were entirely different from those of their enemies. They always appeared in battle with the other race, and not always in retreat as in the case of the others. These frequently seemed to be having the best of the fight, and it was significant, Kane thought, that nowhere were these men portrayed as slaves. But what interested him was the familiarity about their features. No vague misplaced feeling about that familiarity! Those carven features were like the countenance of a friend in a strange land to the wanderer. But for their strange, barbaric arms and apparel they might have been Englishmen, with their Aryan features and yellow locks. They rode horses and rode like the wind.

Somewhere, in the long, long ago, Kane knew, the ancestors of the men of Ninn had warred with men kin to his own ancestors – but in what age and what land, he could not know. Certainly the scenes were not laid in the country that was now the home-land of the Ninnites, for these scenes showed wide fertile plains, grassy hills and wide rivers that wound through fertile plains. Aye, and great cities, like Ninn, but strangely unlike. And suddenly Kane remembered where he had seen similar carvings, wherein kings with black curled beards slew lions from chariots – on crumbling pieces of masonry that marked the site of a long forgotten city in Mesopotamia he had seen them, and men had told him those ruins were all that remained of Nineveh the Bloody, the accursed of God.

Now the Englishman and his captors had reached the ground-tier of the great temple, and they passed between huge squat columns, carven as were the walls, until they came to a vast circular space between the massive wall and the flanking pillars. Apparently cut from the stone of the mighty wall sat a colossal idol, whose carven features were as devoid of human weakness and kindness as the face of a Stone Age monster.

Facing the idol, on a stone throne in the shadow of the pillars, sat the King Asshur-ras-arab, the firelight flickering on his strongly chiseled face so that at first Kane thought that it was an idol that sat on that throne.

Before the god, facing the king's throne, there was another, smaller throne, before which stood a brazier on a golden tripod; coals glowed in the brazier and smoke curled languorously upward.

A flowing robe of shimmering green silk was put upon Kane, hiding his tattered, worn and stained garments and the golden chains. He was motioned to sit in the throne before the brazier, and he did so. Then his ankles and wrists were locked cunningly to the throne, hidden by the folds of the silken robe. Then the lesser priests and the soldiers melted away, leaving only Kane, the priest Yamen, and the king upon his throne. Back in the shadows among the tree-like columns Kane occasionally glimpsed a glint of metal, like fire-flies in the dark. The soldiers still lurked there, out of sight. He sensed that some sort of a stage had been set; somehow he got a suggestion of charlatanry in the whole procedure.

Now Asshur-ras-arab lifted the golden wand and struck once upon a gong that hung near his throne, and a full mellow note like a distant chime echoed among the dim reaches of the shadowy temple. Along the dusky avenue between the columns came a group of men whom Kane realized must be the nobles of that fantastic city. They were tall men, black-bearded and haughty of bearing, clad in shimmering silk and gleaming gold. And among them walked one in golden chains, a youth whose attitude seemed a mixture of apprehension and defiance.

All knelt before the king, bowing their heads to the floor, and at a word from him, rose and faced the god and the Englishman before the god. Now Yamen, with the firelight glinting on his shaven head and evil eyes, so that he looked like a paunchy demon, cried out a sort of weird chant and flung a handful of powder into the brazier. Instantly a greenish smoke billowed upward, half-veiling Kane's face. The Englishman gagged; the smell and taste were unpleasant in the extreme. He felt groggy, drugged. His brain reeled like a drunken man's and he tore savagely at his chains. Only half conscious of what he said, unaccustomed oaths ripped from his lips.

He was dimly aware that Yamen cried out fiercely at his curses, and leaned forward in an attitude of listening. Then the powder burned out, the smoke waned away, and Kane sat groggily and bewilderedly on the throne. Yamen turned toward the king and bending low, straightened again and with his arms outstretched, spoke in a sonorous tone. The king solemnly repeated his words, and Kane saw the face of the noble prisoner go white. Then his companions seized his arms, and the band marched slowly away, their footfalls coming back eerily through the shadowy vastness.

Like silent ghosts the soldiers came from the shadows and unchained him. Again they grouped themselves about Kane and led him up and up through the shadowy galleries to his chamber, where again Shem locked his chains to the wall. Kane sat on his couch, chin on his fist, striving to find some motive in all the fantastic actions he had witnessed. And presently he realized that there was undue stir in the streets below.

He looked out the window. Great fires blazed in the market-place and the figures of men, curiously foreshortened, came and went. They seemed to be busying themselves about a figure in the center of the market-place, but they clustered about it so thickly he could make nothing of it. A circle of soldiers ringed the group; the firelight glanced on their armor. About them clamored a disorderly mob, yelling and shouting. Suddenly a scream of frightful agony cut through the din, and the shouting died away for an instant, to be renewed with more force than before. Most of the clamor sounded like protest, Kane thought, though mingled with it was the sound of jeers, taunting howls and devilish laughter. And all through the babble rang those ghastly, intolerable shrieks.

A swift pad of naked feet sounded on the tiles and the young black, Sula, rushed in and thrust his head into the window, panting with excitement. The firelight from without shone on his ebon face and white rolling eyeballs.

“The people strive with the spearmen,” he exclaimed, forgetting, in his excitement, the order not to converse with the strange captive. “Many of the people loved well the young prince Bel-lardath – oh, bwana, there was no evil in him! Why did you bid the King have him flayed alive?”

“I!” exclaimed Kane, taken aback and dumbfounded. “I said naught! I do not even know this prince! I have never seen him.”

Sula turned his head and looked full into Kane's face.

“Now I know what I have secretly thought, bwana,” he said in the Bantu tongue Kane understood. “You are no god, nor mouthpiece of a god, but a man, such as I have seen before the men of Ninn took me captive. Once before, when I was small, I saw men cast in your mold, who came with their black servants and slew our warriors with weapons which spoke with fire and thunder.”

“Truly I am but a man,” answered Kane, dazedly, “but what – I do not understand. What is it they do in yonder market-place?”

“They are skinning prince Bel-lardath alive,” answered Sula. “It has been talked freely among the market-places that the king and Yamen hated the prince, who is of the blood of Abdulai. But he had many followers among the people, especially among the Arbii, and not even the king dared sentence him to death. But when you were brought into the temple, secretly, none in the city knowing of it, Yamen said you were the mouthpiece of the gods. And he said Baal had revealed to him that prince Bel-lardath had roused the wrath of the gods. So they brought him before the oracle of the gods –”

Kane swore sickly. How incredible – how ghastly – to think that his lusty English oaths had doomed a man to a horrible death. Aye – crafty Yamen had translated his random words in his own way. And so the prince, whom Kane had never seen before, writhed beneath the skinning knives of his executioners in the market-place below, where the crowd shrieked or jeered.

“Sula,” he said, “what do these people call themselves?”

“Assyrians, bwana,” answered the black absently, staring in horrified fascination at the grisly scene below.

III

In the days that followed Sula found opportunities from time to time to talk with Kane. Little he could tell the Englishman of the origin of the men of Ninn. He only knew that they had come out of the east in the long, long ago, and had built their massive city on the plateau. Only the dim legends of his tribe spoke of them. His people lived in the rolling plains far to the south and had warred with the people of the city for untold ages. His people were called Sulas, and they were strong and war-like, he said. From time to time they made raids on the Ninnites, and occasionally the Ninnites returned the raid – in such a raid Sula was captured – but not often did they venture far from the plateau. Though of late, Sula said, they had been forced to range further afield in search of slaves, as the black people shunned the grim plateau and generation by generation moved further back into the wilderness.

The life of a slave of Ninn was hard, Sula said, and Kane believed him, seeing the marks of lash, rack and brand on the young black's body. The drifting ages had not softened the spirit of the Assyrians, nor modified their fierceness, a byword in the ancient East.

Kane wondered much at the presence of this ancient people in this unknown land, but Sula could tell him nothing. They came from the east, long, long ago – that was all Sula knew. Kane knew now why their features and language had seemed remotely familiar. Their features were the original Semitic features, now modified in the modern inhabitants of Mesopotamia, and many of their words had an unmistakable likeness to certain Hebraic words and phrases.

Kane learned from Sula that not all of the inhabitants were of one blood; they did not mix with their black slaves, or if they did, the offspring of such a union was instantly put to death, but there was more than one strain in the race. The dominant strain, Sula learned, was Assyrian; but there were some of the people, both common people and nobles, whom Sula said were “Arbii,” much like the Assyrians, yet differing somewhat. Then there were “Kaldii,” who were magicians and soothsayers, but they were held in no great esteem by the true Assyrians. Shem, Sula said, and his kind were Elamites, and Kane started at the biblical term. There were not many of these, Sula said, and they were the tools of the priests – slayers and doers of strange and unnatural deeds. Sula had suffered at the hands of Shem, he said, and so had every other slave of the temple.

And it was this same Shem on whom Kane kept hungry eyes riveted. At his girdle hung the golden key that meant liberty. But, as if he read the meaning in the Englishman's cold eyes, Shem walked with care, a dark sombre giant with a grim carven face, and came not within reach of the captive's long steely arms, unless accompanied by armed guards.

Never a day passed but Kane heard the crack of the scourge, the screams of agonized slaves beneath the brand, the lash, or the skinning knife. Ninn was a veritable Hell, he reflected, ruled by the demoniac Asshur-ras-arab and his crafty and lustful satellite, Yamen the priest. The king was high priest as well, as had been his royal ancestors in ancient Nineveh. And Kane realized why they called him a Persian, seeing in him a resemblance to those wild old Aryan tribesmen who had ridden down from their mountains to sweep the Assyrian empire off the earth. Surely it was fleeing those yellow-haired conquerors that the people of Ninn had come into Africa.

