Co

StOte: saiccccecee eee aeree ences I

a «| noted psychologist

FREE - - FREE “PSYCHIANA” ‘“PSYCHIANA”’

Enger gs believes and teaches as follows:

tirely on the misun- derstood sayings of | FIRST—That there is no such thing as a “subconscious mind.”

the Galilean Carpen- g&COND—That there is, in this universe, a FAR MORE POTENT and DYNAMIC POW- ter, and designed to ER, the manifestations of which have been erroneously credited to some other sup- show how to find posed power called the “subconscious mind.”

oe Kent mel THIRD—That this INVISIBLE, DYNAMIC Power is THE VERY SAME POWER that — d P JESUS USED when He staggered the nations by His so-called “miracles,” and by

raising the dead. FOURTH—That Jesus had NO MONOPOLY on this Power.

FIFTH—That it is possible for EVERY NORMAL human being understanding spiritual law as He understood it, TO DUPLICATE EVERY WORK THAT THIS CARPEN- TER OF GALILEE EVER DID. When He said: “‘The things that I do shall YE DO ALSO”—He meant EXACTLY WHAT HE SAID.

SIXTH—That this dynamic Power is NOT TO BE FOUND “within,” but has its source in a far different direction.

SEVENTH—THAT THE WORDS OF THIS GALILEAN CARPENTER WENT A THOU- SAND MILES OVER THE HEADS OF HIS HEARERS 2,000 YEARS AGO, AND ARE STILL A THOUSAND MILES OVER THE HEADS OF THOSE WHO PROFESS TO FOLLOW HIM TODAY.

EIGHTH—That this same MIGHTY, INVISIBLE, PULSATING, THROBBING POWER

can be used by anyone—AT ANY HOUR OF THE DAY OR NIGHT—and without such Dr. Frank B. Robinson methods as “going into a silence’ or “gazing at bright objects,” etc.

Founder of “Psychi- NINTH—That when once understood and correctly used, this mighty Power is ABUN- sms ee eae DANTLY ABLE, AND NEVER FAILS TO GIVE HEALTH, HAPPINESS and OVER-

Knows” WHELMING SUCCESS in whatever proper line it may be desired.

DR. FRANK B. ROBI NSON considered by many to be one of the

keenest psychological minds this country has ever produced, and one of the most earnest, intense searchers into the spiritual realm, believes, after years of experimentation and research, that there is in this world today, an UNSEEN power or force, so dynamic in itself, that all other powers or forces FADE INTO INSIGNIFICANCE BESIDE IT. He believes that this power or force is THE VERY SAME POWER THAT JESUS USED. He believes further that the entire world, including the present church structure, MISSED IN ITS ENTIRETY the message that He came to bring. He believes that

The world is on the verge of the most stupendous spiritual upheaval it has ever experienced.

Every reader of this magazine is cordially invited to write “PSYCHIANA” for more details of this revolu- tionary teaching which might very easily be discussed the ENTIRE WORLD AROUND. Dr. Robinson will tell you something of his years of search for the truth as he KNEW it must exist, and will give you a few

facts connected with the founding of “PSYCHIANA.” NO OBLIGATIONS WHATSOEVER. Sign your name and address above.

A MAGAZINE OF THE BIZARRE AND UNUSUAL

‘ REGISTERED IN US. PATENT OFFICE x

Volume 26 CONTENTS FOR DECEMBER, 1935 Number 6

Cover Design. . . . . . o 4 » « o ss «> (ML: Beundage

Illustrating a scene in “The Hour of the Dracow”

The Hour of the Dragon . . . - « «~~~ ~~ Robert E. Howard 658

A vivid weird novel of a thousand thrills

Dancing Feet . . . . . : : » . . . . Paul Ernst 685 The young white wife of the Caid of Howes Metis displeased him; and so—

The Chain of Aforgomon . ..... . =. . . Clark Ashton Smith 695 What strange obsession led John Milwarp to probe into his past lives?

Disillusionment . . ... . =... . . . Victoria Beaudin Johnson 706 Verse

The Great Brain of Kaldar . . ... =. =... . Edmond Hamilton 707

A superb tale of a vampiric monstrosity that fed on the brains of an entire race

The Haunted.Castle . . . 2. «2. 2 « «© « « » © WL. Hasty, Jr. 727

Verse

The Carnival of Death (end) ... . : . . . . Arlton Eadie 728 A novel of a ghastly adventure with a Golden Mame, nee strange death that walked by night

The Man With the Blue Beard . . . ..... +. +. +. Harold Ward 745

A grim mystery story of a weird murder, full of strange surprizes and vivid action

The Hedge. . . . 2... 2s. - . +s + - . Alfred L Tooke 761

A quaint little story, about the gardener who spent his whole life clipping a hedge

Lead Soldiers . . . . . ~~... «+ + ~ Robert Barbour Johnson 764

A strange doom closed round the Dictator who sought to achieve cis destiny by a bleody war Weird Story Reprint: Lukundoo: 0.0.6.5 “.~ : - » «+ « + Edward Lucas White 767 An eery African story from an evi issue of WEIRD TALES

The Byte: ise tees ss sw memes’ 2 caus ae eee 778

The readers of this magazine express their opinions

Published monthly by the Popular Fiction Publishing Company,'2457 E. Washington Street, Indianapolis, Ind. Entered as second-class matter March 20, 1923, at the post office at Indianapolis, Ind., undér the act of March 3, 1879. Single copies, 25 cents. Subscription, $3.00 a year im the United States, English office: Charles Lavell, 13, Serjeants’ Inn, Fleet Street, E. C. 4, London. The publishers are not responsible for the loss of unsolicited manu- scripts, although every care will be taken of such material while in their possession. The contents of this mag- azine are fully protected by copyright and must not be reproduced either wholly or in part without permission from the publishers.

NOTE—All manuscripts and communications should be addressed to the publishers’ Chicago office at 840 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Ill. FARNSWORTH WRIGHT, Editor.

f “WEIRD TALES ISSUED 1st OF EACH MONTH W. T—1 657

She

our of the Dragon

By ROBERT E. HOWARD

A stirring and exciting weird story about a barbarian adventurer who made himself a king, and the strange talismanic jewel that was known as the Heart of Ahriman

1,0 Sleeper, Awake!

"Tie long tapers flickered, sending the Black shadows wavering along the walls, and the velvet tapestries rippled. Yet there was no wind in the chamber. Four men stood about the ebony table on which lay the green sarcophagus that gleamed like carven jade. In the up- raised right hand of each man a curious black candle burned with a weird green- ish light. Outside was night and a lost wind moaning among the black trees.

- Inside the chamber was tense silence, and the wavering of the shadows, while four pairs of eyes, burning with intensity, were fixed on the long green case across which cryptic hieroglyphics writhed, as if lent life and movement by the unsteady light. The man at the foot of the sarcoph- agus leaned over it and moved his can-

dle as if he were wciting with a pen, in-

scribing a mystic symbol in the‘air. Then he set down the candle in its black gold stick at the foot of the case, and, mum- bling some formula unintelligible to his companions, he thrust a broad white hand into his fur-trimmed robe. When he brought it forth again it was as if he cupped in his palm a ball of living fire. The other three drew in their breath sharply, and the dark, powerful man who stood at the head of the sarcophagus whis- pered: “The Heart of Ahriman!” The other lifted a quick hand for silence. Somewhere a dog began howling dole-

fully, and a stealthy step padded outside .

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the barred and bolted door. But none looked aside from the mummy-case over which the man in the ermine-trimmed robe was now moving the great flaming jewel while he muttered an incantation that was old. when Atlantis sank. The glare of the gem dazzled their eyes, so that. they could not be sure of what they saw; but with a splintering crash, the carven lid of the sarcophagus burst out- ward as if from some irresistible pressure applied from within, and the four men, bending eagerly forward, saw the occu- pant—a huddled, withered, wizened shape, with dried brown limbs like dead wood showing through moldering band- ages.

e Bring that thing back?” muttered the small dark man who stood on the right, with a short, sardonic laugh. “‘It is ready to crumble at a touch. We are fools _——”

“Shhh!” It was an urgent hiss of com- mand from the large man who held the jewel. Perspiration stood upon his broad white forehead and his eyes were dilated. He leaned forward, and, without touch- ing the thing with his hand, laid on the breast of the mummy the blazing jewel. Then he drew back and watched with fierce intensity, his lips moving in sound- less invocation. er,

It was as if a globe of living fire flick- ered and burned on the dead, withered bosom. And breath sucked in, hissing, through the clenched teeth of the watch- ers. For as they watched, an awful trans- mutation became apparent. The with-

THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON

ered shape in the sarcophagus was ex- panding, was growing, lengthening. The bandages burst and fell into brown dust. The shriveled limbs swelled, straight- ‘ened. Their dusky hue began to fade. “By Mitra!” whispered the tall, yellow- haired man on the left. “He was not a Stygian. That part at least was true.” Again a trembling finger warned for silence. The hound outside was no longer howling. He whimpered, as with an evil dream, and then that sound, too, died away in silence, in which the yellow-

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“A man—at least it looked like a man— wrapped in rags like a mummy.”

Sy, 7 ey

haired man plainly heard the straining of the heavy door, as if something outside pushed powerfully upon it. He half turned, his hand at his sword, but the man in the ermine robe hissed an urgent warn- ing: ‘Stay! Do not break the chain! And on your life do not go to the door!”

5 Baie yellow-haired man shrugged and turned back, and then he stopped short, staring. In the jade sarcophagus lay a living man: a tall, lusty man, naked,

white of skin, and dark of hair and beard.

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He lay motionless, his eyes wide open, and blank and unknowing as a newborn babe’s. On his breast the great jewel smoldered and sparkled.

The man in ermine reeled as if from some let-down of extreme tension.

“Ishtar!” he gasped. “It is Xaltotun! —and he lives! Valerius! Tarascus! Amal- ric! Do you see? Do you see? You doubt- ed me—but I have not failed! We have been close to the open gates of hell this night, and the shapes of darkness have gathered close about us—aye, they fol- lowed him to the very door—but we have brought the great magician back to life.”

“And damned our souls to purgatories everlasting, I doubt not,” muttered the small, dark man, Tarascus.

The yellow-haired man, Valerius, laughed harshly.

“What purgatory can be worse than life itself? So we are all damned together from birth. Besides, who would not sell his miserable soul for a throne?”

“There is no intelligence in his stare, Orastes,” said the large man.

“He has long been dead,’”’ answered Orastes. ‘He is as one newly awakened. His mind is empty after the long sleep— nay, he was dead, not sleeping. We brought his spirit back over the voids and gulfs of night and oblivion. I will speak to him.”

He bent over the foot of the sarcoph- agus, and fixing his gaze on the wide dark eyes of the man within, he said, slowly: “Awake, Xaltotun!”

The lips of the man moved mechanical- ly. ‘““Xaltotun!” he repeated in a groping whisper.

“You are Xaltotun!” exclaimed Oras- tes, like a hypnotist driving home his suggestions. “You are Xaltotun of ' Py- thon, in Acheron.”

A dim flame flickered in the datk eyes.

WEIRD TALES

“I was Xaltotun,” he whispered. “I am dead.” :

“You are Xaltotun!” cried Orastes. “You are not dead! You live!’

“I am Xaltotun,” came the eery whis- per. “But I am dead. In my house in Khemi, in Stygia, there I died.”

“And the priests who poisoned you mummified your body with their dark arts, keeping all your organs intact!” exclaimed Orastes. “But now you live again! The Heart of Ahriman has restored your life, drawn your spirit back from space and eternity.”

“The Heart of Ahrirnanl" The flame of remembrance grew stronger. ‘The bar- barians stole it from me!”’

“He remembers,” muttered Orastes. “Lift him from the case.”

The others obeyed hesitantly, as if re- luctant to touch the man they had re created, and they seemed not easier in their minds when they felt firm muscular flesh, vibrant with blood and life, beneath their fingers. But they lifted him upon the table, and Orastes clothed him in a curious dark velvet robe, splashed with gold stars and crescent moons, and fas- tened a cloth-of-gold fillet about his tem- ples, confining the black wavy locks that fell to his shoulders. He let them do as they would, saying nothing, not even when they set him in a carven throne-like chair with a high ebony back and wide silver arms, and feet like golden claws. He sat there motionless, and slowly intelligence grew in his dark eyes and madethem deep and strange and luminous. It was as if long-sunken witchlights floated slowly up through midnight pools of darkness.

Orastes cast a furtive glance at his com- panions, who stood staring in morbid fas- cination at their strange guest. Their iron nerves had withstood an ordeal that might have driven weaker men mad. He knew

‘it was with no weaklings that he con-

THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON

spired, but men whose.courage was as pro- found as their lawless ambitions and ca- pacity for evil, He turned his attention to the figure in the ebon-black chair. And this one spoke at last.

“T remember,” he said in a strong, res-

onant voice, speaking Nemedian with a cutious, archaic accent. “I am Xaltotun, who was high priest of Set in Python, which was in Acheron. The Heart of Ahr- iman—lI dreamed I had found it again— where is it?” ‘ Orastes placed it in his hand, and he drew breath deeply as he gazed into the depths of the terrible jewel burning in his grasp.

“They stole it from me, long ago,” he said, ‘The red heart of the night it is, strong to save or to damn. It came from afar, and from long ago. While I held it, none could stand before me. But it was stolen from me, and Acheron fell, and I fled an exile into dark Stygia. Much I remember, but much I have forgotten. I have been in a far land, across misty voids.and gulfs and unlit oceans. What is the year?”

Orastes answered him, “It is the wan- ing of the Year of the Lion, three thou- sand years after the fall of Acheron.”

“Three thousand years!” murmured the other. “So long? Who are you?”

