Part 6 (1/2)

With a fierce cry Yas murderously Then she stu up at the man on the dais He had not ly 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 blosso on the bruised stem

She dropped it as if it had been a viper, and scrambled away from the proximity of her tormentor She returned to her own dais, because that was at leaston the floor at the feet of a sorcerer, and eyed hi reprisals

But the Master made no move

”All substance is one to him who holds the key of the cos is iardens, or flower- swords flash in the ht”

”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 reater than a devil I ain, but I rule demons You have seen the Lords of the Black Circle it would blast your soul to hear frouard theolden serpents

”But only I can rule thereat poor fool, bursting h the air from hill to hill!

Yet if he had not been destroyed his power ain ”And you, poor, silly thing! Plotting to send a hairy hill chief to storned, 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 hter of a thousand proud easped with shame and fury at the word

”You dare not!”

His hter 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 to me than a stran 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 tre 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 htest command is to you as the unalterable will of the Gods And first, to hues, and view all the shapes that have been you Aie, yil la khosa!”

At these words the shadowy rooaze The roots of her hair prickled her scalp, and her tongue clove to her palate Soons on the tapestries glowed like blue fire, and then faded out The Master on his dais was but a shapeless shadow The diible, 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 ilow began, like a firefly that rhytholden ball, and as it expanded its light grewthe darkness hite sparks that did not illuloom, a faint lu up froaze it spread, took shape; stereat black poisonous blossoainst the velvet A subtle perfuure of the black lotus that had grown up as she watched, as it grows in the haunted, forbidden jungles of Khitai

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The broad leaves were murmurous with evil life The blosso serpent-like on pliant steainst soft, iantic, blackly visible in so scent and she sought to crawl fro at an i to the velvet, but she felt her fingers ruthlessly torn away There was a sensation as of all sanity and stability cru ato, 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 iled andlife in the yeasty morass of existence, ain a conscious individual, whirling down an endless spiral of lives

In a nized and was again all the bodies that had carried her ego throughout the changing ages She bruised her feet again over the long, long weary road of life that stretched out behind her into the immemorial Past Back beyond the diles, hunted by slavering beasts of prey Skin-clad, she waded thigh-deep in rice-swarains She labored with the oxen to drag the pointed stick through the stubborn soil, and she crouched endlessly over looms in peasant huts

She saalled cities burst into fla 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 shaony of brutal lust She screamed under the bite of the lash, and ainst the hands that forced her head inexorably down on the bloody block

She knew the agonies of child-birth, and the bitterness of love betrayed She suffered all the woes and wrongs and brutalities that hout the eons; and she endured all the spite and malice of wohout was the consciousness she retained of her Devi-shi+p She was all the wo she was Yasmina This consciousness was not lost in the throes of reincarnation At one and the sa 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 as like a white hot brand

Lifechaos, each with its burden of woe and sha unbearably, like one long-drawn cry of suffering echoing down the ages

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Then she awakened on the velvet-covered dais in the ain 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 na that it was not the Master who sat so silently on that black dais

Then the figureabove her It stooped over her and the long arainst theht, surprized by their lean hardness The hooded head bent doard her averted face And she screa Bony arripped her lithe body, and from that hood looked forth a countenance of death and decay features like rotting parchain, and then, as those cha jaws bent toward her lips, she lost consciousness

IX

THE CASTLE OF THE WIZARDS

The sun had risen over the white Hiroup of horseh above them a stone tower poised on the pitch of the reater 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 adown fros and drooping head

They had pushed hard throughout the night, gnawing at scraps froive the horses the rests they had to have

”That first tower is held by the acolytes of the Black Seers,” said Conan ”Or so s for theirtheir thulanced up the mountain, then back the way they had come; they were already far up on Yis spread out beneath theht in vain for a movement of color that would betray 59

hulis 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, streith boulders not big enough to conceal aelse

The party had not gone fifty steps when a snarling shape burst fros that infested the hill villages, and its eyes glared redly, its jaws dripped foa, but it did not attack him It dashed past him and leaped at Keri itself upon the Irakzai behind him The man yelled and threw up his ars as it bore him backward, and the next instant half a dozen tulere hacking at the beast Yet not until it was literally dismembered did the hideous creature cease its efforts to seize and rend its attackers