And so the days passed and Kane abode as a captive in the city of Ninn. But he went no more to the temple as an oracle. Then one day there was confusion in the city. Kane heard the trumpets blaring upon the wall, and the roll of kettle-drums. Steel clanged in the streets and the sound of men marching rose to his eyrie. Looking out, over the wall, across the plateau, he saw a horde of naked black men approaching the city in loose formation. Their spears flashed in the sun, their head-pieces of ostrich-plumes floated in the breeze, and their yells came faintly to him.

Sula rushed in, his eyes blazing.

“My people!” he exclaimed. “They come against the men of Ninn! My people are warriors! Bogaga is war-chief – Katayo is king. The war-chiefs of the Sulas hold their honors by the might of their hands, for any man who is strong enough to slay him with his naked hands, becomes war-chief in his place! So Bogaga won the chieftainship, but it will be many a day before any slays him, for he is the mightiest chieftain of them all!”

Kane's window afforded a better view over the wall than any other, for his chamber was in the top-most tier of Baal's temple. To his chamber came Yamen, with his grim guards, Shem and another sombre Elamite. They stood out of Kane's reach, looking through one of the windows.

The mighty gates swung wide; the Assyrians were marching out to meet their enemies. Kane reckoned that there were fifteen hundred armed warriors; that left three hundred still in the city, the bodyguard of the king, the sentries, and house-troops of the various noblemen. The host, Kane noted, was divided into four divisions; the center was in the advance, consisting of six hundred men, while each flank or wing was composed of three hundred. The remaining three hundred marched in compact formation behind the center, between the wings, so the whole presented an appearance of this figure:

The warriors were armed with javelins, swords, maces and short heavy bows. On their backs were quivers bristling with shafts.

They marched out on the plain in perfect order, and took up their position, apparently awaiting the attack. It was not slow in coming. Kane estimated that the blacks numbered at least three thousand warriors, and even at that distance he could appreciate their splendid stature and courage. But they had no system or order of warfare. In one great ragged disorderly horde they rushed onward, to be met by a withering blast of arrows that ripped through their bull-hide shields as though they had been made of paper.

The Assyrians had slung their shields about their necks and were drawing and loosing methodically, not in regular volleys as the archers of Crйcy and Agincourt had loosed, but steadily and without pause, nevertheless. With reckless courage the black men hurled themselves forward, into the teeth of the fearful hail; Kane saw whole lines melt away, and the plain became carpeted with the dead, but the blacks hurled themselves forward, wasting their lives like water. Kane marveled at the perfect discipline of the Semitic soldiers, who went through their motions as coolly as if they were on the drill-ground. The wings had moved forward, their foremost tips connecting with the ends of the center, presenting an unbroken front. The men in the company between the wings maintained their place, unmoving, not yet having taken any part in the battle.

The black horde was broken, staggering back under the deadly fire, against which flesh and blood could not stand. The great ragged crescent had broken to bits, and from the fire of the right flank and the center, the black men were falling back disorderly, hounded by the ranging shafts of the white warriors. But on the left flank, a frothing mob of perhaps four hundred warriors had burst through the fearful barrage and, yelling like fiends, they shocked against the Assyrian wing. But before the spears clashed, Kane saw the company in reserve between the wings wheel and march in double quick time to support the threatened wing. Against that double wall of six hundred mailed war-men, the onslaught staggered, broke and reeled backward.

Swords flashed among the spears and Kane saw the naked black men falling like grain before the reaper as the javelins and swords of the Assyrians mowed them down. Not all the corpses on the bloody ground were those of black men, but where one Assyrian lay dead or wounded, ten Sulas had died.

Now the black men were in full flight across the plain, and the iron ranks moved forward in quick but orderly pace, loosing at every step, hunting the vanquished across the plateau, plying the dagger on the wounded. They took no prisoners. Sulas did not make good slaves, as Solomon was instantly to see.

In Kane's chamber, the watchers were crowded at the windows, eyes glued in fascination on the wild and gory scene. Sula's chest heaved with passion; his eyes blazed with the blood-lust of the savage, as the shouts and the slaughter and the spears of his tribesmen fired all the slumbering ferocity in his savage soul.

With the yell of a blood-mad panther, he sprang on the backs of his masters. Before any could lift a hand, he snatched the dagger from Shem's girdle and plunged it to the hilt between Yamen's shoulders. The priest shrieked like a wounded woman and went to his knees, blood spurting, and the Elamites closed with the raging slave. Shem sought to seize his wrist, but the other Elamite and Sula whirled into a deadly embrace, plying their knives which were in an instant red to the hilt. Eyes glaring, froth on their lips, they rolled and tumbled, slashing and stabbing. Shem, seeking to catch Sula's wrist, was struck by the hurtling bodies and knocked violently aside. He lost his footing and sprawled against Kane's couch.

And before he could move, the chained Englishman was on him like a great cat. At last the moment he had waited for had come! Shem was within his reach! Even as Shem sought to rise, Kane's knee smote him in the breast, breaking his ribs, and Kane's iron fingers locked in his throat. Kane scarcely was aware of the terrible, wild-beast struggles of the Elamite as he sought in vain to break that grasp. A red mist veiled the Englishman's sight and through it he saw horror growing in Shem's inhuman eyes – saw them distend and turn blood-shot – saw the mouth gape and the tongue protrude as the shaven head was bent back at a horrible angle – then Shem's neck snapped like a heavy branch and the straining body went limp in Kane's hands.

The Englishman snatched at the key in the dead man's girdle, and an instant later stood up free, feeling a wild surge of exultation sweep over him as he flexed his unhampered limbs. He glanced about the chamber; Yamen was gurgling out his life on the tiles, and Sula and the other Elamite lay dead, locked in each others' iron arms, literally slashed to pieces.

Kane ran swiftly from the chamber. He had no plan, except to escape from the temple he had grown to hate as a man hates Hell. He ran down the winding galleries, meeting no one. Evidently the servants of the temple had been massed on the walls, watching the battle. But on the lower tier, he came face to face with one of the temple guards. The man gaped at him stupidly – and Kane's fist crashed against his black-bearded jowl, stretching him senseless. Kane snatched up his heavy javelin. A thought had come to him that perhaps the streets were practically deserted as the people watched the battle, and he could make his way across the city and scale the wall on the side next the lake.

He ran through the pillar-forested temple and out the mighty portal. He saw a scattering of people who shrieked and fled at the sight of the strange figure emerging from the grim temple. Kane hurried down the street in the direction of the opposite gate. He saw few people. Then as he turned down a side street, thinking to take a short cut, he heard a thunderous roar.

Ahead of him he saw four black slaves bearing a richly ornamented litter, such as nobles rode in. The occupant was a young girl, whose jewel-bedecked garments showed her importance and wealth. And now around the corner came roaring a great tawny shape. A lion, loose in the city streets!

The blacks dropped the litter and fled, shrieking, while the people on the housetops screamed. The girl cried out once, scrambling up in the very path of the charging monster. She stood facing it, frozen with terror.

Kane, at the first roar of the beast, had experienced a fierce satisfaction. So hateful had Ninn become to him that the thought of a wild beast raging through its streets and devouring its cruel inhabitants had given the Puritan an indisputable satisfaction. But now, as he saw the pitiful figure of the girl facing the man-eater, he felt a pang of pity for her, and acted.

As the lion launched himself through the air, Kane hurled the javelin with all the power of his iron frame. Just behind the mighty shoulder it struck, transfixing the tawny body. A deafening roar burst from the beast which spun sidewise in mid-air, as though it had encountered a solid wall, and instead of the rending claws, it was the heavy shaggy shoulder that smote the frail figure of its victim, hurling her aside as the great beast crashed to the earth.

Kane, forgetful of his own position, sprang forward and lifted the girl, to ascertain if she were injured. This was easy, as her garments, like the garments of most of the Assyrian noble-women, were so scanty as to consist more of ornaments than covering. Kane assured himself that she was only bruised and badly frightened.

He helped her to her feet, and then was aware that a throng of curious people had surrounded him. He turned to press through them, and they made no effort to stop him, when suddenly a priest appeared and yelled something, pointing at him. The people instantly fell back, but half a dozen armored soldiers came forward, javelins ready. Kane faced them, red fury seething in his soul, ready to leap among them and do what damage he could with his naked hands before he died, when down the stones of the street sounded the tramp of marching men, and a company of soldiers swung into view, their spears red from the recent strife.

The girl cried out and ran forward to fling her arms about the stalwart neck of the young officer in command and there followed a rapid fire of conversation which Kane naturally could not understand. Then the officer spoke curtly to the guards, who drew back, and advanced toward Kane, his empty hands outstretched, a smile on his lips. His manner was friendly in the extreme and the Englishman realized that he was trying to express his gratitude for his rescue of the girl, who was no doubt either his sister or his sweetheart. The priest frothed and cursed, but the young noble answered him shortly, and made motions for Kane to accompany him. Then as the Englishman hesitated, suspicious, he drew his own sword and extended it to Kane, hilt foremost. Kane took the weapon; it might have been the form of courtesy to have refused it, but Kane was unwilling to take chances, and he felt much more secure with a weapon in his hand.

Solomon Kane's Homecoming

The white gulls wheeled above the cliffs,

the air was slashed with foam,

The long tides moaned along the strand

when Solomon Kane came home.

He walked in silence strange and dazed

through the little Devon town,

His gaze, like a ghost's come back to life,

roamed up the streets and down.

The people followed wonderingly

to mark his spectral stare,

And in the tavern silently

they thronged about him there.