“I am Orastes, once a priest of Mitra. This man is Amalric, baron of Tor, in Nemedia; this other is Tarascus, younger brother of the king of Nemedia; and this tall man is Valerius, rightful heir of the throne of Aquilonia.”

“Why have you given me life?” de- manded Xaltotun. “What do you require of me?”

The man was now fully alive and awake, his keen eyes reflecting the work- ing of an unclouded brain. There was no hesitation or uncertainty in his man- ner. He came directly to the point, as one

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who knows that no man gives something for nothing. Orastes met him with equal candor.

“We have opened the doors of hell this night to free your soul and return it to your body because we need your aid, We wish to place Tarascus on the throne of Nemedia, and to win for Valerius the crown of Aquilonia, With your necro- mancy you can aid us.”

Xaltotun’s mind was devious and full of unexpected slants.

“You must be deep in the arts your- self, Orastes, to have been able to restore my life. How is it that a priest of Mitra knows of the Heart of Ahriman, and the

incantations of Skelos?”’

“T AM no longer a priest of Mitra,” an-

swered Orastes. “I was cast forth

from my order because of my delving in

black magic. But for Amalric there I might have been burned as a magician.

“But that left me free to pursue my studies. I journeyed in Zamora, in Ven- dhya, in Stygia, and among the haunted jungles of Khitai. I read the iron-bound books of Skelos, and talked with unseen creatures in deep wells, and faceless shapes in black reeking jurigles. I ob- tained a glimpse of your sarcophagus in the demon-haunted crypts below the black’

~ giant-walled temple of Set in the hinter- lands of Stygia, and I learned of the arts that would bring back life to your shriv- eled corpse. From moldering manuscripts I learned of the Heart of Ahriman. Then for a year I sought its hiding-place, and at last I found it.”

“Then why trouble to bring me back to life?” demanded Xaltotun, with his pierc- ing gaze fixed on the priest. “Why did you not employ the Heart to further your own power?”

“Because no man today knows the sec- rets of the Heart,” answered Orastes.

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“Not even in legends live the arts by which ‘to loose its full powers. I knew it could restore life; of its deeper secrets I am ignorant. I merely used it to bring you back to life. It is the use of your knowledge we seek. As for the Heart, you alone know its awful secrets.”

Xaltotun shook his head, staring brood- ingly into the flaming depths.

“My necromantic knowledge is greater than the sum of all the knowledge of oth- er men,” he said; “yet I do not know the full power of the jewel. I did not invoke it in the old days; I guarded it lest it be used against me. At last it was stolen, and in the hands of a feathered shaman of the barbarians it defeated all my mighty sorcery. Then it vanished, and I was poi- soned by the jealous priests of Stygia be- fore I could learn where it was hidden.”

“It was hidden in a cavern below the temple of Mitra, in Tarantia,” said Oras- tes. “By devious ways I discovered this, . after I had located your remains in Set’s subterranean temple in Stygia.

“Zamorian thieves, partly protected by spells I learned from sources better left unmentioned, stole your mummy-case from under the very talons of those which guarded it in the dark, and by camel-car- avan and galley and ox-wagon it came at last to this city.

“Those same thieves—or rather those of them who still lived after their fright- ful quest—stole the Heart of Ahriman from its haunted cavern below the temple of Mitra, and all the skill of men and the spells of sorcerers nearly failed. One man of them lived long enough to reach me and give the jewel into my hands, before he died slavering and_gibbering of what he had seen in that accursed crypt. The thieves of Zamora are the most faithful of men to their trust. Even with my con- jurements, none but them could have stol- en the Heart from where it has lain in

‘WEIRD TALES

demon-guarded darkness since the fall of Acheron, three thousand years ago.”

Xaltotun lifted his lion-like head and stared far off into space, as if plumbing the lost centuries.

“Three thousand years!” he muttered. “Set! Tell me what has chanced in the world.”

“The barbarians who overthrew Acher- on set up new kingdoms,” quoth Orastes. “Where the empire had stretched now rose realms called Aquilonia, and Neme- dia, and Argos, from the tribes that founded them. The older kingdoms of Ophir, Corinthia and western Koth, which had been subject to the kings of Acheron, regained their independence with the fall of the empire.”

“And what of the people of Acheron?” demanded Orastes. “When I fled into Stygia, Python was in ruins, and all the great, purple-towered cities of Acheron fouled with blood and trampled by the sandals of the barbarians.”

“In the hills small groups of folk still boast descent from Acheron,” answered Orastes. ‘‘For the rest, the tide of my barbarian ancestors rolled over them and wiped them out. They—my ancestors— had suffered much from the kings of Acheron.”

A grim and terrible smile curled the Pythonian’s lips.

“Aye! Many a barbarian, both man and woman, died screaming on the altar under this hand. I have seen their. heads piled to make a pyramid in the great square in Python when the kings returned from the west with their spoils and naked captives,”

“Aye. And when the day of reckon- ing came, the sword was not spared. So Acheron ceased to be, and purple-tow- ered Python became a memory of forgot- ten days. But the younger kingdoms rose on the imperial ruins and waxed great.

THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON

And now we have brought you back to aid us to rule these kingdoms, which, if less strange and wonderful than Acheron of old, are yet rich and powerful, well worth fighting for. Look!’ Orastes un- rolled before the stranger a map drawn cunningly on vellum.

>, Sains regarded it, and then shook his head, baffled.

“The very outlines of the land are changed. It is like some familiar thing seen in a dream, fantastically distorted.”

“Howbeit,” answered Orastes, tracing with his forefinger, “here is Belverus, the capital of Nemedia, in which we now are. Here run the boundaries of the land of Nemedia. To the south and south- east are Ophir and Corinthia, to the east Brythunia, to the west Aquilonia.”

“It is the map of a world I do not know,” said Xaltotun softly, but Orastes did not miss the lurid fire of hate that flickered in his dark eyes.

“It is a map you shall help us change,” answered Orastes. “It is our desire first to set Tarascus on the throne of Nemedia. We wish to accomplish this without strife, and in such a way that no sus- picion will rest on Tarascus. We do not wish the land to be torn by civil wars, but to reserve all our power for the con- quest of Aquilonia.

“Should King Nimed and his sons die naturally, in a plague for instance, Taras- cus would mount the throne as the next heir, peacefully and unopposed.”

Xaltotun nodded, without replying, and Orastes continued.

“The other task will be more difficult. We cannot set Valerius on the Aquilo- nian throne without a war, and that king- dom is a formidable foe. Its people are a hardy, war-like race, toughened by con- tinual wars with the Picts, Zingarians and Cimmerians. For five hundred years Aquilonia and Nemedia have intermit-

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tently waged war, and the ultimate ad- vantage has always lain with the Aquilo- nians.

“Their present king is the most re- nowned warrior among the western na- tions. He is an outlander, an adventurer who seized the crown by force during a time of civil strife, strangling King Na- medides with his own hands, upon the very throne. His name is Conan, and no man can stand before him in battle.

“Valerius is now the rightful heir of the throne. He had been driven into ex- ile by his royal kinsman, Namedides, and has been away from his native realm for years, but he is of the blood of the old dynasty, and many of the barons would secretly hail the overthrow of Conan, who is a nobody without royal or even noble blood. But the common people are loyal to him, and the nobility of the outlying provinces. Yet if his forces were overthrown in the battle that must first take place, and Conan himself slain, I think it would not be difficult to put Valerius on the throne. Indeed, with Conan slain, the only center of the gov- ernment would be gone. He is not part of a dynasty, but only a lone adventurer.”

“I wish that I might see this king,” mused Xaltotun, glancing toward a sil- very mirror which formed one of the panels of the wall. This mirror cast no reflection, but Xaltotun’s expression showed that he understood its purpose, and Orastes nodded with the pride a good craftsman takes in the recognition of his accomplishments by a master of his craft.

“T will try to show him to you,” he said. And seating himself before the mirror, he gazed hypnotically into its depths, where presently a dim shadow began to take shape.

: It was uncanny, but those watching knew it was no more than the reflected

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image of Orastes’ thought, embodied in that mirror as a wizard’s thoughts are embodied in a magic crystal. It floated hazily, then leaped into startling clarity —a tall man, mightily shouldered and deep of chest, with a massive corded neck and heavily muscled limbs. He was clad in silk and velvet, with the royal lions of Aquilonia worked in gold upon his rich jupon, and the crown of Aquilonia shone on his square-cut black mane; but the great sword at his side seemed more nat- ural to him than the regal accouterments. His brow was low and broad, his eyes a volcanic blue that smoldered as if with some inner fire. His dark, scarred, al- most sinister face was that of a fighting- man, and his velvet garments could not conceal the hard, dangerous lines of his limbs.

“That man is no Hyborian!” exclaimed Xaltotun.

“No; he is a Cimmerian, one of those wild tribesmen who dwell in the gray hills of the north.”

“I fought his ancestors of old,” mut- tered Xaltotun. ‘‘Not even the kings of Acheron could conquer them.”

“They still remain a terror to the na- tions of the south,’ answered Orastes. “He is a true son of that savage race, and has proved himself, thus far, uncon- querable.”

Xaltotun did not reply; he sat staring down at the pool of living fire that shim- mered in his hand. Outside, the hound howled again, long and shudderingly.

2. A Black Wind Blows

dt Year of the Dragon had birth in war and pestilence and unrest. The black plague stalked through the streets of Belverus, striking down the merchant in his stall, the serf in his ken- nel, the knight at his banquet board. Be- fore it the arts of the leeches were help-

WEIRD TALES

less. Men said it had been sent from hell as punishment for the sins of pride and lust. It was swift and deadly as the stroke of an adder. The victim’s body turned purple and then black, and within a few minutes he sank down dying, and the stench of his own putrefaction was in his nostrils even before death wrenched his soul from his rotting body. A hot, roaring wind blew incessantly from the south, and the crops withered in the fields, the cattle sank and died in their tracks.

Men cried out on Mitra, and muttered against the king; for somehow, through- out the kingdom, the word was whispered that the king was secretly addicted to loathsome practises and foul debauches in the seclusion of his nighted palace. And then in that palace death stalked grin- ning on feet about which swirled the monstrous vapors of the plague. In one night the king died with his three sons, and the drums that thundered their dirge drowned the grim and ominous bells that rang from the carts that lumbered through the streets gathering up the rot- ting dead.

That night, just before dawn, the hot wind that had blown for weeks ceased to tustle evilly through the silken window curtains. Out of the north rose a great wind that roared among the towers, and there was cataclysmic thunder, and blind- ing sheets of lightning, and driving rain. But the dawn shone clean and green and clear; the scorched ground veiled itself in grass, the thirsty crops sprang up anew, and the plague was gone—its miasma swept clean out of the land by the mighty wind.

Men said the gods were satisfied be- cause the evil king and his spawn were | slain, and when his young brother Tatas- .. cus was crowned in the great coronation hall, the populace cheered until the tow-

THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON

ers rocked, acclaiming the monarch on whom the gods smiled.

‘Such a wave of enthusiasm and rejoic- ing as swept the land is frequently the signal for a war of conquest. So no one was surprized when it was announced that King Tarascus had declared the truce made by the late king with their western neighbors void, and was gather- ing his hosts to invade Aquilonia. His reason was candid; his motives, loudly proclaimed, gilded his actions with some- thing of the glamor of a crusade. He espoused the cause of Valerius, “rightful heir to the throne;” he came, he pro- claimed, not as an enemy of Aquilonia, but as a friend, to free the people from the tyranny of a usurper and a foreigner.

If there were cynical smiles in certain quarters, and whispers concerning the king’s good friend Amalric, whose vast personal wealth seemed to be flowing into the rather depleted royal treasury, they were unheeded in the general wave of fervor and zeal of Tarascus’s popularity. If any shrewd individuals suspected that Amalric was the real ruler of Nemedia, behind the scenes, they were careful not to voice such heresy. And the war went forward with enthusiasm.

The king and his allies moved west- ward at the head of fifty thousand men— knights in shining armor with their pen- nons streaming above their helmets, pike- men in steel caps and brigandines, cross- bowmen in leather jerkins. They crossed the border, took a frontier castle and burned three mountain villages, and then, in the valley of the Valkia, ten miles west of the boundary line, they met the hosts of Conan, king of Aquilonia—forty-five thousand knights, archers and men-at- arms, the flower of Aquilonian strength and chivalry. Only the knights of Poi- tain, under Prospero, had not yet arrived, for they had far to ride up from the southwestern corner of the kingdom.

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Tarascus had struck without warning. His invasion had come on the heels of his proclamation, without formal decla- ration of war,

The two hosts confronted each other across a wide, shallow valley, with rugged cliffs, and a shallow stream winding through masses of reeds and willows down the middle of the vale. The camp- followers of both hosts came down to this stream for water, and shouted insults and hurled stones across at one another. The last glints of the sun shone on the golden banner of Nemedia with the scar- let dragon, unfurled in the breeze above the pavilion of King Tarascus on an emi- nence near the eastern cliffs. But the shadow of the western cliffs fell like a vast purple pall across the tents and the army of Aquilonia, and upon the black banner with its golden lion that floated above King Conan’s pavilion.

All night the fires flared the length of the valley, and the wind brought the call of trumpets, the clangor of arms, and the sharp challenges of the sentries who paced their horses along either edge of the willow-grown stream.

T WAs in the darkness before dawn that

King Conan stirred on his couch, which was no more than a pile of silks and furs thrown on a dais, and awakened. He started up, crying out sharply and clutching at his sword. Pallantides, his commander, rushing in at the cry, saw his king sitting upright, his hand on his hilt, and perspiration dripping from his strangely pale face.

“Your Majesty!” exclaimed Pallan- tides. “Is aught amiss?”

