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Title: The People of the Black Circle

Author: Robert E. Howard

Release date: March 4, 2013 [eBook #42259]
                Most recently updated: July 4, 2019

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PEOPLE OF THE BLACK CIRCLE ***




Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
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                       THE PEOPLE OF THE BLACK CIRCLE

                            By Robert E. Howard

    [Transcriber's Note: This etext was first published in Weird Tales
    September, October, November 1934. Extensive research did not
    uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was
    renewed.]




1 Death Strikes a King


The king of Vendhya was dying. Through the hot, stifling night the
temple gongs boomed and the conchs roared. Their clamor was a faint echo
in the gold-domed chamber where Bunda Chand struggled on the
velvet-cushioned dais. Beads of sweat glistened on his dark skin; his
fingers twisted the gold-worked fabric beneath him. He was young; no
spear had touched him, no poison lurked in his wine. But his veins stood
out like blue cords on his temples, and his eyes dilated with the
nearness of death. Trembling slave-girls knelt at the foot of the dais,
and leaning down to him, watching him with passionate intensity, was his
sister, the Devi Yasmina. With her was the _wazam_, a noble grown old in
the royal court.

She threw up her head in a gusty gesture of wrath and despair as the
thunder of the distant drums reached her ears.

'The priests and their clamor!' she exclaimed. 'They are no wiser than
the leeches who are helpless! Nay, he dies and none can say why. He is
dying now--and I stand here helpless, who would burn the whole city and
spill the blood of thousands to save him.'

'Not a man of Ayodhya but would die in his place, if it might be, Devi,'
answered the _wazam_. 'This poison--'

'I tell you it is not poison!' she cried. 'Since his birth he has been
guarded so closely that the cleverest poisoners of the East could not
reach him. Five skulls bleaching on the Tower of the Kites can testify
to attempts which were made--and which failed. As you well know, there
are ten men and ten women whose sole duty is to taste his food and wine,
and fifty armed warriors guard his chamber as they guard it now. No, it
is not poison; it is sorcery--black, ghastly magic--'

She ceased as the king spoke; his livid lips did not move, and there
was no recognition in his glassy eyes. But his voice rose in an eery
call, indistinct and far away, as if called to her from beyond vast,
wind-blown gulfs.

'Yasmina! Yasmina! My sister, where are you? I can not find you. All is
darkness, and the roaring of great winds!'

'Brother!' cried Yasmina, catching his limp hand in a convulsive grasp.
'I am here! Do you not know me--'

Her voice died at the utter vacancy of his face. A low confused moan
waned from his mouth. The slave-girls at the foot of the dais whimpered
with fear, and Yasmina beat her breast in anguish.

       *       *       *       *       *

In another part of the city a man stood in a latticed balcony
overlooking a long street in which torches tossed luridly, smokily
revealing upturned dark faces and the whites of gleaming eyes. A
long-drawn wailing rose from the multitude.

The man shrugged his broad shoulders and turned back into the arabesque
chamber. He was a tall man, compactly built, and richly clad.

'The king is not yet dead, but the dirge is sounded,' he said to another
man who sat cross-legged on a mat in a corner. This man was clad in a
brown camel-hair robe and sandals, and a green turban was on his head.
His expression was tranquil, his gaze impersonal.

'The people know he will never see another dawn,' this man answered.

The first speaker favored him with a long, searching stare.

'What I can not understand,' he said, 'is why I have had to wait so long
for your masters to strike. If they have slain the king now, why could
they not have slain him months ago?'

'Even the arts you call sorcery are governed by cosmic laws,' answered
the man in the green turban. 'The stars direct these actions, as in
other affairs. Not even my masters can alter the stars. Not until the
heavens were in the proper order could they perform this necromancy.'
With a long, stained fingernail he mapped the constellations on the
marble-tiled floor. 'The slant of the moon presaged evil for the king of
Vendhya; the stars are in turmoil, the Serpent in the House of the
Elephant. During such juxtaposition, the invisible guardians are removed
from the spirit of Bhunda Chand. A path is opened in the unseen realms,
and once a point of contact was established, mighty powers were put in
play along that path.'

'Point of contact?' inquired the other. 'Do you mean that lock of Bhunda
Chand's hair?'

'Yes. All discarded portions of the human body still remain part of it,
attached to it by intangible connections. The priests of Asura have a
dim inkling of this truth, and so all nail trimmings, hair and other
waste products of the persons of the royal family are carefully reduced
to ashes and the ashes hidden. But at the urgent entreaty of the
princess of Khosala, who loved Bhunda Chand vainly, he gave her a lock
of his long black hair as a token of remembrance. When my masters
decided upon his doom, the lock, in its golden, jewel-encrusted case,
was stolen from under her pillow while she slept, and another
substituted, so like the first that she never knew the difference. Then
the genuine lock travelled by camel-caravan up the long, long road to
Peshkhauri, thence up the Zhaibar Pass, until it reached the hands of
those for whom it was intended.'

'Only a lock of hair,' murmured the nobleman.

'By which a soul is drawn from its body and across gulfs of echoing
space,' returned the man on the mat.

The nobleman studied him curiously.

'I do not know if you are a man or a demon, Khemsa,' he said at last.
'Few of us are what we seem. I, whom the Kshatriyas know as Kerim Shah,
a prince from Iranistan, am no greater a masquerader than most men. They
are all traitors in one way or another, and half of them know not whom
they serve. There at least I have no doubts; for I serve King Yezdigerd
of Turan.'

'And I the Black Seers of Yimsha,' said Khemsa; 'and my masters are
greater than yours, for they have accomplished by their arts what
Yezdigerd could not with a hundred thousand swords.'

       *       *       *       *       *

Outside, the moan of the tortured thousands shuddered up to the stars
which crusted the sweating Vendhyan night, and the conchs bellowed like
oxen in pain.

In the gardens of the palace the torches glinted on polished helmets and
curved swords and gold-chased corselets. All the noble-born fighting-men
of Ayodhya were gathered in the great palace or about it, and at each
broad-arched gate and door fifty archers stood on guard, with bows in
their hands. But Death stalked through the royal palace and none could
stay his ghostly tread.

On the dais under the golden dome the king cried out again, racked by
awful paroxysms. Again his voice came faintly and far away, and again
the Devi bent to him, trembling with a fear that was darker than the
terror of death.

'Yasmina!' Again that far, weirdly dreeing cry, from realms
immeasurable. 'Aid me! I am far from my mortal house! Wizards have drawn
my soul through the wind-blown darkness. They seek to snap the silver
cord that binds me to my dying body. They cluster around me; their hands
are taloned, their eyes are red like flame burning in darkness. _Aie_,
save me, my sister! Their fingers sear me like fire! They would slay my
body and damn my soul! What is this they bring before me?--_Aie!_'

       *       *       *       *       *

At the terror in his hopeless cry Yasmina screamed uncontrollably and
threw herself bodily upon him in the abandon of her anguish. He was torn
by a terrible convulsion; foam flew from his contorted lips and his
writhing fingers left their marks on the girl's shoulders. But the
glassy blankness passed from his eyes like smoke blown from a fire, and
he looked up at his sister with recognition.

'Brother!' she sobbed. 'Brother--'

'Swift!' he gasped, and his weakening voice was rational. 'I know now
what brings me to the pyre. I have been on a far journey and I
understand. I have been ensorcelled by the wizards of the Himelians.
They drew my soul out of my body and far away, into a stone room. There
they strove to break the silver cord of life, and thrust my soul into
the body of a foul night-weird their sorcery summoned up from hell. Ah!
I feel their pull upon me now! Your cry and the grip of your fingers
brought me back, but I am going fast. My soul clings to my body, but its
hold weakens. Quick--kill me, before they can trap my soul for ever!'

'I cannot!' she wailed, smiting her naked breasts.

'Swiftly, I command you!' There was the old imperious note in his
failing whisper. 'You have never disobeyed me--obey my last command!
Send my soul clean to Asura! Haste, lest you damn me to spend eternity
as a filthy gaunt of darkness. Strike, I command you! _Strike!_'

Sobbing wildly, Yasmina plucked a jeweled dagger from her girdle and
plunged it to the hilt in his breast. He stiffened and then went limp, a
grim smile curving his dead lips. Yasmina hurled herself face-down on
the rush-covered floor, beating the reeds with her clenched hands.
Outside, the gongs and conchs brayed and thundered and the priests
gashed themselves with copper knives.




2 A Barbarian from the Hills


Chunder Shan, governor of Peshkhauri, laid down his golden pen and
carefully scanned that which he had written on parchment that bore his
official seal. He had ruled Peshkhauri so long only because he weighed
his every word, spoken or written. Danger breeds caution, and only a
wary man lives long in that wild country where the hot Vendhyan plains
meet the crags of the Himelians. An hour's ride westward or northward
and one crossed the border and was among the Hills where men lived by
the law of the knife.

The governor was alone in his chamber, seated at his ornately carven
table of inlaid ebony. Through the wide window, open for the coolness,
he could see a square of the blue Himelian night, dotted with great
white stars. An adjacent parapet was a shadowy line, and further
crenelles and embrasures were barely hinted at in the dim starlight. The
governor's fortress was strong, and situated outside the walls of the
city it guarded. The breeze that stirred the tapestries on the wall
brought faint noises from the streets of Peshkhauri--occasional snatches
of wailing song, or the thrum of a cithern.

The governor read what he had written, slowly, with his open hand
shading his eyes from the bronze butterlamp, his lips moving. Absently,
as he read, he heard the drum of horses' hoofs outside the barbican, the
sharp staccato of the guards' challenge. He did not heed, intent upon
his letter. It was addressed to the _wazam_ of Vendhya, at the royal
court of Ayodhya, and it stated, after the customary salutations:

     'Let it be known to your excellency that I have faithfully carried
     out your excellency's instructions. The seven tribesmen are well
     guarded in their prison, and I have repeatedly sent word into the
     hills that their chief come in person to bargain for their release.
     But he has made no move, except to send word that unless they are
     freed he will burn Peshkhauri and cover his saddle with my hide,
     begging your excellency's indulgence. This he is quite capable of
     attempting, and I have tripled the numbers of the lance guards. The
     man is not a native of Ghulistan. I cannot with certainty predict
     his next move. But since it is the wish of the Devi--'

He was out of his ivory chair and on his feet facing the arched door,
all in one instant. He snatched at the curved sword lying in its ornate
scabbard on the table, and then checked the movement.

It was a woman who had entered unannounced, a woman whose gossamer robes
did not conceal the rich garments beneath them any more than they
concealed the suppleness and beauty of her tall, slender figure. A filmy
veil fell below her breasts, supported by a flowing headdress bound
about with a triple gold braid and adorned with a golden crescent. Her
dark eyes regarded the astonished governor over the veil, and then with
an imperious gesture of her white hand, she uncovered her face.

'Devi!' The governor dropped to his knees before her, surprize and
confusion somewhat spoiling the stateliness of his obeisance. With a
gesture she motioned him to rise, and he hastened to lead her to the
ivory chair, all the while bowing level with his girdle. But his first
words were of reproof.

'Your Majesty! This was most unwise! The border is unsettled. Raids from
the hills are incessant. You came with a large attendance?'

'An ample retinue followed me to Peshkhauri,' she answered. 'I lodged my
people there and came on to the fort with my maid, Gitara.'

Chunder Shan groaned in horror.

'Devi! You do not understand the peril. An hour's ride from this spot
the hills swarm with barbarians who make a profession of murder and
rapine. Women have been stolen and men stabbed between the fort and the
city. Peshkhauri is not like your southern provinces--'

'But I am here, and unharmed,' she interrupted with a trace of
impatience. 'I showed my signet ring to the guard at the gate, and to
the one outside your door, and they admitted me unannounced, not knowing
me, but supposing me to be a secret courier from Ayodhya. Let us not now
waste time.

'You have received no word from the chief of the barbarians?'

'None save threats and curses, Devi. He is wary and suspicious. He deems
it a trap, and perhaps he is not to be blamed. The Kshatriyas have not
always kept their promises to the hill people.'

'He must be brought to terms!' broke in Yasmina, the knuckles of her
clenched hands showing white.

'I do not understand.' The governor shook his head. 'When I chanced to
capture these seven hill-men, I reported their capture to the _wazam_,
as is the custom, and then, before I could hang them, there came an
order to hold them and communicate with their chief. This I did, but the
man holds aloof, as I have said. These men are of the tribe of Afghulis,
but he is a foreigner from the west, and he is called Conan. I have
threatened to hang them tomorrow at dawn, if he does not come.'

'Good!' exclaimed the Devi. 'You have done well. And I will tell you why
I have given these orders. My brother--' she faltered, choking, and the
governor bowed his head, with the customary gesture of respect for a
departed sovereign.

'The king of Vendhya was destroyed by magic,' she said at last. 'I have
devoted my life to the destruction of his murderers. As he died he gave
me a clue, and I have followed it. I have read the _Book of Skelos_, and
talked with nameless hermits in the caves below Jhelai. I learned how,
and by whom, he was destroyed. His enemies were the Black Seers of Mount
Yimsha.'

'Asura!' whispered Chunder Shan, paling.

Her eyes knifed him through. 'Do you fear them?'

'Who does not, Your Majesty?' he replied. 'They are black devils,
haunting the uninhabited hills beyond the Zhaibar. But the sages say
that they seldom interfere in the lives of mortal men.'

'Why they slew my brother I do not know,' she answered. 'But I have
sworn on the altar of Asura to destroy them! And I need the aid of a man
beyond the border. A Kshatriya army, unaided, would never reach Yimsha.'

'Aye,' muttered Chunder Shan. 'You speak the truth there. It would be
fight every step of the way, with hairy hill-men hurling down boulders
from every height, and rushing us with their long knives in every
valley. The Turanians fought their way through the Himelians once, but
how many returned to Khurusun? Few of those who escaped the swords of
the Kshatriyas, after the king, your brother, defeated their host on the
Jhumda River, ever saw Secunderam again.'

'And so I must control men across the border,' she said, 'men who know
the way to Mount Yimsha--'

'But the tribes fear the Black Seers and shun the unholy mountain,'
broke in the governor.

'Does the chief, Conan, fear them?' she asked.

'Well, as to that,' muttered the governor, 'I doubt if there is anything
that devil fears.'

'So I have been told. Therefore he is the man I must deal with. He
wishes the release of his seven men. Very well; their ransom shall be
the heads of the Black Seers!' Her voice thrummed with hate as she
uttered the last words, and her hands clenched at her sides. She looked
an image of incarnate passion as she stood there with her head thrown
high and her bosom heaving.

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

'It shall be as you wish, Your Majesty.' Then as she presented a calmer
aspect, he rose and ventured to drop a word of warning. 'I can not
predict what the chief Conan's action will be. The tribesmen are always
turbulent, and I have reason to believe that emissaries from the
Turanians are stirring them up to raid our borders. As your majesty
knows, the Turanians have established themselves in Secunderam and other
northern cities, though the hill tribes remain unconquered. King
Yezdigerd has long looked southward with greedy lust and perhaps is
seeking to gain by treachery what he could not win by force of arms. I
have thought that Conan might well be one of his spies.'

'We shall see,' she answered. 'If he loves his followers, he will be at
the gates at dawn, to parley. I shall spend the night in the fortress. I
came in disguise to Peshkhauri, and lodged my retinue at an inn instead
of the palace. Besides my people, only yourself knows of my presence
here.'

'I shall escort you to your quarters, Your Majesty,' said the governor,
and as they emerged from the doorway, he beckoned the warrior on guard
there, and the man fell in behind them, spear held at salute.

The maid waited, veiled like her mistress, outside the door, and the
group traversed a wide, winding corridor, lighted by smoky torches, and
reached the quarters reserved for visiting notables--generals and
viceroys, mostly; none of the royal family had ever honored the fortress
before. Chunder Shan had a perturbed feeling that the suite was not
suitable to such an exalted personage as the Devi, and though she sought
to make him feel at ease in her presence, he was glad when she dismissed
him and he bowed himself out. All the menials of the fort had been
summoned to serve his royal guest--though he did not divulge her
identity--and he stationed a squad of spearmen before her doors, among
them the warrior who had guarded his own chamber. In his preoccupation
he forgot to replace the man.

The governor had not been long gone from her when Yasmina suddenly
remembered something else which she had wished to discuss with him, but
had forgotten until that moment. It concerned the past actions of one
Kerim Shah, a nobleman from Iranistan, who had dwelt for a while in
Peshkhauri before coming on to the court at Ayodhya. A vague suspicion
concerning the man had been stirred by a glimpse of him in Peshkhauri
that night. She wondered if he had followed her from Ayodhya. Being a
truly remarkable Devi, she did not summon the governor to her again, but
hurried out into the corridor alone, and hastened toward his chamber.

       *       *       *       *       *

Chunder Shan, entering his chamber, closed the door and went to his
table. There he took the letter he had been writing and tore it to bits.
Scarcely had he finished when he heard something drop softly onto the
parapet adjacent to the window. He looked up to see a figure loom
briefly against the stars, and then a man dropped lightly into the room.
The light glinted on a long sheen of steel in his hand.

'Shhhh!' he warned. 'Don't make a noise, or I'll send the devil a
henchman!'

The governor checked his motion toward the sword on the table. He was
within reach of the yard-long Zhaibar knife that glittered in the
intruder's fist, and he knew the desperate quickness of a hillman.

The invader was a tall man, at once strong and supple. He was dressed
like a hillman, but his dark features and blazing blue eyes did not
match his garb. Chunder Shan had never seen a man like him; he was not
an Easterner, but some barbarian from the West. But his aspect was as
untamed and formidable as any of the hairy tribesmen who haunt the hills
of Ghulistan.

'You come like a thief in the night,' commented the governor, recovering
some of his composure, although he remembered that there was no guard
within call. Still, the hillman could not know that.

'I climbed a bastion,' snarled the intruder. 'A guard thrust his head
over the battlement in time for me to rap it with my knife-hilt.'

'You are Conan?'

'Who else? You sent word into the hills that you wished for me to come
and parley with you. Well, by Crom, I've come! Keep away from that table
or I'll gut you.'

'I merely wish to seat myself,' answered the governor, carefully sinking
into the ivory chair, which he wheeled away from the table. Conan moved
restlessly before him, glancing suspiciously at the door, thumbing the
razor edge of his three-foot knife. He did not walk like an Afghuli, and
was bluntly direct where the East is subtle.

'You have seven of my men,' he said abruptly. 'You refused the ransom I
offered. What the devil do you want?'

'Let us discuss terms,' answered Chunder Shan cautiously.

'Terms?' There was a timbre of dangerous anger in his voice. 'What do
you mean? Haven't I offered you gold?'

Chunder Shan laughed.

'Gold? There is more gold in Peshkhauri than you ever saw.'

'You're a liar,' retorted Conan. 'I've seen the _suk_ of the goldsmiths
in Khurusun.'