He heard as a man hears in a dream

the worn old rafters creak,

And Solomon lifted his drinking-jack

and spoke as a ghost might speak:

“There sat Sir Richard Grenville once;

in smoke and flame he passed,

“And we were one to fifty-three,

but we gave them blast for blast.

“From crimson dawn to crimson dawn,

we held the Dons at bay.

“The dead lay littered on our decks,

our masts were shot away.

“We beat them back with broken blades,

till crimson ran the tide;

“Death thundered in the cannon smoke

when Richard Grenville died.

“We should have blown her hull apart

and sunk beneath the Main.”

The people saw upon his wrists

the scars of the racks of Spain.

“Where is Bess?” said Solomon Kane.

“Woe that I caused her tears.”

“In the quiet churchyard by the sea

she has slept these seven years.”

The sea-wind moaned at the window-pane,

and Solomon bowed his head.

“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,

and the fairest fade,” he said.

His eyes were mystical deep pools

that drowned unearthly things,

And Solomon lifted up his head

and spoke of his wanderings.

“Mine eyes have looked on sorcery

in the dark and naked lands,

“Horror born of the jungle gloom

and death on the pathless sands.

“And I have known a deathless queen

in a city old as Death,

“Where towering pyramids of skulls

her glory witnesseth.

“Her kiss was like an adder's fang,

with the sweetness Lilith had,

“And her red-eyed vassals howled for blood

in that City of the Mad.

“And I have slain a vampire shape

that sucked a black king white,

“And I have roamed through grisly hills

where dead men walked at night.

“And I have seen heads fall like fruit

in the slaver's barracoon,

“And I have seen winged demons fly

all naked in the moon.

“My feet are weary of wandering

and age comes on apace;

“I fain would dwell in Devon now,

forever in my place.”

The howling of the ocean pack

came whistling down the gale,

And Solomon Kane threw up his head

like a hound that snuffs a trail.

A-down the wind like a running pack

the hounds of the ocean bayed,

And Solomon Kane rose up again

and girt his Spanish blade.

In his strange cold eyes a vagrant gleam

grew wayward and blind and bright,

And Solomon put the people by

and went into the night.

A wild moon rode the wild white clouds,

the waves in white crests flowed,

When Solomon Kane went forth again

and no man knew his road.

They glimpsed him etched against the moon,

where clouds on hilltop thinned;

They heard an eery echoed call

that whistled down the wind.

Solomon Kane's Homecoming (Variant)

The white gulls wheeled above the cliffs,

the wind was slashed with foam,

The long tides moaned along the strand

when Solomon Kane came home.

He walked in silence through the streets

of the little Devon town,

The folk all followed whispering

all up the streets and down.

They whispered of his sun-bronzed hue

and his deep strange stare;

They followed him into the tavern

and thronged about him there.

He heard, as a man hears in a dream,

the old worn rafters creak,

And Solomon lifted his drinking jack

and spoke as a ghost might speak:

“Where are the lads that gathered here

so many years ago?

“Drake and Hawkins and Oxenham,

Grenville and Leigh and Yeo?

“Was it so long ago,” said Kane,

“sat Richard Grenville there?

“The dogs of Spain,” said Solomon Kane,

“by God, we fought them fair!

“For a day and a night and a day again

we held their fleet at bay,

“Till their round shot riddled us through and through

and ripped our masts away.

“Where is Bess?” said Solomon Kane.

“It racked me hard to go –

“But I heard the high tide grate the keel

and I heard the sea-wind blow.

“I left her – though it racked my heart

to see the lass in tears –”

“In the quiet churchyard by the sea

she has slept these seven years.”

The sea-wind moaned at the window pane

and Solomon bowed his head.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,

and the fairest fade,” he said.

His eyes were mystical deep pools

that drown unearthly things,

And Solomon lifted up his head

and spoke of his wanderings.

“My feet have tracked a bloody way

across the trackless sands,

“Mine eyes have looked on sorcery

in the dark and naked lands.

“And I have known a deathless queen

in a city old as Death;

“Her smile was like a serpent's kiss,

her kiss was Lilith's breath.

“And I have roamed in grisly hills

where dead men walked by night,

“And I have seen a tattered corpse

stand up to blast men's sight.

“And I have heard the death-chant rise

in the slaver's barracoon,

“And I have seen a winged fiend fly,

all naked, in the moon.

“My feet are weary of wandering

and age comes on apace –

“I fain would dwell in Devon now,

forever in my place.”

The shouting of the ocean-winds

went whistling down the gale,

And Solomon Kane raised up his head

like a hound that snuffs the trail.

A-down the winds like a running pack,

the hounds of the ocean bayed,

And Solomon Kane rose up again

and girt his Spanish blade.

Hands held him hard but the vagrant gleam

in his eyes grew blind and bright,

And Solomon Kane put by the folk

and went into the night.

A wild moon rode in the wild white clouds,

the waves their white crests showed

When Solomon Kane went forth again,

and no man knew his road.

They saw him etched against the moon

on the hill in clouds that thinned,

They heard an eery, echoed call

that whistled down the wind.

Out of the tavern into the night

went Solomon Kane once more,

He heard the clamor of the winds,

he had harked to the ocean's roar.

Appendices

A Short Biography of Robert E. Howard

by Rusty Burke

Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) ranks among the greatest writers of adventure stories. The creator of Conan the Cimmerian, Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Francis X. Gordon (“El Borak”), Sailor Steve Costigan, Breckenridge Elkins, and many other memorable characters, Howard, during a writing career that spanned barely a dozen years, had well over a hundred stories published in the pulp magazines of his day, chiefly Weird Tales, but including Action Stories, Argosy, Fight Stories, Oriental Stories, Spicy Adventure, Sport Story, Strange Detective, Thrilling Adventure, Top Notch, and a number of others. His stories consistently proved popular with the readers, for they are powerfully vivid adventures, with colorful, larger-than-life heroes and compelling, rivetting prose that grabs the reader from the first paragraph and sweeps him along to the thrilling conclusion. So great was the appeal of Howard's storytelling that it continues to capture new generations of readers and inspire many of the finest writers of fantasy and adventure.

Robert E. Howard was born on January 22, 1906, in the “fading little ex-cowtown” of Peaster, Texas, in Parker County, just west of Fort Worth. The Howards were living at the time in neighboring Palo Pinto County, on the banks of Dark Valley Creek. Robert's father, Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard, presumably moved his wife temporarily to the larger community of Peaster so that she would have readier access to medical care when her pregnancy came to term. Hester Jane Ervin Howard, Robert's mother, did not enjoy robust health, to put it mildly: there was a history of tuberculosis in her family, and Mrs. Howard was sickly for much of Robert's life. Isaac Howard was a country doctor, a profession which entails frequent lengthy absences from home. Thus he may have wished to be certain that his wife of two years, experiencing her first pregnancy in her mid-thirties, would have adequate medical attention when she delivered their first, and as it happened, only child.

Isaac Howard seems to have been possessed of a combination of wanderlust and ambition that led him to move his family frequently in search of better opportunities. By the time he was eight, Robert had lived in at least seven different, widely scattered Texas towns. Finally, in 1915, the family moved to the community of Cross Cut, in Brown County, and they would live in this vicinity, with moves to Burkett (in Coleman County) in 1917 and finally to Cross Plains (Callahan County) in 1919, for the rest of Robert's and his mother's lives.

Cross Plains in the 1920s was a small town of approximately 2000 souls, give or take a thousand, but like much of the Central West Texas region, it went through periodic oil booms. Two town-site booms, in particular, brought hundreds, perhaps thousands, of temporary inhabitants who set up camps just outside the town limits, jammed the hotels to capacity, and rented rooms or beds in private homes. The lease men, riggers, drillers, tool dressers, and roughnecks who followed the oil were followed in their turn by those who sought to exploit them for profit, from men or women who set up temporary hamburger stands to feed them, to gamblers and prostitutes who provided “recreation,” to thugs, thieves and con men who simply preyed on them. An oil boom could transform a sleepy little community into a big city in no time at all, in those days: when oil was discovered in Ranger, Texas (about 40 miles from Cross Plains) in 1917, the population increased from 1,000 to 30,000 in less than a year, and similar growth was reported in nearby Breckinridge. Cross Plains never saw anything like that kind of growth, but certainly the few thousand who did come transformed it into a wilder and rowdier town than usual. One resident recalls her family driving into town on Saturday night just to watch people, hoping fights would break out. They were rarely disappointed. Of the atmosphere in a boom town, Howard wrote: “I'll say one thing about an oil boom: it will teach a kid that Life's a pretty rotten thing about as quick as anything I can think of.” Just as quickly as the town grew, however, it could decline: when the oil played out, the speculators and oil-field workers and their camp-followers moved on. The influence of this boom-and-bust cycle on Howard's later ideas about the growth and decline of civilization has often been overlooked.

Bob Howard attended the local high school, where he was remembered as polite and reserved, and to make pocket money he worked at a variety of jobs, including hauling trash, picking up and delivering laundry for dry-cleaners, clerking in stores, loading freight at the train station, etc. He had some close friends among the local boys, but there seem to have been none who shared his literary interests.

