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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: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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

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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