Part 16 (1/2)

He saw that it was a tremendous edifice, which lay partly in ruins on the plains of Kush-a colossal structure erected by unknown hands for some nameless purpose It looked like a castle or fortress of some sort, but of an architectural type that Conan had never seen Made of dense black stone, it rose in a complex facade of pillars and terraces and battlenment seemed oddly awry It baffled the view The eye followed , weirdly distorted The huge structure gave the impression of a chaotic lack of order, as if its builders had not been quite sane

Conan wrenched his gaze froinous curves of this misshapen mass of ht he could at last perceive why the beasts of the veldt avoided this cru pile It somehow exuded an aura ofthe millennia that the black citadel had squatted on the plains, the animals had come to dread it and to avoid its shadowy precincts, until such habits of avoidance were now instinctive

The ain darkened her ageless face Distant thunder gruht the sulfurous flicker of lightning a masses of cloud One of those quick, tempestuous thunderstorms of the savanna was about to break

Conan hesitated On the one hand, curiosity and a desire for shelter frohold On the other, his barbarian's mind held a deep-rooted aversion to the supernatural Toward earthly, ers he was fearless to the point of rashness, but otherworldly perils could send the tendrils of panic quivering along his nerves And so about this mysterious structure hinted at the supernatural He could feel its menace in the deepest layers of his consciousness

A louder rurip on his nerves, he strode confidently into the dark portal, naked steel in hand, and vanished within

4 The Serpent Men

Conan prowled the length of the high-vaulted hall, finding nothing that lived Dust and dead leaves littered the black pave Moldering rubbish was heaped in the corners and around the bases of towering stone colu thing had dwelt therein for centuries

The hall, revealed by another brief appearance of the h A balustrated balcony ran around the second floor

Curious to probe deeper into the ues fro, Conan roamed the corridors, which wound as sinuously as a serpent's track He poked into dusty chauess

The castle was of staggering size, even to one who had seen the temple of the spider-God at Yezud in Zaood part of it-one whole wing, in fact-had fallen into a featureless mass of tumbled black blocks, but the part that re that Conan had seen Its antiquity was beyond guessing The black onyx of which it rought was unlike any stone that Conan had seen in this part of the world It ht across iine

Some features of the bizarre architecture of the structure reested forbidden te his mercenary service with the Turanians But whether the black castle had been erected primarily as a tomb, a fortress, a palace, or a temple, or some combination of these, he could not tell

Then, too, there was a disturbing alienage about the castle that made him obscurely uneasy Even as the facades seeeo features The steps of the stairways, for example, were much broader and shallower than was required for human feet The doorere too tall and too narrow, so that Conan had to turn sideways to get through the, geo, hypnotic coaze away from the sculptured walls by force of will, lest his mind be entrapped and held by the cryptic sy about this strange, baffling enig corridors, the writhing decoration, and even, he thought, a faint trace of a musky, ophidian odor

Conan halted, brows knotted Could this unknown ruin have been raised by the serpent folk of ancient Valusia? The day of that pre-human people lay an unthinkable interval in the past, before the dawn of iant reptiles ruled the earth

Or ever the Seven Empires arose in the days before the Cataclysm-even before Atlantis arose froned They had vanished long before the co of man-but not entirely

Around the caain in the marbled courts of the teend of Kull, the Atlantean king of Valusia The snake people had survived here and there by ic, which enabled thes But Kull had stued his real theht not the black castle, with its alien architecture, be a relic of that remote era, when men contended for the rule of the planet with these reptilian survivors of lost ages?

5 Whispering Shadows

The first thunderstorm missed the black castle There was a brief patter of raindrops on the cruh holes in the roof Then the lightning and thunder di the aps in the stone But other stor out of the east

Conan slept uneasily in a corner of the balcony above the great hall, tossing and turning like soer Caution hadin the hall before the wide-open doors Even though the circle of death seemed to bar the denizens of the plains, he did not trust the unseen force that held the beasts at bay

A dozen ti the soft shadoith his eyes, searching for whatever had aroused hiloomy vastness of the ancient wreck Each tiain, however, dim shadows clustered around hi a weary curse to his barbaric Gods, the Cimmerian damned all shadows and echoes to the eleven scarlet hells of histo sluth he fell into a deep sleep And in that sleep there cah his body slept, his spirit waked and atchful To the ilooht from some unseen source This was neither the silvery sheen of the aps in the stone, nor the pallid flicker of distant lightning By this sanguine radiance, Conan's spirit could see drifting shadohich flitted like cloudy bats a eyes filled with er-shadows that whispered in an all but inaudible cacophony of hter and bestial cries

Conan's spirit sohosts of thousands of sentient beings, who had died within this ancient structure How he knew this, he could not say, but to his ka it was a plain fact The unknown people who had raised this enorend or sootten race-had drenched the marble altars of the black castle with the blood of thousands The ghosts of their victims were chained forever to this castle of terror Perhaps they were held earthbound by some powerful spell of prehuman sorcery Perhaps it was the same spell that kept out the beasts of the veldt

But this was not all The ghosts of the black castle hungered for the blood of the living-for the blood of Conan

His exhausted body lay chained in ensorcelled slu at hi being unless it first manifests itself on the physical plane and assu shadow hordes eak Not for years had a man defied the ancient curse to set foot within the black castle, enabling theer easily s