“What of the camp?” demanded Co- nan. “Are the guards out?”

“Five hundred horsemen patrol the stream, Your Majesty,’ answered the

general. ‘The Nemedians have not of-

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fered to move against us in the night. They wait for dawn, even as we.”

“By Crom,” muttered Conan, “I awoke with a feeling that doom was creeping on me in the night.”

He stared up at the great golden lamp which shed a soft glow over the velvet hangings and carpets of the great tent. They were alone; not even a slave or a page slept on the carpeted floor; but Co- man’s eyes blazed as they were wont to blaze in the teeth of great peril, and the sword quivered in his hand. Pallantides watched him uneasily. Conan seemed to be listening.

“Listen!” hissed the king. hear it? A furtive step!”

“Seven knights guard your tent, Your Majesty,” said Pallantides. ‘None could approach it unchallenged.”

“Not outside,” growled Conan. seemed to sound inside the tent.”

Pallantides cast a swift, startled look around. The velvet hangings merged with shadows in the corners, but if there had been anyone in the pavilion besides themselves, the general would have seen him. Again he shook his head.

“There is no one here, sire. You sleep in the midst of your host.”

“T have seen death strike a king in the midst of thousands,’’ muttered Conan. “Something that walks on invisible feet and is not seen——”

“Perhaps you were dreaming, Your Majesty,” said Pallantides, somewhat per- tutbed.

“So I was,” grunted Conan. ‘‘A devil- ish strange dream it was, too. I trod again all the long, weary roads I traveled on my way to the kingship.”

He fell silent, and Pallantides stared at him unspeaking. The king was an enigma to the general, as to most of his civilized subjects. Pallantides knew that Conan had walked many strange roads

“Did you

“Tt

WEIRD TALES

in his wild, eventful life, and had been many things before a twist of Fate. set him on the throne of Aquilonia.

“I saw again the battlefield whereon I was born,” said Conan, resting his chin moodily on a massive fist. “I saw myself in a pantherskin loin-clout, throwing my spear at the mountain beasts. I was a mercenary swordsman again, a hetman of the kozaki who dwell along the Zaporo- ska River, a corsair looting the coasts of Kush, a pirate of the Barachan Isles, a chief of the Himelian hillmen. All these things I’ve been, and of all these things I dreamed; all the shapes that have been I passed like an endless procession, and their feet beat out a dirge in the sounding dust.

“But throughout my dreams moved strange, veiled figures and ghostly shad- ows, and a far-away voice mocked me. And toward the last I seemed to see my- self lying on this dais in my tent, and a shape bent over me, robed and hooded. I lay unable to move, and then the hood fell away and a moldering skull grinned down at me. Then it was that I awoke.”

“This is an evil dream, Your Majesty,” said Pallantides, suppressing a shudder, “But no more.”

Conan shook his head, more in doubt than in denial. He came of a barbaric race, and the superstitions and instincts of his heritage lurked close beneath the surface of his consciousness.

“I’ve dreamed many evil dreams,” he said, “and most of them were meaning- less. But by Crom, this was not like most dreams! I wish this battle were fought and won, for I’ve had a grisly premoni- tion ever since King Nimed died in the black plague. Why did it cease when he died?”

“Men say he sinned———” “Men are fools, as always,” grunted Conan. “If the plague struck all who

THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON

sinned, then-by Crom, ‘there wouldn’t be enough left to count the living! Why should the gods—who the priests tell me are just—slay five hundred peasants and merchants and nobles before they slew the king, if the whole pestilence were aimed at him? Were the gods smiting blindly, like swordsmen in a fog? By Mitra, if I aimed my strokes no straight- er, Aquilonia would have had a new king Jong ago.

“No! The black plague’s no common pestilence. It lurks in Stygian tombs, and is called forth into being only by wizards. I was a swordsman in Prince Almu- rics army that invaded Stygia, and of his thirty thousand, fifteen thousand perished by Stygian arrows, and the rest by the black plague that rolled on us like a wind out of the south. I was the only man who lived.” :

“Yet only five hundred died in Neme- dia,” argued Pallantides.

“Whoever called it into being knew how to cut it short at will;’ answered Conan. “So I know there was something planned and diabolical about it. Some- one called it forth, someone banished it when the work was completed—when Tarascus was safe on the throne and be- ing hailed as the deliverer of the people from the wrath of the gods. By Crom, I sense a black, subtle brain behind all this. What of this stranger who men say gives counsel to Tarascus?”

_.“He wears a veil,” answered Pallan- tides; “they say he is a foreigner; a stranger from Stygia.”

“A stranger from Stygia!” repeated Conan scowling. “A stranger from hell, more like!—Ha! What is that?”

“The trumpets of the Nemedians!” ex- claimed Pallantides. “And hark, how our own blare upon their heels! Dawn is breaking, and the captains are marshaling the hosts for the onset! Mitra be with

667,

them, for many will not see the sun go down behind the crags.” .

“Send my squires to me!” exclaimed Conan, rising with alacrity and casting off his velvet night-garment; he seemed to have forgotten his forebodings at the prospect of action. ‘‘Go to the captains and see that all is in readiness. I will be with you as soon as I don my armor.”

M* of Conan’s ways were inex- plicable to the civilized’ people he ruled, and one of them was his insistence on sleeping alone in his chamber or tent. Pallantides hastened from the pavilion, clanking in the armor he had donned at midnight after a few hours’ sleep. He cast a swift glance over the camp, which was beginning to swarm with activity, mail clinking and men moving about dimly in the uncertain light, among the long lines of tents. Stars still glimmered palely in the western sky, but long pink streamers stretched along the eastern horizon, and against them the dragon banner of Nemedia flung out its billow- ing silken folds.

Pallantides turned toward a smaller tent near by, where slept the royal squires. These were tumbling out already, roused by the trumpets. And as Pallantides called to them to hasten, he was frozen speechless by a deep fierce shout and the impact of a heavy blow inside the king’s tent, followed by the heart-stopping crash of a falling body. There sounded a low laugh that turned the general’s blood to ice.

Echoing the cry, Pallantides wheeled and rushed back into the pavilion. He cried out again as he saw Conan’s power- ful frame stretched out on the carpet. The king’s great two-handed sword lay near his hand, and a. shattered tent-pole seemed to show where his stroke had fall- en. Pallantides’ sword was out, and. he

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glared about the tent, but nothing met his gaze. Save for the king and himself it was empty, as it had been when he left it.

“Your Majesty!’ Pallantides threw himself on his knee beside the fallen giant.

Conan’s eyes were open; they blazed up at him with full intelligence and recognition. His lips writhed, but no sound came forth. He seemed unable to move.

Voices sounded without. Pallantides rose swiftly and stepped to the door. The royal squires and one of the knights who guarded the tent stood there.

“We heard a sound within,” said the knight apologetically. “Is all well with the king?”

Pallantides regarded him searchingly.

“None has entered or left the pavilion this night?”

“None save yourself, my lord,” an- swered the knight, and Pallantides could not doubt his honesty.

“The king stumbled and dropped his sword,” said Pallantides briefly. “‘Re- turn to your post.”

As the knight turned away, the gen- eral covertly motioned to the five royal squires, and when they had followed him in, he drew the flap closely. They turned pale at sight of the king stretched upon the carpet, but Pallantides’ quick gesture checked their exclamations.

The general bent over him again, and again Conan made an effort to speak. The veins in his temples and the cords in his neck swelled with his efforts, and he lift- ed his head clear of the ground. Voice came at last, mumbling and half intel- ligible. ;

“The thing—the thing in the corner!”

Pallantides lifted his head and looked fearfully about him. He saw the pale faces of the squires in the lamplight, the velvet shadows that lurked along the walls of the pavilion. That was all.

WEIRD TALES

“There is nothing here, Your Majesty,” he said.

“It was there, in the corner,” muttered the king, tossing his lion-maned head from side to side in his efforts to rise. “A man—at least he looked like a man— wrapped in rags like a mummy’s band- ages, with a moldering cloak drawn about him, and a hood. All I could see was his eyes, as he crouched there in the shadows. I thought he was a shadow himself, until I saw his eyes. They were like black jewels.

“I made at him and swung my sword, but I missed him clean — how, Crom knows—and splintered that pole instead. He caught my wrist as I staggered off balance, and his fingers burned like hot iron. All the strength. went out of me, and the floor rose and struck me like a club. Then he was gone, and I was down, and—curse him!—I can’t move! I’m paralyzed!”

Pallantides lifted the giant’s hand, and his flesh crawled. On the king’s wrist showed the blue marks of long, lean fin< gers. What hand could grip so hard as to leave its print on that thick wrist? Pallantides remembered that low laugh he had heard as he rushed into the tent, and cold perspiration beaded his skin. It had not been Conan who laughed.

“This is a thing diabolical!” whispered a trembling squire. “Men say the chil- dren of darkness war for Tarascus!”’

“B’ SILENT!” sternly. Outside, the dawn was dimming the stars. A light wind sprang up from the peaks, and brought the fanfare of a thou- sand trumpets. At the sound a convulsive shudder ran through the king’s mighty form. Again the veins in his: temples knotted as he strove to break the in- visible shackles which crushed him down. “Put my harness on me and tie me into

ordered Pallantides

THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON

my saddle,” he whispered. “I'll lead the charge yet!”

Pallantides shook his head, and a ae plucked his skirt.

“My lord, we are lost if the host learns the king has been smitten! Only he could have led us to victory this day.”

“Help me lift him on the dais,” swered the general.

They obeyed, and laid the helpless giant on the furs, and spread a silken cloak over him. Pallantides turned to the five squires and searched their pale faces long before he spoke.

“Our lips must be sealed for ever as to what happens in this tent,” he said at last. “The kingdom of Aquilonia depends upon it. One of you go and fetch me the officer Valannus, who is a captain of the Pellian spearmen.”

The ‘squire indicated bowed: and be tened from the tent, and Pallantides stood staring down at the stricken king, while outside trumpets blared, drums thundered, and the roar of the multitudes fose in the growing dawn. Presently the squire returned with the officer Pallan- tides had named—a tall man, broad. and powerful, built much like the king. Like him, also, he had thick black hair. But his eyes were gray and he did not te- semble Conan in his features.

“The king is stricken by a strange malady,” said Pallantides briefly. “A great honor is yours; you are to wear his armor and ride at the head of the host today. None must know that it is not the king who rides.”

“It is an honor for which a man might gladly give up his life,” stammered the captain, overcome by the suggestion. “Mitra grant that I do not fail of this mighty trust!”

And while the fallen king stared with burning eyes that reflected the bitter rage and huiniliation that ate his heart, the squires. stripped Valannus of mail. shirt,

an-

669

burganet and leg-pieces, and clad him in Conan’s armor of black plate-mail, with the vizored salade, and the dark plumes nodding over the wivern crest. Over all they put the silken surcoat with the royal lion worked in gold upon the breast, and they girt him with a broad gold-buckled belt which supported a jewel-hilted broad- sword in a cloth-of-gold scabbard. While they worked, trumpets clamored outside,

-arms clanged, and across the river rose a

deep-throated roar as squadron after squadron swung into place.

Full-armed, Valannus dropped to his knee and bent his plumes before the fig- ure that lay on the dais.

“Lord king, Mitra grant that I do not dishonor the harness I wear this day!”

“Bring me Tarascus’s head and I'll make you a baron!” In'the stress of his anguish Conan’s veneer of civilization had fallen from him. His eyes flamed, he ground his teeth in:fury and blood-lust, as barbaric as any tribesmen in the Cim- merian hills.

3. The Cliffs Reel

ope Aquilonian host was drawn up, long serried lines of pikemen and horsemen in gleaming steel, when a giant figure in black armor emerged from the royal pavilion, and as he swung up into the saddle of the black stallion held by four squires, a roar that shook the moun- tains went up from the host. They shook their blades and thundered forth their ac- claim of their warrior king—knights in gold-chased armor, pikemen in mail coats and basinets, archers in their leather jerkins, with their longbows in their left hands.

The host on the opposite side of the yalley was in motion, trotting down the

long gentle slope toward the river; their

steel shone through the mists of morning that swirled about their horses’ feet. -

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The Aquilonian host moved leisurely to meet them. The measured tramp of the armored horses made the ground tremble. Banners flung out long silken folds in the morning wind; lances swayed like a bristling forest, dipped and sank, their pennons fluttering about them.

Ten men-at-arms, grim, taciturn vet- erans who could hold their tongues, guarded the royal pavilion. One squire stood in the tent, peering out through a slit in the doorway. But for the handful in the secret, no ‘one else in the vast host knew that it was not Conan who rode on the great stallion at the head of the army.

The Aquilonian host had assumed the customary formation: the strongest part was the center, composed entirely of heav- ily armed knights; the wings were made up of smaller bodies of horsemen, mount- ed men-at-arms, mostly, supported by pikemen and archers. The latter were Bossonians from the western marches, strongly built men of medium stature, in leathern jackets and iron head-pieces.

The Nemedian army came on in simi- lar formation, and the two hosts moved toward the river, the wings in advance of the centers. In the center of the Aqui- lonian host the great lion banner streamed its billowing black folds over the steel- clad figure on the black stallion.

But on his dais in the royal pavilion Conan groaned in anguish of spirit, and cursed with strange heathen oaths.

“The hosts move together,” quoth the squire, watching from the door. “Hear the trumpets peal! Ha! The rising sun strikes fire from lance-heads and helmets until I am dazzled. It turns the river crimson—aye, it will be truly crimson before this day is done!

“The foe have reached the river. Now arrows fly between the hosts like stinging clouds that hide the sun. Ha! Well loosed, bowmen! The Bossonians ‘have the better of it! Hark to them shout!”

