Part 8 (2/2)

She looked at hie passion, her fingers working at the gems on her breast

'Very well,' she said absently, hardly heeding hile closed quickly about thereen branches creepers dangled like pythons The warriors fell into single file, creeping through the prihost

Underbrush was not so thick as Conan had anticipated The ground was spongy but not slushy Away froradually upward Deeper and deeper they plunged into the green waving depths, and still there was no sign of water, either running streanant pool Conan halted suddenly, his warriors freezing into basaltic statues In the tense silence that followed, the Cimmerian shook his head irritably

'Go ahead,' he grunted to a sub-chief, N'Gora 'March straight on until you can no longer seefollowed I heard so'

The blacks shuffled their feet uneasily, but did as they were told As they swung onward, Conan stepped quickly behind a great tree, glaring back along the way they had co occurred; the faint sounds of thespearmen faded in the distance Conan suddenly realized that the air was iently brushed his tereen, curiously leafed stalks, great black blossoms nodded at him One of these had touched him They seemed to beckon him, to arch their pliant steh no wind blew

He recoiled, recognizing the black lotus, whose juice was death, and whose scent brought dreay stealing over hiht to lift his sword, to hen the serpentine stalks, but his ar lifeless at his side He opened his mouth to shout to his warriors, but only a faint rattle issued The next instant, with appalling suddenness, the jungle waved and dimmed out before his eyes; he did not hear the screams that burst out awfully not far away, as his knees collapsed, letting hireat black blossoms nodded in the windless air

3 THE HORROR IN THE JUNGLE

Was it a dreaht?

Then cunt the dreaard hour that does not see Hot blood drip blackly fro of Belit First there was the blackness of an utter void, with the cold winds of cosue, h the expanse of nothingness, as if the darkness were takingpyrarew Shape and Di, the darkness rolled away on either hand and a huge city of dark green stone rose on the bank of a wide river, flowing through an illiuration

Cast in the ed and of heroic proportions; not a branch on the mysterious stalk of evolution that culminated in man, but the ripe blossom on an alien tree, separate and apart fros, in physical appearance they resereat apes In spiritual, esthetic and intellectual developorilla But when they reared their colossal city, man's primal ancestors had not yet risen fros were s built of flesh and blood They lived, loved and died, though the individual span of life was enoran The vista shi+mmered and wavered, like a picture thrown on a windblown curtain Over the city and the land the ages flowed as waves flow over a beach, and each wave brought alterations So; the great glaciers and ice-fields ithdrawing toward the new poles

The littoral of the great river altered Plains turned into swamps that stank with reptilian life Where fertile les The changing ages wrought on the inhabitants of the city as well They did not rate to fresher lands Reasons inexplicable to humanity held them to the ancient city and their doohty land sank deeper and deeper into the blackjungle life sank the people of the city Terrific convulsions shook the earth; the nights were lurid with spouting volcanoes that fringed the dark horizons with red pillars

After an earthquake that shook down the outer walls and highest towers of the city, and caused the river to run black for days with some lethal substance spewed up froe became apparent in the waters the folk had drunk for millenniums uncountable

Many died who drank of it; and in those who lived, the drinking wrought change, subtle, gradual and grisly In adapting the conditions, they had sunk far below their original level But the lethal waters altered theeneration They who had been winged Gods became pinioned dee distorted and perverted and twisted into ghastly paths As they had risen higher than htmares reach They died fast, by cannibalisht jungle And at last ale shape lurked, a stunted abhorrent perversion of nature

Then for the first time humans appeared: dark-skinned, hawk-facedbows - the warriors of pre-historic Stygia There were only fifty of theed effort, stained and scratched with jungle-wandering, with blood-crusted bandages that told of fierce fighting In their ht before a stronger tribe which drove thereen ocean of jungle and river

