Part 9 (1/2)

The other, springing forward on three legs, was slashi+ng at his belly as a wolf slashes, actually rending the links of his rappled the crippled horror and, with a roan fro the struggling, tearing fiend in his arms An instant he reeled off balance, its fetid breath hot on his nostrils; its jaws snapping at his neck; then he hurled it fro force down thefor breath, the jungle and the s was loud in his ears Stooping, he groped for his sword, and swaying upright, braced his feet drunkenly and heaved the great blade above his head with both hands, shaking the blood froht the air above him for his foe

Instead of attack froered suddenly and awfully beneath his feet He heard a ru crackle and saw the tall colualvanized life, he bounded far out; his feet hit a step, halfway dohich rocked beneath him, and his next desperate leap carried him clear But even as his heels hit the earth, with a shattering crash like a breakingdown in bursting fragments For a wind cataclysmic instant the sky seemed to rain shards of marble Then a rubble of shattered stone lay whitely under theoff the splinters that half covered hi blow had knocked off his helreat piece of the colus were unbroken His black locks were plastered with sweat; blood trickled from the wounds in his throat and hands He hitched up on one ar with the debris that prisoned hi swept down across the stars and struck the sward near hied one With fearful speed it was rushi+ng upon him, and in that instant Conan had only a confused i on bowed and stunted legs; of huge hairy ar misshapen black-nailed paws; of a nizable as such were a pair of blood-red eyes It was a thing neither man, beast, nor devil, imbued with characteristics subhuman as well as characteristics superhuman

But Conan had no tiht He threw hiers rasped the shard which pinned his legs, and the veins swelled in his teave slowly, but he knew that before he could free himself the monster would be upon him, and he knew that those black-taloned hands were death

The headlong rush of the winged one had not wavered It towered over the prostrate Cilimmer of white flashed between it and its victim

In one mad instant she was there - a tense white shape, vibrant with love fierce as a she-panther's The dazed Ci death, her lithe figure, shi+ like ivory beneath the moon; he saw the blaze of her dark eyes, the thick cluster of her burnished hair; her bosom heaved, her red lips were parted, she cried out sharp and ringing at the ring of steel as she thrust at the winged monster's breast

'Belitr screalance at hi, a naked eleone, and the Ciered back in unwonted fear, arms lifted as if to fend off attack And he knew that Belit in truth lay on her pyre on the Tigress's deck In his ears rang her passionate cry: 'Were I still in death and you fighting for life I would come back from the abyss-'

With a terrible cry he heaved upward hurling the stone aside The winged one ca to meet it, his veins on fire with madness The thews started out like cords on his forear on his heel with the force of the sweeping arc Just above the hips it caught the hurtling shape, and the knotted legs fell one way, the torso another as the blade sheared clear through its hairy body

Conan stood in thein his hand, staring down at the relared up at hireat hands knotted spasmodically and stiffened And the oldest race in the world was extinct

Conan lifted his head, s that had been its slaves and executioners None rass were of men, not beasts: hawk-faced, dark-skinned led by sword-strokes And they were crued led with theht turn and rend it? Craft and caution had lurked in thaton his heel, the Ci wharfs and stepped aboard the galley A few strokes of his sword cut her adrift, and he went to the sweep-head The Tigress rocked slowly in the sullen water, sliding out sluggishly toward the ht her Conan leaned on the sweep, his soaze fixed on the cloak-wrapped shape that lay in state on the pyre the richness of which was equal to the ransom of an empress

5 THE FUNERAL PYRE

Noe are done with roa, evermore; No more the oars, the windy harp's refrain; Nor criirdle of the world, receive again Her whoed the ocean A redder glow lit the river-reat sword upon the white beach, watching the Tigress swinging out on her last voyage There was no light in his eyes that conte blue wastes all glory and wonder had gone A fierce revulsion shook hies that deepened into purple hazes of mystery

Belit had been of the sea; she had lent it splendor and allure Without her it rolled a barren, dreary and desolate waste fro mystery he returned her He could do noblue splendor was more repellent than the leafy fronds which rustled and whispered behind him of vast e

