Part 33 (1/2)
She cried out in protest
”Nothing will harm you there,” he soothed ”Whatever threw the stone at us did not follow usout of the woods There was nothing to show that any wild thing lairs in the ruins Besides, you189
are soft-skinned, and used to shelter and dainties I could sleep naked in the snow and feel no discoive you cramps, e to sleep in the open”
Olivia helplessly acquiesced, and they descended the cliffs, crossed the plateau and once e-haunted ruins By this ti below the plateau rim They had found fruit in the trees near the cliffs, and these forht swept down quickly, littering the dark blue sky with great white stars, and Conan entered the shadowy ruins, drawing the reluctant Olivia after hiht of those tense black shadows in their niches along the walls In the darkness that the starlight only faintly touched, she could not make out their outlines; she could only sense their attitude of waiting waiting as they had waited for untold centuries
Conan had brought a great armful of tender branches, well-leafed These he heaped to make a couch for her, and she lay upon it, with a curious sensation as of one lying down to sleep in a serpent's lair
Whatever her forebodings, Conan did not share theainst a pillar, his sword across his knees His eyes gleairl,” said he ”My slu can enter this hall without awaking me”
Olivia did not reply Froure, indistinct in the soft darkness How strange, to move in fellowshi+p with a barbarian, to be cared for and protected by one of a race, tales of which had frightened her as a child! He carim and ferocious His kinshi+p to the as apparent in his every action; it burned in his s eyes Yet he had not harmed her, and her worst oppressor had been a uor stole over her relaxing limbs and she sank into foaht was a drowsy recollection of the firers on her soft flesh
Olivia drea evil, like a black serpent writhing through flower gardens Her dreamentary and colorful, exotic shards of a broken, unknown pattern, until they crystallized into a scene of horror and round of cyclopean stones and pillars
She saw a great hall, whose lofty ceiling was upheld by stone colu the reen and scarlet parrots, and the hall was thronged with black-skinned, hawk-faced warriors They were not negroes Neither they nor their gar of the world the drea about one bound to a pillar: a slender white-skinned youth, with a cluster of golden curls about his alabaster brow His beauty was not altogether hu hed at hiue The lithe naked form writhed beneath their cruel hands Blood trickled down the ivory thighs to spatter on the polished floor The screa his head toward the ceiling and the skies beyond, he cried out a naer in an ebon hand cut short his cry, and the golden head rolled on the ivory breast
As if in answer to that desperate cry, there was a rolling thunder as of celestial chariot-wheels, and a figure stood before the slayers, as if materialized out of empty air The form was of a man, but no mortal man ever wore such an aspect of inhuman beauty There was an unmistakable resemblance between him and the youth who drooped lifeless in his chains, but the alloy of hu in the features of the stranger, awful and immobile in their beauty
The blacks shrank back before hi a hand, he spoke, and his tones echoed through the silent halls in deep rich waves of sound Like men in a trance the black warriors fell back until they were ranged along the walls in regular lines Then fro a terrible invocation and cokoolan yok tha, xuthalla!”
At the blast of that awful cry, the black figures stiffened and froze Over their liidity, an unnatural petrification The stranger touched the limp body of the youth, and the chains fell away from it He lifted the corpse in his arain over the silent rows of ebony figures, and he pointed to the h the case statues that had beenup on her couch of branches, a cold sweat beading her skin Her heart pounded loud in the silence She glanced wildly about Conan slept against his pillar, his head fallen upon his massive breast The silvery radiance of the latewhite lines along the dusty floor She could see the i hysteria, she saw the htly on the pillars and the shapes between
What was that? A treht fell A paralysis of horror
191gripped her, for where there should have been the i, a flexing and writhing of ebon limbs an awful scream burst from her lips as she broke the bonds that held her lea, sword lifted
”The statues! The statues! ohto life!”
And with the cry she sprang through a crevice in the wall, burstvines, and ran, ran, ran blind, screaht her up short and she shrieked and fought against the arht her, until a familiar voice penetrated the mists of her terror, and she saw Conan's face, a ht
”What in Croht gasp she threw her ar in panting catches
”Where are they? Did they follow us?”
”nobody followed us,” he answered
She sat up, still clinging to hiht had carried her to the southern edge of the plateau Just below them was the slope, its foot masked in the thick shadows of the woods Behind the , lifting their hands, their eyes glaring in the shadows?”