Exhausted they lay down a the ruins where red blossoms that bloom but once in a century waved in the full moon, and sleep fell upon them And as they slept, a hideous shape crept red-eyed from the shadows and performed weird and awful rites about and above each sleeper The le red and black; above the sleepers glimmered the crimson blossoms, like splashes of blood Then the moon went down and the eyes of the necroht

When dawn spread its white veil over the river, there were no ed horror that squatted in the center of a ring of fifty great spotted hyenas that pointed quivering hastly sky and howled like souls in hell

Then scene followed scene so swiftly that each tripped over the heels of its predecessor There was a confusion of ainst a background of black jungle, green stone ruins andboats with skulls grinning on the prows, or stole stooping through the trees, spear in hand They fled screas Howls of dying loorisly feasts beneath the moon, across whose red disk a bat-like shadow incessantly swept

Then abruptly, etched clearly in contrast to these iled point in the whitening daept a long galley, thronged with shi+ning ebon figures, and in the bows stood a white-skinned ghost in blue steel

It was at this point that Conan first realized that he was drea Until that instant he had had no consciousness of individual existence But as he saw hinized both the existence and the dreah he did not awaken

Even as he wondered, the scene shi+fted abruptly to a jungle glade where N'Gora and nineteen black spear someone Even as he realized that it was he for whom they waited, a horror swooped down from the skies and their stolidity was broken by yells of fear Like men maddened by terror, they threay their weapons and raced wildly through the jungle, pressed close by the slavering s above the which Conan feebly struggled to awake Di cluster of black blossoms, while froe effort he broke the unseen bonds which held hiht

Bewilderlare he cast about him Near him swayed the dusky lotus, and he hastened to draay froy soil near by there was a track as if an ani from the bushes, then had withdrawn it It looked like the spoor of an unbelievably large hyena

He yelled for N'Gora Prile, in which his yells sounded brittle and hollow as mockery He could not see the sun, but his wilderness-trained instinct told hiht that he had lain senseless for hours He hastily followed the tracks of the spearmen, which lay plain in the daed into a glade -to stop short, the skin crawling between his shoulders as he recognized it as the glade he had seen in his lotus-drugged dream shi+elds and spears lay scattered about as if dropped in headlong flight

And frolade and deeper into the fastnesses, Conan knew that the spearmen had fled, wildly The footprints overlay one another; they weaved blindly a Cile onto a hill-like rock which sloped steeply, to break off abruptly in a sheer precipice forty feet high And soht it to be a great black gorilla Then he saw that it was a giant blackfro cry, the creature lifted huge hands and rushed towards hiave no heed to Conan's shout as he charged, eyes rolled up to display the whites, teeth glea with the horror that madness always instils in the sane, Conan passed his sword through the blackthe hooked hands that clawed at hie of the cliff

For an instant he stood looking down into the jagged rocks belohere lay N'Gora's spearmen, in limp, distorted attitudes that told of crushed lie black flies buzzed loudly above the blood-splashed stones; the ants had already begun to gnaw at the corpses On the trees about sat birds of prey, and a jackal, looking up and seeing the man on the cliff, slunk furtively away

For a little space Conan stood motionless Then he wheeled and ran back the way he had corass and bushes, hurdling creepers that sprawled snake-like across his path His sword swung low in his right hand, and an unaccustoned in the jungle was not broken The sun had set and great shadows rushed upward froantic shades of lurking death and grilimmer of scarlet and blue steel No sound in all the solitude was heard except his own quick panting as he burst froht of the river-shore

He saw the galley shouldering the rotten wharf, the ruins reeling drunkenly in the gray half-light

And here and there aht color, as if a careless hand had splashed with a criain Conan looked on death and destruction Before him lay his speare to the riverbank, a the broken piers they lay, torn and led and half devoured, chewed travesties of men

All about the bodies and pieces of bodies were sware footprints, like those of hyenas

Conan caalley above whose deck was suspended soht Speechless, the Ci froalley Between the yard and her white throat stretched a line of criht