'Well, more than an Afghuli ever saw,' amended Chunder Shan. 'And it is
but a drop of all the treasure of Vendhya. Why should we desire gold? It
would be more to our advantage to hang these seven thieves.'

Conan ripped out a sulfurous oath and the long blade quivered in his
grip as the muscles rose in ridges on his brown arm.

'I'll split your head like a ripe melon!'

A wild blue flame flickered in the hillman's eyes, but Chunder Shan
shrugged his shoulders, though keeping an eye on the keen steel.

'You can kill me easily, and probably escape over the wall afterward.
But that would not save the seven tribesmen. My men would surely hang
them. And these men are headmen among the Afghulis.'

'I know it,' snarled Conan. 'The tribe is baying like wolves at my heels
because I have not procured their release. Tell me in plain words what
you want, because, by Crom! if there's no other way, I'll raise a horde
and lead it to the very gates of Peshkhauri!'

Looking at the man as he stood squarely, knife in fist and eyes glaring,
Chunder Shan did not doubt that he was capable of it. The governor did
not believe any hill-horde could take Peshkhauri, but he did not wish a
devastated countryside.

'There is a mission you must perform,' he said, choosing his words with
as much care as if they had been razors. 'There--'

Conan had sprung back, wheeling to face the door at the same instant,
lips asnarl. His barbarian ears had caught the quick tread of soft
slippers outside the door. The next instant the door was thrown open and
a slim, silk-robed form entered hastily, pulling the door shut--then
stopping short at sight of the hillman.

Chunder Shan sprang up, his heart jumping into his mouth.

'Devi!' he cried involuntarily, losing his head momentarily in his
fright.

'_Devi!_' It was like an explosive echo from the hillman's lips. Chunder
Shan saw recognition and intent flame up in the fierce blue eyes.

The governor shouted desperately and caught at his sword, but the
hillman moved with the devastating speed of a hurricane. He sprang,
knocked the governor sprawling with a savage blow of his knife-hilt,
swept up the astounded Devi in one brawny arm and leaped for the window.
Chunder Shan, struggling frantically to his feet, saw the man poise an
instant on the sill in a flutter of silken skirts and white limbs that
was his royal captive, and heard his fierce, exultant snarl: '_Now_ dare
to hang my men!' and then Conan leaped to the parapet and was gone. A
wild scream floated back to the governor's ears.

'Guard! _Guard!_' screamed the governor, struggling up and running
drunkenly to the door. He tore it open and reeled into the hall. His
shouts re-echoed along the corridors, and warriors came running, gaping
to see the governor holding his broken head, from which the blood
streamed.

'Turn out the lancers!' he roared. 'There has been an abduction!' Even
in his frenzy he had enough sense left to withhold the full truth. He
stopped short as he heard a sudden drum of hoofs outside, a frantic
scream and a wild yell of barbaric exultation.

Followed by the bewildered guardsmen, the governor raced for the stair.
In the courtyard of the fort a force of lancers stood by saddled steeds,
ready to ride at an instant's notice. Chunder Shan led his squadron
flying after the fugitive, though his head swam so he had to hold with
both hands to the saddle. He did not divulge the identity of the victim,
but said merely that the noblewoman who had borne the royal signet-ring
had been carried away by the chief of the Afghulis. The abductor was out
of sight and hearing, but they knew the path he would strike--the road
that runs straight to the mouth of the Zhaibar. There was no moon;
peasant huts rose dimly in the starlight. Behind them fell away the grim
bastion of the fort, and the towers of Peshkhauri. Ahead of them loomed
the black walls of the Himelians.




3 Khemsa Uses Magic


In the confusion that reigned in the fortress while the guard was being
turned out, no one noticed that the girl who had accompanied the Devi
slipped out the great arched gate and vanished in the darkness. She ran
straight for the city, her garments tucked high. She did not follow the
open road, but cut straight through fields and over slopes, avoiding
fences and leaping irrigation ditches as surely as if it were broad
daylight, and as easily as if she were a trained masculine runner. The
hoof-drum of the guardsmen had faded away up the hill before she reached
the city wall. She did not go to the great gate, beneath whose arch men
leaned on spears and craned their necks into the darkness, discussing
the unwonted activity about the fortress. She skirted the wall until she
reached a certain point where the spire of the tower was visible above
the battlements. Then she placed her hands to her mouth and voiced a low
weird call that carried strangely.

Almost instantly a head appeared at an embrasure and a rope came
wriggling down the wall. She seized it, placed a foot in the loop at the
end, and waved her arm. Then quickly and smoothly she was drawn up the
sheer stone curtain. An instant later she scrambled over the merlons and
stood up on a flat roof which covered a house that was built against the
wall. There was an open trap there, and a man in a camel-hair robe who
silently coiled the rope, not showing in any way the strain of hauling a
full-grown woman up a forty-foot wall.

'Where is Kerim Shah?' she gasped, panting after her long run.

'Asleep in the house below. You have news?'

'Conan has stolen the Devi out of the fortress and carried her away into
the hills!' She blurted out her news in a rush, the words stumbling over
one another.

Khemsa showed no emotion, but merely nodded his turbaned head. 'Kerim
Shah will be glad to hear that,' he said.

'Wait!' The girl threw her supple arms about his neck. She was panting
hard, but not only from exertion. Her eyes blazed like black jewels in
the starlight. Her upturned face was close to Khemsa's, but though he
submitted to her embrace, he did not return it.

'Do not tell the Hyrkanian!' she panted. 'Let us use this knowledge
ourselves! The governor has gone into the hills with his riders, but he
might as well chase a ghost. He has not told anyone that it was the Devi
who was kidnapped. None in Peshkhauri or the fort knows it except us.'

'But what good does it do us?' the man expostulated. 'My masters sent me
with Kerim Shah to aid him in every way--'

'Aid yourself!' she cried fiercely. 'Shake off your yoke!'

'You mean--disobey my masters?' he gasped, and she felt his whole body
turn cold under her arms.

'Aye!' she shook him in the fury of her emotion. 'You too are a
magician! Why will you be a slave, using your powers only to elevate
others? Use your arts for yourself!'

'That is forbidden!' He was shaking as if with an ague. 'I am not one of
the Black Circle. Only by the command of the masters do I dare to use
the knowledge they have taught me.'

'But you _can_ use it!' she argued passionately. 'Do as I beg you! Of
course Conan has taken the Devi to hold as hostage against the seven
tribesmen in the governor's prison. Destroy them, so Chunder Shan can
not use them to buy back the Devi. Then let us go into the mountains and
take her from the Afghulis. They can not stand against your sorcery with
their knives. The treasure of the Vendhyan kings will be ours as
ransom--and then when we have it in our hands, we can trick them, and
sell her to the king of Turan. We shall have wealth beyond our maddest
dreams. With it we can buy warriors. We will take Khorbhul, oust the
Turanians from the hills, and send our hosts southward; become king and
queen of an empire!'

Khemsa too was panting, shaking like a leaf in her grasp; his face
showed gray in the starlight, beaded with great drops of perspiration.

'I love you!' she cried fiercely, writhing her body against his, almost
strangling him in her wild embrace, shaking him in her abandon. 'I will
make a king of you! For love of you I betrayed my mistress; for love of
me betray your masters! Why fear the Black Seers? By your love for me
you have broken one of their laws already! Break the rest! You are as
strong as they!'

A man of ice could not have withstood the searing heat of her passion
and fury. With an inarticulate cry he crushed her to him, bending her
backward and showering gasping kisses on her eyes, face and lips.

'I'll do it!' His voice was thick with laboring emotions. He staggered
like a drunken man. 'The arts they have taught me shall work for me, not
for my masters. We shall be rulers of the world--of the world--'

'Come then!' Twisting lithely out of his embrace, she seized his hand
and led him toward the trap-door. 'First we must make sure that the
governor does not exchange those seven Afghulis for the Devi.'

He moved like a man in a daze, until they had descended a ladder and she
paused in the chamber below. Kerim Shah lay on a couch motionless, an
arm across his face as though to shield his sleeping eyes from the soft
light of a brass lamp. She plucked Khemsa's arm and made a quick gesture
across her own throat. Khemsa lifted his hand; then his expression
changed and he drew away.

'I have eaten his salt,' he muttered. 'Besides, he can not interfere
with us.'

He led the girl through a door that opened on a winding stair. After
their soft tread had faded into silence, the man on the couch sat up.
Kerim Shah wiped the sweat from his face. A knife-thrust he did not
dread, but he feared Khemsa as a man fears a poisonous reptile.

'People who plot on roofs should remember to lower their voices,' he
muttered. 'But as Khemsa has turned against his masters, and as he was
my only contact between them, I can count on their aid no longer. From
now on I play the game in my own way.'

Rising to his feet he went quickly to a table, drew pen and parchment
from his girdle and scribbled a few succinct lines.

     'To Khosru Khan, governor of Secunderam: the Cimmerian Conan has
     carried the Devi Yasmina to the villages of the Afghulis. It is an
     opportunity to get the Devi into our hands, as the king has so long
     desired. Send three thousand horsemen at once. I will meet them in
     the valley of Gurashah with native guides.'

And he signed it with a name that was not in the least like Kerim Shah.

Then from a golden cage he drew forth a carrier pigeon, to whose leg he
made fast the parchment, rolled into a tiny cylinder and secured with
gold wire. Then he went quickly to a casement and tossed the bird into
the night. It wavered on fluttering wings, balanced, and was gone like a
flitting shadow. Catching up helmet, sword and cloak, Kerim Shah hurried
out of the chamber and down the winding stair.

       *       *       *       *       *

The prison quarters of Peshkhauri were separated from the rest of the
city by a massive wall, in which was set a single iron-bound door under
an arch. Over the arch burned a lurid red cresset, and beside the door
squatted a warrior with spear and shield.

This warrior, leaning on his spear, and yawning from time to time,
started suddenly to his feet. He had not thought he had dozed, but a man
was standing before him, a man he had not heard approach. The man wore a
camel-hair robe and a green turban. In the flickering light of the
cresset his features were shadowy, but a pair of lambent eyes shone
surprizingly in the lurid glow.

'Who comes?' demanded the warrior, presenting his spear. 'Who are you?'

The stranger did not seem perturbed, though the spear-point touched his
bosom. His eyes held the warrior's with strange intensity.

'What are you obliged to do?' he asked, strangely.

'To guard the gate!' The warrior spoke thickly and mechanically; he
stood rigid as a statue, his eyes slowly glazing.

'You lie! You are obliged to obey me! You have looked into my eyes, and
your soul is no longer your own. Open that door!'

Stiffly, with the wooden features of an image, the guard wheeled about,
drew a great key from his girdle, turned it in the massive lock and
swung open the door. Then he stood at attention, his unseeing stare
straight ahead of him.

A woman glided from the shadows and laid an eager hand on the
mesmerist's arm.

'Bid him fetch us horses, Khemsa,' she whispered.

'No need of that,' answered the Rakhsha. Lifting his voice slightly he
spoke to the guardsman. 'I have no more use for you. Kill yourself!'

Like a man in a trance the warrior thrust the butt of his spear against
the base of the wall, and placed the keen head against his body, just
below the ribs. Then slowly, stolidly, he leaned against it with all his
weight, so that it transfixed his body and came out between his
shoulders. Sliding down the shaft he lay still, the spear jutting above
him its full length, like a horrible stalk growing out of his back.

The girl stared down at him in morbid fascination, until Khemsa took her
arm and led her through the gate. Torches lighted a narrow space between
the outer wall and a lower inner one, in which were arched doors at
regular intervals. A warrior paced this enclosure, and when the gate
opened he came sauntering up, so secure in his knowledge of the prison's
strength that he was not suspicious until Khemsa and the girl emerged
from the archway. Then it was too late. The Rakhsha did not waste time
in hypnotism, though his action savored of magic to the girl. The guard
lowered his spear threateningly, opening his mouth to shout an alarm
that would bring spearmen swarming out of the guardrooms at either end
of the alleyway. Khemsa flicked the spear aside with his left hand, as a
man might flick a straw, and his right flashed out and back, seeming
gently to caress the warrior's neck in passing. And the guard pitched on
his face without a sound, his head lolling on a broken neck.

Khemsa did not glance at him, but went straight to one of the arched
doors and placed his open hand against the heavy bronze lock. With a
rending shudder the portal buckled inward. As the girl followed him
through, she saw that the thick teakwood hung in splinters, the bronze
bolts were bent and twisted from their sockets, and the great hinges
broken and disjointed. A thousand-pound battering-ram with forty men to
swing it could have shattered the barrier no more completely. Khemsa was
drunk with freedom and the exercise of his power, glorying in his might
and flinging his strength about as a young giant exercises his thews
with unnecessary vigor in the exultant pride of his prowess.

The broken door let them into a small courtyard, lit by a cresset.
Opposite the door was a wide grille of iron bars. A hairy hand was
visible, gripping one of these bars, and in the darkness behind them
glimmered the whites of eyes.

Khemsa stood silent for a space, gazing into the shadows from which
those glimmering eyes gave back his stare with burning intensity. Then
his hand went into his robe and came out again, and from his opening
fingers a shimmering feather of sparkling dust sifted to the flags.
Instantly a flare of green fire lighted the enclosure. In the brief
glare the forms of seven men, standing motionless behind the bars, were
limned in vivid detail; tall, hairy men in ragged hill-men's garments.
They did not speak, but in their eyes blazed the fear of death, and
their hairy fingers gripped the bars.

The fire died out but the glow remained, a quivering ball of lambent
green that pulsed and shimmered on the flags before Khemsa's feet. The
wide gaze of the tribesmen was fixed upon it. It wavered, elongated; it
turned into a luminous greensmoke spiraling upward. It twisted and
writhed like a great shadowy serpent, then broadened and billowed out in
shining folds and whirls. It grew to a cloud moving silently over the
flags--straight toward the grille. The men watched its coming with
dilated eyes; the bars quivered with the grip of their desperate
fingers. Bearded lips parted but no sound came forth. The green cloud
rolled on the bars and blotted them from sight; like a fog it oozed
through the grille and hid the men within. From the enveloping folds
came a strangled gasp, as of a man plunged suddenly under the surface of
water. That was all.

Khemsa touched the girl's arm, as she stood with parted lips and dilated
eyes. Mechanically she turned away with him, looking back over her
shoulder. Already the mist was thinning; close to the bars she saw a
pair of sandalled feet, the toes turned upward--she glimpsed the
indistinct outlines of seven still, prostrate shapes.

'And now for a steed swifter than the fastest horse ever bred in a
mortal stable,' Khemsa was saying. 'We will be in Afghulistan before
dawn.'




4 An Encounter in the Pass


Yasmina Devi could never clearly remember the details of her abduction.
The unexpectedness and violence stunned her; she had only a confused
impression of a whirl of happenings--the terrifying grip of a mighty
arm, the blazing eyes of her abductor, and his hot breath burning on
her flesh. The leap through the window to the parapet, the mad race
across battlements and roofs when the fear of falling froze her, the
reckless descent of a rope bound to a merlon--he went down almost at a
run, his captive folded limply over his brawny shoulder--all this was a
befuddled tangle in the Devi's mind. She retained a more vivid memory of
him running fleetly into the shadows of the trees, carrying her like a
child, and vaulting into the saddle of a fierce Bhalkhana stallion which
reared and snorted. Then there was a sensation of flying, and the racing
hoofs were striking sparks of fire from the flinty road as the stallion
swept up the slopes.

As the girl's mind cleared, her first sensations were furious rage and
shame. She was appalled. The rulers of the golden kingdoms south of the
Himelians were considered little short of divine; and she was the Devi
of Vendhya! Fright was submerged in regal wrath. She cried out furiously
and began struggling. She, Yasmina, to be carried on the saddle-bow of a
hill chief, like a common wench of the market-place! He merely hardened
his massive thews slightly against her writhings, and for the first time
in her life she experienced the coercion of superior physical strength.
His arms felt like iron about her slender limbs. He glanced down at her
and grinned hugely. His teeth glimmered whitely in the starlight. The
reins lay loose on the stallion's flowing mane, and every thew and fiber
of the great beast strained as he hurtled along the boulder-strewn
trail. But Conan sat easily, almost carelessly, in the saddle, riding
like a centaur.

'You hill-bred dog!' she panted, quivering with the impact of shame,
anger, and the realization of helplessness. 'You dare--you _dare_! Your
life shall pay for this! Where are you taking me?'

'To the villages of Afghulistan,' he answered, casting a glance over his
shoulder.

Behind them, beyond the slopes they had traversed, torches were tossing
on the walls of the fortress, and he glimpsed a flare of light that
meant the great gate had been opened. And he laughed, a deep-throated
boom gusty as the hill wind.

'The governor has sent his riders after us,' he laughed. 'By Crom, we
will lead him a merry chase! What do you think, Devi--will they pay
seven lives for a Kshatriya princess?'

'They will send an army to hang you and your spawn of devils,' she
promised him with conviction.

He laughed gustily and shifted her to a more comfortable position in his
arms. But she took this as a fresh outrage, and renewed her vain
struggle, until she saw that her efforts were only amusing him. Besides,
her light silken garments, floating on the wind, were being outrageously
disarranged by her struggles. She concluded that a scornful submission
was the better part of dignity, and lapsed into a smoldering quiescence.

She felt even her anger being submerged by awe as they entered the mouth
of the Pass, lowering like a black well mouth in the blacker walls that
rose like colossal ramparts to bar their way. It was as if a gigantic
knife had cut the Zhaibar out of walls of solid rock. On either hand
sheer slopes pitched up for thousands of feet, and the mouth of the Pass
was dark as hate. Even Conan could not see with any accuracy, but he
knew the road, even by night. And knowing that armed men were racing
through the starlight after him, he did not check the stallion's speed.
The great brute was not yet showing fatigue. He thundered along the road
that followed the valley bed, labored up a slope, swept along a low
ridge where treacherous shale on either hand lurked for the unwary, and
came upon a trail that followed the lap of the left-hand wall.

Not even Conan could spy, in that darkness, an ambush set by Zhaibar
tribesmen. As they swept past the black mouth of a gorge that opened
into the Pass, a javelin swished through the air and thudded home behind
the stallion's straining shoulder. The great beast let out his life in a
shuddering sob and stumbled, going headlong in mid-stride. But Conan had
recognized the flight and stroke of the javelin, and he acted with
spring-steel quickness.

As the horse fell he leaped clear, holding the girl aloft to guard her
from striking boulders. He lit on his feet like a cat, thrust her into a
cleft of rock, and wheeled toward the outer darkness, drawing his knife.

Yasmina, confused by the rapidity of events, not quite sure just what
had happened, saw a vague shape rush out of the darkness, bare feet
slapping softly on the rock, ragged garments whipping on the wind of his
haste. She glimpsed the flicker of steel, heard the lightning crack of
stroke, parry and counter-stroke, and the crunch of bone as Conan's long
knife split the other's skull.