Bob's literary interests had probably been encouraged from an early age by his mother, an ardent poetry lover. He was an avid reader, claiming even to have raided schoolhouses during the summer in his quest for books. While this story is probably hyperbolic, it does give an indication of his thirst for reading material, which was a rare commodity in the communities in which the Howards lived, most of which had no libraries, much less bookstores. Bob seems to have had an extraordinary ability to read quickly and to remember what he had read. His friends recall their astonishment at his ability to pick up a book in the library or a store or someone's house, to quickly turn the pages and run his eyes over them, faster than they thought anyone could actually be reading, and later to be able to relate to them with perfect clarity what he had read. His library, presented by his father to Howard Payne College after his death, reveals the breadth of his interests: history and fiction are dominant, but also represented are biography, sports, poetry, anthropology, Texana, and erotica. Near the end of his life he wrote to H.P. Lovecraft:

“My favorite writers are A. Conan Doyle, Jack London, Mark Twain, Sax Rohmer, Jeffery Farnol, Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, R.W. Chambers, Rider Haggard, Kipling, Sir Walter Scott, [Stanley] Lane-Poole, Jim Tully, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft. For poetry, I like Robert W. Service, Kipling, John Masefield, James Elroy Flecker, [Robert] Vansittart, Sidney Lanier, Edgar Allan Poe, the Benets – Stephen Vincent better than William Rose – Walter de la Mare, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Francis Ledwedge, Omar Khayyam, Joe Moncure March, Nathalia Crane, Henry Herbert Knibbs, Lord Dunsany, G.K. Chesterton, Bret Harte, Oscar Wilde, Longfellow, Tennyson, Swinburne, [George Sylvester] Viereck, Alfred Noyes, and Lovecraft.”

In addition to his reading, Bob Howard had a passion for oral storytelling. It is well attested that he frequently told his stories aloud as he typed them: his neighbors reported that they sometimes had difficulty sleeping at night because of the racket Howard was making. His youthful buddies in Cross Cut remember that he liked to have them all play out stories he made up, and the literary friends of his adulthood recall being often enthralled by the stories he would tell when they were together. He seemed never to tire of telling stories, though he generally would not relate a tale he was actually writing: he told Novalyne Price that once the story was told, he had difficulty getting it on paper. Sometimes, however, his oral stories were the inspiration or basis for the stories he would write. He loved, too, to listen to others tell stories: in his letters he relates how as a young boy he was thrilled and terrified by the tales of the family's cook, a former slave, and those of his grandmother. Novalyne Price remembers him sitting riveted by the stories of her grandmother, and that he loved to find old-timers who could relate tales of pioneer days. It may well be the quality of the oral story, the well-spun yarn, that makes Howard's stories so enthralling.

Howard seems to have determined upon a literary career at an early age. In a letter to H.P. Lovecraft he says that his first story was written when he was “nine or ten,” and a former postmistress at Burkett recalls that he began writing stories about this time and expressed an intention of becoming a writer. He submitted his first story for professional publication when he was but 15, and his first professional sale, “Spear and Fang,” was made at age 18. Howard always insisted that he chose writing as his profession simply because it gave him the freedom to be his own boss:

“I've always had a honing to make my living by writing, ever since I can remember, and while I haven't been a howling success in that line, at least I've managed for several years now to get by without grinding at some time clock-punching job. There's freedom in this game; that's the main reason I chose it.”

Whatever his reasons, once Howard had determined upon his path, he kept at it.

The Cross Plains school only went through tenth grade during Bob Howard's day, but he needed to complete the eleventh grade to qualify for college admission. Therefore, in the fall of 1922 Bob and his mother moved to Brownwood, a larger town that served as the county seat for Brown County, so that he could finish high school there. It was there that he met Truett Vinson and Clyde Smith, who would remain his friends until the end of his life: they were the first of his friends to share and encourage his interest in literature and writing. Smith, in particular, shared much of Howard's literary taste, and the two encouraged each other in writing poetry. Also at Brownwood High, Howard enjoyed his first appearances as a published author: two of his stories won cash prizes and publication in the high school paper, The Tattler, December 22, 1922, and three more were printed during the spring term.

After his graduation from high school, Howard returned to Cross Plains. His father, in particular, wanted him to attend college, perhaps hoping that he, too, would become a physician. But Bob had little aptitude for and no interest in science. He also claimed a passionate hatred for school. As he wrote later to Lovecraft: “I hated school as I hate the memory of school. It wasn't the work I minded; I had no trouble learning the tripe they dished out in the way of lessons – except arithmetic, and I might have learned that if I'd gone to the trouble of studying it. I wasn't at the head of my classes – except in history – but I wasn't at the foot either. I generally did just enough work to keep from flunking the courses, and I don't regret the loafing I did. But what I hated was the confinement – the clock-like regularity of everything; the regulation of my speech and actions; most of all the idea that someone considered himself or herself in authority over me, with the right to question my actions and interfere with my thoughts.”

Although he did eventually take courses at the Howard Payne commercial school, these were business courses – stenography, typing, and a program in bookkeeping; despite his interest in history, anthropology, and literature, Howard never took college courses in these subjects. During the period from his high school graduation in spring of 1923 to his completion of the bookkeeping program in the spring of 1927, he continued writing. While he finally made his first professional sale during this period, when Weird Tales accepted “Spear and Fang,” he also accumulated many rejection slips. Further, because most of his early sales were to Weird Tales, which paid upon publication, rather than acceptance, he found that the money was not coming in as he might have liked. He therefore took a variety of jobs during these years. He tried reporting oil-field news, but found he did not like interviewing people he did not know or like about a topic that did not interest him. He tried stenography, both in a law office and as an independent public stenographer, but found he was not particularly good at it and did not like it. He worked as an assistant to an oil-field geologist, and while he did enjoy the work, he one day collapsed in the fearsome Texas summer heat, which led him to fear that he had heart problems (it was later learned that his heart had a mild tendency to race under stress), so he was just as glad when the survey ended and the geologist left town. He spent several months as a soda jerk and counterman at Robertson's Drug Store, a job that he actively detested, and which required so much of his time that he had little left over for writing or recreation. Thus he made a pact with his father: he would take the course in bookkeeping at the Howard Payne Academy, following which he would have one year to try to make a success of his writing. If at the end of that year he was not making it, he would try to find a bookkeeping job.

During the summer of 1927, Bob Howard met Harold Preece, who would be an important friend and correspondent for the next few years. It was Preece who encouraged Bob's interest in Irish and Celtic history and legend: he had earlier shown some interest in the subject, and now, inspired by Preece's enthusiasm, it would become an active passion. He also met, the same weekend, Booth Mooney, who would become the editor of a literary circular, The Junto, to which Howard, Preece, Clyde Smith, Truett Vinson, and others contributed over a period of about two years.

After completing the bookkeeping course, Howard set about in earnest the business of becoming a writer. By early 1928, it was clear that he was going to be able to succeed in this, and indeed he never again worked at any other job. Weird Tales had published two Howard stories in 1925, one in 1926, and one (plus two poems) in 1927. In 1928 they would publish four stories (including the first Solomon Kane tale, “Red Shadows”) and five poems. From January 1928 until his death in June 1936, Howard stories or verse appeared in nearly three of every four issues of Weird Tales.

Several critics have noted that Howard's writing can be divided into “periods.” Though they overlap to a degree, these periods, which seemed to last two to three years each, may reveal something about Howard's writing style and methods. The most well-defined periods are those during which he wrote boxing stories, culminating in the Steve Costigan series; heroic fantasy stories, culminating with Conan; oriental adventure stories, culminating with the El Borak tales; and western stories – he was still “in” this period at his death. A close reading of Howard's letters and stories, and placement of these along a timeline, reveals that he would develop an interest in a subject, read about it avidly, immerse himself in it so thoroughly that he virtually adopted a new identity (a persona, the “voice” through which a writer speaks, not to be confused with the writer's own personality), whereupon he would begin, at first tentatively and then with increasing confidence and vigor, to write about the subject in this new “voice.” While something of the pattern can be seen from his early writing, it is most vivid beginning with his “boxing” persona, Steve Costigan.

Howard's passion for boxing is attested as early as age nine. He boxed with his friends at any opportunity, and in his late teens may have occasionally assisted in promoting fights at local clubs in Cross Plains. While working at the soda fountain at Robertson's Drug Store, he developed a friendship with one oil-field worker who introduced him to the amateur fighters at the local ice house, and he became a frequent participant in these bouts. Between 1925 (at the latest) and 1928, he put himself through a weight and strength program, and took on really heroic proportions. He read avidly about prizefighters, and attended fights whenever and wherever he could. By early 1929 he had begun writing and submitting boxing stories, though his first efforts mingled boxing with weird themes. (This was another of his patterns: when trying out a new literary field, he would often use characters, settings or themes with which he was already comfortable.) With the first Steve Costigan story, “The Pit of the Serpent,” in the July 1929 Fight Stories, he had found a market that would prove as steady for him as Weird Tales, at least until the Depression knocked out Fight Stories and its companion magazine, Action Stories, in 1932.

The same weekend he met Harold Preece in Austin, Howard had bought a copy of G.K. Chesterton's book-length epic poem, The Ballad of the White Horse, which brings together Celts, Romanized Britons, and Anglo-Saxons under King Alfred in a battle of Christians against the heathen Danish and Norse invaders of the 9th century. Howard enthusiastically praised the poem in letters to Clyde Smith, sharing lengthy passages. It apparently inspired him to begin work on “The Ballad of King Geraint,” in which he brings together representatives of various Celtic peoples of early Britain in a valiant “last stand” against the invading Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Chesterton's idea of “telescoping history,” that “it is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment,” must have appealed to Howard greatly, for this is precisely what he did in many of his fantasy adventures, particularly in his creation of Conan's Hyborian Age, in which we find represented many different historical eras and cultures, from medieval Europe (Aquilonia and Poitain) to the American frontier (the Pictish Wilderness and its borderlands), from Cossacks (the Kozaki) to Elizabethan pirates (the Free Brotherhood). Howard “mix(ed) up the centuries while preserving the sentiment”: this “telescoping” allowed him to portray what he saw as universal elements of human nature and historical patterns, as well as giving him virtually all of human history for a playground.