No hand was at the sweep of the Tigress, no oars drove her through the green water But a clean tanging wind bellied her silken sail, and as a wild swan cleaves the sky to her nest, she sped seaward, flaher froure that lay lapped in scarlet on the shi+ning pyre

So passed the Queen of the Black Coast, and leaning on his red-stained sword, Conan stood silently until the red glow had faded far out in the blue hazes and dawn splashed its rose and gold over the ocean

THE VALE OF LOST WOMEN

The thunder of the dru, but in Livia's ears the cla dull and far away As she lay on the angareb in the great hut, her state bordered between delirium and semi-unconsciousness Outward sounds and ed upon her senses Her whole h dazed and chaotic, was yet centered with hideous certitude on the naked, writhing figure of her brother, blood strearound of dusky interweaving shapes and shadows, that white form was limned in merciless and awful clarity The air seeled and interwoven obscenely with a rustle of fiendish laughter

She was not conscious of sensation as an individual, separate and distinct froulf of pain - was herself but pain crystalized and ht or motion, while outside the drums bellowed, the horns cla ti the hard earth and open palh her frozen an to seep A dull wonder that she was still bodily unharmed first iving Theareb and stared dully about her Her extre to blindly awakening nerve centers Her naked feet scruffed nervously at the hard-beaten dirt floor Her fingers twitched convulsively at the skirt of the scanty undertunic which constituted her only gar, long ago, rude hands had torn her other garht and sha should have caused her so nity was only relative, after all, like everything else

The hut door opened, and a black woleamed like polished ebony, adorned only by a wisp of silk twisted about her strutting loins The white of her eyeballs reflected the firelight outside, as she rolled the

She bore a ba ots of native bread - and a vessel of haold, filled with yarati beer These she set down on the angareb, but Livia paid no heed; she sat staring dully at the opposite wall, hung with hed evilly, with a flash of dark eyes and white teeth, and with a hiss of spiteful obscenity and a e, she turned and swaggered out of the hut, expressinginsolence with the motions of her hips than any civilized woman could with spoken insults

Neither the wench's words nor her actions had stirred the surface of Livia's consciousness All her sensations were still turned inward Still the vividness of her mental pictures hosts and shadows Mechanically she ate the food and drank the liquor without tasting either

It was still mechanically that at last she rose and walked unsteadily across the hut, to peer out through a crack between the bae in the timbre of the drums and horns that reacted upon some obscure part of her mind and made her seek the cause, without sensible volition

At first she couldof what she saw; all was chaotic and shadowy, shapes , black for of blood-red that dulled and glowed Then actions and objects assumed their proper proportions, and she linted on silver and ivory ornaures strutted and posed, silhouettes carved out of darkness and liiants in pluirdles, sat a fat, squat shape, abys of the dank rotting jungle and the nighted sway hands rested on the sleek arch of his belly; his nape was a roll of sooty fat that seeleaht, like live coals in a dead black stuestion of the gross body

As the girl's gaze rested on that repellant figure her body stiffened and tensed as frantic life surged through her again Froed suddenly to a sentientPain was drowned in hate, so intense it in turn became pain; she felt hard and brittle, as if her body were turning to steel She felt her hate flow al the line of her vision; so it seemed to her that the object of her emotion should fall dead from his carven stool because of its force

But if Bajujh, king of Bakalah, felt any psychic discomfort because of the concentration of his captive, he did not show it He continued to cra-like mouth to capacity with handfuls ofwo for back on either hand

Down this lane, walled with sweaty black hue would co from the strident clamor of drum and horn And as she watched, one ca three abreast, advanced toward the ivory stool, a thick line of waving pluh the ure at the sight of which Livia started violently; her heart seeainst that dusky background, this man stood out with vivid distinctness He was clad like his followers in leopardskin loin-cloth and plumed headpiece, but he was a white man