Conan sprang back, crouching in the shelter of the rocks. Out in the
night men were moving and a stentorian voice roared: 'What, you dogs! Do
you flinch? In, curse you, and take them!'

Conan started, peered into the darkness and lifted his voice.

'Yar Afzal! Is it you?'

There sounded a startled imprecation, and the voice called warily.

'Conan? Is it you, Conan?'

'Aye!' the Cimmerian laughed. 'Come forth, you old war-dog. I've slain
one of your men.'

There was movement among the rocks, a light flared dimly, and then a
flame appeared and came bobbing toward him, and as it approached, a
fierce bearded countenance grew out of the darkness. The man who carried
it held it high, thrust forward, and craned his neck to peer among the
boulders it lighted; the other hand gripped a great curved tulwar. Conan
stepped forward, sheathing his knife, and the other roared a greeting.

'Aye, it is Conan! Come out of your rocks, dogs! It is Conan!'

Others pressed into the wavering circle of light--wild, ragged, bearded
men, with eyes like wolves, and long blades in their fists. They did not
see Yasmina, for she was hidden by Conan's massive body. But peeping
from her covert, she knew icy fear for the first time that night. These
men were more like wolves than human beings.

'What are you hunting in the Zhaibar by night, Yar Afzal?' Conan
demanded of the burly chief, who grinned like a bearded ghoul.

'Who knows what might come up the Pass after dark? We Wazulis are
night-hawks. But what of you, Conan?'

'I have a prisoner,' answered the Cimmerian. And moving aside he
disclosed the cowering girl. Reaching a long arm into the crevice he
drew her trembling forth.

Her imperious bearing was gone. She stared timidly at the ring of
bearded faces that hemmed her in, and was grateful for the strong arm
that clasped her possessively. The torch was thrust close to her, and
there was a sucking intake of breath about the ring.

'She is my captive,' Conan warned, glancing pointedly at the feet of the
man he had slain, just visible within the ring of light. 'I was taking
her to Afghulistan, but now you have slain my horse, and the Kshatriyas
are close behind me.'

'Come with us to my village,' suggested Yar Afzal. 'We have horses
hidden in the gorge. They can never follow us in the darkness. They are
close behind you, you say?'

'So close that I hear now the clink of their hoofs on the flint,'
answered Conan grimly.

Instantly there was movement; the torch was dashed out and the ragged
shapes melted like phantoms into the darkness. Conan swept up the Devi
in his arms, and she did not resist. The rocky ground hurt her slim feet
in their soft slippers and she felt very small and helpless in that
brutish, primordial blackness among those colossal, nighted crags.

Feeling her shiver in the wind that moaned down the defiles, Conan
jerked a ragged cloak from its owner's shoulders and wrapped it about
her. He also hissed a warning in her ear, ordering her to make no sound.
She did not hear the distant clink of shod hoofs on rock that warned the
keen-eared hill-men; but she was far too frightened to disobey, in any
event.

She could see nothing but a few faint stars far above, but she knew by
the deepening darkness when they entered the gorge mouth. There was a
stir about them, the uneasy movement of horses. A few muttered words,
and Conan mounted the horse of the man he had killed, lifting the girl
up in front of him. Like phantoms except for the click of their hoofs,
the band swept away up the shadowy gorge. Behind them on the trail they
left the dead horse and the dead man, which were found less than half an
hour later by the riders from the fortress, who recognized the man as a
Wazuli and drew their own conclusions accordingly.

Yasmina, snuggled warmly in her captor's arms, grew drowsy in spite of
herself. The motion of the horse, though it was uneven, uphill and down,
yet possessed a certain rhythm which combined with weariness and
emotional exhaustion to force sleep upon her. She had lost all sense of
time or direction. They moved in soft thick darkness, in which she
sometimes glimpsed vaguely gigantic walls sweeping up like black
ramparts, or great crags shouldering the stars; at times she sensed
echoing depths beneath them, or felt the wind of dizzy heights blowing
cold about her. Gradually these things faded into a dreamy unwakefulness
in which the clink of hoofs and the creak of saddles were like the
irrelevant sounds in a dream.

She was vaguely aware when the motion ceased and she was lifted down and
carried a few steps. Then she was laid down on something soft and
rustling, and something--a folded coat perhaps--was thrust under her
head, and the cloak in which she was wrapped was carefully tucked about
her. She heard Yar Afzal laugh.

'A rare prize, Conan; fit mate for a chief of the Afghulis.'

'Not for me,' came Conan's answering rumble. 'This wench will buy the
lives of my seven headmen, blast their souls.'

That was the last she heard as she sank into dreamless slumber.

She slept while armed men rode through the dark hills, and the fate of
kingdoms hung in the balance. Through the shadowy gorges and defiles
that night there rang the hoofs of galloping horses, and the starlight
glimmered on helmets and curved blades, until the ghoulish shapes that
haunt the crags stared into the darkness from ravine and boulder and
wondered what things were afoot.

A band of these sat gaunt horses in the black pitmouth of a gorge as the
hurrying hoofs swept past. Their leader, a well-built man in a helmet
and gilt-braided cloak, held up his hand warningly, until the riders had
sped on. Then he laughed softly.

'They must have lost the trail! Or else they have found that Conan has
already reached the Afghuli villages. It will take many riders to smoke
out that hive. There will be squadrons riding up the Zhaibar by dawn.'

'If there is fighting in the hills there will be looting,' muttered a
voice behind him, in the dialect of the Irakzai.

'There will be looting,' answered the man with the helmet. 'But first it
is our business to reach the valley of Gurashah and await the riders
that will be galloping southward from Secunderam before daylight.'

He lifted his reins and rode out of the defile, his men falling in
behind him--thirty ragged phantoms in the starlight.




5 The Black Stallion


The sun was well up when Yasmina awoke. She did not start and stare
blankly, wondering where she was. She awoke with full knowledge of all
that had occurred. Her supple limbs were stiff from her long ride, and
her firm flesh seemed to feel the contact of the muscular arm that had
borne her so far.

She was lying on a sheepskin covering a pallet of leaves on a
hard-beaten dirt floor. A folded sheepskin coat was under her head, and
she was wrapped in a ragged cloak. She was in a large room, the walls of
which were crudely but strongly built of uncut rocks, plastered with
sun-baked mud. Heavy beams supported a roof of the same kind, in which
showed a trap-door up to which led a ladder. There were no windows in
the thick walls, only loop-holes. There was one door, a sturdy bronze
affair that must have been looted from some Vendhyan border tower.
Opposite it was a wide opening in the wall, with no door, but several
strong wooden bars in place. Beyond them Yasmina saw a magnificent black
stallion munching a pile of dried grass. The building was fort,
dwelling-place and stable in one.

At the other end of the room a girl in the vest and baggy trousers of a
hill-woman squatted beside a small fire, cooking strips of meat on an
iron grid laid over blocks of stone. There was a sooty cleft in the wall
a few feet from the floor, and some of the smoke found its way out
there. The rest floated in blue wisps about the room.

The hill-girl glanced at Yasmina over her shoulder, displaying a bold,
handsome face, and then continued her cooking. Voices boomed outside;
then the door was kicked open, and Conan strode in. He looked more
enormous than ever with the morning sunlight behind him, and Yasmina
noted some details that had escaped her the night before. His garments
were clean and not ragged. The broad Bakhariot girdle that supported his
knife in its ornamented scabbard would have matched the robes of a
prince, and there was a glint of fine Turanian mail under his shirt.

'Your captive is awake, Conan,' said the Wazuli girl, and he grunted,
strode up to the fire and swept the strips of mutton off into a stone
dish.

The squatting girl laughed up at him, with some spicy jest, and he
grinned wolfishly, and hooking a toe under her haunches, tumbled her
sprawling onto the floor. She seemed to derive considerable amusement
from this bit of rough horse-play, but Conan paid no more heed to her.
Producing a great hunk of bread from somewhere, with a copper jug of
wine, he carried the lot to Yasmina, who had risen from her pallet and
was regarding him doubtfully.

'Rough fare for a Devi, girl, but our best,' he grunted. 'It will fill
your belly, at least.'

He set the platter on the floor, and she was suddenly aware of a
ravenous hunger. Making no comment, she seated herself cross-legged on
the floor, and taking the dish in her lap, she began to eat, using her
fingers, which were all she had in the way of table utensils. After all,
adaptability is one of the tests of true aristocracy. Conan stood
looking down at her, his thumbs hooked in his girdle. He never sat
cross-legged, after the Eastern fashion.

'Where am I?' she asked abruptly.

'In the hut of Yar Afzal, the chief of the Khurum Wazulis,' he answered.
'Afghulistan lies a good many miles farther on to the west. We'll hide
here awhile. The Kshatriyas are beating up the hills for you--several of
their squads have been cut up by the tribes already.'

'What are you going to do?' she asked.

'Keep you until Chunder Shan is willing to trade back my seven
cow-thieves,' he grunted. 'Women of the Wazulis are crushing ink out of
_shoki_ leaves, and after a while you can write a letter to the
governor.'

A touch of her old imperious wrath shook her, as she thought how
maddeningly her plans had gone awry, leaving her captive of the very man
she had plotted to get into her power. She flung down the dish, with the
remnants of her meal, and sprang to her feet, tense with anger.

'I will not write a letter! If you do not take me back, they will hang
your seven men, and a thousand more besides!'

The Wazuli girl laughed mockingly, Conan scowled, and then the door
opened and Yar Afzal came swaggering in. The Wazuli chief was as tall as
Conan, and of greater girth, but he looked fat and slow beside the hard
compactness of the Cimmerian. He plucked his red-stained beard and
stared meaningly at the Wazuli girl, and that wench rose and scurried
out without delay. Then Yar Afzal turned to his guest.

'The damnable people murmur, Conan,' quoth he. 'They wish me to murder
you and take the girl to hold for ransom. They say that anyone can tell
by her garments that she is a noble lady. They say why should the
Afghuli dogs profit by her, when it is the people who take the risk of
guarding her?'

'Lend me your horse,' said Conan. 'I'll take her and go.'

'Pish!' boomed Yar Afzal. 'Do you think I can't handle my own people?
I'll have them dancing in their shirts if they cross me! They don't love
you--or any other outlander--but you saved my life once, and I will not
forget. Come out, though, Conan; a scout has returned.'

Conan hitched at his girdle and followed the chief outside. They closed
the door after them, and Yasmina peeped through a loop-hole. She looked
out on a level space before the hut. At the farther end of that space
there was a cluster of mud and stone huts, and she saw naked children
playing among the boulders, and the slim erect women of the hills going
about their tasks.

Directly before the chief's hut a circle of hairy, ragged men squatted,
facing the door. Conan and Yar Afzal stood a few paces before the door,
and between them and the ring of warriors another man sat cross-legged.
This one was addressing his chief in the harsh accents of the Wazuli
which Yasmina could scarcely understand, though as part of her royal
education she had been taught the languages of Iranistan and the kindred
tongues of Ghulistan.

'I talked with a Dagozai who saw the riders last night,' said the scout.
'He was lurking near when they came to the spot where we ambushed the
lord Conan. He overheard their speech. Chunder Shan was with them. They
found the dead horse, and one of the men recognized it as Conan's. Then
they found the man Conan slew, and knew him for a Wazuli. It seemed to
them that Conan had been slain and the girl taken by the Wazuli; so they
turned aside from their purpose of following to Afghulistan. But they
did not know from which village the dead man was come, and we had left
no trail a Kshatriya could follow.

'So they rode to the nearest Wazuli village, which was the village of
Jugra, and burnt it and slew many of the people. But the men of Khojur
came upon them in darkness and slew some of them, and wounded the
governor. So the survivors retired down the Zhaibar in the darkness
before dawn, but they returned with reinforcements before sunrise, and
there has been skirmishing and fighting in the hills all morning. It is
said that a great army is being raised to sweep the hills about the
Zhaibar. The tribes are whetting their knives and laying ambushes in
every pass from here to Gurashah valley. Moreover, Kerim Shah has
returned to the hills.'

A grunt went around the circle, and Yasmina leaned closer to the
loop-hole at the name she had begun to mistrust.

'Where went he?' demanded Yar Afzal.

'The Dagozai did not know; with him were thirty Irakzai of the lower
villages. They rode into the hills and disappeared.'

'These Irakzai are jackals that follow a lion for crumbs,' growled Yar
Afzal. 'They have been lapping up the coins Kerim Shah scatters among
the border tribes to buy men like horses. I like him not, for all he is
our kinsman from Iranistan.'

'He's not even that,' said Conan. 'I know him of old. He's an Hyrkanian,
a spy of Yezdigerd's. If I catch him I'll hang his hide to a tamarisk.'

'But the Kshatriyas!' clamored the men in the semicircle. 'Are we to
squat on our haunches until they smoke us out? They will learn at last
in which Wazuli village the wench is held. We are not loved by the
Zhaibari; they will help the Kshatriyas hunt us out.'

'Let them come,' grunted Yar Afzal. 'We can hold the defiles against a
host.'

One of the men leaped up and shook his fist at Conan.

'Are we to take all the risks while he reaps the rewards?' he howled.
'Are we to fight his battles for him?'

With a stride Conan reached him and bent slightly to stare full into his
hairy face. The Cimmerian had not drawn his long knife, but his left
hand grasped the scabbard, jutting the hilt suggestively forward.

'I ask no man to fight my battles,' he said softly. 'Draw your blade if
you dare, you yapping dog!'

The Wazuli started back, snarling like a cat.

'Dare to touch me and here are fifty men to rend you apart!' he
screeched.

'What!' roared Yar Afzal, his face purpling with wrath. His whiskers
bristled, his belly swelled with his rage. 'Are you chief of Khurum? Do
the Wazulis take orders from Yar Afzal, or from a low-bred cur?'

The man cringed before his invincible chief, and Yar Afzal, striding up
to him, seized him by the throat and choked him until his face was
turning black. Then he hurled the man savagely against the ground and
stood over him with his tulwar in his hand.

'Is there any who questions my authority?' he roared, and his warriors
looked down sullenly as his bellicose glare swept their semicircle. Yar
Afzal grunted scornfully and sheathed his weapon with a gesture that was
the apex of insult. Then he kicked the fallen agitator with a
concentrated vindictiveness that brought howls from his victim.

'Get down the valley to the watchers on the heights and bring word if
they have seen anything,' commanded Yar Afzal, and the man went, shaking
with fear and grinding his teeth with fury.

Yar Afzal then seated himself ponderously on a stone, growling in his
beard. Conan stood near him, legs braced apart, thumbs hooked in his
girdle, narrowly watching the assembled warriors. They stared at him
sullenly, not daring to brave Yar Afzal's fury, but hating the foreigner
as only a hillman can hate.

'Now listen to me, you sons of nameless dogs, while I tell you what the
lord Conan and I have planned to fool the Kshatriyas.' The boom of Yar
Afzal's bull-like voice followed the discomfited warrior as he slunk
away from the assembly.

The man passed by the cluster of huts, where women who had seen his
defeat laughed at him and called stinging comments, and hastened on
along the trail that wound among spurs and rocks toward the valley head.

Just as he rounded the first turn that took him out of sight of the
village, he stopped short, gaping stupidly. He had not believed it
possible for a stranger to enter the valley of Khurum without being
detected by the hawk-eyed watchers along the heights; yet a man sat
cross-legged on a low ledge beside the path--a man in a camel-hair robe
and a green turban.

The Wazuli's mouth gaped for a yell, and his hand leaped to his
knife-hilt. But at that instant his eyes met those of the stranger and
the cry died in his throat, his fingers went limp. He stood like a
statue, his own eyes glazed and vacant.

For minutes the scene held motionless; then the man on the ledge drew a
cryptic symbol in the dust on the rock with his forefinger. The Wazuli
did not see him place anything within the compass of that emblem, but
presently something gleamed there--a round, shiny black ball that looked
like polished jade. The man in the green turban took this up and tossed
it to the Wazuli, who mechanically caught it.

'Carry this to Yar Afzal,' he said, and the Wazuli turned like an
automaton and went back along the path, holding the black jade ball in
his outstretched hand. He did not even turn his head to the renewed
jeers of the women as he passed the huts. He did not seem to hear.

The man on the ledge gazed after him with a cryptic smile. A girl's head
rose above the rim of the ledge and she looked at him with admiration
and a touch of fear that had not been present the night before.

'Why did you do that?' she asked.

He ran his fingers through her dark locks caressingly.

'Are you still dizzy from your flight on the horse-of-air, that you
doubt my wisdom?' he laughed. 'As long as Yar Afzal lives, Conan will
bide safe among the Wazuli fighting-men. Their knives are sharp, and
there are many of them. What I plot will be safer, even for me, than to
seek to slay him and take her from among them. It takes no wizard to
predict what the Wazulis will do, and what Conan will do, when my victim
hands the globe of Yezud to the chief of Khurum.'

       *       *       *       *       *

Back before the hut, Yar Afzal halted in the midst of some tirade,
surprized and displeased to see the man he had sent up the valley,
pushing his way through the throng.

'I bade you go to the watchers!' the chief bellowed. 'You have not had
time to come from them.'

The other did not reply; he stood woodenly, staring vacantly into the
chief's face, his palm outstretched holding the jade ball. Conan,
looking over Yar Afzal's shoulder, murmured something and reached to
touch the chief's arm, but as he did so, Yar Afzal, in a paroxysm of
anger, struck the man with his clenched fist and felled him like an ox.
As he fell, the jade sphere rolled to Yar Afzal's foot, and the chief,
seeming to see it for the first time, bent and picked it up. The men,
staring perplexedly at their senseless comrade, saw their chief bend,
but they did not see what he picked up from the ground.

Yar Afzal straightened, glanced at the jade, and made a motion to thrust
it into his girdle.

'Carry that fool to his hut,' he growled. 'He has the look of a
lotus-eater. He returned me a blank stare. I--_aie!_'

In his right hand, moving toward his girdle, he had suddenly felt
movement where movement should not be. His voice died away as he stood
and glared at nothing; and inside his clenched right hand he felt the
quivering of _change_, of _motion_, of _life_. He no longer held a
smooth shining sphere in his fingers. And he dared not look; his tongue
clove to the roof of his mouth, and he could not open his hand. His
astonished warriors saw Yar Afzal's eyes distend, the color ebb from his
face. Then suddenly a bellow of agony burst from his bearded lips; he
swayed and fell as if struck by lightning, his right arm tossed out in
front of him. Face down he lay, and from between his opening fingers
crawled a spider--a hideous, black, hairy-legged monster whose body
shone like black jade. The men yelled and gave back suddenly, and the
creature scuttled into a crevice of the rocks and disappeared.

