Part 14 (2/2)

A beastlike baying rose, terrifying in its prih thetoward the hut where the girl cowered, and in his hand he bore a relic-the firelight glealassy now instead of vital, rolled up, revealing only the whites; the jaw hung slack as if in a grin of idiocy; red drops showered thickly along the ground

Livia gave back with ato clairasp her with his bloody fingers, crush her lips with ht came delirium

With a screaainst the door in the back wall It fell open, and she darted across the open space, a flitting white ghost in a realm of black shadows and red flame

Some obscure instinct led her to the pen where the horses were kept A warrior was just taking down the bars that separated the horse pen from the main boma, and he yelled in amazement as she darted past him His hand clutched at her, closed on the neck of her tunic With a frantic jerk she tore away, leaving the garment in his hand The horses snorted and sta the warrior in the dust-lean, wiry steeds of the Kushi+te breed, already frantic with the fire and the scent of blood

Blindly she caught at a flying ain on her toes, sprang high, pulled and scra back Mad with fear the herd plunged through the fires, their s shower The startled black people had a wild gli naked to the mane of a beast that raced like the wind that streaht for the boly into the air, and was gone into the night

Chapter Three

Livia could uide her steed, nor did she feel any need of so doing The yells and the glow of the fires were fading out behind her; the wind tossed her hair and caressed her naked li mane and ride, ride, over the ririef and horror

And for hours the wiry steed raced, until, topping a starlit crest, he stu

She struck on soft cushi+oning sward, and lay for an instant half stunned, diered up, the first thing that i-soft, darkly velvet-after the incessant blare of barbaric horns and drureat white stars clustered thickly in the dark sky There was no h illusively, with unexpected clusterings of shadow She stood on a swarded eently ht Far away in one direction she discerned a dense, dark line of trees which ht and trancelike stillness and a faint breeze blowing through the stars

The land see The warm caress of the breeze led uneasily, spreading her hands over her body Then she felt the loneliness of the night, and the unbrokenness of the solitude She was alone; she stood on the suht and the whispering wind

She was suddenly glad of the night and the loneliness There was none to threaten her, or to seize her with rude, violent hands She looked before her and saw the slope falling away into a broad valley; there fronds waved thickly and the starlight reflected whitely on ht they were great white blossoht of a valley of which the blacks had spoken with fear: a valley to which had fled the young woe brown-skinned race which had inhabited the land before the co of the ancestors of the Bakalahs

There, men said, they had turned into white flowers, had been transformed by the old Gods to escape their ravishers There no native dared to go

But into that valley Livia dared to go She would go down those grassy slopes which were like velvet under her tender feet; she would dwell there a white blossoms, and no man would ever come to lay rude hands on her Conan had said that pacts were made to be broken; she would break her pact with hio into the vale of the lost women; she would lose herself in solitude and stillness

even as these dreah her consciousness, she was descending the gentle slopes, and the tiers of the valley walls were rising higher on each hand

But so gentle were their slopes that when she stood on the valley floor she did not have the feeling of being ied walls All about her floated seas of shadow, and great white blossoms nodded and whispered to her She wandered at rando to the whisper of the wind through the leaves, finding a childish pleasure in the gurgling of an unseen streae unreality One thought reiterated itself continually: there she was safe from the brutality of th upon the sward and clutched the soft grass as if she would crush her new-found refuge to her breast and hold it there forever

She plucked the petals of the blossoolden hair Their perfus in the valley, drealade in the reat stone, hewn as if by human hands, and adorned with ferns and blosso at it, and then there wasfrom the denser shadows-slender brooht-black hair Like creatures of a dream they came about her, and they did not speak But suddenly terror seized her as she looked into their eyes Those eyes were luminous, radiant in the starshi+ne; but they were not hue change had been wrought; a change reflected in their glowing eyes Fear descended on Livia in a wave The serpent reared its grisly head in her new-found Paradise

But she could not flee The lithe broomen were all about her One, lovelier than the rest, cairl, and enfolded her with supple brown arms Her breath was scented with the same perfume that stole from the white blossoms that waved in the starshi+ne Her lips pressed Livia's in a long, terrible kiss The Ophirean felt coldness running through her veins; her limbs turned brittle; like a white statue of marble she lay in the arms of her captress, incapable of speech or movement

Quick, soft hands lifted her and laid her on the altar-stone a and e dark measure Never the sun or the rehiter and gloith a ht as if its dark witchery struck response in things cosmic and elemental

And a low chant arose, that was less hu of the distant strea of the blossoms that waved beneath the stars Livia lay, conscious but without power of moveht not to reason or analyze; she was and these strange beings dancing about her were; a dunition of the actuality of night up at the star clustered sky, whence, she so would coo to s they noere

First, high above her, she saw a black dot arew and expanded; it neared her; it swelled to a bat; and still it grew, though its shape did not alter further to any great extent It hovered over her in the stars, dropping plus spread over her; she lay in its shadow And all about her the chant rose higher, to a soft paean of soulless joy, a welcome to the God which came to claim a fresh sacrifice, fresh and rose-pink as a flower in the dew of dawn

Now it hung directly over her, and her soul shriveled and grew chill and ss were bat-like; but its body and the di of sea or earth or air; she knew she looked upon ultiulfs beyond the reach of athe unseen bonds that held her dumb, she screa shout She heard the pounding of rushi+ng feet; all about her there was a swirl as of saters; the white blossoone Over her hovered the great black shadow, and she saw a tall white figure, with plu toward her