WEIRD TALES

Faintly in the éars of the king, above the din of trumpets and clanging steel, came the deep fierce shout of the Bos- sonians as they drew and loosed in per- fect unison.

“Their archers seek to hold ours in play while their knights ride into the river,” said the squire. ‘The banks are not steep; they slope to the water's edge. The knights come on, they crash through the willows. By Mitra, the clothyard shafts find every crevice of their harness! Horses and men go down, struggling and thrashing in the water. It is not deep, nor is the current swift, but men are drowning there, dragged under by their armor, and trampled by the frantic horses. Now the knights of Aquilonia advance. They ride into the water and engage the knights of Nemedia. The water swirls about their horses’ bellies and the clang of sword against sword is deafening.”

“Crom!” burst in agony’ from Conan’s lips. Life was coursing sluggishly back into his veins, but still he‘ could not lift his mighty frame from the dais. =

“The wings close in,” said the squire. “Pikemen and swordsmen fight hand to hand in the stream, and behind them the bowmen ply their shafts.

“By Mitra, the Nemedian arbalesters are sorely harried, and the Bossonians arch their arrows to drop amid the rear ranks. Their center gains not a foot, and their wings are pushed back up from the stream again.”

“Crom, Ymir, and Mitra!” raged Conan. ‘Gods and devils, could I but reach the fighting, if but to die at the first blow!” ;

UTSIDE through the long hot day the battle stormed and thundered. The valley shook to charge and counter- charge, to the whistling of shafts, and the crash of rending shields and splin-

‘tering lances. But the hosts of Aquilonia

THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON

-held fast. Once they were forced back from the bank, but a counter-charge, with the black banner flowing over the black stallion, regained the lost ground. And like an iron rampart they held the right bank of the stream, and at last the squire gave Conan the news that the Nemedians were falling back from the river.

“Their wings are in confusion!” he cried. “Their knights reel back from the sword-play. But what is this? Your ban- ner is in motion—the center sweeps into

the stream! By Mitra, Valannus is lead-.

ing the host across the river!”

“Fool!” groaned Conan, “It may be a

trick. He should hold his position; by dawn Prospero will be here with the Poi- tanian levies.” _ “The knights ride into a hail of ar- rows!” cried the squire. “But they do not falter! They sweep on—they have crossed! They charge up the slope! Pal- lantides has hurled the wings across the river to their support! It is all he can do. The lion banner dips and staggers above the mélée.

“The knights of Nemedia make a stand, They are broken! They fall back! Their left wing is in full flight, and our pikemen cut them down as they run! I see Valannus, riding and smiting like a madman. He is carried beyond himself by the fighting-lust. Men no longer look to Pallantides. They follow Valannus, deeming him Conan, as he rides with closed vizor.

“But look! There is method in his madness! He swings wide of the Neme- dian front, with five thousand knights, the pick of the army. The main host of the Nemedians is in confusion—and Jook! Their flank is protected by the cliffs, but there is a defile left unguarded! It is like a great cleft in the wall that opens again behind the Nemedian lines. By Mitra, Valannus sees and seizes the opportunity! He has driven their wing

671

before him, and he leads his knights to- ward that defile. They swing wide of the main battle; they cut through a line of spearmen, they charge into the defile!”

“An ambush!” cried Conan, striving to struggle upright.

“No!” shouted the squire exultantly. “The whole Nemedian host is in full sight! They have forgotten the defile! They never expected to be pushed back that far. Oh, fool, fool, Tarascus, to make such a blunder! Ah, I see lances and pennons pouring from the farther mouth of the defile, beyond the Nemedian lines. They will smite those ranks from the rear and crumple them. Mitra, what is this?”

He staggered as the walls of the tent swayed drunkenly. Afar over the thun- der of the fight rose a deep bellowing roar, indescribably ominous.

“The cliffs reel!’ shrieked the squire. “Ah, gods, what is this? The river foams out of its channel, and the peaks are crumbling! The ground shakes and horses and riders in armor are overthrown! The cliffs! The cliffs are falling!”

With his words there came a grinding rumble and a thunderous concussion, and the ground trembled. Over the roar of the battle sounded screams of mad terror.

“The cliffs have crumbled!” cried the livid squire. ‘“They have thundered down into the defile and crushed every living creature in it! I saw the lion banner wave an instant amid the dust and falling stones, and then it vanished! Ha, the Nemedians shout with triumph! Well may they shout, for the fall of the cliffs has wiped out five thousand of our brav- est knights—hark!”

To Conan’s ears came a vast torrent of sound, rising and rising in frenzy: “The king is dead! The. king is dead! Flee! Flee! The king is dead!”

“Liars!” panted Conan. “Dogs! Knaves! Cowards! Oh, Crom, if I could

672

but stand—but crawl to the river with my sword in my teeth! How, boy, do they flee?”

“Aye!” sobbed the squire. “They spur for the river; they are broken, hurled on like spume before a storm. I see Pallan- tides striving to stem the torrent—he is down, and the horses trample him! They rush into the river, knights, bowmen, pikemen, all mixed and mingled in one mad torrent of destruction. The Neme- dians are on their heels, cutting them down like corn.”

“But they will make a stand on this side of the river!” cried the king. With an effort that brought the sweat dripping from his temples, he heaved himself up on his elbows.

“Nay!” cried the squire. “They can- not! They are broken! Routed! Oh gods, that I should live to see this day!”

Then he remembered his duty and shouted to the men-at-arms who stood stolidly watching the flight of their com- rades. ‘‘Get a horse, swiftly, and help me lift the king upon it. We dare not bide here.”

But before they could do his bidding, the first drift of the storm was upon

_them. Knights and spearmen and archers fled among the tents, stumbling over ropes and baggage, and mingled with them were Nemedian riders, who smote right and left at all alien figures. Tent- ropes were cut, fire sprang up in a hun- dred places, and the plundering had al- ready begun. The grim guardsmen about Conan’s tent died where they stood, smit- ing and thrusting, and over their mangled corpses beat the hoofs of the conquerors.

But the squire had drawn the flap close, and in the confused madness of the slaughter none realized that the pavilion held an occupant. So the flight and the pursuit swept past, and roared away up the valley, and the squire looked out

WEIRD TALES

presently to see a cluster of men ap- proaching the royal tent with evident pur- pose.

“Here comes the king of Nemedia with four companions and his squire,” quoth he. “He will accept your surren- der, my fair lord -——”

“Surrender the devil’s heart!” gritted the king.

He had forced himself up to a sitting posture. He swung his legs painfully off the dais, and staggered upright, reeling drunkenly. The squire ran to assist him, but Conan pushed him away.

“Give me that bow!” he gritted, indi- cating a longbow and quiver that hung from a tent-pole.

“But Your Majesty!” cried the squire in great perturbation. ‘“The battle is lost! It were the part of majesty to yield with the dignity becoming one of royal blood!”

“I have no royal blood,” ground Co- nan. “I am a barbarian and the son of a blacksmith.”

Vy sow away the bow and an arrow he staggered toward the opening of the pavilion. So formidable was his appearance, naked but for short leather breeks and sleeveless shirt, open to reveal his great, hairy chest, with his huge limbs and his blue eyes blazing under his tangled black mane, that the squire shrank back, more afraid of his king than of the whole Nemedian host.

Reeling on wide-braced legs Conan drunkenly tore the door-flap open and staggered out under the canopy. The king of Nemedia and his companions had dismounted, and they halted short, star- ing in wonder at the apparition confront- ing them.

“Here I am, you jackals!” roared the Cimmerian. “I am the king! Death to you, dog-brothers!”

He jerked the arrow to its head and

W.T—t4t &

THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON

loosed, and the shaft feathered itself in the breast of the knight who stood beside Tarascus. Conan hurled the bow at the king of Nemedia.

“Curse my shaky hand! Come in and take me if you dare!”

Reeling backward on unsteady legs, he fell with his shoulders against a tent-pole, and propped upright, he lifted his great sword with both hands.

“By Mitra, it is the king!” swore Taras- cus. He cast a swift look about him, and laughed. “That other -was a jackal in his harness! In, dogs, and take his head!”

The three soldiers—men-at-arms wear- ing the emblem of the royal guards— rushed at the king, and one felled the squire with a blow of a mace. The other two fared less well. As the first rushed in, lifting his sword, Conan met him with a sweeping stroke that severed mail-links like cloth, and sheared the Nemedian’s arm and shoulder clean from his body. His corpse, pitching backward, fell across his campanion’s legs. The man stumbled, and before he could recover, the great sword was through him.

Conan wrenched out his steel with a racking gasp, and staggered back against the tent-pole. His great limbs trembled, his chest heaved, and sweat poured down his face and neck. But his eyes flamed with exultant savagery and he panted: “Why do you stand afar off, dog of Bel- verus? I can’t reach you; come in and die!”

Tarascus hesitated, glanced at the re- maining man-at-arms, and his squire, a gaunt, saturnine man in black mail, and took a step forward. He was far in- ferior in size and strength to the giant Cimmerian, but he was in full armor, and was famed in all the western nations as a swordsman, But his squire caught his arm. “Nay, Your Majesty, do not throw

W. T.—2

673

away your life. I will summon archers to shoot this barbarian, as we shoot lions.”

Nee of them had noticed that a chariot had approached while the fight was. going on, and now came to a halt before them. But Conan saw, look- ing over their shoulders, and a queer chill sensation crawled along his spine. There was something vaguely unnatural about the appearance of the black horses that drew the vehicle, but it was the occupant of the chariot that arrested the king’s at- tention.

He was a tall man, superbly built, clad in a long unadorned silk robe. He wore a Shemitish head-dress, and its lower folds hid his features, except for the dark, magnetic eyes. The hands that grasped the reins, pulling the rearing horses back on their haunches, were white but strong. Conan glared at the stranger, all his primitive instincts roused. He sensed an auta of menace and power that exuded from this veiled figure, a menace as def- inite as the windless waving of tall grass that marks the path of the serpent.

“Hail, Xaltotun!” exclaimed Tarascus. “Here is the king of Aquilonia! He did not die in the landslide as we thought.”

“I know,” answered the other, without bothering to say how he knew. “What is your present intention?”

“I will summon the archers to slay him,” answered the Nemedian. ‘As long as he lives he will be dangerous to us.”

“Yet even a dog has uses,” answered Xaltotun. ‘Take him alive.”

Conan laughed raspingly. “Come in and try!” he challenged. “But for my treacherous legs I’d hew you out of that chariot like a woodman hewing a tree: But you'll never take me alive, damn you!”

“He speaks the truth, I fear,” said Tarascus, “The man is a barbarian, with

674 the senseless ferocity of a wounded tiger. Let me summon the archers.”

“Watch me and learn wisdom,” ad- vised Xaltotun.

His hand dipped into his robe and came out with something shining—a glistening sphere. This he threw suddenly at Conan. The Cimmerian contemptuously struck it aside with his sword—at the instant of contact there was a sharp explosion, a flare of white, blinding flame, and Conan pitched senseless to the ground.

“He is dead?” ‘Tarascus’s tone was more assertion than inquiry.

“No. He is but senseless. He will re- cover his senses in a few hours. Bid your men bind his arms and legs and lift him into my chariot.” :

With a gesture Tarascus did so, and they heaved the senseless king into the chariot, grunting with their burden. Xaltotun threw a velvet cloak over his body, completely covering him from any who might peer in. He gathered the reins

' in his hands.

“I’m for Belverus,” he said. ‘Tell Amalric that I will be with him if he needs me. But with Conan out of the way, and his army broken, lance and sword should suffice for the rest of the conquest. Prospero cannot be bringing more than ten thousand men to the field, and will doubtless fall back to Tarantia_ when he hears the news of the battle. Say nothing to Amalric or Valerius or any- one about our capture. Let them think Conan died in the fall of the cliffs.”

He looked at the man-at-arms for a long space, until the guardsman moved ‘restlessly, nervous under the scrutiny.

“What is that about your waist?” Xal- totun demanded.

“Why, my girdle, may it please you, my lord!” stuttered the amazed guards- man.

“You lie!” Xaltotun’s laugh was merci- less as a sword-edge. “It is a poisonous

WEIRD TALES

serpent! What a fool you are, to wear a reptile about your waist!”

With distended eyes the man looked down; and to his utter horror he saw the buckle of his girdle rear up at him. It was a snake's head! He saw the evil eyes and the dripping fangs, heard the hiss and felt the loathsome contact of the thing about his body. He screamed hideously and struck at it with his naked hand, felt its fangs flesh themselves in that hand— and then he stiffened and fell heavily. Tarascus looked down at him without ex- pression. He saw only the leathern girdle and the buckle, the pointed tongue of which was stuck in the guardsman’s palm. Xaltotun turned his hypnotic gaze on Tarascus’s squire, and the man turned ashen and began to tremble, but the king interposed: ‘‘Nay, we can trust him.”

The sorcerer tautened the reins and swung the horses around.

“See that this piece of work remains secret. If I am needed, let Altaro, Oras- tes’ servant, summon me as I have taught him. I will be in your palace at Bel- verus.””

Tarascus lifted his hand in salutation, but his expression was not pleasant to see as he looked after the departing mes- merist.

“Why should he spare the Cimmer- ian?” whispered the frightened squire.

“That I am wondering myself,” grunt- ed Tarascus.

Behind the rumbling chariot the dull roar of battle and pursuit faded in the distance; the setting sun rimmed the cliffs with scarlet flame, and the chariot moved into the vast blue shadows float- ing up out of the east.

4. "From What Hell Have You Crawled?” O: THAT long ride in the chariot of Xaltotun, Conan knew nothing. He lay like a dead man while the bronze

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wheels clashed over the stonés of moun- tain roads and swished though the deep grass of fertile valleys, and finally drop- ping down from the rugged heights, rumbled rhythmically along the broad white road that winds through the rich meadowlands to the walls of Belverus.