The warriors started up, glaring wildly, and a voice rose above their
clamor, a far-carrying voice of command which came from none knew where.
Afterward each man there--who still lived--denied that he had shouted,
but all there heard it.

'Yar Afzal is dead! Kill the outlander!'

That shout focused their whirling minds as one. Doubt, bewilderment and
fear vanished in the uproaring surge of the blood-lust. A furious yell
rent the skies as the tribesmen responded instantly to the suggestion.
They came headlong across the open space, cloaks flapping, eyes blazing,
knives lifted.

Conan's action was as quick as theirs. As the voice shouted he sprang
for the hut door. But they were closer to him than he was to the door,
and with one foot on the sill he had to wheel and parry the swipe of a
yard-long blade. He split the man's skull--ducked another swinging knife
and gutted the wielder--felled a man with his left fist and stabbed
another in the belly--and heaved back mightily against the closed door
with his shoulders. Hacking blades were nicking chips out of the jambs
about his ears, but the door flew open under the impact of his
shoulders, and he went stumbling backward into the room. A bearded
tribesman, thrusting with all his fury as Conan sprang back, overreached
and pitched head-first through the doorway. Conan stopped, grasped the
slack of his garments and hauled him clear, and slammed the door in the
faces of the men who came surging into it. Bones snapped under the
impact, and the next instant Conan slammed the bolts into place and
whirled with desperate haste to meet the man who sprang from the floor
and tore into action like a madman.

Yasmina cowered in a corner, staring in horror as the two men fought
back and forth across the room, almost trampling her at times; the flash
and clangor of their blades filled the room, and outside the mob
clamored like a wolf-pack, hacking deafeningly at the bronze door with
their long knives, and dashing huge rocks against it. Somebody fetched a
tree trunk, and the door began to stagger under the thunderous assault.
Yasmina clasped her ears, staring wildly. Violence and fury within,
cataclysmic madness without. The stallion in his stall neighed and
reared, thundering with his heels against the walls. He wheeled and
launched his hoofs through the bars just as the tribesman, backing away
from Conan's murderous swipes, stumbled against them. His spine cracked
in three places like a rotten branch and he was hurled headlong against
the Cimmerian, bearing him backward so that they both crashed to the
beaten floor.

Yasmina cried out and ran forward; to her dazed sight it seemed that
both were slain. She reached them just as Conan threw aside the corpse
and rose. She caught his arm, trembling from head to foot.

'Oh, you live! I thought--I thought you were dead!'

He glanced down at her quickly, into the pale, upturned face and the
wide staring dark eyes.

'Why are you trembling?' he demanded. 'Why should you care if I live or
die?'

A vestige of her poise returned to her, and she drew away, making a
rather pitiful attempt at playing the Devi.

'You are preferable to those wolves howling without,' she answered,
gesturing toward the door, the stone sill of which was beginning to
splinter away.

'That won't hold long,' he muttered, then turned and went swiftly to the
stall of the stallion.

Yasmina clenched her hands and caught her breath as she saw him tear
aside the splintered bars and go into the stall with the maddened beast.
The stallion reared above him, neighing terribly, hoofs lifted, eyes and
teeth flashing and ears laid back, but Conan leaped and caught his mane
with a display of sheer strength that seemed impossible, and dragged the
beast down on his forelegs. The steed snorted and quivered, but stood
still while the man bridled him and clapped on the gold-worked saddle,
with the wide silver stirrups.

Wheeling the beast around in the stall, Conan called quickly to Yasmina,
and the girl came, sidling nervously past the stallion's heels. Conan
was working at the stone wall, talking swiftly as he worked.

'A secret door in the wall here, that not even the Wazuli know about.
Yar Afzal showed it to me once when he was drunk. It opens out into the
mouth of the ravine behind the hut. Ha!'

As he tugged at a projection that seemed casual, a whole section of the
wall slid back on oiled iron runners. Looking through, the girl saw a
narrow defile opening in a sheer stone cliff within a few feet of the
hut's back wall. Then Conan sprang into the saddle and hauled her up
before him. Behind them the great door groaned like a living thing and
crashed in, and a yell rang to the roof as the entrance was instantly
flooded with hairy faces and knives in hairy fists. And then the great
stallion went through the wall like a javelin from a catapult, and
thundered into the defile, running low, foam flying from the bit-rings.

That move came as an absolute surprize to the Wazulis. It was a
surprize, too, to those stealing down the ravine. It happened so
quickly--the hurricane-like charge of the great horse--that a man in a
green turban was unable to get out of the way. He went down under the
frantic hoofs, and a girl screamed. Conan got one glimpse of her as they
thundered by--a slim, dark girl in silk trousers and a jeweled
breast-band, flattening herself against the ravine wall. Then the black
horse and his riders were gone up the gorge like the spume blown before
a storm, and the men who came tumbling through the wall into the defile
after them met that which changed their yells of blood-lust to shrill
screams of fear and death.




6 The Mountain of the Black Seers


'Where now?' Yasmina was trying to sit erect on the rocking saddle-bow,
clutching her captor. She was conscious of a recognition of shame that
she should not find unpleasant the feel of his muscular flesh under her
fingers.

'To Afghulistan,' he answered. 'It's a perilous road, but the stallion
will carry us easily, unless we fall in with some of your friends, or my
tribal enemies. Now that Yar Afzal is dead, those damned Wazulis will be
on our heels. I'm surprized we haven't sighted them behind us already.'

'Who was that man you rode down?' she asked.

'I don't know. I never saw him before. He's no Ghuli, that's certain.
What the devil he was doing there is more than I can say. There was a
girl with him, too.'

'Yes.' Her gaze was shadowed. 'I can not understand that. That girl was
my maid, Gitara. Do you suppose she was coming to aid me? That the man
was a friend? If so, the Wazulis have captured them both.'

'Well,' he answered, 'there's nothing we can do. If we go back, they'll
skin us both. I can't understand how a girl like that could get this far
into the mountains with only one man--and he a robed scholar, for that's
what he looked like. There's something infernally queer in all this.
That fellow Yar Afzal beat and sent away--he moved like a man walking in
his sleep. I've seen the priests of Zamora perform their abominable
rituals in their forbidden temples, and their victims had a stare like
that man. The priests looked into their eyes and muttered incantations,
and then the people became the walking dead men, with glassy eyes, doing
as they were ordered.

'And then I saw what the fellow had in his hand, which Yar Afzal picked
up. It was like a big black jade bead, such as the temple girls of Yezud
wear when they dance before the black stone spider which is their god.
Yar Afzal held it in his hand, and he didn't pick up anything else. Yet
when he fell dead, a spider, like the god at Yezud, only smaller, ran
out of his fingers. And then, when the Wazulis stood uncertain there, a
voice cried out for them to kill me, and I know that voice didn't come
from any of the warriors, nor from the women who watched by the huts. It
seemed to come from _above_.'

Yasmina did not reply. She glanced at the stark outlines of the
mountains all about them and shuddered. Her soul shrank from their gaunt
brutality. This was a grim, naked land where anything might happen.
Age-old traditions invested it with shuddery horror for anyone born in
the hot, luxuriant southern plains.

The sun was high, beating down with fierce heat, yet the wind that blew
in fitful gusts seemed to sweep off slopes of ice. Once she heard a
strange rushing above them that was not the sweep of the wind, and from
the way Conan looked up, she knew it was not a common sound to him,
either. She thought that a strip of the cold blue sky was momentarily
blurred, as if some all but invisible object had swept between it and
herself, but she could not be sure. Neither made any comment, but Conan
loosened his knife in his scabbard.

They were following a faintly marked path dipping down into ravines so
deep the sun never struck bottom, laboring up steep slopes where loose
shale threatened to slide from beneath their feet, and following
knife-edge ridges with blue-hazed echoing depths on either hand.

The sun had passed its zenith when they crossed a narrow trail winding
among the crags. Conan reined the horse aside and followed it southward,
going almost at right angles to their former course.

'A Galzai village is at one end of this trail,' he explained. 'Their
women follow it to a well, for water. You need new garments.'

Glancing down at her filmy attire, Yasmina agreed with him. Her
cloth-of-gold slippers were in tatters, her robes and silken
under-garments torn to shreds that scarcely held together decently.
Garments meant for the streets of Peshkhauri were scarcely appropriate
for the crags of the Himelians.

Coming to a crook in the trail, Conan dismounted, helped Yasmina down
and waited. Presently he nodded, though she heard nothing.

'A woman coming along the trail,' he remarked. In sudden panic she
clutched his arm.

'You will not--not kill her?'

'I don't kill women ordinarily,' he grunted; 'though some of the
hill-women are she-wolves. No,' he grinned as at a huge jest. 'By Crom,
I'll _pay_ for her clothes! How is that?' He displayed a large handful
of gold coins, and replaced all but the largest. She nodded, much
relieved. It was perhaps natural for men to slay and die; her flesh
crawled at the thought of watching the butchery of a woman.

Presently a woman appeared around the crook of the trail--a tall, slim
Galzai girl, straight as a young sapling, bearing a great empty gourd.
She stopped short and the gourd fell from her hands when she saw them;
she wavered as though to run, then realized that Conan was too close to
her to allow her to escape, and so stood still, staring at them with a
mixed expression of fear and curiosity.

Conan displayed the gold coin.

'If you will give this woman your garments,' he said, 'I will give you
this money.'

The response was instant. The girl smiled broadly with surprize and
delight, and, with the disdain of a hill-woman for prudish conventions,
promptly yanked off her sleeveless embroidered vest, slipped down her
wide trousers and stepped out of them, twitched off her wide-sleeved
shirt, and kicked off her sandals. Bundling them all in a bunch, she
proffered them to Conan, who handed them to the astonished Devi.

'Get behind that rock and put these on,' he directed, further proving
himself no native hillman. 'Fold your robes up into a bundle and bring
them to me when you come out.'

'The money!' clamored the hill-girl, stretching out her hands eagerly.
'The gold you promised me!'

Conan flipped the coin to her, she caught it, bit, then thrust it into
her hair, bent and caught up the gourd and went on down the path, as
devoid of self-consciousness as of garments. Conan waited with some
impatience while the Devi, for the first time in her pampered life,
dressed herself. When she stepped from behind the rock he swore in
surprize, and she felt a curious rush of emotions at the unrestrained
admiration burning in his fierce blue eyes. She felt shame,
embarrassment, yet a stimulation of vanity she had never before
experienced, and a tingling when meeting the impact of his eyes. He laid
a heavy hand on her shoulder and turned her about, staring avidly at her
from all angles.

'By Crom!' said he. 'In those smoky, mystic robes you were aloof and
cold and far off as a star! Now you are a woman of warm flesh and blood!
You went behind that rock as the Devi of Vendhya; you come out as a
hill-girl--though a thousand times more beautiful than any wench of the
Zhaibar! You were a goddess--now you are real!'

He spanked her resoundingly, and she, recognizing this as merely another
expression of admiration, did not feel outraged. It was indeed as if the
changing of her garments had wrought a change in her personality. The
feelings and sensations she had suppressed rose to domination in her
now, as if the queenly robes she had cast off had been material shackles
and inhibitions.

But Conan, in his renewed admiration, did not forget that peril lurked
all about them. The farther they drew away from the region of the
Zhaibar, the less likely he was to encounter any Kshatriya troops. On
the other hand he had been listening all throughout their flight for
sounds that would tell him the vengeful Wazulis of Khurum were on their
heels.

Swinging the Devi up, he followed her into the saddle and again reined
the stallion westward. The bundle of garments she had given him, he
hurled over a cliff, to fall into the depths of a thousand-foot gorge.

'Why did you do that?' she asked. 'Why did you not give them to the
girl?'

'The riders from Peshkhauri are combing these hills,' he said. 'They'll
be ambushed and harried at every turn, and by way of reprisal they'll
destroy every village they can take. They may turn westward any time. If
they found a girl wearing your garments, they'd torture her into
talking, and she might put them on my trail.'

'What will she do?' asked Yasmina.

'Go back to her village and tell her people that a stranger attacked
her,' he answered. 'She'll have them on our track, all right. But she
had to go on and get the water first; if she dared go back without it,
they'd whip the skin off her. That gives us a long start. They'll never
catch us. By nightfall we'll cross the Afghuli border.'

'There are no paths or signs of human habitation in these parts,' she
commented. 'Even for the Himelians this region seems singularly
deserted. We have not seen a trail since we left the one where we met
the Galzai woman.'

For answer he pointed to the northwest, where she glimpsed a peak in a
notch of the crags.

'Yimsha,' grunted Conan. 'The tribes build their villages as far from
the mountain as they can.'

She was instantly rigid with attention.

'Yimsha!' she whispered. 'The mountain of the Black Seers!'

'So they say,' he answered. 'This is as near as I ever approached it. I
have swung north to avoid any Kshatriya troops that might be prowling
through the hills. The regular trail from Khurum to Afghulistan lies
farther south. This is an ancient one, and seldom used.'

She was staring intently at the distant peak. Her nails bit into her
pink palms.

'How long would it take to reach Yimsha from this point?'

'All the rest of the day, and all night,' he answered, and grinned. 'Do
you want to go there? By Crom, it's no place for an ordinary human, from
what the hill-people say.'

'Why do they not gather and destroy the devils that inhabit it?' she
demanded.

'Wipe out wizards with swords? Anyway, they never interfere with people,
unless the people interfere with them. I never saw one of them, though
I've talked with men who swore they had. They say they've glimpsed
people from the tower among the crags at sunset or sunrise--tall, silent
men in black robes.'

'Would you be afraid to attack them?'

'I?' The idea seemed a new one to him. 'Why, if they imposed upon me, it
would be my life or theirs. But I have nothing to do with them. I came
to these mountains to raise a following of human beings, not to war with
wizards.'

Yasmina did not at once reply. She stared at the peak as at a human
enemy, feeling all her anger and hatred stir in her bosom anew. And
another feeling began to take dim shape. She had plotted to hurl against
the masters of Yimsha the man in whose arms she was now carried. Perhaps
there was another way, besides the method she had planned, to accomplish
her purpose. She could not mistake the look that was beginning to dawn
in this wild man's eyes as they rested on her. Kingdoms have fallen when
a woman's slim white hands pulled the strings of destiny. Suddenly she
stiffened, pointing.

'Look!'

Just visible on the distant peak there hung a cloud of peculiar aspect.
It was a frosty crimson in color, veined with sparkling gold. This cloud
was in motion; it rotated, and as it whirled it contracted. It dwindled
to a spinning taper that flashed in the sun. And suddenly it detached
itself from the snow-tipped peak, floated out over the void like a
gay-hued feather, and became invisible against the cerulean sky.

'What could that have been?' asked the girl uneasily, as a shoulder of
rock shut the distant mountain from view; the phenomenon had been
disturbing, even in its beauty.

'The hill-men call it Yimsha's Carpet, whatever that means,' answered
Conan. 'I've seen five hundred of them running as if the devil were at
their heels, to hide themselves in caves and crags, because they saw
that crimson cloud float up from the peak. What in--'

They had advanced through a narrow, knife-cut gash between turreted
walls and emerged upon a broad ledge, flanked by a series of rugged
slopes on one hand, and a gigantic precipice on the other. The dim trail
followed this ledge, bent around a shoulder and reappeared at intervals
far below, working a tedious way downward. And emerging from the cut
that opened upon the ledge, the black stallion halted short, snorting.
Conan urged him on impatiently, and the horse snorted and threw his head
up and down, quivering and straining as if against an invisible barrier.

Conan swore and swung off, lifting Yasmina down with him. He went
forward, with a hand thrown out before him as if expecting to encounter
unseen resistance, but there was nothing to hinder him, though when he
tried to lead the horse, it neighed shrilly and jerked back. Then
Yasmina cried out, and Conan wheeled, hand starting to knife-hilt.

Neither of them had seen him come, but he stood there, with his arms
folded, a man in a camel-hair robe and a green turban. Conan grunted
with surprize to recognize the man the stallion had spurned in the
ravine outside the Wazuli village.

'Who the devil are you?' he demanded.

The man did not answer. Conan noticed that his eyes were wide, fixed,
and of a peculiar luminous quality. And those eyes held his like a
magnet.

Khemsa's sorcery was based on hypnotism, as is the case with most
Eastern magic. The way has been prepared for the hypnotist for untold
centuries of generations who have lived and died in the firm conviction
of the reality and power of hypnotism, building up, by mass thought and
practise, a colossal though intangible atmosphere against which the
individual, steeped in the traditions of the land, finds himself
helpless.

But Conan was not a son of the East. Its traditions were meaningless to
him; he was the product of an utterly alien atmosphere. Hypnotism was
not even a myth in Cimmeria. The heritage that prepared a native of the
East for submission to the mesmerist was not his.

He was aware of what Khemsa was trying to do to him; but he felt the
impact of the man's uncanny power only as a vague impulsion, a tugging
and pulling that he could shake off as a man shakes spiderwebs from his
garments.

Aware of hostility and black magic, he ripped out his long knife and
lunged, as quick on his feet as a mountain lion.

But hypnotism was not all of Khemsa's magic. Yasmina, watching, did not
see by what roguery of movement or illusion the man in the green turban
avoided the terrible disembowelling thrust. But the keen blade whickered
between side and lifted arm, and to Yasmina it seemed that Khemsa merely
brushed his open palm lightly against Conan's bull-neck. But the
Cimmerian went down like a slain ox.

Yet Conan was not dead; breaking his fall with his left hand, he slashed
at Khemsa's legs even as he went down, and the Rakhsha avoided the
scythe-like swipe only by a most unwizardly bound backward. Then Yasmina
cried out sharply as she saw a woman she recognized as Gitara glide out
from among the rocks and come up to the man. The greeting died in the
Devi's throat as she saw the malevolence in the girl's beautiful face.

Conan was rising slowly, shaken and dazed by the cruel craft of that
blow which, delivered with an art forgotten of men before Atlantis sank,
would have broken like a rotten twig the neck of a lesser man. Khemsa
gazed at him cautiously and a trifle uncertainly. The Rakhsha had
learned the full flood of his own power when he faced at bay the knives
of the maddened Wazulis in the ravine behind Khurum village; but the
Cimmerian's resistance had perhaps shaken his new-found confidence a
trifle. Sorcery thrives on success, not on failure.

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

Down the mountain slopes, like a whirl of shining dust blown before the
wind, a crimson, conoid cloud came dancing. Khemsa's dark face turned
ashen; his hand began to tremble, then sank to his side. The girl beside
him, sensing the change in him, stared at him inquiringly.

The crimson shape left the mountain slope and came down in a long
arching sweep. It struck the ledge between Conan and Khemsa, and the
Rakhsha gave back with a stifled cry. He backed away, pushing the girl
Gitara back with groping, fending hands.