When Howard discovered that Harold Preece shared his enthusiasm for matters Celtic, he entered into his “Celtic” phase with his customary brio. His letters to Preece and to Clyde Smith from 1928 to 1930 are full of discussions of Irish history, legend, and poetry – he even taught himself a smattering of Irish Gaelic, and began exploring his genealogy in earnest. Irish and Celtic themes came to dominate his poetry, and by 1930 he was ready to try out this new persona with fiction. In keeping with his general tendency to use older work as a springboard to the new, he first introduced an Irish character into a story featuring two earlier creations – Cormac of Connacht is often overlooked as one of the “Kings of the Night,” overshadowed by the teaming up of Bran Mak Morn and King Kull, but the story is told from the Irish king's point of view. During 1930 Howard wrote a number of stories featuring Gaelic heroes, nearly all of them outlawed by clan and country.

In June 1930 Howard received a letter from Farnsworth Wright informing him that Weird Tales planned to launch a companion magazine dealing with oriental fiction, and asking him to contribute. This request rekindled the author's avid interest in the Orient, particularly the Middle East, and he produced some of his finest stories for the new magazine (originally titled Oriental Stories, later Magic Carpet). But while these stories were set during the Crusades, or periods of Mongol or Islamic conquests, they inevitably featured Celtic heroes.

Also in June 1930, Howard wrote to Farnsworth Wright in praise of H.P. Lovecraft's “The Rats in the Walls,” which had just been reprinted in Weird Tales. In the letter, he noted the use of a phrase in Gaelic, suggesting that Lovecraft might hold to a minority view on the settling of the British Isles. Wright sent the letter on to Lovecraft, who frankly had not supposed when he wrote the story that anyone would notice the liberty he had taken with his archaic language. He wrote to Howard to set the record straight, and so began what is surely one of the great correspondence cycles in all of fantasy literature. For the next six years, Howard and Lovecraft debated the merits of civilization versus barbarism, cities and society versus the frontier, the mental versus the physical, art versus commerce, and other subjects. At first Howard was very deferential to Lovecraft, whom he (like many of his colleagues) considered the pre-eminent writer of weird fiction of the day. But gradually Howard came to assert his own views more forcefully, and eventually could even direct withering sarcasm toward Lovecraft's views, as when he noted how “civilized” Italy was in bombing Ethiopia.

These letters provide a vast store of information on Howard's travels and activities during these years, as well as his views on many subjects, and in them we see the development of the persona that would come increasingly to dominate Howard's fiction and letters in the last part of his life, “The Texian” (a term used for Texans prior to statehood). Lovecraft, and later August Derleth, with whom Howard also began corresponding, strongly encouraged Howard's growing interests in regional history and lore, as did E. Hoffmann Price, with whom Howard was already corresponding in 1930 and who was the only writer of the Weird Tales group to actually meet him in person. It is unfortunate that this persona did not have a chance to develop fully by the time of Howard's death. The evidence of his letters suggests that he might have become a great western writer.

Even before Howard bought his own car in 1932, he and his parents had made many trips to various parts of Texas, to visit friends and relatives, and for his mother's health, which was in serious decline. After he bought his car, he continued to travel with his parents, but made a few trips with his friends, such as Lindsey Tyson and Truett Vinson. His travels ranged from Fort Worth to the Rio Grande Valley, from the East Texas oil fields to New Mexico. His letters to Lovecraft contain a good deal of description and discussion of the geography and history of these places, and are highly entertaining in their own right, apart from being windows into Howard's life.

In 1934, a new schoolteacher arrived in Cross Plains, who was to become a major force in Bob Howard's life. Bob had met Novalyne Price a little over a year previously, when introduced to her by their mutual friend Clyde Smith. Upon moving to Cross Plains, Novalyne made several attempts to call Bob, only to be told by his mother that he could not come to the phone, or was out of town. At last tiring of these excuses, she talked her cousin into giving her a ride to the Howard home, where she was greeted stand-offishly by his father but warmly by Bob. This was the beginning of a sometimes romantic, sometimes stormy relationship. For the first time, Bob had someone locally who shared his interests – and she was a woman! But his closeness to his mother, particularly his insistence upon attending to her in her illness, which Novalyne thought he should hire a nurse to do, rankled Novalyne, as did his refusal to attend social events. Marriage often entered their minds, and was even occasionally discussed – but the two never entertained the same feelings at the same time. When she would think she was in love, he would insist he needed his freedom. When he thought he was ready for love, she saw only the differences in their attitudes toward socializing. They were two headstrong, passionate, assertive personalities, which made for an interesting relationship, but one that was impossible to sustain. In the spring of 1936, Novalyne was accepted into the graduate program in education at Louisiana State, and left Cross Plains.

Through 1935 and 1936, Howard's mother's health was in rapid decline. More and more frequently Robert had to take her to sanitariums and hospitals, and even though Dr. Howard received a courtesy discount on services, the medical bills began to mount. Bob was faced with a dilemma: his need for money was more pressing than ever, but he had little time in which to write. Weird Tales owed him around $800, and payments were slow. Dr. Howard, his own meager savings exhausted, moved his practice to his home, so that patients came in and out all day and night. Father and son finally tried hiring women to nurse and keep house, further filling the house with people. Bob could find no time to be alone with his writing. This, and the despair he felt as his mother inexorably slid toward death, created enormous stress for the young writer. He resurrected an apparently long-standing plan not to outlive his mother.

This was no impulsive act. For years, he had told associates such as Clyde Smith that he would kill himself were it not that his mother needed him. Much of his poetry, most of it written during the 1920s and early 1930s, clearly and forcefully reflects his suicidal ideation. He was not at all enamored with life for its own sake, seeing it only as weary, gruelling toil at the behest of others, with scant chance of success and precious little freedom. A 1931 letter to Farnsworth Wright contains several statements of common Howard themes: “Like the average man, the tale of my life would merely be a dull narration of drab monotony and toil, a grinding struggle against poverty. . . . I'll say one thing about an oil boom; it will teach a kid that life's a pretty rotten thing about as quick as anything I can think of. . . . Life's not worth living if somebody thinks he's in authority over you. . . . I'm merely one of a huge army, all of whom are bucking the line one way or another for meat for their bellies. . . . Every now and then one of us finds the going too hard and blows his brains out, but it's all in the game, I reckon.”

His letters frequently express the feeling that he was a misfit in a cold and hostile world: “The older I grow the more I sense the senseless unfriendly attitude of the world at large.” In nearly all his fiction, the characters are misfits, outcasts, aliens in a world that is hostile to them. One wonders if the early childhood experience of being uprooted on a regular basis, as Dr. Howard gambled on one boom town after another – the Howards had at least eight different residences, scattered all over Texas, before Robert was nine years old – may have contributed to this feeling of being an outsider in an inhospitable land.

In some of his letters to Lovecraft he expressed another variation on this theme: the feeling that he was somehow born out of his proper time. He frequently bemoaned the fate that had him born too late to have participated in the taming of the frontier. “I only wish I had been born earlier – thirty years earlier, anyway. As it was I only caught the tag end of a robust era, when I was too young to realize its meaning. When I look down the vista of the years, with all the ‘improvements', ‘inventions' and ‘progress' that they hold, I am infinitely thankful that I am no younger. I could wish to be older, much older. Every man wants to live out his life's span. But I hardly think life in this age is worth the effort of living. I'd like to round out my youth; and perhaps the natural vitality and animal exuberance of youth will carry me to middle age. But good God, to think of living the full three score years and ten!”

Howard also seems to have had an abhorrence of the idea of growing old and infirm. A month before his death he'd written to August Derleth: “Death to the old is inevitable, and yet somehow I often feel that it is a greater tragedy than death to the young. When a man dies young he misses much suffering, but the old have only life as a possession and somehow to me the tearing of a pitiful remnant from weak fingers is more tragic than the looting of a life in its full rich prime. I don't want to live to be old. I want to die when my time comes, quickly and suddenly, in the full tide of my strength and health.”

For a young man, Howard seems to have had an exaggerated sense of growing old. When he was only 24 he wrote to Harold Preece, “I am haunted by the realization that my best days, mental and physical, lie behind me.” Novalyne Price recalls that during the time they were dating, in 1934–35, Bob often said that he was in his “sere and yellow leaf,” echoing a phrase from Macbeth: “I have lived long enough, my way of life | Is fal'n into the sere, the yellow leaf . . .”

Also in his May 1936 letter to Derleth, Howard mentioned that “I haven't written a weird story for nearly a year, though I've been contemplating one dealing with Coronado's expedition on the Staked Plains in 1541.” This suggests that “Nekht Semerkeht” may well have been the last story Howard started, and if so, it is of interest here, in that it dwells upon the idea of suicide. “The game is not worth the candle,” thinks the hero, de Guzman:

“‘Oh, of course we are guided solely by reason, even when reason tells us it is better to die than to live! It is not the intellect we boast that bids us live–and kill to live–but the blind unreasoning beast-instinct.'

“Hernando de Guzman did not try to deceive himself into believing there was some intellectual reason, then, why he should not give up the agonizing struggle and place the muzzle of his pistol to his head; quit an existence whose savor had long ago become less than its pain.”

And in the end, it may be that stress played an important role in his decision to take his own life. His mother's worsening illness had necessitated frequent absences from home, to take her to medical facilities in other parts of the state, and even when the Howards were home, Bob had little uninterrupted time, or peace, in which to write. He worried constantly about his mother. It may be that a complex array of forces coalesced to convince him of the futility of existence, and to impel him to take a long-contemplated course of action.