4 THE ATTACK FROM THE AIR

The shadoere black around hiaped wide, Thicker than rain the red drops fell; But my love was fiercer than Death's black spell, Nor all the iron walls of bel Could keep le was a black colossus that locked the ruin-littered glade in ebon arms The moon had not risen; the stars were flecks of hot amber in a breathless sky that reeked of death On the pyra the fallen towers sat Conan the Cimmerian like an iron statue, chin propped on massive fists Out in the black shadows stealthy feet padded and red eyes glimmered The dead lay as they had fallen But on the deck of the Tigress, on a pyre of broken benches, spear-shafts and leopardskins, lay the Queen of the Black Coast in her last sleep, wrapped in Conan's scarlet cloak Like a true queen she lay, with her plunder heaped high about her: silks, cloth-of-gold, silver braid, casks of geers and teocallis of gold wedges

But of the plunder of the accursed city, only the sullen waters of Zarkheba could tell where Conan had thrown it with a heathen curse Now he sat gri for his unseen foes The black fury in his soul drove out all fear What shapes would ee froer doubted the visions of the black lotus He understood that while waiting for hilade, N'Gora and his co upon the in blind panic, had fallen over the cliff, all except their chief, who had soh not madness Meanwhile, or immethately after, or perhaps before, the destruction of those on the riverbank had been acco the river had been massacre rather than battle Already unht well have died without striking a blow in their own defense when attacked by their inhu, he did not understand, unless the n entity which ruled the river rief and fear All pointed to a hu of the water-casks to divide the forces, the driving of the blacks over the cliff, and last and greatest, the gri apparently saved the Cimmerian for the choicest victim, and extracted the last ounce of exquisite mental torture, it was likely that the unknown ene hirihter

Thefire from the Cimmerian's horned helrew tense and the jungle held its breath Instinctively Conan loosened the great sword in its sheath The pyramid on which he rested was four-sided, one - the side toward the jungle -carved in broad steps In his hand was a Sheht her pirates to use A heap of arrows lay at his feet, feathered ends towards hi moved in the blackness under the trees Etched abruptly in the rising moon, Conan saw a darkly blocked-out head and shoulders, brutish in outline And now fro loenty great spotted hyenas Their slavering fangs flashed in the ht, their eyes blazed as no true beast's eyes ever blazed

Twenty: then the spears of the pirates had taken toll of the pack, after all Even as he thought this, Conan drew nock to ear, and at the twang of the string a fla The rest did not falter; on they ca them fell the arrows of the Cimmerian, driven with all the force and accuracy of steely thews backed by a hate hot as the slag-heaps of hell

In his berserk fury he did not miss; the air was filled with feathered destruction The havoc wrought a Less than half of them reached the foot of the pyra down into the blazing eyes, Conan knew these creatures were not beasts; it was not merely in their unnatural size that he sensed a blaspheible as the blackfrom a corpse-littered swaht into existence, he could not guess; but he knew he faced diabolis to his feet, he bent his boerfully and drove his last shaft point blank at a great hairy shape that soared up at his throat The arroas a flying beaht that flashed onith but a blur in its course, but the were-beast plunged convulsively in h

Then the rest were on his His fiercely driven sword shore the first asunder; then the desperate impact of the others bore him down He crushed a narrow skull with the po the bone splinter and blood and brains gush over his hand; then, dropping the sword, useless at such deadly close quarters, he caught at the throats of the two horrors which were ripping and tearing at him in silent fury A foul acrid scent almost stifled him, his oeat blinded hi ripped to ribbons in an instant The next, his naked right hand locked on a hairy throat and tore it open His left hand, ht and broke its foreleg A short yelp, the only cry in that grim battle, and hideously human-like, burst from the maimed beast At the sick horror of that cry frorip

One, blood gushi+ng froed at his on his throat - to fall back dead, even as Conan felt the tearing agony of its grip