Just before dawn some faint reviving of life touched him. He heard a mumble of voices, the groan of ponderous hinges. Through a slit in the cloak that covered him he saw, faintly in the lurid glare of torches, the great black arch of a gateway, and the bearded faces of men-at-arms, the torches striking fire from their spear- heads and helmets.

' “How went the battle, my fair lord?” spoke an eager voice, in the Nemedian tongue.

“Well indeed,” was the curt reply. “The king of Aquilonia lies slain and his host is broken.”

A babble of excited voices rose, drowned the next instant by the whirling wheels of the chariot on the flags. Sparks flashed from under the revolving rims as Xaltotun lashed his steeds through the arch. But Conan heard one of the guards- men mutter: “From beyond the border to Belverus between sunset and dawn! And the horses scarcely sweating! By Mitra, they ———’”” Then silence drank the voices, and there was only the clatter of hoofs and wheels along the shadowy street.

What he had heard registered itself on Conan’s brain but suggested nothing to him. He was like a mindless automaton that hears and sees, but does not under- stand. Sights and sounds flowed mean- inglessly about him. He lapsed again into a deep lethargy, and was only dimly aware when the chariot halted in a deep, high-walled court, and he was lifted from it by many hands and borne up a winding stone stair, and down a long dim corridor.

Whispers, stealthy footsteps, unrelated.

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sounds surged or rustled about him, ir- relevant and far away.

Yet his ultimate awakening was ab- rupt and crystal-clear. He possessed full knowledge of the battle in the moun- tains and its sequences, and he had a good idea of where he was.

He lay on a velvet couch, clad as he was the day before, but with his limbs loaded with chains not even he could break. The room in which he lay was furnished with somber magnificence, the walls covered with black velvet tapestries, the floor with heavy purple carpets. There was no sign of door or window, and one curiously carven gold lamp, swinging from the fretted ceiling, shed a lurid light over all.

In that light the figure seated in a sil- ver, throne-like chair before him seemed unreal and fantastic, with an illusiveness of outline that was heightened by a filmy silken robe. But the features were dis- tinct—unnaturally so in that uncertain light. It was almost as if a weird nimbus played about the man’s head, casting the bearded face into bold relief, so that it was the only definite and distinct reality in that mystic, ghostly chamber.

It was a magnificent face, with strong- ly chiseled features of classical beauty. There was, indeed, something disquieting about the calm tranquillity of its aspect, a suggestion of more than human knowl- edge, of a profound certitude beyond human assurance. Also an uneasy sensa- tion of familiarity twitched at the back of Conan’s consciousness. He had never seen this man’s face before, he well knew; yet those features reminded him of some- thing or someone. It was like encounter- ing in the flesh some dream-image that had haunted one in nightmares.

“Who are you?” demanded the king belligerently, struggling to a sitting posi- tion in spite of his chains.

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“Men call me Xaltotun,” was the re- ply, in a strong, golden voice.

. “What place is this?” the Cimmerian next demanded.

“A chamber in the palace of King Tarascus, in Belverus.”’

Conan was not surprized. Belverus, the capital, was at the same time the largest Nemedian city so near the border.

“And where’s Tarascus?”

“With the army.”

“Well,” growled Conan, “if you mean to murder me, why don’t you do it and get it over with?”

“I did not save you from the king’s archers to murder you in Belverus,” an- swered Xaltotun.

“What the devil did you do to me?” demanded Conan.

“I blasted your consciousness,” an- swered Xaltotun. “How, you would not understand, Call it black magic, if you will.”

_ Conan had already reached that con- clusion, and was mulling over something else.

“T think I understand why you spared my life,” he rumbled. “Amalric wants to keep me as a check on Valerius, in case the impossible happens and he becomes king of Aquilonia. It’s well known that the baron of Tor is behind this move to seat Valerius on my throne.- And. if I know Amalric, he doesn’t intend that Valerius shall be anything more than a figurehead, as Tarascus is now.”

“Amalric knows nothing of your cap- ture,” answered Xaltotun. ‘Neither does Valerius. Both think you died at Valkia.”

Conan’s eyes narrowed as he stared at the man in silence.

“TI sensed a brain behind all this,’ .he muttered, “but I thought it was Amal- ric’s. Are Amalric, Tarascus and Valerius all but puppets dancing on your string? Who are you?”

“What does it matter? If I told you,

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you would not believe me. What if I told you I might set you back on the throne of Aquilonia?”

Conan’s eyes burned on him like a wolf.

“What's your price?”

“Obedience to me.”

“Go to hell with your offer!” snarled Conan. “I’m no figurehead. I won my crown with my sword. Besides, it’s be- yond your power to buy and sell the throne of Aquilonia at your will. The kingdom’s not conquered; one battle doesn’t decide a war.”

“You war against more than swords,” answered Xaltotun. “Was it a mortal’s sword that felled you in your tent before the fight? Nay, it was a child of the dark, a waif of outer space, whose fingers were afire with the frozen coldness of the black gulfs, which froze the blood in your veins and the marrow of your thews. Coldness so cold it burned your flesh like white-hot iron!

“Was it chance that led the man who wore your harness to lead his knights into the defile? — chance that brought the cliffs crashing down upon them?”

O55 glared at him unspeaking, feeling a chill along his spine. Wiz- ards and sorcerers abounded in his bar-. baric mythology, and any fool could tell that this was no common man. Conan sensed an inexplicable something about him that set him apart—an alien aura of Time and Space, a sense of tremendous and sinister antiquity. But his stubborn spirit refused to flinch.

“The fall of the cliffs was chance,” he muttered truculently. “The charge into the defile was what any man would have done.”

“Not so.. You would not have led a charge into it. You would have suspected atrap. You would never have crossed the river in the first place, until you were

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sure the Nemedian rout was real. Hyp- notic suggestions would not have invaded your mind, even in the madness of bat- tle, to make you mad, and rush blindly into the trap laid for you, as it did the lesser man who masqueraded as you.”

“Then if this was all planned,” Conan grunted skeptically, “‘all a plot to trap my host, why did not the ‘child of darkness’ kill me in my tent?”

“Because I wished to take you alive. It

took no wizardry to predict that Pallan- tides would send another man out in your harness. I wanted you alive and unhurt. You may fit into my scheme of things. There is a vital power about you greater than the craft and cunning of my allies. You ate a bad enemy, but might make a fine vassal.” _ Conan spat savagely at the word, and Xaltotun, ignoring his fury, took a crys- tal globe from a near-by table and placed it before him. He did not support it in any way, nor place it on anything, but it hung motionless in midair, as solidly as if it rested on an iron pedestal. Conan snorted at this bit of necromancy, but he was nevertheless impressed.

“Would you know of what goes on in Aquilonia?” he asked.

Conan did not reply, but the sudden rigidity of his form betrayed his interest.

Xaltotun stared into the cloudy depths, and spoke: “It is now the evening of the day after the battle of Valkia. Last night the main body of the army camped by Valkia, while squadrons of knights har- ried the fleeing Aquilonians. At dawn the host broke camp and pushed west- ward through the mountains. Prospero, with ten thousand Poitanians, was miles from the battlefield when he met the flee- ing survivors in the early dawn. He had pushed on all night, hoping to reach the field before the battle joined. Unable to rally the remnants of the broken host, he fell back toward Tarantia. Riding hard,

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replacing his wearied horses with steeds seized from the countryside, he ap- proaches Tarantia.

“I see his weary knights, their armor gray with dust, their pennons drooping as they push their tired horses through the plain. I see, also, the streets of Taxantia. The city is in turmoil. Somehow word has reached the people of the defeat and the death of King Conan. The mob is mad with fear, crying out that the king is dead, and there is none to lead them against the Nemedians. Giant shadows rush on Aquilonia from the east, and the sky is black with vultures.”

Conan cursed deeply.

“What are these but words? The rag- gedest beggar in the street might proph- esy as much. If you say you saw all that in the glass ball, then you're a liar as well as a knave, of which last there’s no doubt! Prospero will hold Tarantia, and the bar- ons will rally to him. Count Trocero of Poitain commands the kingdom in my absence, and he'll drive these Nemedian dogs howling back to their kennels. What are fifty thousand Nemedians? Aquilonia will swallow them up. They'll never see Belverus again. It’s not Aqui- lonia which was conquered at Valkia; ‘it was only Conan.”

“Aquilonia is doomed,” answered Xaltotun, unmoved, “Lance and ax and torch shall conquer her; or if they fail, powers from the dark of ages shall march against her. As the cliffs fell at Valkia, so shall walled cities and mountains fall, if the need arise, and rivers roar from their channels to drown whole provinces.

“Better if steel and bowstring prevail without further aid from the arts, for the constant use of mighty spells sometimes sets forces in motion that might rock the universe,”

“From what hell have you crawled, you nighted dog?’ muttered Conan, staring at the man. The Cimmerian involuntarily

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shivered; he sensed something anctedibly ancient, incredibly evil. ..« «

TEN lifted his head, as if listen- ing to whispers across the void. He seemed to have forgotten his prisoner. Then he shook his head impatiently, and glanced impersonally at Conan.

“What? Why, if I told you, you would not believe me. But I am wearied of con- versation with you; it is less fatiguing to destroy a walled city. than it is to frame my thoughts in words a brainless bar- barian can understand.”

“If my hands were free,” opined Conan, “‘I’d soon make a brainless corpse out of you.”

“TI do not doubt it, if I were fool enough to give you the opportunity,” an- swered Xaltotun, clapping his hands.

His manner had changed; there was impatience in his tone, and a certain nerv- ousness in his manner, though Conan did not think this attitude was in any way connected with himself.

“Consider what I have told you, bar- barian,” said Xaltotun. ‘You will have plenty of leisure. I have not yet decided what I shall do with you. It depends on circumstances yet unborn. But let this be impressed upon you: that if I decide to use you in my game, it will be better to submit without resistance than to suffer my wrath.”

Conan spat a curse at him, just as hang- ings that masked a door swung apart and four giant negroes entered. Each was clad only in a silken breech-clout sup- ported by a girdle, from which hung a great key.

Xaltotun gestured impatiently toward the king and turned away, as if dismiss- ing the matter entirely from his mind. His fingers twitched queerly. From a carven green jade box he took a hand- ful of shimmering black dust, and placed

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it in a brazier which stood on-a golden tripod at his elbow. The crystal. globe, which he seemed to have forgotten, fell suddenly to the floor, as if its invisible support had been removed.

Then. the blacks had lifted Conan— for so loaded with chains was he that he could not walk—and carried him from the chamber. A glance back, before the heavy, gold-bound teak door was closed, showed him Xaltotun leaning back in his throne-like chair, his arms folded, while a thin wisp of smoke curled up from the brazier. Conan’s scalp prickled. In Stygia, that ancient and evil kingdom that lay far to the south, he had seen such black dust before. It was the pollen of the black lotus, which creates death-like sleep and monstrous dreams; and he knew that only the grisly wizards of the Black Ring, which is the nadir of evil, volun- tarily seek the scarlet nightmares of the black lotus, to revive their necromantic powers.

The Black Ring was a fable and a lie to most folk of the western world, but

Conan knew of its ghastly reality, and its gtim votaries who practise their abom- inable sorceries amid the black vaults of Stygia and the nighted domes of accursed Sabatea.

He glanced back at the cryptic, gold- bound door, shuddering at what it hid.

Whether it was day or night the king could not tell. The palace of King Tarascus seemed a shadowy, nighted place, that shunned natural illumination. The spirit of darkness and shadow hov- ered over it, and that spirit, Conan felt, was embodied in the stranger Xaltotun. The negroes carried the king along a winding corridor so dimly lighted: that , they moved through it like black ghosts bearing a dead man, and down a stone stair that wound endlessly. A torch in the hand of one cast the great deformed shadows: streaming along the wall; it

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was like the descent into hell of a corpse borne by dusky demons.

At last they reached the foot of the stair, and then they traversed a long straight corridor, with a blank wall on one hand pierced by an occasional arched doorway with a stair leading up behind it; and on the other hand another wall showing heavy barred doors at regular intervals of a few feet.

Halting before one of these doors, one of the blacks produced the key that hung at his girdle, and turned it in the lock. Then, pushing open the grille, they en- tered with their captive. They were in a small dungeon with heavy stone walls,

floor and ceiling, and in the opposite wall _

there was another grilled door. What lay beyond that door Conan could not tell, but he did not believe it was another corridor. The glimmering light of the torch, flickering through the bars, hinted at shadowy spaciousness and echoing depths.

In one corner of the dungeon, near the door through which they had entered, a cluster of rusty chains hung from a great iron ring set in the stone. In these chains a skeleton dangled. Conan glared at it with some curiosity, noticing the state of the bare bones, most of which were splintered and broken; the skull, which had fallen from the vertebrae, was crushed as if by some savage blow of tremendous force.

Stolidly one of the blacks, not the one who had opened the door, removed the chains from the ring, using his key on the massive lock, and dragged the mass of rusty metal and shattered bones over to one side. Then they fastened Conan’s chains to that ring, and the third black turned Ais key in the lock of the farther door, grunting when he had assured him- self that it was properly fastened.

Then they regarded Conan cryptically,

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slit-eyed ebony giants, the torch striking highlights from their glossy skin.

He who held the key to the nearer door was moved to remark, gutturally: “This your palace now, white dog-king! None but master and we know. All palace sleep. We keep. secret. You live and die here, maybe. Like him!” He contemptu- ously kicked the shattered skull and sent it clattering across the stone floor.