The crimson cloud balanced like a spinning top for an instant, whirling
in a dazzling sheen on its point. Then without warning it was gone,
vanished as a bubble vanishes when burst. There on the ledge stood four
men. It was miraculous, incredible, impossible, yet it was true. They
were not ghosts or phantoms. They were four tall men, with shaven,
vulture-like heads, and black robes that hid their feet. Their hands
were concealed by their wide sleeves. They stood in silence, their naked
heads nodding slightly in unison. They were facing Khemsa, but behind
them Conan felt his own blood turning to ice in his veins. Rising, he
backed stealthily away, until he could feel the stallion's shoulder
trembling against his back, and the Devi crept into the shelter of his
arm. There was no word spoken. Silence hung like a stifling pall.

All four of the men in black robes stared at Khemsa. Their vulture-like
faces were immobile, their eyes introspective and contemplative. But
Khemsa shook like a man in an ague. His feet were braced on the rock,
his calves straining as if in physical combat. Sweat ran in streams down
his dark face. His right hand locked on something under his brown robe
so desperately that the blood ebbed from that hand and left it white.
His left hand fell on the shoulder of Gitara and clutched in agony like
the grasp of a drowning man. She did not flinch or whimper, though his
fingers dug like talons into her firm flesh.

Conan had witnessed hundreds of battles in his wild life, but never one
like this, wherein four diabolical wills sought to beat down one lesser
but equally devilish will that opposed them. But he only faintly sensed
the monstrous quality of that hideous struggle. With his back to the
wall, driven to bay by his former masters, Khemsa was fighting for his
life with all the dark power, all the frightful knowledge they had
taught him through long, grim years of neophytism and vassalage.

He was stronger than even he had guessed, and the free exercise of his
powers in his own behalf had tapped unsuspected reservoirs of forces.
And he was nerved to super-energy by frantic fear and desperation. He
reeled before the merciless impact of those hypnotic eyes, but he held
his ground. His features were distorted into a bestial grin of agony,
and his limbs were twisted as on a rack. It was a war of souls, of
frightful brains steeped in lore forbidden to men for a million years,
of mentalities which had plumbed the abysses and explored the dark stars
where spawn the shadows.

Yasmina understood this better than did Conan. And she dimly understood
why Khemsa could withstand the concentrated impact of those four hellish
wills which might have blasted into atoms the very rock on which he
stood. The reason was the girl that he clutched with the strength of his
despair. She was like an anchor to his staggering soul, battered by the
waves of those psychic emanations. His weakness was now his strength.
His love for the girl, violent and evil though it might be, was yet a
tie that bound him to the rest of humanity, providing an earthly
leverage for his will, a chain that his inhuman enemies could not break;
at least not break through Khemsa.

They realized that before he did. And one of them turned his gaze from
the Rakhsha full upon Gitara. There was no battle there. The girl shrank
and wilted like a leaf in the drought. Irresistibly impelled, she tore
herself from her lover's arms before he realized what was happening.
Then a hideous thing came to pass. She began to back toward the
precipice, facing her tormentors, her eyes wide and blank as dark
gleaming glass from behind which a lamp has been blown out. Khemsa
groaned and staggered toward her, falling into the trap set for him. A
divided mind could not maintain the unequal battle. He was beaten, a
straw in their hands. The girl went backward, walking like an automaton,
and Khemsa reeled drunkenly after her, hands vainly outstretched,
groaning, slobbering in his pain, his feet moving heavily like dead
things.

On the very brink she paused, standing stiffly, her heels on the edge,
and he fell on his knees and crawled whimpering toward her, groping for
her, to drag her back from destruction. And just before his clumsy
fingers touched her, one of the wizards laughed, like the sudden, bronze
note of a bell in hell. The girl reeled suddenly and, consummate climax
of exquisite cruelty, reason and understanding flooded back into her
eyes, which flared with awful fear. She screamed, clutched wildly at her
lover's straining hand, and then, unable to save herself, fell headlong
with a moaning cry.

Khemsa hauled himself to the edge and stared over, haggardly, his lips
working as he mumbled to himself. Then he turned and stared for a long
minute at his torturers, with wide eyes that held no human light. And
then with a cry that almost burst the rocks, he reeled up and came
rushing toward them, a knife lifted in his hand.

One of the Rakhshas stepped forward and stamped his foot, and as he
stamped, there came a rumbling that grew swiftly to a grinding roar.
Where his foot struck, a crevice opened in the solid rock that widened
instantly. Then, with a deafening crash, a whole section of the ledge
gave way. There was a last glimpse of Khemsa, with arms wildly upflung,
and then he vanished amidst the roar of the avalanche that thundered
down into the abyss.

The four looked contemplatively at the ragged edge of rock that formed
the new rim of the precipice, and then turned suddenly. Conan, thrown
off his feet by the shudder of the mountain, was rising, lifting
Yasmina. He seemed to move as slowly as his brain was working. He was
befogged and stupid. He realized that there was a desperate need for him
to lift the Devi on the black stallion and ride like the wind, but an
unaccountable sluggishness weighted his every thought and action.

And now the wizards had turned toward him; they raised their arms, and
to his horrified sight, he saw their outlines fading, dimming, becoming
hazy and nebulous, as a crimson smoke billowed around their feet and
rose about them. They were blotted out by a sudden whirling cloud--and
then he realized that he too was enveloped in a blinding crimson
mist--he heard Yasmina scream, and the stallion cried out like a woman
in pain. The Devi was torn from his arm, and as he lashed out with his
knife blindly, a terrific blow like a gust of storm wind knocked him
sprawling against a rock. Dazedly he saw a crimson conoid cloud spinning
up and over the mountain slopes. Yasmina was gone, and so were the four
men in black. Only the terrified stallion shared the ledge with him.




7 On to Yimsha


As mists vanish before a strong wind, the cobwebs vanished from Conan's
brain. With a searing curse he leaped into the saddle and the stallion
reared neighing beneath him. He glared up the slopes, hesitated, and
then turned down the trail in the direction he had been going when
halted by Khemsa's trickery. But now he did not ride at a measured gait.
He shook loose the reins and the stallion went like a thunderbolt, as if
frantic to lose hysteria in violent physical exertion. Across the ledge
and around the crag and down the narrow trail threading the great steep
they plunged at breakneck speed. The path followed a fold of rock,
winding interminably down from tier to tier of striated escarpment, and
once, far below, Conan got a glimpse of the ruin that had fallen--a
mighty pile of broken stone and boulders at the foot of a gigantic
cliff.

The valley floor was still far below him when he reached a long and
lofty ridge that led out from the slope like a natural causeway. Out
upon this he rode, with an almost sheer drop on either hand. He could
trace ahead of him the trail and made a great horseshoe back into the
river-bed at his left hand. He cursed the necessity of traversing those
miles, but it was the only way. To try to descend to the lower lap of
the trail here would be to attempt the impossible. Only a bird could get
to the river-bed with a whole neck.

So he urged on the wearying stallion, until a clink of hoofs reached his
ears, welling up from below. Pulling up short and reining to the lip of
the cliff, he stared down into the dry river-bed that wound along the
foot of the ridge. Along that gorge rode a motley throng--bearded men on
half-wild horses, five hundred strong, bristling with weapons. And Conan
shouted suddenly, leaning over the edge of the cliff, three hundred feet
above them.

At his shout they reined back, and five hundred bearded faces were
tilted up towards him; a deep, clamorous roar filled the canyon. Conan
did not waste words.

'I was riding for Ghor!' he roared. 'I had not hoped to meet you dogs on
the trail. Follow me as fast as your nags can push! I'm going to Yimsha,
and--'

'Traitor!' The howl was like a dash of ice-water in his face.

'What?' He glared down at them, jolted speechless. He saw wild eyes
blazing up at him, faces contorted with fury, fists brandishing blades.

'Traitor!' they roared back, wholeheartedly. 'Where are the seven chiefs
held captive in Peshkhauri?'

'Why, in the governor's prison, I suppose,' he answered.

A bloodthirsty yell from a hundred throats answered him, with such a
waving of weapons and a clamor that he could not understand what they
were saying. He beat down the din with a bull-like roar, and bellowed:
'What devil's play is this? Let one of you speak, so I can understand
what you mean!'

A gaunt old chief elected himself to this position, shook his tulwar at
Conan as a preamble, and shouted accusingly: 'You would not let us go
raiding Peshkhauri to rescue our brothers!'

'No, you fools!' roared the exasperated Cimmerian. 'Even if you'd
breached the wall, which is unlikely, they'd have hanged the prisoners
before you could reach them.'

'And you went alone to traffic with the governor!' yelled the Afghuli,
working himself into a frothing frenzy.

'Well?'

'Where are the seven chiefs?' howled the old chief, making his tulwar
into a glimmering wheel of steel about his head. 'Where are they? Dead!'

'What!' Conan nearly fell off his horse in his surprize.

'Aye, dead!' five hundred bloodthirsty voices assured him.

The old chief brandished his arms and got the floor again. 'They were
not hanged!' he screeched. 'A Wazuli in another cell saw them die! The
governor sent a wizard to slay them by craft!'

'That must be a lie,' said Conan. 'The governor would not dare. Last
night I talked with him--'

The admission was unfortunate. A yell of hate and accusation split the
skies.

'Aye! You went to him alone! To betray us! It is no lie. The Wazuli
escaped through the doors the wizard burst in his entry, and told the
tale to our scouts whom he met in Zhaibar. They had been sent forth to
search for you, when you did not return. When they heard the Wazuli's
tale, they returned with all haste to Ghor, and we saddled our steeds
and girt our swords!'

'And what do you fools mean to do?' demanded the Cimmerian.

'To avenge our brothers!' they howled. 'Death to the Kshatriyas! Slay
him, brothers, he is a traitor!'

Arrows began to rattle around him. Conan rose in his stirrups, striving
to make himself heard above the tumult, and then, with a roar of mingled
rage, defiance and disgust, he wheeled and galloped back up the trail.
Behind him and below him the Afghulis came pelting, mouthing their rage,
too furious even to remember that the only way they could reach the
height whereon he rode was to traverse the river-bed in the other
direction, make the broad bend and follow the twisting trail up over the
ridge. When they did remember this, and turned back, their repudiated
chief had almost reached the point where the ridge joined the
escarpment.

At the cliff he did not take the trail by which he had descended, but
turned off on another, a mere trace along a rock-fault, where the
stallion scrambled for footing. He had not ridden far when the stallion
snorted and shied back from something lying in the trail. Conan stared
down on the travesty of a man, a broken, shredded, bloody heap that
gibbered and gnashed splintered teeth.

Impelled by some obscure reason, Conan dismounted and stood looking down
at the ghastly shape, knowing that he was witness of a thing miraculous
and opposed to nature. The Rakhsha lifted his gory head, and his strange
eyes, glazed with agony and approaching death, rested on Conan with
recognition.

'Where are they?' It was a racking croak not even remotely resembling a
human voice.

'Gone back to their damnable castle on Yimsha,' grunted Conan. 'They
took the Devi with them.'

'I will go!' muttered the man. 'I will follow them! They killed Gitara;
I will kill them--the acolytes, the Four of the Black Circle, the Master
himself! Kill--kill them all!' He strove to drag his mutilated frame
along the rock, but not even his indomitable will could animate that
gory mass longer, where the splintered bones hung together only by torn
tissue and ruptured fibre.

'Follow them!' raved Khemsa, drooling a bloody slaver. 'Follow!'

'I'm going to,' growled Conan. 'I went to fetch my Afghulis, but they've
turned on me. I'm going on to Yimsha alone. I'll have the Devi back if I
have to tear down that damned mountain with my bare hands. I didn't
think the governor would dare kill my headmen, when I had the Devi, but
it seems he did. I'll have his head for that. She's no use to me now as
a hostage, but--'

'The curse of Yizil on them!' gasped Khemsa. 'Go! I am dying. Wait--take
my girdle.'

He tried to fumble with a mangled hand at his tatters, and Conan,
understanding what he sought to convey, bent and drew from about his
gory waist a girdle of curious aspect.

'Follow the golden vein through the abyss,' muttered Khemsa. 'Wear the
girdle. I had it from a Stygian priest. It will aid you, though it
failed me at last. Break the crystal globe with the four golden
pomegranates. Beware of the Master's transmutations--I am going to
Gitara--she is waiting for me in hell--_aie, ya Skelos yar!_' And so he
died.

Conan stared down at the girdle. The hair of which it was woven was not
horsehair. He was convinced that it was woven of the thick black tresses
of a woman. Set in the thick mesh were tiny jewels such as he had never
seen before. The buckle was strangely made, in the form of a golden
serpent-head, flat, wedge-shaped and scaled with curious art. A strong
shudder shook Conan as he handled it, and he turned as though to cast it
over the precipice; then he hesitated, and finally buckled it about his
waist, under the Bakhariot girdle. Then he mounted and pushed on.

The sun had sunk behind the crags. He climbed the trail in the vast
shadow of the cliffs that was thrown out like a dark blue mantle over
valleys and ridges far below. He was not far from the crest when, edging
around the shoulder of a jutting crag, he heard the clink of shod hoofs
ahead of him. He did not turn back. Indeed, so narrow was the path that
the stallion could not have wheeled his great body upon it. He rounded
the jut of the rock and came upon a portion of the path that broadened
somewhat. A chorus of threatening yells broke on his ear, but his
stallion pinned a terrified horse hard against the rock, and Conan
caught the arm of the rider in an iron grip, checking the lifted sword
in midair.

'Kerim Shah!' muttered Conan, red glints smoldering luridly in his eyes.
The Turanian did not struggle; they sat their horses almost breast to
breast, Conan's fingers locking the other's sword-arm. Behind Kerim Shah
filed a group of lean Irakzai on gaunt horses. They glared like wolves,
fingering bows and knives, but rendered uncertain because of the
narrowness of the path and the perilous proximity of the abyss that
yawned beneath them.

'Where is the Devi?' demanded Kerim Shah.

'What's it to you, you Hyrkanian spy?' snarled Conan.

'I know you have her,' answered Kerim Shah. 'I was on my way northward
with some tribesmen when we were ambushed by enemies in Shalizah Pass.
Many of my men were slain, and the rest of us harried through the hills
like jackals. When we had beaten off our pursuers, we turned westward,
toward Amir Jehun Pass, and this morning we came upon a Wazuli wandering
through the hills. He was quite mad, but I learned much from his
incoherent gibberings before he died. I learned that he was the sole
survivor of a band which followed a chief of the Afghulis and a captive
Kshatriya woman into a gorge behind Khurum village. He babbled much of a
man in a green turban whom the Afghuli rode down, but who, when attacked
by the Wazulis who pursued, smote them with a nameless doom that wiped
them out as a gust of wind-driven fire wipes out a cluster of locusts.

'How that one man escaped, I do not know, nor did he; but I knew from
his maunderings that Conan of Ghor had been in Khurum with his royal
captive. And as we made our way through the hills, we overtook a naked
Galzai girl bearing a gourd of water, who told us a tale of having been
stripped and ravished by a giant foreigner in the garb of an Afghuli
chief, who, she said, gave her garments to a Vendhyan woman who
accompanied him. She said you rode westward.'

Kerim Shah did not consider it necessary to explain that he had been on
his way to keep his rendezvous with the expected troops from Secunderam
when he found his way barred by hostile tribesmen. The road to Gurashah
valley through Shalizah Pass was longer than the road that wound through
Amir Jehun Pass, but the latter traversed part of the Afghuli country,
which Kerim Shah had been anxious to avoid until he came with an army.
Barred from the Shalizah road, however, he had turned to the forbidden
route, until news that Conan had not yet reached Afghulistan with his
captive had caused him to turn southward and push on recklessly in the
hope of overtaking the Cimmerian in the hills.

'So you had better tell me where the Devi is,' suggested Kerim Shah. 'We
outnumber you--'

'Let one of your dogs nock a shaft and I'll throw you over the cliff,'
Conan promised. 'It wouldn't do you any good to kill me, anyhow. Five
hundred Afghulis are on my trail, and if they find you've cheated them,
they'll flay you alive. Anyway, I haven't got the Devi. She's in the
hands of the Black Seers of Yimsha.'

'_Tarim!_' swore Kerim Shah softly, shaken out of his poise for the
first time. 'Khemsa--'

'Khemsa's dead,' grunted Conan. 'His masters sent him to hell on a
landslide. And now get out of my way. I'd be glad to kill you if I had
the time, but I'm on my way to Yimsha.'

'I'll go with you,' said the Turanian abruptly.

Conan laughed at him. 'Do you think I'd trust you, you Hyrkanian dog?'

'I don't ask you to,' returned Kerim Shah. 'We both want the Devi. You
know my reason; King Yezdigerd desires to add her kingdom to his empire,
and herself in his seraglio. And I knew you, in the days when you were a
hetman of the _kozak_ steppes; so I know your ambition is wholesale
plunder. You want to loot Vendhya, and to twist out a huge ransom for
Yasmina. Well, let us for the time being, without any illusion about
each other, unite our forces, and try to rescue the Devi from the Seers.
If we succeed, and live, we can fight it out to see who keeps her.'

Conan narrowly scrutinized the other for a moment, and then nodded,
releasing the Turanian's arm. 'Agreed; what about your men?'

Kerim Shah turned to the silent Irakzai and spoke briefly: 'This chief
and I are going to Yimsha to fight the wizards. Will you go with us, or
stay here to be flayed by the Afghulis who are following this man?'

They looked at him with eyes grimly fatalistic. They were doomed and
they knew it--had known it ever since the singing arrows of the ambushed
Dagozai had driven them back from the pass of Shalizah. The men of the
lower Zhaibar had too many reeking bloodfeuds among the crag-dwellers.
They were too small a band to fight their way back through the hills to
the villages of the border, without the guidance of the crafty Turanian.
They counted themselves as dead already, so they made the reply that
only dead men would make: 'We will go with thee and die on Yimsha.'

'Then in Crom's name let us be gone,' grunted Conan, fidgeting with
impatience as he started into the blue gulfs of the deepening twilight.
'My wolves were hours behind me, but we've lost a devilish lot of time.'

Kerim Shah backed his steed from between the black stallion and the
cliff, sheathed his sword and cautiously turned the horse. Presently the
band was filing up the path as swiftly as they dared. They came out upon
the crest nearly a mile east of the spot where Khemsa had halted the
Cimmerian and the Devi. The path they had traversed was a perilous one,
even for hill-men, and for that reason Conan had avoided it that day
when carrying Yasmina, though Kerim Shah, following him, had taken it
supposing the Cimmerian had done likewise. Even Conan sighed with relief
when the horses scrambled up over the last rim. They moved like phantom
riders through an enchanted realm of shadows. The soft creak of leather,
the clink of steel marked their passing, then again the dark mountain
slopes lay naked and silent in the starlight.