It was not in the manner of a supplicant or a subordinate that he strode up to the ivory stool, and sudden silence fell over the throng as he halted before the squatting figure Livia felt the tenseness, though she only di his short neck upward, like a great frog; then, as if pulled against his will by the other's steady glare, he sha his shaven head

Instantly the tension was broken A treesture froer, his warriors lifted their spears and boo Bajujh Whoever he was, Livia knew the man must indeed be powerful in that wild land, if Bajujh of Bakalah rose to greet hie - violence was the only thing respected by those ferocious races

Thereafter Livia stood with her eyes glued to the crack in the hut wall, watching the white stranger His warriorsbeer He himself, with a few of his chiefs, sat with Bajujh and the head She saw his hands dipped deep into the cooking-pots with the others, saw his muzzle thrust into the beer vessel out of which Bajujh also drank But she noticed, nevertheless, that he was accorded the respect due to a king Since he had no stool, Bajujh renounced his also, and sat on the ht, the king of Bakalah barely sipped it before he passed it to the white man Power! All this ceree! Livia trean to form in her mind

So she watched the whiteevery detail of his appearance He was tall; neither in height nor in iant blacks He reat panther When the firelight caught his eyes, they burned like blue fire High-strapped sandals guarded his feet, and fro a sword in a leather scabbard His appearance was alien and unfamiliar Livia had never seen his like, but shethe races of h that his skin hite

The hours passed, and gradually the roar of revelry lessened, as men and wo, and lifted his hands, less a sign to end the feast, than a token of surrender in the contest of gorging and guzzling, and stuht by his warriors, who bore him to his hut The white man rose, apparently none the worse for the incredible auest hut by such of the Bakalah head He disappeared into the hut, and Livia noticed that a dozen of his own spearmen took their places about the structure, spears ready Evidently the stranger was taking no chances on Bajujh's friendshi+p

Livia cast her glance about the village, which faintly rese streets streith drunken shapes She knew that uarded the outer boe were the spearinning to nod and lean on their spears

With her heart beating halided to the back of her prison hut and out the door, passing the snoring guard Bajujh had set over her Like an ivory shadow she glided across the space between her hut and that occupied by the stranger On her hands and knees she crawled up to the back of that hut A black giant squatted here, his pluled past him to the wall of the hut She had first been imprisoned in that hut, and a narrow aperture in the wall, hidden inside by a hanging mat, represented her weak and pathetic attegled her lithe body through, thrusting the inner ht from without faintly illumined the interior of the hut Even as she thrust back the rasp in her hair, and was dragged bodily through the aperture and plu with the suddenness of it, she gathered her scattered wits together, and raked her disordered tresses out of her eyes to stare up into the face of the white man who towered over her, amazement written on his dark scarred face His sas naked in his hand, and his eyes blazed like bale-fire, whether with anger, suspicion or surprize she could not judge He spoke in a language she could not understand - a tongue which was not a negro guttural, yet did not have a civilized sound

'Oh, please!' she begged 'Not so loud They will hear '

'Who are you?' he de Ophirean with a barbarous accent 'By Croirl in this hellish land!'

'My name is Livia,' she answered 'I am Bajujh's captive Oh, listen, please listen toI must return before they miss me from my hut

'My brother' a sob choked her, then she continued: 'My brother was Theteles, and ere of the house of Chelkus, scientists and nobleia, icians, to study their arts, and I accoer than er said nothing, but stood watching her with burning eyes, his face frowning and unreadable There was sohtened her and made her nervous and uncertain

'The black Kushi+tes raided Kheshatta,' she continued hurriedly 'We were approaching the city in a cauards fled and the raiders carried us aith them But they did us no harians and accept a ransom for our return But one of the chiefs desired all the ransom for himself, and he and his followers stole us out of the caht, and fled far to the southeast with us, to the very borders of Kush There they were attacked and cut down by a band of Bakalah raiders Theteles and I were dragged into this den of beasts ' she sobbed convulsively' Thised and went momentarily blind at theI lay in a faint I do not know '

Words failing her, she lifted her eyes to the scowling face of the stranger A mad fury swept over her; she lifted her fists and beat futilely on hisof a fly