Conan did not deign to reply to the taunt, and the black, galled perhaps by his prisoner’s silence, muttered a curse, stooped and spat full in the king’s face. It was an unfortunate move for the black. Conan was seated on the floor, the chains about his waist; ankles and wrists locked to the ring in the wall. He could neither rise, nor move more than a yard out from the wall. But there was considerable slack in the chains that shackled his wrists, and before the bullet-shaped head could be withdrawn out of reach, the king gathered this slack in his mighty hand and smote the black on the head. The man fell like a butchered ox, and his comrades stared to see him lying with his scalp laid open, and blood oozing from his nose and ears.

But they attempted no reprisal, nor did they accept Conan’s urgent invitation to approach within reach of the bloody chain in his hand. Presently, grunting in their ape-like speech, they lifted the senseless black and bore him out like a sack of wheat, arms and legs dangling. They used his key to lock the door behind them, but did not remove it from the gold chain that fastened it to his girdle. They took the torch with them, and as they moved up the corridor the darkness slunk behind them like an animate thing. Their soft padding footsteps died away, with the glimmer of their torch, and darkness and silence remained unchal-

lenged.

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5. The Haunter of the Pits

Bee lay still, enduring the weight of his chains and the despair of his position with the stoicism of the wilds that had bred him. He did not move, be- cause the jangle of his chains, when he shifted his body, sounded startlingly loud in the darkness and stillness, and it was his instinct, born of a thousand wilder- ness-bred ancestors, not to betray his posi- tion in his helplessness. This did not re- sult from a logical reasoning process; he did not lie quiet because he reasoned that the darkness hid lurking dangers that might discover him in his helplessness. Xaltotun had assured him that he was not to be harmed, and Conan believed that it was in the man’s interest to preserve him, at least for the time being. But the instincts of the wild were there, that had caused him in his childhood to lie hid- den and silent while wild beasts prowled about his covert.

Even his keen eyes could not pierce the solid darkness. Yet after a while, after a period of time he had no way of esti- mating, a faint glow became apparent, a sort of slanting gray beam, by which Conan could see, vaguely, the bars of the door at his elbow, and even make out the skeleton of the other grille. This puz- zled him, until at last he realized the ex- planation. He was far below ground, in the pits below the palace; yet for some reason a shaft had been constructed from somewhere above. Outside, the moon had risen to a point where its light slanted dimly down the shaft. He reflected that in this manner he could tell the passing of the days and nights. Perhaps the sun, too, would shine down that shaft, though on the other hand it might be closed by day. Perhaps it was a subtle method of torture, allowing a prisoner but a glimpse of daylight or moonlight.

His gaze fell on the broken bones in

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the farther corner, glimmering dimly. He did not tax his brain with futile spec- ulation as to who the wretch had been and for what reason he had been doomed, but he wondered at the shattered condi- tion of the bones. They had not been broken on a rack. Then, as he looked, another unsavory detail made itself evi- dent. The shin-bones were split length- wise, and there was but one explanation; they had been broken in that manner in order to obtain the marrow. Yet what creature but man breaks bones for their marrow? Perhaps those remnants were mute evidence of a horrible, cannibalistic feast, of some wretch driven to madness by starvation. Conan wondered if his own bones would be found at some fu- ture date, hanging in their rusty chains. He fought down the unreasoning panic of a trapped wolf.

The Cimmerian did not curse, scream, weep or rave as a civilized man might have done. But the pain and turmoil in his bosom were none the less fierce. His great limbs quivered with the intensity of his emotions. Somewhere, far to the westward, the Nemedian host was slash- ing and burning its way through the heart of his kingdom. The small host of the Poitanians could not stand before them. Prospero might be able to hold Tarantia for weeks, or months; but eventually, if not relieved, he must sur- render to greater numbers. Surely the barons would rally to him against the in- vaders. But in the meanwhile he, Conan, must lie helpless in a darkened cell, while others led his spears and fought for his kingdom. The king ground his powerful teeth in red rage.

Then he stiffened as outside the farther door he heard a stealthy step. Straining his eyes he made out a bent, indistinct figure outside the grille. There was a rasp of metal against metal, and he heard the clink of tumblers, as if a key had been

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turned in the lock. Then the figure moved silently out of his range of vision. Some guard, he supposed, trying the lock. After a while he heard the sound repeat- ed faintly somewhere farther on, and that was followed by the soft opening of a door, and then a swift scurry of softly shod feet retreated in the distance. Then silence fell again.

Conan listened for what seemed a long time, but which could not have been, for the moon still shone down the hidden shaft, but he heard no further sound. He shifted his position at last, and his chains clanked. Then he heard another, lighter footfall—a soft step outside the nearer door, the door through which he had entered the cell. An instant later a slen- der figure was etched dimly in the gray light.

“King Conan!” a soft voice intoned urgently. “Oh, my lord, are you there?”

“Where else?” he answered guardedly, twisting his head about to stare at the apparition.

It was a gitl who stood grasping the bars with her slender fingers. The dim glow behind her outlined her supple fig- ure through the wisp of silk twisted about her loins, and shone vaguely on jeweled breast-plates. Her dark eyes gleamed in the shadows, her white limbs glistened softly, like alabaster. Her hair was a mass of dark foam, at the burnished lus- ter of which the dim light only hinted.

“The keys to your shackles and to the farther door!’”’ she whispered, and a slim white hand came through the bars and dropped three objects with a clink to the flags beside him.

“What game is this?” he demanded. “You speak in the Nemedian tongue, and I have no friends in Nemedia. What deviltry is your master up to now? Has he sent you here to mock me?”

“It is no mockery!” The girl was trembling violently. Her bracelets and

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breast-plates clinked against the bars she gtasped. “I swear by Mitra! I stole the keys from the black jailers. They are the keepers of the pits, and each bears a key which will open only one set of locks. I made them drunk. The one whose head you broke was carried away to a leech, and I could not get his key. But the others I stole. Oh, please do not loiter! Beyond these dungeons lie the pits which are the doors to hell.”

Sens impressed, Conan tried the keys dubiously, expecting to meet only failure and a burst of mocking laughter. But he was galvanized to dis- cover that one, indeed, loosed him of his shackles, fitting not only the lock that held them to the ring, but the locks on his limbs as well. A few seconds later he stood upright, exulting fiercely in his comparative freedom. A quick stride carried him to the grille, and his fingers closed about a bar and the slender wrist that was pressed against it, imprisoning the owner, who lifted her face bravely to his fierce gaze.

“Who are you, girl?” he demanded. “Why do you do this?”

“E am only Zenobia,” she murmured, with a catch of breathlessness, as if in fright; “‘only a girl of the king’s seraglio.”

“Unless this is some cursed trick,’ mut- tered Conan, ‘I cannot see why you bring me these keys.”

She bowed her dark head, and then lifted it and looked full into his sus- Picious eyes. Tears sparkled like jewels on her long dark lashes.

“I am only a girl of the king’s se- raglio,” she said, with a certain proud hu- mility. “He has never glanced at me, and probably never will. I am less than one of the dogs that gnaw the bones in his banquet hall.

“But I am no painted toy; I am of flesh and blood. I breathe, hate, fear, re-

”

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joice and love. And I have loved you, King Conan, ever since I saw you riding at the head of your knights along the streets of Belverus when you visited King Nimed, years ago. My heart tugged at its strings to leap from my bosom and fall in the dust of the street under your horse’s hoofs.”

Color flooded her countenance as she spoke, but her dark eyes did not waver. Conan did not at once reply; wild and passionate and untamed he was, yet any but the most brutish of men must be touched with a certain awe or wonder at the baring of a woman’s naked soul.

She bent her head then, and pressed her red lips to the fingers that imprisoned her slim wrist. Then she flung up her head as if in sudden recollection of their position, and terror flared in her dark eyes.

“Haste!” she whispered urgently. “It is past midnight. You must be gone.”

“But won’t they skin you alive for stealing these keys?”

“They'll never know. If the black men remember in the morning who gave them the wine, they will not dare admit the keys were stolen from them while they were drunk. The key that I could not obtain is the one that unlocks this door. You must make your way to freedom through the pits. What awful perils lurk beyond that door I cannot even guess. But greater danger lurks for you if you remain in this cell.

“King Tarascus has returned——”

“What? Tarascus?”

“Aye! He has returned, in great

secrecy, and not long ago he descended -

into the pits and then came out again, pale and shaking, like a man who has dared a great hazard. I heard him whis- per to his squire, Arideus, that despite Xaltotun you should die.”

“What of Xaltotun?” Conan.

murmured

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He felt her shudder.

“Do not speak of him!” she whis- pered. “Demons are often summoned by the sound of their names. The slaves say that he lies in his chamber, behind a bolted door, dreaming the dreams of the black lotus. I believe that even Tarascus secretly fears him, or he would slay you openly. But he has been in the pits to- night, and what he did here, only Mitra knows.”

“I wonder if that could have been Tarascus who fumbled at my cell door awhile ago?” muttered Conan.

“Here is a dagger!” she whispered, pressing something through the bars. His eager fingers closed on an object familiar to their touch. “Go quickly through yonder door, turn to the left and make your way along the cells until you come to a stone stair. On your life do not stray from the line of the cells! Climb the stair and open the door at the top; one of the keys will fit it. If it be the will of Mitra, I will await you there.” Then she was gone, with a patter of light slippered feet.

co shrugged his shoulders, and turned toward the farther grille. This might be some diabolical trap planned by Tarascus, but plunging headlong into a snare was less abhorrent to Conan’s tem- perament than sitting meekly to await his doom. He inspected the weapon the girl had given him, and smiled grimly. Whatever else she might be, she was proven by that dagger to be a person of practical intelligence. It was no slender stiletto, selected because of a jeweled hilt or gold guard, fitted only for dainty mur- der in milady’s boudoir; it was a forth- right poniard, a warrior’s weapon, broad- bladed, fifteen inches in length, tapering to a diamond-sharp point.

He grunted with satisfaction. The feel of the hilt cheered him and gave him a

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glow of confidence. Whatever webs of conspiracy were drawn about him, what- ever trickery and treachery ensnared him, this knife was real. The great muscles of his right arm swelled in anticipation of murderous blows.

He tried the farther door, fumbling with the keys as he did so. It was not locked. Yet he remembered the black . man locking it. That furtive, bent figure, then, had been no jailer seeing that the bolts were in place. He had unlocked the door, instead. There was a sinister sug- gestion about that unlocked door. But Conan did not hesitate. He pushed open the grille and stepped from the dungeon into the outer darkness.

As he had thought, the door did not open into another corridor. The flagged floor stretched away under his feet, and the line of cells ran away to right and left behind him, but he could not make out the other limits of the place into which he had come. He could see neither the roof nor any other wall. The moonlight filtered into that vastness only through the grilles of the cells, and was almost lost in the darkness. Less keen eyes than his.could scarcely have discerned the dim gray patches that floated before each cell

or.

Turning to the left, he moved swiftly and noiselessly along the line of dun- geons, his bare feet making no sound on the flags. He glanced briefly into each dungeon as he passed it. They were all empty, but locked. In some he caught the glimmer of naked white bones. These pits were a relic of a grimmer age, con- structed long ago when Belverus was a fortress rather than a city. But evidently their more recent use had been more ex- tensive than the world guessed. ° .. Ahead of him, presently, he saw the dim outline of a stair sloping sharply up- ward, and knew it must be the stair he sought. Then he whirled suddenly,

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crouching in the deep shadows at its foot.

Somewhere behind him something was moving—something bulky and stealthy that padded on feet which were not human feet. He was looking down the long row of cells, before each one of which lay a square of dim gray light that was little more than a patch of less dense darkness. But he saw something moving along these squares. What it was he could not tell, but it was heavy and huge, and yet it moved with more than human ease and swiftness. He glimpsed it as it moved across the squares of gray, then lost it as it merged in the expanses of shadow between. It was uncanny, in its stealthy advance, appearing and disap- pearing like a blur of the vision.

He heard the bars rattle as it tried each door in turn. Now it had reached the cell he had so recently quitted, and the door swung open as it tugged. He saw a great bulky shape limned faintly and briefly in the gray doorway, and then the thing had vanished into the dungeon. Sweat beaded Conan’s face and hands. Now he knew why Tarascus had come so subtly to his door, and later had fled so swiftly. The king had unlocked his door, and, somewhere in these hellish pits, had opened a cell or cage that held some grim monstrosity.

Now the thing was emerging from the cell and was again advancing up the cor- ridor, its misshapen head close to the ground. It paid no more heed to the» locked doors. It was smelling out his trail. He saw it more plainly now; the gray light limned a giant anthropomor- phic body, but vaster of bulk and girth than any man. It went on two legs, though it stooped forward, and it was grayish and shaggy, its thick coat shot with silver. Its head was a grisly trav- esty of the human, its long arms hung nearly to the ground.

Conan knew it at last—understood the

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meaning of those crushed and broken bones in the dungeon, and recognized the haunter of the pits. It was a gray ape, one of the grisly man-eaters from the forests that wave on the mountainous eastern shores of the Sea of Vilayet. Half mythical and altogether horrible, these apes were the goblins of Hyborian leg- endry, and were in reality ogres of the natural world, cannibals and murderers of the nighted forests.

He knew it scented his presence, for it‘

was coming swiftly now, rolling its bar- rel-like body rapidly along on its short, mighty, bowed legs. He cast a quick glance up the long stair, but knew that the thing would be on his back before he could mount to the distant door. He chose to meet it face to face.

cos stepped out into the nearest square of moonlight, so as to have all the advantage of illumination that he could; for the beast, he knew, could see better than himself in the dark. Instantly the brute saw him; its great yellow tusks gleamed in the shadows, but it made no sound, Creatures of night and the silence, the gray apes of Vilayet were voiceless. But in its dim, hideous features, which were a bestial travesty of a human face, showed ghastly exultation.