8 Yasmina Knows Stark Terror


Yasmina had time but for one scream when she felt herself enveloped in
that crimson whirl and torn from her protector with appalling force. She
screamed once, and then she had no breath to scream. She was blinded,
deafened, rendered mute and eventually senseless by the terrific rushing
of the air about her. There was a dazed consciousness of dizzy height
and numbing speed, a confused impression of natural sensations gone mad,
and then vertigo and oblivion.

A vestige of these sensations clung to her as she recovered
consciousness; so she cried out and clutched wildly as though to stay a
headlong and involuntary flight. Her fingers closed on soft fabric, and
a relieving sense of stability pervaded her. She took cognizance of her
surroundings.

She was lying on a dais covered with black velvet. This dais stood in a
great, dim room whose walls were hung with dusky tapestries across which
crawled dragons reproduced with repellent realism. Floating shadows
merely hinted at the lofty ceiling, and gloom that lent itself to
illusion lurked in the corners. There seemed to be neither windows nor
doors in the walls, or else they were concealed by the nighted
tapestries. Where the dim light came from, Yasmina could not determine.
The great room was a realm of mysteries, or shadows, and shadowy shapes
in which she could not have sworn to observe movement, yet which invaded
her mind with a dim and formless terror.

But her gaze fixed itself on a tangible object. On another, smaller dais
of jet, a few feet away, a man sat cross-legged, gazing contemplatively
at her. His long black velvet robe, embroidered with gold thread, fell
loosely about him, masking his figure. His hands were folded in his
sleeves. There was a velvet cap upon his head. His face was calm,
placid, not unhandsome, his eyes lambent and slightly oblique. He did
not move a muscle as he sat regarding her, nor did his expression alter
when he saw she was conscious.

Yasmina felt fear crawl like a trickle of ice-water down her supple
spine. She lifted herself on her elbows and stared apprehensively at the
stranger.

'Who are you?' she demanded. Her voice sounded brittle and inadequate.

'I am the Master of Yimsha.' The tone was rich and resonant, like the
mellow tones of a temple bell.

'Why did you bring me here?' she demanded.

'Were you not seeking me?'

'If you are one of the Black Seers--yes!' she answered recklessly,
believing that he could read her thoughts anyway.

He laughed softly, and chills crawled up and down her spine again.

'You would turn the wild children of the hills against the Seers of
Yimsha!' He smiled. 'I have read it in your mind, princess. Your weak,
human mind, filled with petty dreams of hate and revenge.'

'You slew my brother!' A rising tide of anger was vying with her fear;
her hands were clenched, her lithe body rigid. 'Why did you persecute
him? He never harmed you. The priests say the Seers are above meddling
in human affairs. Why did you destroy the king of Vendhya?'

'How can an ordinary human understand the motives of a Seer?' returned
the Master calmly. 'My acolytes in the temples of Turan, who are the
priests behind the priests of Tarim, urged me to bestir myself in behalf
of Yezdigerd. For reasons of my own, I complied. How can I explain my
mystic reasons to your puny intellect? You could not understand.'

'I understand this: that my brother died!' Tears of grief and rage shook
in her voice. She rose upon her knees and stared at him with wide
blazing eyes, as supple and dangerous in that moment as a she-panther.

'As Yezdigerd desired,' agreed the Master calmly. 'For a while it was my
whim to further his ambitions.'

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

'Is the dog that licks up the offal in the temple yard the vassal of the
god?' returned the Master.

He did not seem to notice the actions she sought to dissemble. Concealed
by the velvet, her fingers closed on what she knew was the golden hilt
of a dagger. She bent her head to hide the light of triumph in her eyes.

'I am weary of Yezdigerd,' said the Master. 'I have turned to other
amusements--ha!'

With a fierce cry Yasmina sprang like a jungle cat, stabbing
murderously. Then she stumbled and slid to the floor, where she cowered,
staring up at the man on the dais. He had not moved; his cryptic smile
was unchanged. Tremblingly she lifted her hand and stared at it with
dilated eyes. There was no dagger in her fingers; they grasped a stalk
of golden lotus, the crushed blossoms drooping on the bruised stem.

She dropped it as if it had been a viper, and scrambled away from the
proximity of her tormenter. She returned to her own dais, because that
was at least more dignified for a queen than groveling on the floor at
the feet of a sorcerer, and eyed him apprehensively, expecting
reprisals.

But the Master made no move.

'All substance is one to him who holds the key of the cosmos,' he said
cryptically. 'To an adept nothing is immutable. At will, steel blossoms
bloom in unnamed gardens, or flower-swords flash in the moonlight.'

'You are a devil,' she sobbed.

'Not I!' he laughed. 'I was born on this planet, long ago. Once I was a
common man, nor have I lost all human attributes in the numberless eons
of my adeptship. A human steeped in the dark arts is greater than a
devil. I am of human origin, but I rule demons. You have seen the Lords
of the Black Circle--it would blast your soul to hear from what far
realm I summoned them and from what doom I guard them with ensorcelled
crystal and golden serpents.

'But only I can rule them. My foolish Khemsa thought to make himself
great--poor fool, bursting material doors and hurtling himself and his
mistress through the air from hill to hill! Yet if he had not been
destroyed his power might have grown to rival mine.'

He laughed again. 'And you, poor, silly thing! Plotting to send a hairy
hill chief to storm Yimsha! It was such a jest that I myself could have
designed, had it occurred to me, that you should fall in his hands. And
I read in your childish mind an intention to seduce by your feminine
wiles to attempt your purpose, anyway.

'But for all your stupidity, you are a woman fair to look upon. It is my
whim to keep you for my slave.'

The daughter of a thousand proud emperors gasped with shame and fury at
the word.

'You dare not!'

His mocking laughter cut her like a whip across her naked shoulders.

'The king dares not trample a worm in the road? Little fool, do you not
realize that your royal pride is no more than a straw blown on the wind?
I, who have known the kisses of the queens of Hell! You have seen how I
deal with a rebel!'

Cowed and awed, the girl crouched on the velvet-covered dais. The light
grew dimmer and more phantom-like. The features of the Master became
shadowy. His voice took on a newer tone of command.

'I will never yield to you!' Her voice trembled with fear but it carried
a ring of resolution.

'You will yield,' he answered with horrible conviction. 'Fear and pain
shall teach you. I will lash you with horror and agony to the last
quivering ounce of your endurance, until you become as melted wax to be
bent and molded in my hands as I desire. You shall know such discipline
as no mortal woman ever knew, until my slightest command is to you as
the unalterable will of the gods. And first, to humble your pride, you
shall travel back through the lost ages, and view all the shapes that
have been you. _Aie, yil la khosa!_'

At these words the shadowy room swam before Yasmina's affrighted gaze.
The roots of her hair prickled her scalp, and her tongue clove to her
palate. Somewhere a gong sounded a deep, ominous note. The dragons on
the tapestries glowed like blue fire, and then faded out. The Master on
his dais was but a shapeless shadow. The dim light gave way to soft,
thick darkness, almost tangible, that pulsed with strange radiations.
She could no longer see the Master. She could see nothing. She had a
strange sensation that the walls and ceiling had withdrawn immensely
from her.

Then somewhere in the darkness a glow began, like a firefly that
rhythmically dimmed and quickened. It grew to a golden ball, and as it
expanded its light grew more intense, flaming whitely. It burst
suddenly, showering the darkness with white sparks that did not illumine
the shadows. But like an impression left in the gloom, a faint luminance
remained, and revealed a slender dusky shaft shooting up from the
shadowy floor. Under the girl's dilated gaze it spread, took shape;
stems and broad leaves appeared, and great black poisonous blossoms that
towered above her as she cringed against the velvet. A subtle perfume
pervaded the atmosphere. It was the dread figure of the black lotus that
had grown up as she watched, as it grows in the haunted, forbidden
jungles of Khitai.

The broad leaves were murmurous with evil life. The blossoms bent toward
her like sentient things, nodding serpent-like on pliant stems. Etched
against soft, impenetrable darkness it loomed over her, gigantic,
blackly visible in some mad way. Her brain reeled with the drugging
scent and she sought to crawl from the dais. Then she clung to it as it
seemed to be pitching at an impossible slant. She cried out with terror
and clung to the velvet, but she felt her fingers ruthlessly torn away.
There was a sensation as of all sanity and stability crumbling and
vanishing. She was a quivering atom of sentiency driven through a black,
roaring, icy void by a thundering wind that threatened to extinguish her
feeble flicker of animate life like a candle blown out in a storm.

Then there came a period of blind impulse and movement, when the atom
that was she mingled and merged with myriad other atoms of spawning life
in the yeasty morass of existence, molded by formative forces until she
emerged again a conscious individual, whirling down an endless spiral of
lives.

In a mist of terror she relived all her former existences, recognized
and _was_ again all the bodies that had carried her ego throughout the
changing ages. She bruised her feet again over the long, weary road of
life that stretched out behind her into the immemorial past. Back beyond
the dimmest dawns of Time she crouched shuddering in primordial jungles,
hunted by slavering beasts of prey. Skin-clad, she waded thigh-deep in
rice swamps, battling with squawking water-fowl for the precious grains.
She labored with the oxen to drag the pointed stick through the stubborn
soil, and she crouched endlessly over looms in peasant huts.

She saw walled cities burst into flame, and fled screaming before the
slayers. She reeled naked and bleeding over burning sands, dragged at
the slaver's stirrup, and she knew the grip of hot, fierce hands on her
writhing flesh, the shame and agony of brutal lust. She screamed under
the bite of the lash, and moaned on the rack; mad with terror she fought
against the hands that forced her head inexorably down on the bloody
block.

She knew the agonies of childbirth, and the bitterness of love betrayed.
She suffered all the woes and wrongs and brutalities that man has
inflicted on woman throughout the eons; and she endured all the spite
and malice of women for woman. And like the flick of a fiery whip
throughout was the consciousness she retained of her Devi-ship. She was
all the women she had ever been, yet in her knowing she was Yasmina.
This consciousness was not lost in the throes of reincarnation. At one
and the same time she was a naked slave-wench groveling under the whip,
and the proud Devi of Vendhya. And she suffered not only as the
slave-girl suffered, but as Yasmina, to whose pride the whip was like a
white-hot brand.

Life merged into life in flying chaos, each with its burden of woe and
shame and agony, until she dimly heard her own voice screaming
unbearably, like one long-drawn cry of suffering echoing down the ages.

Then she awakened on the velvet-covered dais in the mystic room.

In a ghostly gray light she saw again the dais and the cryptic robed
figure seated upon it. The hooded head was bent, the high shoulders
faintly etched against the uncertain dimness. She could make out no
details clearly, but the hood, where the velvet cap had been, stirred a
formless uneasiness in her. As she stared, there stole over her a
nameless fear that froze her tongue to her palate--a feeling that it was
not the Master who sat so silently on that black dais.

Then the figure moved and rose upright, towering above her. It stooped
over her and the long arms in their wide black sleeves bent about her.
She fought against them in speechless fright, surprized by their lean
hardness. The hooded head bent down toward her averted face. And she
screamed, and screamed again in poignant fear and loathing. Bony arms
gripped her lithe body, and from that hood looked forth a countenance of
death and decay--features like rotting parchment on a moldering skull.

She screamed again, and then, as those champing, grinning jaws bent
toward her lips, she lost consciousness....




9 The Castle of the Wizards


The sun had risen over the white Himelian peaks. At the foot of a long
slope a group of horsemen halted and stared upward. High above them a
stone tower poised on the pitch of the mountainside. Beyond and above
that gleamed the walls of a greater keep, near the line where the snow
began that capped Yimsha's pinnacle. There was a touch of unreality
about the whole--purple slopes pitching up to that fantastic castle,
toy-like with distance, and above it the white glistening peak
shouldering the cold blue.

'We'll leave the horses here,' grunted Conan. 'That treacherous slope is
safer for a man on foot. Besides, they're done.'

He swung down from the black stallion which stood with wide-braced legs
and drooping head. They had pushed hard throughout the night, gnawing at
scraps from saddle-bags, and pausing only to give the horses the rests
they had to have.

'That first tower is held by the acolytes of the Black Seers,' said
Conan. 'Or so men say; watch-dogs for their masters--lesser sorcerers.
They won't sit sucking their thumbs as we climb this slope.'

Kerim Shah glanced up the mountain, then back the way they had come;
they were already far up Yimsha's side, and a vast expanse of lesser
peaks and crags spread out beneath them. Among these labyrinths the
Turanian sought in vain for a movement of color that would betray men.
Evidently the pursuing Afghulis had lost their chief's trail in the
night.

'Let us go, then.' They tied the weary horses in a clump of tamarisk and
without further comment turned up the slope. There was no cover. It was
a naked incline, strewn with boulders not big enough to conceal a man.
But they did conceal something else.

The party had not gone fifty steps when a snarling shape burst from
behind a rock. It was one of the gaunt savage dogs that infested the
hill villages, and its eyes glared redly, its jaws dripped foam. Conan
was leading, but it did not attack him. It dashed past him and leaped at
Kerim Shah. The Turanian leaped aside, and the great dog flung itself
upon the Irakzai behind him. The man yelled and threw up his arm, which
was torn by the brute's fangs as it bore him backward, and the next
instant half a dozen tulwars were hacking at the beast. Yet not until it
was literally dismembered did the hideous creature cease its efforts to
seize and rend its attackers.

Kerim Shah bound up the wounded warrior's gashed arm, looked at him
narrowly, and then turned away without a word. He rejoined Conan, and
they renewed the climb in silence.

Presently Kerim Shah said: 'Strange to find a village dog in this
place.'

'There's no offal here,' grunted Conan.

Both turned their heads to glance back at the wounded warrior toiling
after them among his companions. Sweat glistened on his dark face and
his lips were drawn back from his teeth in a grimace of pain. Then both
looked again at the stone tower squatting above them.

A slumberous quiet lay over the uplands. The tower showed no sign of
life, nor did the strange pyramidal structure beyond it. But the men who
toiled upward went with the tenseness of men walking on the edge of a
crater. Kerim Shah had unslung the powerful Turanian bow that killed at
five hundred paces, and the Irakzai looked to their own lighter and less
lethal bows.

But they were not within bow-shot of the tower when something shot down
out of the sky without warning. It passed so close to Conan that he felt
the wind of rushing wings, but it was an Irakzai who staggered and fell,
blood jetting from a severed jugular. A hawk with wings like burnished
steel shot up again, blood dripping from the scimitar-beak, to reel
against the sky as Kerim Shah's bowstring twanged. It dropped like a
plummet, but no man saw where it struck the earth.

Conan bent over the victim of the attack, but the man was already dead.
No one spoke; useless to comment on the fact that never before had a
hawk been known to swoop on a man. Red rage began to vie with fatalistic
lethargy in the wild souls of the Irakzai. Hairy fingers nocked arrows
and men glared vengefully at the tower whose very silence mocked them.

But the next attack came swiftly. They all saw it--a white puffball of
smoke that tumbled over the tower-rim and came drifting and rolling down
the slope toward them. Others followed it. They seemed harmless, mere
woolly globes of cloudy foam, but Conan stepped aside to avoid contact
with the first. Behind him one of the Irakzai reached out and thrust his
sword into the unstable mass. Instantly a sharp report shook the
mountainside. There was a burst of blinding flame, and then the puffball
had vanished, and the too-curious warrior remained only a heap of
charred and blackened bones. The crisped hand still gripped the ivory
sword-hilt, but the blade was gone--melted and destroyed by that awful
heat. Yet men standing almost within reach of the victim had not
suffered except to be dazzled and half blinded by the sudden flare.

'Steel touches it off,' grunted Conan. 'Look out--here they come!'

The slope above them was almost covered by the billowing spheres. Kerim
Shah bent his bow and sent a shaft into the mass, and those touched by
the arrow burst like bubbles in spurting flame. His men followed his
example and for the next few minutes it was as if a thunderstorm raged
on the mountain slope, with bolts of lightning striking and bursting in
showers of flame. When the barrage ceased, only a few arrows were left
in the quivers of the archers.

They pushed on grimly, over soil charred and blackened, where the naked
rock had in places been turned to lava by the explosion of those
diabolical bombs.

Now they were almost within arrow-flight of the silent tower, and they
spread their line, nerves taut, ready for any horror that might descend
upon them.

On the tower appeared a single figure, lifting a ten-foot bronze horn.
Its strident bellow roared out across the echoing slopes, like the blare
of trumpets on Judgment Day. And it began to be fearfully answered. The
ground trembled under the feet of the invaders, and rumblings and
grindings welled up from the subterranean depths.

The Irakzai screamed, reeling like drunken men on the shuddering slope,
and Conan, eyes glaring, charged recklessly up the incline, knife in
hand, straight at the door that showed in the tower-wall. Above him the
great horn roared and bellowed in brutish mockery. And then Kerim Shah
drew a shaft to his ear and loosed.

Only a Turanian could have made that shot. The bellowing of the horn
ceased suddenly, and a high, thin scream shrilled in its place. The
green-robed figure on the tower staggered, clutching at the long shaft
which quivered in its bosom, and then pitched across the parapet. The
great horn tumbled upon the battlement and hung precariously, and
another robed figure rushed to seize it, shrieking in horror. Again the
Turanian bow twanged, and again it was answered by a death-howl. The
second acolyte, in falling, struck the horn with his elbow and knocked
it clattering over the parapet to shatter on the rocks far below.

At such headlong speed had Conan covered the ground that before the
clattering echoes of that fall had died away, he was hacking at the
door. Warned by his savage instinct, he gave back suddenly as a tide of
molten lead splashed down from above. But the next instant he was back
again, attacking the panels with redoubled fury. He was galvanized by
the fact that his enemies had resorted to earthly weapons. The sorcery
of the acolytes was limited. Their necromantic resources might well be
exhausted.

Kerim Shah was hurrying up the slope, his hill-men behind him in a
straggling crescent. They loosed as they ran, their arrows splintering
against the walls or arching over the parapet.

The heavy teak portal gave way beneath the Cimmerian's assault, and he
peered inside warily, expecting anything. He was looking into a circular
chamber from which a stair wound upward. On the opposite side of the
chamber a door gaped open, revealing the outer slope--and the backs of
half a dozen green-robed figures in full retreat.

Conan yelled, took a step into the tower, and then native caution jerked
him back, just as a great block of stone fell crashing to the floor
where his foot had been an instant before. Shouting to his followers, he
raced around the tower.

The acolytes had evacuated their first line of defence. As Conan rounded
the tower he saw their green robes twinkling up the mountain ahead of
him. He gave chase, panting with earnest blood-lust, and behind him
Kerim Shah and the Irakzai came pelting, the latter yelling like wolves
at the flight of their enemies, their fatalism momentarily submerged by
temporary triumph.

The tower stood on the lower edge of a narrow plateau whose upward slant
was barely perceptible. A few hundred yards away this plateau ended
abruptly in a chasm which had been invisible farther down the mountain.
Into this chasm the acolytes apparently leaped without checking their
speed. Their pursuers saw the green robes flutter and disappear over the
edge.