Howard planned for his death very carefully. He made arrangements with his agent, Otis Kline, for the handling of his stories in the event of his death. He carefully put together the manuscripts he had not yet submitted to Weird Tales or the Kline agency, with instructions on where they were to be sent. He borrowed a gun, a .380 Colt automatic, from a friend who was unaware of his plans. Dr. Howard may have hidden Bob's own guns, aware of what he might be contemplating. He said that he had seen his son make preparations on earlier occasions when it appeared Mrs. Howard might die. He said that he was trying to keep an eye on his son, but that he did not expect him to act before his mother died.

Hester Howard sank into her final coma about the 8th of June, 1936. On the 10th, Bob went to Brownwood and purchased a cemetery lot for three burials, with perpetual care. He asked Dr. J.W. Dill, who had come to be with Dr. Howard during his wife's final illness, whether anyone had been known to live after being shot through the brain. Unaware of Bob's plan, the doctor told him that such an injury meant certain death.

Dr. Howard related that Robert had disarmed him of his intentions the night before, assuming “an almost cheerful attitude”: “He came to me in the night, put his arm around me and said, buck up, you are equal to it, you will go through it all right.” He did not know, he said, that on the morning of the 11th, Robert asked the nurse attending Mrs. Howard if she thought his mother would ever regain consciousness, and that the nurse had told him she would not.

He then left the room, and was next seen leaving the house and getting into his car. The cook he and his father had hired said later that, looking through the kitchen window, she saw him raise his hands in prayer, though what looked to her like prayer may have been holding up the gun to get it ready. She heard a shot, and saw Robert slump over the steering wheel. She screamed. Dr. Howard and Dr. Dill ran out to the car and carried Bob back into the house. Both were country doctors, and they knew that no one could live with the kind of injury Bob had sustained. He had shot himself above the right ear, the bullet emerging on the left side.

Robert Howard's robust health allowed him to survive this terrible wound for almost eight hours. He died at about 4:00 in the afternoon, Thursday, June 11, 1936, without ever regaining consciousness. His mother died the following day, also without regaining consciousness. A double funeral was held on June 14, and the mother and son were transported to Brownwood for burial.

In Robert's room, a four line couplet was reportedly found on his typewriter:

All fled, all done

So lift me on the pyre.

The feast is over

And the lamps expire.

Gary Gianni

Gary Gianni graduated from The Chicago Academy of Fine Art in 1976. From there, he worked for the Chicago Tribune as an illustrator and Network Television News as a courtroom sketch artist. His artwork has appeared in numerous magazines, children's books and paperbacks.

1990 marked his debut in the illustrated graphic novel field with adaptations of The Tales of O. Henry and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for the Classics Illustrated series.

At Dark Horse Comics, he wrote and drew Indiana Jones and the Shrine of the Sea Devil, collaborated with such major writers as Harlan Ellison and Andrew Vachss and teamed up with Michael Kaluta to work on the enduring pulp hero, The Shadow. He is the creator of Corpus Monstrum Mysteries running as a back-up feature in Mike Mignola's Hellboy.

Gianni says: “I have always wanted to produce a book that may stand the test of time. I hope somebody could pick this thing up and say, oh, this is a very classically, traditionally illustrated book. It doesn't look like it's rooted in the 1990s when it was done. I tried to stay away from things that might pinpoint when it was actually produced. That way, maybe it'll always have some merit, like the old Harryhausen films, the old Thief of Baghdad. They have certain qualities to them because the people really cared about what they were doing. I care about Howard and I have grown to care for Kane, hopefully this will have that same feel as those masters of genres.”

Al Williamson said of Gianni, “He is a wonderful artist, he brings to his work the feeling and love of the great pulp illustrators.” Scott Gustafson compares his work with the old Brandywine painting tradition of N.C.Wyeth with his “sheer love of drawing.”

Gary's work harks back to the golden age of illustrating, to people like Vierge, Clement Coll, Booth and Krenkel.

In 1997, his illustrations won him The Eisner Award for Best Short Story, Heroes, in Batman: Black and White, for DC Comics.

Notes on the Original Howard Text

The texts for this edition of The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane were prepared by Rusty Burke and David Gentzel, with the assistance of Glenn Lord, Rob Jones, Bill Cavalier, and Steve Trout. The stories which appeared in Weird Tales have been carefully checked against the magazine appearances; the whereabouts of the typescripts for these stories is unknown, and they are presumed lost. Other stories have been checked against Howard's original typescripts, provided by Lord, or against the first known publication, when typescripts were unavailable. Every effort has been made to present the text as written by Robert E. Howard, as faithfully as practicable.

Deviations from original sources are detailed in these textual notes. In the following notes, page, line, and word numbers are given as follows: 21.3.2, indicating page 21, third line, second word. Story titles, chapter titles, and breaks before and after chapter headings or titles are not counted; in poems, only text lines are counted. The page/line number will be followed by the reading in the original source, or a statement indicating the type of change made.

Two types of changes are not detailed here. We have standardized chapter numbering and titling; Howard's and Weird Tales' practices varied. Standard Weird Tales practice was to italicize non-English words, such as m'sieu or senhor, except when they were followed by a proper name. We have not italicized these words, following Howard's own practice.

Skulls in the Stars

Originally appeared in Weird Tales, January 1929. No changes were made for this appearance.

The Right Hand of Doom

Text taken from typescript, provided by Glenn Lord. 21.3.2: no hyphen in “high pitched”; 21.8.1: comma after “voice”; 21.13.11: “end of noose”; 22.3.8: comma after “boasted”; 22.9.10: “That” capitalized; 22.19.7: comma after “resentfully”; 22.24.2: no hyphen in “long stemmed”; 23.1.4: no comma after “tomorrow”; 23.10: four asterisks mark section break; 24.1.10: comma after “in”; 24.3.4: no hyphen in “evil visaged”; 24.9.6: comma after “hairy”; 24.12.7: “spell bound” as two words; 24.13.10: “up” repeated; 24.14.2: “bed stead” as two words; 24.16.8: “the” for “a”; 24.28.1-2: “human hand” in capitals; 25.22.1: comma after “gasped”; 25.25: four asterisks mark section break; 26.15.7: “a” omitted (“as man that”); 27.13.2: comma after “Kane”

Red Shadows

Originally appeared in Weird Tales, August 1928. 37.28.1: “mephistophelean”; 40.8.7: comma after “idly”; 47.4.7: “hog-like” hyphenated at line break; similar constructions elsewhere in the story (e.g., “catlike”) not hyphenated; 52.3.12: “rфle”; 52.4.8: omits closing quotation marks; 52.8.7: closing quotation marks omitted; 56.19.10: “is” is not capitalized; 58.6.1: “swaying”; 69.19.4: “man-like” hyphenated at line break; similar constructions elsewhere in the story (e.g., “catlike”) not hyphenated

Rattle of Bones

Originally appeared in Weird Tales, June 1929. 79.24.5: “the” omitted

The Castle of the Devil

Text taken from typescript, provided by Glenn Lord. 87.15.5: period after “garb”; 87.16.4: comma after “horse”; 87.19.7: there is a blank space in the typescript, indicating that a place name was to be filled in later (“Genoa” added by Lord); 87.21.2: comma after “voice”; 87.27.1: “Where-ever”; 88.1.4: “over-tax”; 88.15.6: “You” capitalized; 88.18.4: following “soldiery” is the word “in,” followed by a blank space indicating a place-name to be filled in later; 88.18.9: following “going to” there is a blank space, indicating a place name to be filled in later (“Genoa” added by Lord); 88.18.10: “to” not in typescript; 88.26.2: “t'is”; 88.29.7: “t'is”; 89.5.3: comma after “mildly”; 89.11.3: “You” capitalized; 89.15.6: a hyphen rather than a period follows “impatience”; 89.18.1: no opening quotation marks; 89.19.9: comma after “grimly”; 89.26.6: comma after “Kane”; 89.30.9: “way farers” as two words; 90.2.1: “so-journs”; 90.8.9: comma after “somberly”; 90.14.8: comma after “suddenly”; 90.15.2: “T'is”; 90.18.9: “But” capitalized

Death's Black Riders

Originally appeared in The Howard Collector, volume 2, number 4 (whole number 10), Spring 1968. No changes have been made for this publication.

The Moon of Skulls

Originally appeared in Weird Tales, June and July 1930 (two-part serial). 107.19.6: “swordsman”; 111.18.11: “pжan”; 122.26.5: “Taferel”; 123.8.7: omits “for”; 128.2.1: comma after “muttered”; 133.21.11: closing quotation marks omitted; 133.31.9: comma after “said”; 166.11.1: “hour”

The One Black Stain

Originally appeared in The Howard Collector, volume 1, number 2 (whole number 2), Spring 1962. 173.14.5: “sombre”; 174.12.3: “sombrely”; 175.16.3: “sombre.” The typescript from which The Howard Collector version was taken was not located in time for this publication. Three other drafts of the poem exist, and all three conform to the American spelling, “somber.” We have accordingly used this spelling. Otherwise the text is identical with that in The Howard Collector.