Conan stood poised, watching the on- coming monster without a quiver. He knew he must stake his life on one thrust; there would be no chance for another; nor would there be time to strike and spring away. The first blow must kill, and kill instantly, if he hoped to survive that awful grapple.. He swept his gaze over the short, squat throat, the hairy swagbelly, and the mighty breast, swell- ing in giant arches like twin shields. It must be the heart; better to risk the blade being deflected by the heavy ribs than to strike in where a stroke was not instantly fatal. With full realization of the odds,

WEIRD TALES

Conan matched his speed of eye and hand and his muscular power against the brute might and ferocity of the man-eat- er. He must meet the brute breast to breast, strike a death-blow, and then trust to the ruggedness of his frame to survive the instant of manhandling that was cer- tain to be his.

As the ape came rolling in on him, swinging wide its terrible arms, he plunged in between them and struck with all his desperate power. He felt the blade sink to the hilt in the hairy breast, and instantly, releasing it, he ducked his head and bunched his whole body into one compact mass of knotted muscles, and as he did so he grasped the closing arms and drove his knee fiercely into the mon- ster’s belly, bracing himself against that crushing grapple.

For one dizzy instant he felt as if he were being dismembered in the grip of an earthquake; then suddenly he was free, sprawling on the floor, and the monster was gasping out its life beneath him, its red eyes turned upward, the hilt of the-poniard quivering in its breast. His desperate stab had gone home.

Conan was panting as if after long conflict, trembling in every limb. Some of his joints felt as if they had been dis- located, and blood dripped from scratch- es on his skin where the monster's talons had ripped; his muscles and tendons had been savagely wrenched and twisted. If the beast had lived a second longer, it would surely have dismembered him. But the Cimmerian’s mighty strength had resisted, for the fleeting instant it had en- dured, the dying convulsion of the ape that would have torn a lesser man limb from limb.

Don’t miss_the Sate es and arises chapters in net month's WEIRD TALES, that tell of , rending of thi Veil, the rescue of a beautiful woman from the man’s ax in the Iron Tower, and the. weitd help given Conan by the strange priests of Asura. Reserve your copy at your news dealer’s now.

“He drew a knife from under his burnoose and put a bowl under her feet.”

ancing Feet

By PAUL ERNST

A story of the Caid of Hamam Meknes in the Sahara desert, and the young white wife who displeased him—a grim tale, through

which blows a breath of horror

E KNEW her only as Mademoi- selle d’Or. None of us knew

where she came from. Some said Russia, for she spoke Russian like a na-

tive. Some said from the south of France,

and that she had fled here: to avoid a

political scandal. Some said: from the

Saar. But none of us knew, and none of 685

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us cared. You didn’t cate where Ma- demoiselle d’Or was from, so long as you could be with her.

She was small, beautifully formed. She had tawny hair, and topaz eyes with a deep mysticism in them. Her skin was tanned a light gold in spite of the fact that she kept out of the sun as every woman must in Hamam Meknes on the eastern fringe of the Sahara.

But it was her feet and legs that one remarked on most, She had the daintiest small feet and slender ankles, and the loveliest, lithe legs. Dainty, small feet. Dancing feet. Dancing their way into the hearts of all of us.

She used to spend much of her time at the Café Penny, where the French offi- cers in charge of the Hamam Meknes post came, and where I, as local manager of a farm machinery corporation, often went with Arab customers. Most after- noons at.three-thirty or four she would come there, a cool and lovely golden fig- ure in the blazing sun. And the recep- tion was ever the same.

"Voila! Mam’selle d’Or!”

“A dance, a dance!”

» Sometimes she would smile and refuse. Oftener, she would oblige.

There was a phonograph in the rear of the café. Somebody would turn it on to the one record which was appropriate to dancing. “There are smiles...”

That one record! I can hear the song yet—outmoded even at that time, but the one she liked best to dance to. With the phonograph grinding out its tune, she would tap-dance for us, either on a cleared spot among the tables or perhaps on a table top. And we would watch— and dream.

Mademoiselle d’Or, a slender golden vision on a table top, laughing, tawny eyes glinting, skirts raised a little to allow her beautiful legs proper freedom, dainty feet tapping with the perfect rhythm of

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one born to dance. She would have been a sensation in Paris. In fact, I’ve some- times suspected she had been a sensation there—before fate or whim drove her down here into North Africa to Hamam Meknes near the Isle of the Lotus Eaters. One lovely woman alone among men exiled here by business or the army— dancing her way into all our hearts. ... .

After her tap-dance she would dance with those of us she knew would not try to take liberties. She played no favorites; indeed she scarcely knew whose arms she danced in.

It was the dancing itself that intoxi- cated her. That was all. Born to dance, loving it, almost seeming to live for it.

And then she went mad—or womanly —and married Lakhdar.

A= LAKHDAR was the Caid of Hamam Meknes. His house didn’t look like much from the outside, and he himself always dressed in plain bur- nooses. But Lakhdar was a rich man. He could probably have laid his hands on a quarter of a million in cash had he need- ed it.

Lakhdar was up in Madrid when Ma- demoiselle d’Or first appeared among us. He was there for six months before com- ing back and meeting Mademoiselle d’Or.

The first day he met her he proposed marriage.

Lakhdar was handsome in his way. About forty, he was lean and supple, with a Close-cropped black beard. He was suave and smooth-mannered, but even a

“woman should have seen the ruthlessness

under the surface. His hawk nose and thin-lipped mouth indicated it. So did his eyes, tawny eyes much the color of Ma- demoiselle d’Or’s, only cold as frozen amber where hers were warm and laugh- ing.

We all tried to reason with her. But it seemed her money was running low.

DANCING FEET

Caid Lakhdar was rich, he loved her, he was reasonably good-looking, it would be romantic. . ..

Lakhdar’s Renault town car came back from Tunis one day with the shades pulled tightly over the windows. In the body was Mademoiselle d’Or, now Lakh- dar’s wife.

Fourth wife of the Caid Lakhdar, im- mured in his house. . . .

These marriages of East and West! They can be made to look very romantic, but seldom do they work out that way. Sometimes an Arab petty potentate will have only the one wife, allow her a sort of half-freedom, may even permit her to retain her own religion. Even in these rare cases happiness seldom lasts long. And the Caid Lakhdar was far from be- ing that sort of husband.

From the moment Mademoiselle d’Or disappeared into his home, she stayed in it as in a tomb. Now and thea, rarely, we saw her. Always she was heavily chaperoned. We would never have known her, veiled and swathed in white, from other Arab women driven under surveil- lance to a secluded shop, had it not been for her feet. Those dainty, thistle-down feet, clad stubbornly in high-heeled shoes. The one feature of her individuality left. You couldn’t mistake those.

And so we knew, when infrequently a small, shrouded figure with forlornly drooping shoulders hastened from closed cat to dimly lit shop on lovely little feet in high-heeled slippers, that this was our Mademoiselle d’Or. Or her shell, per- haps! And we sighed and looked at each other, and ordered another cognac, which was drunk in silence.

The Café Penny—indeed the whole town of Hamam Meknes—was a bleak, grim place without our dancing, small companion. But if Mademoiselle d’Or was absent in the flesh, she was much with us in the spirit. All we could talk

687,

about was her probable happiness in Lakhdar’s white-walled home, and what she was doing now to busy herself—and how she could live without her dancing and her gay comradeship with men.

Well, I had the answer to that, long afterward, from one of Lakhdar’s house- boys in a gossiping moment.

She had no happiness in Lakhdar's house, she had nothing with which to busy herself—and she could not live without the dancing and the comradeship.

It went well for a few weeks, the boy said. Lakhdar was no fool. He knew the yearning of those trim small feet in their high-heeled shoes. When they came back from Tunis that day, he had a phono- gtaph and some records in the car with them. Among the records was the one to whose dancing he had first seen Mademoi- selle d'Or. “There are smiles . . .”

She danced for him, to that record.

I can see her, tawny eyes laughing, tawny hair tossing a little as her feet tapped out the tune, dressed probably in the gauzy harem garments whose main function is coolness rather than embel- lishment of sex—though the sex is not ignored.

She danced and danced. And Lakhdar, who had no rhythm in his heart or music in his soul, of course quickly tired of it. More, he began to be annoyed by it, so that Mademoiselle d’Or danced alone when her feet urged her past enduring, or danced not at all.

In Lakhdar’s house, under Lakhdar’s frozen amber eyes, she could not dance and had no one to talk to but the servants, and Lakhdar’s three other wives, who were fat and stupid and hated her with a consuming hatred.

A short distance away was the Café Penny, where she could dance to ecstatic bravos, and later dance with men who treated her almost reverently and whose adoration must have been like wine to her

688

gay, starved soul. A short distance from Lakhdar’s home to the Café Penny. And even an idiot should have foretold the sesult.’ 5.

But I was utterly unprepared for it when it came. For I had not then talked to the house-boy, and even in my most pessimistic moments had not dreamed the gitl was so wildly unhappy.

All I knew was that, as I sat under the awning on the baked sidewalk at a Café Penny table, I looked down the narrow street and saw an Arab woman walking alone over the cobbles.

I STARED. Arab women, except of the lowest class, do not commonly walk, alone, along the streets. And this wo- man’s haik was exceptionally fine, and she was small and daintily formed, as you could see in spite of the shapelessness of her garments.

And then I heard the French lieutenant sitting next to me gasp and sit very straight and incredulous in his chair. And I saw what he was looking at.

The woman’s feet were very small, and were clad in high-heeled, European shoes.

We stared at those feet while the wo- man came up to the sidewalk tables. As we stared, so did the others—a dozen of them—seated there. And in unison, our eyes swept up her body and to the eyes showing over her veil.

Tawny, golden eyes. Laughing eyes,

though now a certain desperation showed -

in them.

“My God!” I said.

The French lieutenant looked the other way, and spoke to her out of the corner of his mouth.

‘Mon Dieu! You must not stand here, Mam’selle. Leaving the Caid Lakhdar’s harem and coming to a café alone where a dozen men sit! Lakhdar will flay you alive!”

Mademoiselle d’Or just stood there.

WEIRD TALES.

The Frenchman had been in North Africa for a long time. He knew the place well. And his face was white to the lips at the: thing she had done. But Mademoiselle d’Or was mad—or womanly.

She came among the tables, and she unloosed her veil!

“T came to dance,” she said. “I came to live again one of the afternoons that were mine before I She faltered and stopped.

Well, with her unloosing of the veil, the damage was done. Had she simply gone out alone, and walked away from the café with her veil still in place, Lakh- dar’s rage, though bound to be terrific, might have stayed within bounds. But this! Lowering her veil before a café full of men! Wife of a Caid!

We did what we could to cover the affair. We hustled her into the closed part of the café where we sat during the rare days when it rained, or the more frequent days when driving wind made of the narrow street outside an inferno of whirling dust.

“This is horrible,” said the Frenchman. “It is a—nightmare! If Lakhdar ever dis- covers——”’

In the back of the café, Mademoiselle dOr laughed at us. Mad—or woman-

ly

“Why do you look so terrified? Like frightened children instead of men. I know this is a very bad thing I am doing. But suppose I am caught? This is the Twentieth Century. Even an Arab hus- band can do no more than divorce me.” Her tawny eyes laughed at us. And what could we say in the face of such wilfulness? She should have known bet- ter, after living for weeks in the harem of that thin-lipped man with the frozen amber eyes. But she didn’t seem to. “Anyway,” she said gayly, “I shall not be caught. Today he is in Tunis. So I shall dance and dance.” .W.T.—2

DANCING FEET

~ She got toa table top, helped by hands that, I think, trembled. I know mine did. She shook her tawny hair free and, like a child delivered from a dark prison, laughed and danced. To the tinny record: “There are smiles...”

There was no gayety, aside from the almost hysterical gayety of Mademoiselle d’Or. We stood close to the table, as if to ring her around against possible evil.

I can see her yet, dancing there in her incongruous Arab costume, tawny hair flying, small feet tapping madly to the beat of the outmoded song.

“Laugh!” she cried. “Sing the song with me as I dance! This is a celebration. Lakhdar is in Tunis and so for a rare few minutes I am free!”

ib WAS just at that moment that I heard a strangled curse rip from the lips of the French lieutenant. At the same time Mademoiselle d’Or’s dancing feet broke their rhythm and stopped. She stared toward the doorway with eyes no longer laughing.

I turned to look, too, knowing what I was going to see but still hoping my knowledge was wrong. . . .

In the doorway stood Achmed Lakhdar.

He was dressed in a light blue bur- noose, with the hood hanging down his back. He stood easily in the doorway, with a little smile on his lips. There was no expression in the icy amber of his eyes. But I began to sweat as the full enormity of what those eyes saw swept over me. The wife of the Caid of Hamam Mcknes, dancing on a table top in a café before a dozen men, with her veil down and her face fully exposed to profaning gazes!

Instinctively we crowded between Lakhdar and the table. He ignored us, and smiled at the girl, whose white face appeared over our heads.

“Come, cherie,” he said.

I felt the table tremble against me with

W.T—3

689

the trembling of Mademoiselle d’Or’s slender body.

“Come,” he repeated.

Ruin for me, or for any of the others there, to try to oppose the man. The French govern Tunisia politically, but they are meticulous in refraining from meddling in the Arabs’ personal affairs. And nothing could be more personal than this scene between a petty tyrant and his wife.

Ruin for any of us to try to interfere, but we all did.

“Don’t go,” an Italian trader next to me said in a low tone.

The French lieutenant seconded it. “Nom de Dieu, no!” he said. “Stay.”

“TIL drive you to Tunis in my car,” I said. “You can catch a Marseilles boat.”

But she only shook her tawny head at us, while the Caid Lakhdar stood easily in the doorway, smiling.