A few moments later they themselves were standing on the brink of the
mighty moat that cut them off from the castle of the Black Seers. It
was a sheer-walled ravine that extended in either direction as far as
they could see, apparently girdling the mountain, some four hundred
yards in width and five hundred feet deep. And in it, from rim to rim, a
strange, translucent mist sparkled and shimmered.

Looking down, Conan grunted. Far below him, moving across the glimmering
floor, which shone like burnished silver, he saw the forms of the
green-robed acolytes. Their outline was wavering and indistinct, like
figures seen under deep water. They walked in single file, moving toward
the opposite wall.

Kerim Shah nocked an arrow and sent it singing downward. But when it
struck the mist that filled the chasm it seemed to lose momentum and
direction, wandering widely from its course.

'If they went down, so can we!' grunted Conan, while Kerim Shah stared
after his shaft in amazement. 'I saw them last at this spot--'

Squinting down he saw something shining like a golden thread across the
canyon floor far below. The acolytes seemed to be following this thread,
and there suddenly came to him Khemsa's cryptic words--'Follow the
golden vein!' On the brink, under his very hand as he crouched, he found
it, a thin vein of sparkling gold running from an outcropping of ore to
the edge and down across the silvery floor. And he found something else,
which had before been invisible to him because of the peculiar
refraction of the light. The gold vein followed a narrow ramp which
slanted down into the ravine, fitted with niches for hand and foot hold.

'Here's where they went down,' he grunted to Kerim Shah. 'They're no
adepts, to waft themselves through the air! We'll follow them--'

It was at that instant that the man who had been bitten by the mad dog
cried out horribly and leaped at Kerim Shah, foaming and gnashing his
teeth. The Turanian, quick as a cat on his feet, sprang aside and the
madman pitched head-first over the brink. The others rushed to the edge
and glared after him in amazement. The maniac did not fall plummet-like.
He floated slowly down through the rosy haze like a man sinking in deep
water. His limbs moved like a man trying to swim, and his features were
purple and convulsed beyond the contortions of his madness. Far down at
last on the shining floor his body settled and lay still.

'There's death in that chasm,' muttered Kerim Shah, drawing back from
the rosy mist that shimmered almost at his feet. 'What now, Conan?'

'On!' answered the Cimmerian grimly. 'Those acolytes are human; if the
mist doesn't kill them, it won't kill me.'

He hitched his belt, and his hands touched the girdle Khemsa had given
him; he scowled, then smiled bleakly. He had forgotten that girdle; yet
thrice had death passed him by to strike another victim.

The acolytes had reached the farther wall and were moving up it like
great green flies. Letting himself upon the ramp, he descended warily.
The rosy cloud lapped about his ankles, ascending as he lowered himself.
It reached his knees, his thighs, his waist, his arm-pits. He felt as
one feels a thick heavy fog on a damp night. With it lapping about his
chin he hesitated, and then ducked under. Instantly his breath ceased;
all air was shut off from him and he felt his ribs caving in on his
vitals. With a frantic effort he heaved himself up, fighting for life.
His head rose above the surface and he drank air in great gulps.

Kerim Shah leaned down toward him, spoke to him, but Conan neither heard
nor heeded. Stubbornly, his mind fixed on what the dying Khemsa had told
him, the Cimmerian groped for the gold vein, and found that he had moved
off it in his descent. Several series of hand-holds were niched in the
ramp. Placing himself directly over the thread, he began climbing down
once more. The rosy mist rose about him, engulfed him. Now his head was
under, but he was still drinking pure air. Above him he saw his
companions staring down at him, their features blurred by the haze that
shimmered over his head. He gestured for them to follow, and went down
swiftly, without waiting to see whether they complied or not.

Kerim Shah sheathed his sword without comment and followed, and the
Irakzai, more fearful of being left alone than of the terrors that might
lurk below, scrambled after him. Each man clung to the golden thread as
they saw the Cimmerian do.

Down the slanting ramp they went to the ravine floor and moved out
across the shining level, treading the gold vein like rope-walkers. It
was as if they walked along an invisible tunnel through which air
circulated freely. They felt death pressing in on them above and on
either hand, but it did not touch them.

The vein crawled up a similar ramp on the other wall up which the
acolytes had disappeared, and up it they went with taut nerves, not
knowing what might be waiting for them among the jutting spurs of rock
that fanged the lip of the precipice.

It was the green-robed acolytes who awaited them, with knives in their
hands. Perhaps they had reached the limits to which they could retreat.
Perhaps the Stygian girdle about Conan's waist could have told why their
necromantic spells had proven so weak and so quickly exhausted. Perhaps
it was knowledge of death decreed for failure that sent them leaping
from among the rocks, eyes glaring and knives glittering, resorting in
their desperation to material weapons.

There among the rocky fangs on the precipice lip was no war of wizard
craft. It was a whirl of blades, where real steel bit and real blood
spurted, where sinewy arms dealt forthright blows that severed quivering
flesh, and men went down to be trodden under foot as the fight raged
over them.

One of the Irakzai bled to death among the rocks, but the acolytes were
down--slashed and hacked asunder or hurled over the edge to float
sluggishly down to the silver floor that shone so far below.

Then the conquerors shook blood and sweat from their eyes, and looked at
one another. Conan and Kerim Shah still stood upright, and four of the
Irakzai.

They stood among the rocky teeth that serrated the precipice brink, and
from that spot a path wound up a gentle slope to a broad stair,
consisting of half a dozen steps, a hundred feet across, cut out of a
green jade-like substance. They led up to a broad stage or roofless
gallery of the same polished stone, and above it rose, tier upon tier,
the castle of the Black Seers. It seemed to have been carved out of the
sheer stone of the mountain. The architecture was faultless, but
unadorned. The many casements were barred and masked with curtains
within. There was no sign of life, friendly or hostile.

They went up the path in silence, and warily as men treading the lair of
a serpent. The Irakzai were dumb, like men marching to a certain doom.
Even Kerim Shah was silent. Only Conan seemed unaware what a monstrous
dislocating and uprooting of accepted thought and action their invasion
constituted, what an unprecedented violation of tradition. He was not of
the East; and he came of a breed who fought devils and wizards as
promptly and matter-of-factly as they battled human foes.

He strode up the shining stairs and across the wide green gallery
straight toward the great golden-bound teak door that opened upon it. He
cast but a single glance upward at the higher tiers of the great
pyramidal structure towering above him. He reached a hand for the bronze
prong that jutted like a handle from the door--then checked himself,
grinning hardly. The handle was made in the shape of a serpent, head
lifted on arched neck; and Conan had a suspicion that that metal head
would come to grisly life under his hand.

He struck it from the door with one blow, and its bronze clink on the
glassy floor did not lessen his caution. He flipped it aside with his
knife-point, and again turned to the door. Utter silence reigned over
the towers. Far below them the mountain slopes fell away into a purple
haze of distance. The sun glittered on snow-clad peaks on either hand.
High above, a vulture hung like a black dot in the cold blue of the sky.
But for it, the men before the gold-bound door were the only evidence of
life, tiny figures on a green jade gallery poised on the dizzy height,
with that fantastic pile of stone towering above them.

A sharp wind off the snow slashed them, whipping their tatters about.
Conan's long knife splintering through the teak panels roused the
startled echoes. Again and again he struck, hewing through polished wood
and metal bands alike. Through the sundered ruins he glared into the
interior, alert and suspicious as a wolf. He saw a broad chamber, the
polished stone walls untapestried, the mosaic floor uncarpeted. Square,
polished ebon stools and a stone dais formed the only furnishings. The
room was empty of human life. Another door showed in the opposite wall.

'Leave a man on guard outside,' grunted Conan. 'I'm going in.'

Kerim Shah designated a warrior for that duty, and the man fell back
toward the middle of the gallery, bow in hand. Conan strode into the
castle, followed by the Turanian and the three remaining Irakzai. The
one outside spat, grumbled in his beard, and started suddenly as a low
mocking laugh reached his ears.

He lifted his head and saw, on the tier above him, a tall, black-robed
figure, naked head nodding slightly as he stared down. His whole
attitude suggested mockery and malignity. Quick as a flash the Irakzai
bent his bow and loosed, and the arrow streaked upward to strike full in
the black-robed breast. The mocking smile did not alter. The Seer
plucked out the missile and threw it back at the bowman, not as a weapon
is hurled, but with a contemptuous gesture. The Irakzai dodged,
instinctively throwing up his arm. His fingers closed on the revolving
shaft.

Then he shrieked. In his hand the wooden shaft suddenly _writhed_. Its
rigid outline became pliant, melting in his grasp. He tried to throw it
from him, but it was too late. He held a living serpent in his naked
hand, and already it had coiled about his wrist and its wicked
wedge-shaped head darted at his muscular arm. He screamed again and his
eyes became distended, his features purple. He went to his knees shaken
by an awful convulsion, and then lay still.

The men inside had wheeled at his first cry. Conan took a swift stride
toward the open doorway, and then halted short, baffled. To the men
behind him it seemed that he strained against empty air. But though he
could see nothing, there was a slick, smooth, hard surface under his
hands, and he knew that a sheet of crystal had been let down in the
doorway. Through it he saw the Irakzai lying motionless on the glassy
gallery, an ordinary arrow sticking in his arm.

Conan lifted his knife and smote, and the watchers were dumbfounded to
see his blow checked apparently in midair, with the loud clang of steel
that meets an unyielding substance. He wasted no more effort. He knew
that not even the legendary tulwar of Amir Khurum could shatter that
invisible curtain.

In a few words he explained the matter to Kerim Shah, and the Turanian
shrugged his shoulders. 'Well, if our exit is barred, we must find
another. In the meanwhile our way lies forward, does it not?'

With a grunt the Cimmerian turned and strode across the chamber to the
opposite door, with a feeling of treading on the threshold of doom. As
he lifted his knife to shatter the door, it swung silently open as if of
its own accord. He strode into the great hall, flanked with tall glassy
columns. A hundred feet from the door began the broad jade-green steps
of a stair that tapered toward the top like the side of a pyramid. What
lay beyond that stair he could not tell. But between him and its
shimmering foot stood a curious altar of gleaming black jade. Four great
golden serpents twined their tails about this altar and reared their
wedge-shaped heads in the air, facing the four quarters of the compass
like the enchanted guardians of a fabled treasure. But on the altar,
between the arching necks, stood only a crystal globe filled with a
cloudy smoke-like substance, in which floated four golden pomegranates.

The sight stirred some dim recollection in his mind; then Conan heeded
the altar no longer, for on the lower steps of the stair stood four
black-robed figures. He had not seen them come. They were simply there,
tall, gaunt, their vulture-heads nodding in unison, their feet and hands
hidden by their flowing garments.

One lifted his arm and the sleeve fell away revealing his hand--and it
was not a hand at all. Conan halted in mid-stride, compelled against his
will. He had encountered a force differing subtly from Khemsa's
mesmerism, and he could not advance, though he felt it in his power to
retreat if he wished. His companions had likewise halted, and they
seemed even more helpless than he, unable to move in either direction.

The seer whose arm was lifted beckoned to one of the Irakzai, and the
man moved toward him like one in a trance, eyes staring and fixed, blade
hanging in limp fingers. As he pushed past Conan, the Cimmerian threw an
arm across his breast to arrest him. Conan was so much stronger than the
Irakzai that in ordinary circumstances he could have broken his spine
between his hands. But now the muscular arm was brushed aside like straw
and the Irakzai moved toward the stair, treading jerkily and
mechanically. He reached the steps and knelt stiffly, proffering his
blade and bending his head. The Seer took the sword. It flashed as he
swung it up and down. The Irakzai's head tumbled from his shoulders and
thudded heavily on the black marble floor. An arch of blood jetted from
the severed arteries and the body slumped over and lay with arms spread
wide.

Again a malformed hand lifted and beckoned, and another Irakzai
stumbled stiffly to his doom. The ghastly drama was re-enacted and
another headless form lay beside the first.

As the third tribesman clumped his way past Conan to his death, the
Cimmerian, his veins bulging in his temples with his efforts to break
past the unseen barrier that held him, was suddenly aware of allied
forces, unseen, but waking into life about him. This realization came
without warning, but so powerfully that he could not doubt his instinct.
His left hand slid involuntarily under his Bakhariot belt and closed on
the Stygian girdle. And as he gripped it he felt new strength flood his
numbed limbs; the will to live was a pulsing white-hot fire, matched by
the intensity of his burning rage.

The third Irakzai was a decapitated corpse, and the hideous finger was
lifting again when Conan felt the bursting of the invisible barrier. A
fierce, involuntary cry burst from his lips as he leaped with the
explosive suddenness of pent-up ferocity. His left hand gripped the
sorcerer's girdle as a drowning man grips a floating log, and the long
knife was a sheen of light in his right. The men on the steps did not
move. They watched calmly, cynically; if they felt surprise they did not
show it. Conan did not allow himself to think what might chance when he
came within knife-reach of them. His blood was pounding in his temples,
a mist of crimson swam before his sight. He was afire with the urge to
kill--to drive his knife deep into flesh and bone, and twist the blade
in blood and entrails.

Another dozen strides would carry him to the steps where the sneering
demons stood. He drew his breath deep, his fury rising redly as his
charge gathered momentum. He was hurtling past the altar with its golden
serpents when like a levin-flash there shot across his mind again as
vividly as if spoken in his external ear, the cryptic words of Khemsa:
'_Break the crystal ball!_'

His reaction was almost without his own volition. Execution followed
impulse so spontaneously that the greatest sorcerer of the age would not
have had time to read his mind and prevent his action. Wheeling like a
cat from his headlong charge, he brought his knife crashing down upon
the crystal. Instantly the air vibrated with a peal of terror, whether
from the stairs, the altar, or the crystal itself he could not tell.
Hisses filled his ears as the golden serpents, suddenly vibrant with
hideous life, writhed and smote at him. But he was fired to the speed of
a maddened tiger. A whirl of steel sheared through the hideous trunks
that waved toward him, and he smote the crystal sphere again and yet
again. And the globe burst with a noise like a thunderclap, raining
fiery shards on the black marble, and the gold pomegranates, as if
released from captivity, shot upward toward the lofty roof and were
gone.

A mad screaming, bestial and ghastly, was echoing through the great
hall. On the steps writhed four black-robed figures, twisting in
convulsions, froth dripping from their livid mouths. Then with one
frenzied crescendo of inhuman ululation they stiffened and lay still,
and Conan knew that they were dead. He stared down at the altar and the
crystal shards. Four headless golden serpents still coiled about the
altar, but no alien life now animated the dully gleaming metal.

Kerim Shah was rising slowly from his knees, whither he had been dashed
by some unseen force. He shook his head to clear the ringing from his
ears.

'Did you hear that crash when you struck? It was as if a thousand
crystal panels shattered all over the castle as that globe burst. Were
the souls of the wizards imprisoned in those golden balls?--Ha!'

Conan wheeled as Kerim Shah drew his sword and pointed.

Another figure stood at the head of the stair. His robe, too, was black,
but of richly embroidered velvet, and there was a velvet cap on his
head. His face was calm, and not unhandsome.

'Who the devil are you?' demanded Conan, staring up at him, knife in
hand.

'I am the Master of Yimsha!' His voice was like the chime of a temple
bell, but a note of cruel mirth ran through it.

'Where is Yasmina?' demanded Kerim Shah.

The Master laughed down at him.

'What is that to you, dead man? Have you so quickly forgotten my
strength, once lent to you, that you come armed against me, you poor
fool? I think I will take your heart, Kerim Shah!'

He held out his hand as if to receive something, and the Turanian cried
out sharply like a man in mortal agony. He reeled drunkenly, and then,
with a splintering of bones, a rending of flesh and muscle and a
snapping of mail-links, his breast burst outward with a shower of blood,
and through the ghastly aperture something red and dripping shot through
the air into the Master's outstretched hand, as a bit of steel leaps to
the magnet. The Turanian slumped to the floor and lay motionless, and
the Master laughed and hurled the object to fall before Conan's feet--a
still-quivering human heart.

With a roar and a curse Conan charged the stair. From Khemsa's girdle he
felt strength and deathless hate flow into him to combat the terrible
emanation of power that met him on the steps. The air filled with a
shimmering steely haze through which he plunged like a swimmer, head
lowered, left arm bent about his face, knife gripped low in his right
hand. His half-blinded eyes, glaring over the crook of his elbow, made
out the hated shape of the Seer before and above him, the outline
wavering as a reflection wavers in disturbed water.

He was racked and torn by forces beyond his comprehension, but he felt
a driving power outside and beyond his own lifting him inexorably upward
and onward, despite the wizard's strength and his own agony.

Now he had reached the head of the stairs, and the Master's face floated
in the steely haze before him, and a strange fear shadowed the
inscrutable eyes. Conan waded through the mist as through a surf, and
his knife lunged upward like a live thing. The keen point ripped the
Master's robe as he sprang back with a low cry. Then before Conan's
gaze, the wizard vanished--simply disappeared like a burst bubble, and
something long and undulating darted up one of the smaller stairs that
led up to left and right from the landing.

Conan charged after it, up the left-hand stair, uncertain as to just
what he had seen whip up those steps, but in a berserk mood that drowned
the nausea and horror whispering at the back of his consciousness.

He plunged out into a broad corridor whose uncarpeted floor and
untapestried walls were of polished jade, and something long and swift
whisked down the corridor ahead of him, and into a curtained door. From
within the chamber rose a scream of urgent terror. The sound lent wings
to Conan's flying feet and he hurtled through the curtains and headlong
into the chamber within.

A frightful scene met his glare. Yasmina cowered on the farther edge of
a velvet-covered dais, screaming her loathing and horror, an arm lifted
as if to ward off attack, while before her swayed the hideous head of a
giant serpent, shining neck arching up from dark-gleaming coils. With a
choked cry Conan threw his knife.

Instantly the monster whirled and was upon him like the rush of wind
through tall grass. The long knife quivered in its neck, point and a
foot of blade showing on one side, and the hilt and a hand's-breadth of
steel on the other, but it only seemed to madden the giant reptile. The
great head towered above the man who faced it, and then darted down, the
venom-dripping jaws gaping wide. But Conan had plucked a dagger from his
girdle and he stabbed upward as the head dipped down. The point tore
through the lower jaw and transfixed the upper, pinning them together.
The next instant the great trunk had looped itself about the Cimmerian
as the snake, unable to use its fangs, employed its remaining form of
attack.

Conan's left arm was pinioned among the bone-crushing folds, but his
right was free. Bracing his feet to keep upright, he stretched forth his
hand, gripped the hilt of the long knife jutting from the serpent's
neck, and tore it free in a shower of blood. As if divining his purpose
with more than bestial intelligence, the snake writhed and knotted,
seeking to cast its loops about his right arm. But with the speed of
light the long knife rose and fell, shearing halfway through the
reptile's giant trunk.