The Blue Flame of Vengeance

Text taken from typescript, provided by Bill Cavalier. This story was revised by another author for its first publication; when the Howard-only version was first published, it was retitled “Blades of the Brotherhood.” We have restored Howard's original title. 179, heading: no period after “corpses,” period after “Kane”; 179.7.4: no hyphen in “blue eyed”; 180.1.3: “the” not capitalized; 180.7.2: no hyphen in “black eyed”; 180.12.1: comma after “oath”; 180.12.9: “T'is”; 180.16.3: comma after “steel”; 180.19.4: comma after “Rupert”; 180.23.7: no apostrophe in “an”; 181.3.11: “drift wood” as two words; 181.13.5: no hyphen in “gilt work”; 181.15.8: “home spun” as two words; 182.5.6: no hyphen in “sweat plastered”; 182.9.7: no hyphen in “moss grown”; 182.13.7: “sea-ward”; 182.14.5: no hyphen in “deep-throated”; 182.20.5: “It's” capitalized; 182.20.8: “villian”; 182.26.1: comma after “fell”; 182.28.4: comma after “passionately”; 183.14.1: no apostrophe in “An”; 183.22.8: no em-dash after “teeth!”; 183.27.4: comma after “Randel”; 183.30.8: comma after “other”; 184.11.1: “T'would”; 184.12.3: “THAT” all caps; 184.12.5: “t'will”; 185.9.3: “surplous”; 185.26.8: no hyphen in “smooth shaven”; 185.28.6: no hyphen in “corpse like”; 185.30.4: “vitallity”; 186.14.4: “this waist”; 186.26.9: “On” capitalized; 187.27.10: no apostrophe in “ships”; 187.29.1: “T'is”; 187.30.1: comma after “Kane”; 188.28.1: “were” for “where”; 188.32.7: comma after “sombrely”; 189.12.6: no hyphen in “dream haunted”; 190.8.7: “villiany”; 190.12.4: comma after “clothes”; 190.20.6: comma after “he”; 190.28.8: no hyphen in “evil visaged”; 191.8.4: no hyphen in “boulder torn”; 191.26.1: comma after “whisper”; 192.1.2: “as” omitted; 192.17.8: no hyphen in “sticky looking”; 192.28.1: “devided”; 193.8.9: “evidene”; 193.9.4: no hyphen in “jewel hilted”; 193.9.8: no hyphen in “silver chased”; 193.15.7: no hyphen in “silver buckled”; 193.29.7: no hyphen in “broad shouldered”; 194.4.1: “resplendant”; 194.4.3: no hyphen in “gold work”; 194.5.1: no hyphen in “scroll worked”; 194.15.2: “lips”; 194.21.3: comma after “words”; 194.32.2: “t'is”; 194.32.3: “YOUR” all caps; 194.33.1: “JACK” all caps; 195.9.8: “dissaray”; 195.13.6: comma after “jack”; 195.16.2: no hyphen in “black hearted”; 195.17.5: comma after “effort”; 195.18.5: no hyphen in “white livered”; 195.19.10: no apostrophe in “an”; 195.23.7: comma after “admiringly”; 195.27.6: comma after “rat”; 196.4.4: “weared”; 196.5.1: “tow”; 196.6.2: “jovialty” followed by a comma; 196.14.2: no apostrophe in “its”; 196.19.7: “How” capitalized; 196.20.5: “missal”; 196.21.4: comma after “aloud”; 196.21.7: “writtin”; 196.25.8: “hairsute”; 196.26.2: comma after “glee”; 196.30.5: “t'is”; 197.10.1: “down hearted” as two words; 197.11.1: no apostrophe in “havent”; 197.20.1: no apostrophe in “Its”; 197.23.6: comma after “back”; 197.25.5: “THAT” all caps; 197.28.6: comma after “up”; 198.4.9: “You” capitalized; 198.8.3: comma after “direly”; 198.20.2: no hyphen in “low drawn”; 198.22.7: comma after “tonelessly”; 200.10.1: “cut throat” as two words; 202.14.4: comma after “Fishhawk”; 202.16.6: comma after “it”; 202.21.3: double quotation marks before and after “The Flying Heart”; 202.28.7: “her”; 203.1.1-6: “YES, I, YOU DAMNED BLACK SWINE!” all caps; 203.16.2: “For” capitalized; 203.18.9: “You'd” capitalized; 203.21.9: “And” capitalized; 203.27.8: “YOU” all caps; 204.3.2: comma after “armor”; 204.7.5: “But” capitalized; 204.10.1: comma after “somberly”; 204.11.6: comma after “triumphantly”; 204.11.7: no apostrophe in “An”; 204.23.4: “by-word”; 205.17.5: comma after “muttered”; 206.5.8: comma after “approach”; 206.7.2: “AM” all caps; 206.8.1: comma after “somberly”; 206.10.3: “But” capitalized; 206.11.4: “BLOOD” all caps; 206.14.5: no hyphen in “down turned”; 206.16.3: no hyphen in “steel spring”; 209.28.9: “blood stained” as two words; 210.14.2: no comma after “Hollinster”; 210.15.3: no hyphen in “trance like”; 210.28.2: “soullfully”; 211.7.1: “T'is”; 211.17.5: no comma after “Jack”; 211.27.6: comma after “requested”; 212.19.4: no hyphen in “red hot”; 213.4.3: no hyphen in “self reproaches”; 213.5.11: comma after “youth”; 213.14.4: comma after “brought”; 213.22.3: “be” omitted; 214.5.7: comma after “brow”; 214.13.9: no hyphen in “evil looking”; 214.15.4: comma after “house”; 214.15.6: “was”; 214.17.1: “recieved”; 215.11.11: no hyphen in “long boat”; 215.13.1: “boat load” as two words; 215.25.4: “NO” all caps; 215.25.8: comma after “rasp”; 215.29.9: “sun-rise”; 216.25.1: no hyphen in “blood blinded”; 216.29.11: no comma after “Jack”; 217.13.11: comma after “himself”; 218.6.5: no hyphen in “breath taking”; 218.14.1: “adversay”; 218.23.4: “t'was”; 218.23.9: “your's”; 218.31.9: no hyphen in “white faced”; 219.6.5: comma after “hearers”; 219.23.4: comma after “blood”; 220.4.5: comma after “sea”; 220.7.8: comma after “him”; 220.9.1: “distruction”; 220.14.2: “But” capitalized; 220.19.10: comma after “him”; 220.22.3: comma after “tenderly”; 220.22.4: “T'is”; 220.27.5: comma after “man”; 220.27.6: “a” lower case; 220.28.7: comma after “eyes”; 220.29.8: “where-ever”

The Hills of the Dead

Originally appeared in Weird Tales, August 1930. 240.18.5: “he” not capitalized; 244.32.2: “easy”; 252.2.10: “remove”; 252.17.5: “blood brother” not hyphenated here, though it is elsewhere in the story

Hawk of Basti

Text taken from typescript, provided by Glenn Lord. Originally untitled, titled by Lord. 257.3.8: no hyphen in “moss carpeted”; 257.5.2: “witch-craft”; 257.9.6: no hyphen in “sharp pointed”; 257.10.8: “flint lock” as two words; 257.13.4: “loin cloth” as two words; 257.14.6: “Arm-lets”; 258.1.3: “ear-rings”; 258.2.9: “sea-men”; 258.10.3: comma after “Englishman”; 258.10.4: “Keel haul” as two words; 258.13.9: comma after “Kane”; 258.16.6: comma after “he”; 258.17.7: “suddenly” followed by em-dash rather than period; 258.17.8: “well” not capitalized; 258.18.3: “cut-throat”; 258.29.6: comma after “oath”; 259.2.1: no apostrophe in “Its”; 259.3.2: comma after “Kane”; 259.3.6: “in”; 259.7.3: comma after “harshly”; 259.13.1: no apostrophe in “Its”; 259.13.6: comma after “answered”; 260.20.4: “barricoon”; 260.25.6: comma after “I”; 260.30.3: comma after “fiercely”; 261.31.1: no hyphen in “brown skinned”; 262.31.10: “fire-arm”; 263.5.7: “Though” capitalized; 263.9.1: comma after “Hawk”; 263.8.5: “broad-brim”; 263.11.1: comma after “sombrely”; 263.18.3: “whale-bone”; 264.15.9: “And” capitalized; 264.17.3: no apostrophe in “wont”; 264.21.1: comma after “reluctantly”; 265.1.4: comma after “sombrely”; 265.9.7: no hyphen in “keen eared”; 265.11.8: comma after “fiercely”; 265.31.4: no hyphen in “well formed”; 266.9.5: “re-enforced”; 266.19.5: “You” capitalized; 266.20.9: no question mark after “ruler”; 266.22.2: no hyphen in “well built”; 266.25.2: no comma after “dialects”; 266.28.1: no hyphen in “Red handed”; 266.29.4: comma after “anger”; 267.1.1: no hyphen in “heavy bored”; 267.10.1: “litterally”; 267.17.5: comma after “hand”; 267.33.1: comma after “kick”; 268.6.1: comma after “he”

The Return of Sir Richard Grenville

Text taken from typescript provided by Glenn Lord. Originally untitled, titled by Lord.

