Part 22 (1/2)

Conan made no comment; his scarred dark countenance was ie the truth to anyone,' she said 'We were alone when Jungir Khan went mad None knew of it but myself Had it been known that the satrap of Zamboula was a , even as Totrasmek planned, who plotted our destruction

'You see no impossible is the reward for which you hoped The satrap's o unrewarded Here is a sack of gold'

She gave hi she had received from the slave

'Go, now, and when the sun is coir Khan uard But you will take your orders from me, secretly Your first duty will be to march a squad to the shrine of Hanuman, ostensibly to search for clues of the priest's slayer; in reality to search for the Star of Khorala Itit to o now'

He nodded, still silent, and strode away The girl, watching the swing of his broad shoulders, was piqued to note that there was nothing in his bearing to show that he was in any way chagrined or abashed

When he had rounded a corner, he glanced back, and then changed his direction and quickened his pace A fewthe Horse Market There he smote on a door until from theabove a bearded head was thrust to demand the reason for the disturbance

'A horse,' demanded Conan 'The swiftest steed you have'

'I open no gates at this tirumbled the horse-trader

Conan rattled his coins

'Dog's son knave! Don't you see I'm white, and alone? Come down, before I smash your door!'

Presently, on a bay stallion, Conan was riding toward the house of Aram Baksh

He turned off the road into the alley that lay between the tavern coate He rode on to the northeast corner of the wall, then turned and rode along the north wall, to halt within a few paces of the northwest angle No trees grew near the wall, but there were some low bushes To one of these he tied his horse, and was about to cli of voices beyond the corner of the wall

Drawing his foot frole and peered around it Three roves, and froroes They halted at his low call, bunching themselves as he strode toward theleaht Their brutish lust shone in their ebony faces, but they knew their three cudgels could not prevail against his sword, just as he knew it

'Where are you going?' he challenged

'To bid our brothers put out the fire in the pit beyond the groves,' was the sullen, guttural reply 'Aram Baksh promised us a man, but he lied We found one of our brothers dead in the trap-chaht'

'I think not,' sive you a man Do you see that door?'

He pointed to a small, iron-bound portal set in the midst of the western wall

'Wait there Ara warily away until he was out of reach of a sudden bludgeon blow, he turned andhis horse he paused to ascertain that the blacks were not sneaking after hiht on it, quieting the uneasy steed with a loord He reached up, grasped the coping of the wall and drew hirounds for an instant The tavern was built in the southwest corner of the enclosure, the reardens He saw no one in the grounds The tavern was dark and silent, and he knew all the doors and ere barred and bolted

Conan knew that Aram Baksh slept in a chamber that opened into a cypress-bordered path that led to the door in the western wall Like a shadow he glided ahtly on the cha voice within

'Ara over the wall!'

Al the tavern-keeper, naked but for his shi+rt, with a dagger in his hand

He craned his neck to stare into the Cieful fingers strangled the yell in his throat They went to the floor together and Conan wrenched the dagger froht, and blood spurted Ara on a ain the dagger slashed, and ripping his captive's diroat - for a ue slit - Conan dragged him out of the dark chamber and down the cypress-shadowed path, to the iron-bound door in the outer wall With one hand he lifted the bolt and threw the door open, disclosing the three shadowy figures which waited like black vultures outside Into their eager arms Conan thrust the innkeeper

A horrible, blood-choked scream rose from the Zamboulan's diroat, but there was no response from the silent tavern The people there were used to screaht like a wild man, his distended eyes turned frantically on the Ci of the scores of wretches ed their bloody dooed his How could they recognize Ararotesquely shorn beard and unintelligible babblings? The sounds of the struggle caate, even after the clu the door behind him, Conan returned to his horse,wide to skirt the sinister belt of pallea iridescence He held it up to adold pieces clinked gendy at his saddle-bow, like a proreater riches to conized her as Nafertari and hiir Khan the instant I saw them,' he mused 'I knew the Star of Khorala, too There'll be a fine scene if she ever guesses that I slipped it off his finger while I was tying him with his sword-belt But they'll never catch lanced back at the shadowy pal rose to the night, vibrating savage exultation And another sound ibbering in which no words could be distinguished The noise followed Conan as he rode ard beneath the paling stars

THE DEVIL IN IRON

The fisheresture was instinctive, for what he feared was nothing a knife could slay, not even the saw-edged crescent blade of the Yuetshi+ that could disembowel a man with an upward stroke Neither man nor beast threatened him in the solitude which brooded over the castellated isle of Xapur