Before he could strike again, the great pliant loops fell from him and
the monster dragged itself across the floor, gushing blood from its
ghastly wounds. Conan sprang after it, knife lifted, but his vicious
swipe cut empty air as the serpent writhed away from him and struck its
blunt nose against a paneled screen of sandalwood. One of the panels
gave inward and the long, bleeding barrel whipped through it and was
gone.

Conan instantly attacked the screen. A few blows rent it apart and he
glared into the dim alcove beyond. No horrific shape coiled there; there
was blood on the marble floor, and bloody tracks led to a cryptic arched
door. Those tracks were of a man's bare feet....

'_Conan!_' He wheeled back into the chamber just in time to catch the
Devi of Vendhya in his arms as she rushed across the room and threw
herself upon him, catching him about the neck with a frantic clasp, half
hysterical with terror and gratitude and relief.

His wild blood had been stirred to its uttermost by all that had passed.
He caught her to him in a grasp that would have made her wince at
another time, and crushed her lips with his. She made no resistance; the
Devi was drowned in the elemental woman. She closed her eyes and drank
in his fierce, hot, lawless kisses with all the abandon of passionate
thirst. She was panting with his violence when he ceased for breath, and
glared down at her lying limp in his mighty arms.

'I knew you'd come for me,' she murmured. 'You would not leave me in
this den of devils.'

At her words recollection of their environment came to him suddenly. He
lifted his head and listened intently. Silence reigned over the castle
of Yimsha, but it was a silence impregnated with menace. Peril crouched
in every corner, leered invisibly from every hanging.

'We'd better go while we can,' he muttered. 'Those cuts were enough to
kill any common beast--or _man_--but a wizard has a dozen lives. Wound
one, and he writhes away like a crippled snake to soak up fresh venom
from some source of sorcery.'

He picked up the girl and carrying her in his arms like a child, he
strode out into the gleaming jade corridor and down the stairs, nerves
tautly alert for any sign or sound.

'I met the Master,' she whispered, clinging to him and shuddering. 'He
worked his spells on me to break my will. The most awful thing was a
moldering corpse which seized me in its arms--I fainted then and lay as
one dead, I do not know how long. Shortly after I regained consciousness
I heard sounds of strife below, and cries, and then that snake came
slithering through the curtains--ah!' She shook at the memory of that
horror. 'I knew somehow that it was not an illusion, but a real serpent
that sought my life.'

'It was not a shadow, at least,' answered Conan cryptically. 'He knew he
was beaten, and chose to slay you rather than let you be rescued.'

'What do you mean, _he_?' she asked uneasily, and then shrank against
him, crying out, and forgetting her question. She had seen the corpses
at the foot of the stairs. Those of the Seers were not good to look at;
as they lay twisted and contorted, their hands and feet were exposed to
view, and at the sight Yasmina went livid and hid her face against
Conan's powerful shoulder.




10 Yasmina and Conan


Conan passed through the hall quickly enough, traversed the outer
chamber and approached the door that led upon the gallery. Then he saw
the floor sprinkled with tiny, glittering shards. The crystal sheet that
had covered the doorway had been shivered to bits, and he remembered the
crash that had accompanied the shattering of the crystal globe. He
believed that every piece of crystal in the castle had broken at that
instant, and some dim instinct or memory of esoteric lore vaguely
suggested the truth of the monstrous connection between the Lords of the
Black Circle and the golden pomegranates. He felt the short hair bristle
chilly at the back of his neck and put the matter hastily out of his
mind.

He breathed a deep sigh of relief as he stepped out upon the green jade
gallery. There was still the gorge to cross, but at least he could see
the white peaks glistening in the sun, and the long slopes falling away
into the distant blue hazes.

The Irakzai lay where he had fallen, an ugly blotch on the glassy
smoothness. As Conan strode down the winding path, he was surprised to
note the position of the sun. It had not yet passed its zenith; and yet
it seemed to him that hours had passed since he plunged into the castle
of the Black Seers.

He felt an urge to hasten, not a mere blind panic, but an instinct of
peril growing behind his back. He said nothing to Yasmina, and she
seemed content to nestle her dark head against his arching breast and
find security in the clasp of his iron arms. He paused an instant on the
brink of the chasm, frowning down. The haze which danced in the gorge
was no longer rose-hued and sparkling. It was smoky, dim, ghostly, like
the life-tide that flickered thinly in a wounded man. The thought came
vaguely to Conan that the spells of magicians were more closely bound to
their personal beings than were the actions of common men to the
actors.

But far below, the floor shone like tarnished silver, and the gold
thread sparkled undimmed. Conan shifted Yasmina across his shoulder,
where she lay docilely, and began the descent. Hurriedly he descended
the ramp, and hurriedly he fled across the echoing floor. He had a
conviction that they were racing with time, that their chances of
survival depended upon crossing that gorge of horrors before the wounded
Master of the castle should regain enough power to loose some other doom
upon them.

When he toiled up the farther ramp and came out upon the crest, he
breathed a gusty sigh of relief and stood Yasmina upon her feet.

'You walk from here,' he told her; 'it's downhill all the way.'

She stole a glance at the gleaming pyramid across the chasm; it reared
up against the snowy slope like the citadel of silence and immemorial
evil.

'Are you a magician, that you have conquered the Black Seers of Yimsha,
Conan of Ghor?' she asked, as they went down the path, with his heavy
arm about her supple waist.

'It was a girdle Khemsa gave me before he died,' Conan answered. 'Yes, I
found him on the trail. It is a curious one, which I'll show you when I
have time. Against some spells it was weak, but against others it was
strong, and a good knife is always a hearty incantation.'

'But if the girdle aided you in conquering the Master,' she argued, 'why
did it not aid Khemsa?'

He shook his head. 'Who knows? But Khemsa had been the Master's slave;
perhaps that weakened its magic. He had no hold on me as he had on
Khemsa. Yet I can't say that I conquered him. He retreated, but I have a
feeling that we haven't seen the last of him. I want to put as many
miles between us and his lair as we can.'

He was further relieved to find horses tethered among the tamarisks as
he had left them. He loosed them swiftly and mounted the black stallion,
swinging the girl up before him. The others followed, freshened by their
rest.

'And what now?' she asked. 'To Afghulistan?'

'Not just now!' He grinned hardly. 'Somebody--maybe the governor--killed
my seven headmen. My idiotic followers think I had something to do with
it, and unless I am able to convince them otherwise, they'll hunt me
like a wounded jackal.'

'Then what of me? If the headmen are dead, I am useless to you as a
hostage. Will you slay me, to avenge them?'

He looked down at her, with eyes fiercely aglow, and laughed at the
suggestion.

'Then let us ride to the border,' she said. 'You'll be safe from the
Afghulis there--'

'Yes, on a Vendhyan gibbet.'

'I am Queen of Vendhya,' she reminded him with a touch of her old
imperiousness. 'You have saved my life. You shall be rewarded.'

She did not intend it as it sounded, but he growled in his throat, ill
pleased.

'Keep your bounty for your city-bred dogs, princess! If you're a queen
of the plains, I'm a chief of the hills, and not one foot toward the
border will I take you!'

'But you would be safe--' she began bewilderedly.

'And you'd be the Devi again,' he broke in. 'No, girl; I prefer you as
you are now--a woman of flesh and blood, riding on my saddle-bow.'

'But you can't _keep_ me!' she cried. 'You can't--'

'Watch and see!' he advised grimly.

'But I will pay you a vast ransom--'

'Devil take your ransom!' he answered roughly, his arms hardening about
her supple figure. 'The kingdom of Vendhya could give me nothing I
desire half so much as I desire you. I took you at the risk of my neck;
if your courtiers want you back, let them come up the Zhaibar and fight
for you.'

'But you have no followers now!' she protested. 'You are hunted! How can
you preserve your own life, much less mine?'

'I still have friends in the hills,' he answered. 'There is a chief of
the Khurakzai who will keep you safely while I bicker with the Afghulis.
If they will have none of me, by Crom! I will ride northward with you to
the steppes of the _kozaki_. I was a hetman among the Free Companions
before I rode southward. I'll make you a queen on the Zaporoska River!'

'But I can not!' she objected. 'You must not hold me--'

'If the idea's so repulsive,' he demanded, 'why did you yield your lips
to me so willingly?'

'Even a queen is human,' she answered, coloring. 'But because I am a
queen, I must consider my kingdom. Do not carry me away into some
foreign country. Come back to Vendhya with me!'

'Would you make me your king?' he asked sardonically.

'Well, there are customs--' she stammered, and he interrupted her with a
hard laugh.

'Yes, civilized customs that won't let you do as you wish. You'll marry
some withered old king of the plains, and I can go my way with only the
memory of a few kisses snatched from your lips. Ha!'

'But I must return to my kingdom!' she repeated helplessly.

'Why?' he demanded angrily. 'To chafe your rump on gold thrones, and
listen to the plaudits of smirking, velvet-skirted fools? Where is the
gain? Listen: I was born in the Cimmerian hills where the people are
all barbarians. I have been a mercenary soldier, a corsair, a _kozak_,
and a hundred other things. What king has roamed the countries, fought
the battles, loved the women, and won the plunder that I have?

'I came into Ghulistan to raise a horde and plunder the kingdoms to the
south--your own among them. Being chief of the Afghulis was only a
start. If I can conciliate them, I'll have a dozen tribes following me
within a year. But if I can't I'll ride back to the steppes and loot the
Turanian borders with the _kozaki_. And you'll go with me. To the devil
with your kingdom; they fended for themselves before you were born.'

She lay in his arms looking up at him, and she felt a tug at her spirit,
a lawless, reckless urge that matched his own and was by it called into
being. But a thousand generations of sovereignship rode heavy upon her.

'I can't! I can't!' she repeated helplessly.

'You haven't any choice,' he assured her. 'You--what the devil!'

They had left Yimsha some miles behind them, and were riding along a
high ridge that separated two deep valleys. They had just topped a steep
crest where they could gaze down into the valley on their right hand.
And there was a running fight in progress. A strong wind was blowing
away from them, carrying the sound from their ears, but even so the
clashing of steel and thunder of hoofs welled up from far below.

They saw the glint of the sun on lance-tip and spired helmet. Three
thousand mailed horsemen were driving before them a ragged band of
turbaned riders, who fled snarling and striking like fleeing wolves.

'Turanians,' muttered Conan. 'Squadrons from Secunderam. What the devil
are they doing here?'

'Who are the men they pursue?' asked Yasmina. 'And why do they fall back
so stubbornly? They can not stand against such odds.'

'Five hundred of my mad Afghulis,' he growled, scowling down into the
vale. 'They're in a trap, and they know it.'

The valley was indeed a cul-de-sac at that end. It narrowed to a
high-walled gorge, opening out further into a round bowl, completely
rimmed with lofty, unscalable walls.

The turbaned riders were being forced into this gorge, because there was
nowhere else for them to go, and they went reluctantly, in a shower of
arrows and a whirl of swords. The helmeted riders harried them, but did
not press in too rashly. They knew the desperate fury of the hill
tribes, and they knew too that they had their prey in a trap from which
there was no escape. They had recognized the hill-men as Afghulis, and
they wished to hem them in and force a surrender. They needed hostages
for the purpose they had in mind.

Their emir was a man of decision and initiative. When he reached the
Gurashah valley, and found neither guides nor emissary waiting for him,
he pushed on, trusting to his own knowledge of the country. All the way
from Secunderam there had been fighting, and tribesmen were licking
their wounds in many a crag-perched village. He knew there was a good
chance that neither he nor any of his helmeted spearmen would ever ride
through the gates of Secunderam again, for the tribes would all be up
behind him now, but he was determined to carry out his orders--which
were to take Yasmina Devi from the Afghulis at all costs, and to bring
her captive to Secunderam, or if confronted by impossibility, to strike
off her head before he himself died.

Of all this, of course, the watchers on the ridge were not aware. But
Conan fidgeted with nervousness.

'Why the devil did they get themselves trapped?' he demanded of the
universe at large. 'I know what they're doing in these parts--they were
hunting me, the dogs! Poking into every valley--and found themselves
penned in before they knew it. The poor fools! They're making a stand in
the gorge, but they can't hold out for long. When the Turanians have
pushed them back into the bowl, they'll slaughter them at their
leisure.'

The din welling up from below increased in volume and intensity. In the
strait of the narrow gut, the Afghulis, fighting desperately, were for
the time holding their own against the mailed riders, who could not
throw their whole weight against them.

Conan scowled darkly, moved restlessly, fingering his hilt, and finally
spoke bluntly: 'Devi, I must go down to them. I'll find a place for you
to hide until I come back to you. You spoke of your kingdom--well, I
don't pretend to look on those hairy devils as my children, but after
all, such as they are, they're my henchmen. A chief should never desert
his followers, even if they desert him first. They think they were right
in kicking me out--hell, I won't be cast off! I'm still chief of the
Afghulis, and I'll prove it! I can climb down on foot into the gorge.'

'But what of me?' she queried. 'You carried me away forcibly from _my_
people; now will you leave me to die in the hills alone while you go
down and sacrifice yourself uselessly?'

His veins swelled with the conflict of his emotions.

'That's right,' he muttered helplessly. 'Crom knows what I _can_ do.'

She turned her head slightly, a curious expression dawning on her
beautiful face. Then:

'Listen!' she cried. 'Listen!'

A distant fanfare of trumpets was borne faintly to their ears. They
stared into the deep valley on the left, and caught a glint of steel on
the farther side. A long line of lances and polished helmets moved along
the vale, gleaming in the sunlight.

'The riders of Vendhya!' she cried exultingly.

'There are thousands of them!' muttered Conan. 'It has been long since a
Kshatriya host has ridden this far into the hills.'

'They are searching for me!' she exclaimed. 'Give me your horse! I will
ride to my warriors! The ridge is not so precipitous on the left, and I
can reach the valley floor. I will lead my horsemen into the valley at
the upper end and fall upon the Turanians! We will crush them in the
vise! Quick, Conan! Will you sacrifice your men to your own desire?'

The burning hunger of the steppes and the wintry forests glared out of
his eyes, but he shook his head and swung off the stallion, placing the
reins in her hands.

'You win!' he grunted. 'Ride like the devil!'

She wheeled away down the left-hand slope and he ran swiftly along the
ridge until he reached the long ragged cleft that was the defile in
which the fight raged. Down the rugged wall he scrambled like an ape,
clinging to projections and crevices, to fall at last, feet first, into
the mêlée that raged in the mouth of the gorge. Blades were whickering
and clanging about him, horses rearing and stamping, helmet plumes
nodding among turbans that were stained crimson.

As he hit, he yelled like a wolf, caught a gold-worked rein, and dodging
the sweep of a scimitar, drove his long knife upward through the rider's
vitals. In another instant he was in the saddle, yelling ferocious
orders to the Afghulis. They stared at him stupidly for an instant; then
as they saw the havoc his steel was wreaking among their enemies, they
fell to their work again, accepting him without comment. In that inferno
of licking blades and spurting blood there was no time to ask or answer
questions.

The riders in their spired helmets and gold-worked hauberks swarmed
about the gorge mouth, thrusting and slashing, and the narrow defile was
packed and jammed with horses and men, the warriors crushed breast to
breast, stabbing with shortened blades, slashing murderously when there
was an instant's room to swing a sword. When a man went down he did not
get up from beneath the stamping, swirling hoofs. Weight and sheer
strength counted heavily there, and the chief of the Afghulis did the
work of ten. At such times accustomed habits sway men strongly, and the
warriors, who were used to seeing Conan in their vanguard, were
heartened mightily, despite their distrust of him.

But superior numbers counted too. The pressure of the men behind forced
the horsemen of Turan deeper and deeper into the gorge, in the teeth of
the flickering tulwars. Foot by foot the Afghulis were shoved back,
leaving the defile-floor carpeted with dead, on which the riders
trampled. As he hacked and smote like a man possessed, Conan had time
for some chilling doubts--would Yasmina keep her word? She had but to
join her warriors, turn southward and leave him and his band to perish.

But at last, after what seemed centuries of desperate battling, in the
valley outside there rose another sound above the clash of steel and
yells of slaughter. And then with a burst of trumpets that shook the
walls, and rushing thunder of hoofs, five thousand riders of Vendhya
smote the hosts of Secunderam.

That stroke split the Turanian squadrons asunder, shattered, tore and
rent them and scattered their fragments all over the valley. In an
instant the surge had ebbed back out of the gorge; there was a chaotic,
confused swirl of fighting, horsemen wheeling and smiting singly and in
clusters, and then the emir went down with a Kshatriya lance through his
breast, and the riders in their spired helmets turned their horses down
the valley, spurring like mad and seeking to slash a way through the
swarms which had come upon them from the rear. As they scattered in
flight, the conquerors scattered in pursuit, and all across the valley
floor, and up on the slopes near the mouth and over the crests streamed
the fugitives and the pursuers. The Afghulis, those left to ride, rushed
out of the gorge and joined in the harrying of their foes, accepting the
unexpected alliance as unquestioningly as they had accepted the return
of their repudiated chief.

The sun was sinking toward the distant crags when Conan, his garments
hacked to tatters and the mail under them reeking and clotted with
blood, his knife dripping and crusted to the hilt, strode over the
corpses to where Yasmina Devi sat her horse among her nobles on the
crest of the ridge, near a lofty precipice.

'You kept your word, Devi!' he roared. 'By Crom, though, I had some bad
seconds down in that gorge--_look out!_'

Down from the sky swooped a vulture of tremendous size with a thunder of
wings that knocked men sprawling from their horses.

The scimitar-like beak was slashing for the Devi's soft neck, but Conan
was quicker--a short run, a tigerish leap, the savage thrust of a
dripping knife, and the vulture voiced a horribly human cry, pitched
sideways and went tumbling down the cliffs to the rocks and river a
thousand feet below. As it dropped, its black wings thrashing the air,
it took on the semblance, not of a bird, but of a black-robed human body
that fell, arms in wide black sleeves thrown abroad.

Conan turned to Yasmina, his red knife still in his hand, his blue eyes
smoldering, blood oozing from wounds on his thickly muscled arms and
thighs.

'You are the Devi again,' he said, grinning fiercely at the gold-clasped
gossamer robe she had donned over her hill-girl attire, and awed not at
all by the imposing array of chivalry about him. 'I have you to thank
for the lives of some three hundred and fifty of my rogues, who are at
least convinced that I didn't betray them. You have put my hands on the
reins of conquest again.'

'I still owe you my ransom,' she said, her dark eyes glowing as they
swept over him. 'Ten thousand pieces of gold I will pay you--'

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

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

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

His eyes shone with fierce appreciation and admiration, and stepping
back, he lifted his hand with a gesture that was like the assumption of
kingship, indicating that her road was clear before her.





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