Wings in the Night

Originally appeared in Weird Tales, July 1932. 287.30.2: both instances of “breast-bone” occur at line breaks (see also 292.33.4); 291.15.9: “bird-man” hyphenated at line break 292.33.4: both instances of “breast-bone” occur at line breaks (see also 287.32.2); 301.20.3: “bow-shots” hyphenated at line break; elsewhere (see 297.21.4) “bowshot” is not hyphenated; 306.24.3: comma after “fetishes”; 306.25.1: no comma after “which”; 307.27.11: “mкlйe”; 313.14.1: no hyphens in “four hundred odd”; 320.11.13: “plays”

The Footfalls Within

Originally appeared in Weird Tales, September 1931. 332.2.8: comma after “he”; 332.3.7: “shas”; 344.29.5: “alredy”

The Children of Asshur

Text taken from original typescript, provided by Glenn Lord. Originally untitled, titled by Lord. 350.1.4: no hyphen in “deep toned”; 350.11.7: “set”; 350.14.8: comma after “clear”; 350.15.9: comma after “truth”; 350.20.1: “wantoness”; 350.28.6: no hyphen in “sharp pointed”; 250.30.1: no comma after “witch-man”; 351.9.7: comma after “that”; 351.14.9: comma after “sanity”; 351.15.3: “no”; 351.18.8: “strikingly”; 351.30.5: “make-shift”; 352.7.4: comma after “column”; 352.14.1: comma after “twilight”; 352.14.8: “grassgrown” as one word; 352.22.11-12: comma after “tree” rather than “and”; 352.31.9: comma after “hand”; 352.32.8: “grass-land”; 353.6.3: comma after “tails”; 353.21.6: comma after “plain”; 354.1.7: “excellence”; 354.3.9: “consumate”; 354.10.6: no hyphen in “boulder strewn”; 354.15.3: “halluciation”; 354.28.3: comma after “expanses”; 355.12.2: comma after “eyes”; 355.15.1: “hard-wood”; 355.25.9: comma after shield; 355.26.1: no comma after “and”; 356.7.1: no comma after “Maddened”; 356.11.2: no comma after “close-locked”; 357.3.12: comma after “sky”; 357.6.8: “similiar”; 358.12.8: “back-ground”; 358.24.6: “high-priest”; 359.3.10: “illusive”; 359.13.7: “accolytes”; 359.18.2-3: comma after “him” rather than “and”; 359.21.3: comma after “galleries”; 359.23.9: “similiarly”; 359.25.5: “could” omitted; 360.3.2: “than” repeated; 360.13.3: no hyphen in “flat roofed”; 360.20.7: “repellant”; 360.24.4: “toweres”; 360.29.2: “far”; 361.3.2: no hyphen in “well tinted”; 361.5.9: “powerfully”; 361.17.2: “lion”; 361.28.3: “devisions”; 362.17.4: “Kane's”; 362.21.4: no apostrophe in “slayers”; 362.22.2: “loosly”; 362.27.9: “impacable”; 363.19.6: “accolytes”; 363.25.8: “nitches”; 363.32.7: comma after “chariots”; 364.7.2: “and”; 364.13.9: comma after “him”; 364.17.9: comma after “apparel”; 364.29.1: “beard”; 365.4.5: comma after “space”; 365.11.3: “fire-light”; 365.15.4: no comma after “another”; 365.18.3: “langurously”; 365.21.5: comma after “garments”; 366.2.4: “gang”; 366.13.9: “fire-light”; 366.17.5: no hyphen in “half veiling”; 366.21.1: “concious”; 367.2.11: comma after “galleries”; 367.12.6: no hyphen in “market place” (two words); 367.14.2: “fore-shortened”; 367.33.6: “fire-light”; 368.1.9: “eye-balls”; 368.2.6: “spear-men”; 368.4.3-4: comma after “captive,” “many” lower-case; 368.7.7: “dumfounded”; 368.12.7-8: comma after “understood,” “you” lower-case; 368.13.2: “mouth-piece”; 368.22.1-2: comma after “Sula,” “it” lower-case; 368.26.1: “sentance”; 368.28.4: “mouth-piece”; 369.6.9: period rather than question mark after “themselves”; 369.18-19: in the typescript, which is double-spaced, the phrase “in such a raid Sula was captured” is inserted between lines which begin “raids on the Ninnites” and “often did they venture” – it is flush with the left margin, and no indication is given as to where in the text it was to be inserted; 369.28.1: “by-word”; 370.23.4: no comma after “Kaldii”; 371.11.6: “high-priest”; 371.31.4-5: comma after “exclaimed,” “they” lower-case; 372.16.2: “devided”; 372.16.5: “devisions”; 372.32.9: “numbered” omitted; 373.1.5: “statue”; 373.2.7: “war-fare”; 373.8.6: No accent in “Crecy”; 373.28.1-2: comma after “barrage” rather than “and”; 373.30.6: comma after “wings”; 374.15.1: no hyphen in “blood lust”; 375.5.5: “it” omitted; 375.30.3: “face” omitted; 375.31.4: “temple-guards”; 376.14.8: comma after “slaves”; 376.20.5: “house-tops”; 376.24.9: comma after “him”; 376.26.4: comma after “inhabitants”; 378.1.2: “him”; 378.2.11: comma after “hands”; 378.10.1: no comma after “guards”; 378.19.9: “curtesty”

Solomon Kane's Homecoming

Originally appeared in Fanciful Tales, volume 1, number 1, Fall 1936. 381.7.9: period after “life”; 382.10.6: no period after “tears”; 383.7.3: “bave”; 383.12.4: comma after “place”; 383.18.2: “huonds”

Solomon Kane's Homecoming (Variant)

Text taken from typescript, provided by Glenn Lord. The typescript is in four-line stanzas; we have divided the lines. 387.22.1: “Sat” capitalized; 387.24.1: “By” capitalized; 388.4.5: closing quotation mark after “away.”; 388.5.3: comma rather than question mark after “Bess”; 388.11.4: “church-yard”; 388.13.7: “window-pane”; 389.13.1: no hyphen in “Adown”; 389.18.7: no comma after “bright”; 389.23.6: no comma after “again”

The fully illustrated Robert E. Howard Library for Del Rey Books

The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane

The Bloody Crown of Conan*

Bran Mak Morn: The Last King*

The Conquering Sword of Conan*

*forthcoming

PRAISE FOR ROBERT E. HOWARD

“At his best, Howard was the Thomas Wolfe of fantasy.”

– STEPHEN KING

“Howard was a true storyteller – one of first, and certainly among the best, you'll find in heroic fantasy. If you've never read him before, you're in for a real treat.”

– CHARLES DE LINT

Award-winning author of

Forests of the Heart andThe Onion Girl

“I adore these books. Howard had a gritty, vibrant style – broadsword writing that cut its way to the heart, with heroes who are truly larger than life. It must be thirty years since I last read Howard, but there are moments from his stories that are as fresh in my mind as if I'd read them yesterday. I heartily recommend them to anyone who loves fantasy.”

– DAVID GEMMELL

Author of Legend and White Wolf

“The voice of Robert E. Howard still resonates after decades with readers – equal parts ringing steel, thunderous horse hooves, and spattered blood. Far from being a stereotype, his creation of Conan is the high heroic adventurer. His raw muscle and sinews, boiling temper, and lusty laughs are the gauge by which all modern heroes must be measured.”

– ERIC NYLUND

Author of Halo: The Fall of Reach

“Howard honestly believed the basic truth of the stories he was telling. It's as if he'd said, ‘This is how life was really lived in those former savage times!'”

– DAVID DRAKE

Author of Grimmer Than Hell and Dogs of War

“That teller of marvellous tales, Robert Howard, did indeed create a giant [Conan] in whose shadow other ‘hero tales' must stand.”

– JOHN JAKES

New York Times bestselling author

of the North and South trilogy

“Most of the fantasy of the past thirty-five years has two main wellsprings: J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. Tolkien himself, who had little use for most contemporary fantasists, rather liked the Conan tales. For headlong, nonstop adventure and for vivid, even florid, scenery, no one even comes close to Howard. If you want a rip-roaring good time, this is the place to start.”

– HARRY TURTLEDOVE

Author of Guns of the South

“[Behind Howard's stories] lurks a dark poetry, and the timeless truth of dreams. That is why these tales have survived. They remain a fitting heritage of the poet and dreamer who was Robert E. Howard.”

– ROBERT BLOCH

Author of Psycho

“The stories have a livingness about them [that's] impossible to fake. . . . Not one of them is boring – there is always some special touch – and most, of course, are rousers.”

– GAHAN WILSON

Reviewer and author of I Paint What I See

“For stark, living fear . . . what other writer is even in the running with Robert E. Howard?”

– H. P. LOVECRAFT

“Howard . . . brought a brash, tough element to the epic fantasy which did as much to change the course of the American school away from precious writing and static imagery as Hammett, Chandler, and the Black Mask pulp writers were to change the course of American detective fiction.”

– MICHAEL MOORCOCK

Award-winning author of the Elric saga

“In this, I think, the art of Robert E. Howard was hard to surpass: vigor, speed, vividness. And always there is that furious, galloping narrative pace.”

– POUL ANDERSON

Award-winning author of Genesis

and World Without Stars

“For vivid, violent, gripping, headlong action, the stories of Robert E. Howard . . . take the prize among heroic fantasies.”

– L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP

Author of Lest Darkness Fall

“The best pulp [fantasy] writer was Robert E. Howard. . . . He painted in about the broadest strokes imaginable. A mass of glimmering black for the menace, an ice-blue cascade for the hero, betweeen them a swath of crimson for battle, passion, blood – and that was the picture, or story, rather, except where a vivid detail might chance to spring to life, or a swift thought-arabesque be added.”

– FRITZ LEIBER

Author of Farewell to Lankhmar

A Del Rey® Book

Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright © 1998 by Solomon Kane LLC

Solomon Kane is a registered trademark of Solomon Kane LLC

Illustrations copyright © 1998 by Gary Gianni

Editor: Rusty Burke

Series editor: Rusty Burke

Skulls in the Stars © 1928 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company for Weird Tales, January 1929

The Right Hand of Doom © 1968 by Glenn Lord for Red Shadows

Red Shadows © 1928 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company for Weird Tales, August 1928

Rattle of Bones © 1929 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company for Weird Tales, June 1929

The Castle of the Devil © 1968

by Glenn Lord for Red Shadows

Death's Black Riders © 1968 by Glenn Lord for The Howard Collector Vol 2, No. 4, Spring 1968

The Moon of Skulls © 1930 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company for Weird Tales, June, July 1930

The One Black Stain © 1962 by Glenn Lord for The Howard Collector, Spring 1962

Blades of the Brotherhood © 1968 by Glenn Lord for Red Shadows

The Hills of the Dead © 1930 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company for Weird Tales, August 1930