He had clile that bordered them, and now stood surrounded by evidences of a vanished state Broken colu lines of cru walls meandered off into the shadows, and under his feet were broad paves, cracked and bowed by roots growing beneath

The fisherin is lost in the gray dawn of the past, and who have dwelt in their rude fishi+ng huts along the southern shore of the Sea of Vilayet since ti apish ars His face was broad, his forehead low and retreating, his hair thick and tangled A belt for a knife and a rag for a loin-cloth were all he wore in the way of clothing

That he here he was proved that he was less dully incurious than most of his people Men seldootten, reat inland sea Men called it Xapur, the Fortified, because of its ruins, reotten before the conquering Hyborians had ridden southward None kneho reared those stones, though diibly suggested a connection of immeasurable antiquity between the fishers and the unknown island kingdom

But it had been a thousand years since any Yuetshi+ had understood the iless foribberish framed by their lips by custom No Yuetshi+ had come to Xapur for a century The adjacent coast of the rie lay some distance to the south, on thecraft far fro lightning and roaring waters on the towering cliffs of the isle Now in the dawn the sky shone blue and clear, the rising sunleaves He had cliht because, in the htning fork out of the black heavens, and the concussion of its stroke, which had shaken the whole island, had been accompanied by a cataclysmic crash that he doubted could have resulted from a riven tree

A dull curiosity had caused hiht and an ani peril

Aigantic blocks of the peculiar iron-like green stone found only on the islands of Vilayet It seemed incredible that human hands could have shaped and placed them, and certainly it was beyond human power to have overthrown the structure they formed But the thunderbolt had splintered the ton-heavy blocks like so reen dust, and ripped away the whole arch of the dome

The fisherman cliht a grunt from him Within the ruined dome, surrounded by stone-dust and bits of broken olden block He was clad in a sort of skirt and a shagreen girdle His black hair, which fell in a square mane to his massive shoulders, was confined about his teold band On his bare, er with a jeweled poreen-bound hilt, and a broad crescent blade It was much like the knife the fishere, and was reater skill

The fisherman lusted for the weapon The man, of course, was dead; had been dead for many centuries This dome was his tomb The fisherman did not wonder by what art the ancients had preserved the body in such a vivid likeness of life, which kept the muscular limbs full and unshrunken, the dark flesh vital The dull brain of the Yuetshi+ had roo lines along the dully glea down into the dome, he lifted the weapon froe and terrible thing came to pass The muscular dark hands knotted convulsively, the lids flared open, revealing great dark netic eyes whose stare struck the startled fisher the jeweled dagger in his perturbation Theposition, and the fisheraped at the full extent of his size, thus revealed His narrowed eyes held the Yuetshi+ and in those slitted orbs he read neither friendliness nor gratitude; he saw only a fire as alien and hostile as that which burns in the eyes of a tiger

Suddenly the man rose and towered above him, menace in his every aspect There was no room in the fisherrip a man who has just seen the fundareat hands fell to his shoulders, he drew his saw-edged knife and struck upith the saer's corded belly as against a steel column, and then the fisheriant hands

Jehungir Agha, lord of Khawarizm and keeper of the coastal border, scanned once more the ornate parchhed shortly and sardonically

'Well?' bluntly deed his shoulders He was a handsome man, with the rows short of patience,' said he 'In his own hand he couard the frontier By Tarim, if I can not deal a blow to these robbers of the steppes, Khawarizray-shot beard in htiest reat port city of Aghrapur was heaped the plunder of ealleys had made Vilayet an Hyrkanian lake The dark-skinned people of Zamora paid him tribute, as did the eastern provinces of Koth The Shemites bowed to his rule as far west as Shushan His aria in the south and the snowy lands of the Hyperboreans in the north His riders bore torch and sard into Brythunia and Ophir and Corinthia, even to the borders of Neilt-helmeted swordsmen had trampled hosts under their horses' hoofs, and walled cities went up in flahrapur, Sultanapur, Khawarizm, Shahpur and Khorusun, women were sold for three sians, dark-haired Zamorians, ebon Kushi+tes, olive-skinned Shemites

Yet, while his swift horsemen overthrew armies far from his frontiers, at his very borders an audacious foe plucked his beard with a red-dripping and smoke-stained hand

On the broad steppes between the Sea of Vilayet and the borders of the eastern up in the past half-century, for cri soldiers

They were men of many cri frodoms in the west They were called kozak, whichon the wild, open steppes, owning no law but their own peculiar code, they had beco the Grand Monarch Ceaselessly they raided the Turanian frontier, retiring in the steppes when defeated; with the pirates of Vilayet,off the merchant shi+ps which plied between the Hyrkanian ports