She got off the table and started toward him. The group of us took a step after her.

“Gentlemen,” said Lakhdar courteous- ly, “‘twenty of my men wait in the street. Any trouble would result in a small war, after which, I think you would be exe- cuted by the French if you were left alive by my men.”

Mademoiselle d’Or faced us. ‘‘Please,” she said. “This will be all right.”

She was gone before we quite knew what had happened. We rushed to the sidewalk in time to see Lakhdar’s closed Renault whirl up the narrow, crooked street.

AS FAR as any of us could tell, that was all there was to it. Lakhdar took his wife from the café and kept her there- after more closely in his harem. In a few months it was rumored that Mademoiselle d’Or had gone to Paris, and from then on no one ever heard of her again. That was the rumor. We believed it mainly

690

because we wanted to believe it. But later, bit by bit, I got the whole grim story—a story that brings sweat to the palms of my hands even now as I write it, though many years and thousands of miles now separate me from Hamam Meknes.

Lakhdar took Mademoiselle d’Or home. He went with her to the big, se- cluded room where he met with his wives.

He dismissed the three wives who were waiting there, hating Mademoiselle d’Or and pleased with the trap their lord had set for her. He went to the phonograph that looked so out of place among the other furnishings, and put on its felt- covered disk the record, Smiles.

It was, again, a house-boy of Lakhdar’s who told me this, looking a little sick as he recounted it.

“There are smiles,” the record ground out, “that make you happy—there are smiles that make you blue...”

Lakhdar stared at the girl.

“Dance for me,” he said softly.

She stared back at him, fear and be- wilderment on her face.

“I—I don’t feel like dancing.”

“Dance for me.”

There was something in his voice that belied the expressionlessness of his. cold amber eyes.

She danced for him, alone in the harem room. Her lovely small feet in their ridiculously inadequate but entrancing high-heeled slippers tapped out the tune. Tawny hair tossing, body swaying like thistle-down, she danced to the music as she had danced so often before. But now her face was white as the sand under the moon, and her tongue kept moistening her dry lips as she stared at those icy, expressionless eyes.

“You love dancing, don’t you?” mur- mured Lakhdar, as the record whirred to a close and she stopped. ‘Those little

WEIRD TALES

feet of yours won't let you be still. And they lead you. into places where a Caid’s wife should not go.”

He began to smile again. And at that smile, the house-boy, watching in peril of his life from a high grating, says Ma- demoiselle’ d’Or screamed a little.

She screamed again as Lakhdar raised his voice and a man came into the room in answer. The fellow was a big, burly Arab with bloody hands. He was a butcher from the local souks.

Lakhdar tore the veil from the girl’s face. And at the look in his eyes then, she fainted. While she lay unconscious, at Lakhdar’s command the big Arab butcher gagged her and bound her arms. He placed her on a table, binding her legs separately to rings in the table top in such a way that her feet hung over the edge. He drew a knife from under his stinking burnoose, put a bowl under her feet. “ss

The house-boy heard someone coming, then. He dropped from the grating to the yard and ran and hid.

“It was about a month later that I heard there was a new grave in the cem- etery by the sea-wall,”’ the house-boy said. “It was a nameless grave. A child of parents too poor to buy a headstone was buried there, I was told.”

It was just at this time that Lakhdar gave out that rumor of Mademoiselle d’Or’s going to Paris.

if was two weeks after the Paris rumor that we saw Lakhdar again.

Usually he went to the Arab café down the tortuous street, but this time he came to the Café Penny, and sat down at a side- walk table, arranging the folds of his burnoose.

To a man we turned in our chairs so that our backs would be presented to him. None addressed him or glanced at him. We knew nothing then of the hellish

DANCING FEET

thing that had happened to the golden girl, like a golden butterfly, in his house. But we suspected that something to make a calloused Legionnaire shudder had gone on under Lakhdar’s roof before he al- Towed her “to go to Paris,” and we acted accordingly.

Lakhdar didn’t even bother to smile. The opinions of Infidels were less than nothing to him. He simply sat indiffer- ently at his table, sipping at the wine he had ordered.

Not looking at him, I was unprepared for the sound of his voice when it grated out:

“Allah!”

I turned in my chair to stare at him.

He had risen to his feet. His face was white with a maniac’s rage. His eyes were blazing. He turned toward the service bar.

“What fool dares play that record— and dance to it?”

The Frerich café owner dropped the glass he was polishing.

“Play what record?” he faltered. “And who is dancing?”

“Pig!” rasped Lakhdar, his nostrils quivering with mad wrath. “The song she danced to! Who started that in the machine? And who is dancing to it as she danced to it?”

“But no one,” gasped the proprietor. “No one. I hear nothing.

Lakhdar’s curse crackled out. He strode to the rear of the café and looked around.

There was no one there. I could see that from where I was. Not a soul. But Lakhdar looked for a full minute, as though he doubted the evidence of his eyes.

Then he went to the phonograph. No sound was coming from it, of course. Had there been, we all could have heard. But there was a record lying on its disk,

691.

collecting dust because none of us cared to play it any more.

Lakhdar grasped the record. He raised it high and dashed it to the floor, shat- tering it to pieces.

I knew what the record was. ave smiles...”

Caid Lakhdar stalked out of the café. And we looked after him, and then turned to stare at one another.

The song she danced to? Dancing as she had danced to it?

We looked at one another quite a long time, there at the Penny Café, with the floor behind us littered with the pieces of the record to the tune of which those small flying feet had twinkled so often.

“T here

A BRILLIANT young Arab physician, gtaduate of the Sorbonne, who had come to Hamam Meknes only a little be- fore Mademoiselle d’Or’s disappearance, and who knew nothing of the tale and cared less, supplied me with the next bit in the mosaic.

I went to his house with an infected hand, and while he bound the puffy, dis- colored cut, he talked. He talked of the Caid, which was unwise; but he wanted to impress me with the fact that he at- tended Lakhdar.

“I have attended him daily in the last week,” he said. “Or, I should say, night- ly. There is a curious case.”

He frowned a little.

“The Caid seems unable to sleep. And I seem unable to make him—unless I give him morphine enough to kill a camel,”

“Unable to sleep?” I repeated. “That is odd.”

“Very,” said the doctor. “But not so odd as the cause. He keeps thinking he hears somebody dancing. Tap-dancing, as they call it in English. He swears someone is dancing, and the sound keeps him from sleeping. He remains uncon-

692

vinced even when I-show him there is no one in the room—or any of the rooms near by.’

I felt a little chill touch my spine, and I did not look at the doctor. I didn’t feel that I could trust my eyes.

“The first time I went to see him, to try to cure his sleeplessness, I thought he was right. I thought someone really was dancing. His fingers were tapping to a sort of tune, and his head was a little sideways as he listened. There was no expression on his face, but in his eyes I thought I could see that he did not like the dancing.”

The doctor finished dressing my hand.

“It was the devil’s own job getting him to sleep. Always he insisted someone was dancing near him. And once I even thought I heard faint music, so strong was his conviction.”

“Music?” I said. ‘Could you recognize it?”

He smiled.

“When there was actually no music to be heard? No, my friend. Yet I thought I heard it. When I was a student and we wanted music late at night without noise, J would sharpen a splinter of soft wood and put it in my phonograph for a needle. This music that I thought I heard was like that.’ Like the ghost of a phono- graph record,”

“You must have heard it pretty plain- ly.” He shrugged. “No. I would not have thought of that phonograph trick at all if my patient had not seemed to think of it first. He got up, as I listened, and went to his own phonograph. There was a record on it.. He took the record off and broke it over his knee. It was this that suggested the thought to me, you. see? Mental suggestion can be a powerful thing,” he added importantly, “as any a doctor knows.”

..I took out my wallet to pay him, but

WEIRD. TALES

delayed counting the bills. I wanted to hear more. :

“Has the Caid continued to hear this —this dancing?” I asked.

“He has said nothing more,” the young doctor said, suddenly realizing that he was talking pretty freely about the man who could make or break him in Hamam Meknes.

i al was all I could get out of him. But I talked one evening to a French olive buyer. .

“What,” said the Frenchman, happened to the Caid Lakhdar?”’

I shook my head. “I haven’t seen him for weeks. Nor has anyone else. It seems he is keeping closely to his own house.”

The French buyer nodded slowly.

“It was there I saw him, instead of at the Arab café where we often talk over the coming Beans business. He looked bad.”

I said nothing, and abruptly the Frenchman became more voluble.

“Looked bad? Mon Dieux! He looked like a very sick man. He acts like a man of seventy, and his hair is graying, and his hands and head shake constantly, as though he had palsy. But always as his head shakes, it keeps to one side and his eyes are far off and intent as if he lis- tened to something.”

“Did he tell you what he was listen- ing to?” I asked, with a carelessness I was far from feeling.

The buyer scowled. :

“He mumbled something about danc- ing feet, several times. Dancing feet. . . . And his fingers tapped as if he was keep- ing time to these dancing feet. And once he hummed part of one of your Ameri- can tunes. Or English, I don’t know which.”

“What tune was that?”

He pursed his bearded lips and shi tled a few bars. “There are smiles...”

“has

DANCING FEET

“But the man is mad, I think,” he went on, still scowling bewilderedly. “He asked me constantly to repeat what I had been saying. . . . Yet he seemed to hear things my ears could not hear. I suppose

someone was dancing in a near room, and ~

he heard—but I could not.”

His eyes narrowed shrewdly, and he chuckled.

“In fact, mon ami, 1 know he is mad! I contracted for all his olive oil for the season at a price so low that I could hard- ly believe he understood—a price that will ruin him, for this year at least. I was astonished when he signed at that figure. Had it been anyone else, I would have raised my own price—I only used it as a basis for bargaining. But Lakhdar is a hard man, and it is a stroke of business my house will appreciate. He has his own olive presses, you know, and ships a very fair grade of oil. . . .”

I let him talk on, but I wasn’t listen- ing. I was remembering Lakhdar’s rage in the café awhile before:

“What fool dares play that record . . . the song she danced to . . . dancing as she danced? .. .”

But the phonograph in the rear of the café had not been playing, and no one had been dancing.

How was it that he—and he alone— heard the dancing feet of the golden girl— ‘who was said to have gone to Paris? . . .

“__Caid must indeed be a very sick man,” I heard the voice of the buyer again.

He left the café then, leaving me to wonder . . . with that small chill steal- ing along my spine. . . .

“i ie scandal of Caid Lakhdar’s death

taised a very small tempest in a tea- pot composed of a very small bit of North Africa, when you contrast it with the great world happenings. But it cer-

693

tainly turned things upside down around Hamam Meknes, :

The young doctor fled at night. If he hadn’t he would have risked being sent to Devil’s Island. For there was a charge that he had deliberately made a dope ad- dict out of the Caid, perhaps to drain him of money.

“But I didn’t!” he cried again and again. “I didn’t! I gave him morphine. Much morphine. But it was to make him sleep. He could not sleep, I tell you, un- less he had a huge dose. He said he heard dancing feet constantly, and that they kept him awake. What could I do?”

His accusets grimly pointed out the circumstances of the Caid’s suicide.

“But it was madness that made him do it,” pleaded the doctor. “It was not the drug. It was madness. Who but a mad- man constantly cries out that he hears feet dancing—when there are none around to dance?”

He could never have prevailed in court, so it was just as well that he fled to Somaliland. The ending of the Caid Lakhdar was too monstrous.

Le Temps, in Paris, gave an account of it as accurate as any; a fairly long account, considering the item was but local colonial news:

Achmed Lakhdar, Caid of Hamam Meknes, Tunisia, committed suicide this morning, a raving maniac,

For some weeks he had been ill, suffering from insomnia, according to the Arab physician who at- tended him, though it seems unlikely that in- somnia alone could have been the cause of his illness and the ensuing madness.

This morning, after a sleepless night, the Caid rose from his Tod: suddenly, screaming. He has had a delusion for some time that he could hear dancing feet, according to the Arab servant who told the stoty. It is alleged that the delusion went back to his marriage with a dancer of un- known origin, who left him after a few months of -harem life. But regardless of where the de- lusion originated, it overpowered him.

Screaming and raving about the dancing feet that would not let him rest, the Caid wrenched a surgical knife from the kit of the Arab doctor, and ran into the next room. He barred the door against the attacks of the doctor, the servants, and

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an American. business man who fepresents a farm machinery corporation in Hamam Meknes.

It took many minutes before the door could be broken down. And by that time the- Caid had killed himself with the knife.

It is alleged that the doctor in attendance will be charged with injudicious use of narcotics, and that the Caid’s momentary insanity sprang from the use of morphine, to which the Caid had re- cently become addicted.

Yes, I was the American business man. I'd gone into the house to see about a machinery order the Caid had placed months before and refused to confirm since. I arrived just in time to see him run, screaming and biting his frothing lips, into the next room—not having

been stopped by any servants at the door

as I should have been, and not knowing the real extent of the man’s illness.

Le Temps didn’t print quite all the de- tails of his death—because the reporter from Tunis didn’t get them all. But those of us trying to break down that barred door and reach him got the de- tails, all right! . First audibly, and then visually. :

“For the love of Allah!” we heard him shriek again and again behind the barred door. “I can’t bear any more! Not any more! In Allah’s name!” ~ Then his screams took a turn that made

our blood run cold, and we heard him shriek:

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“Stop that dancing! Stop it! Stop it!”

He sang crazily, with a harsh Arabic accent, the only English words he knew: “There are smiles that make you happy...”

We got the door down then, and saw him standing in the center of the room. The surgical knife he had snatched from the doctor’s emergency kit was pressed to his chest. Blood was dripping from it, and the point was sinking deeper and deeper into his flesh under the pressure of his mad hand.

He gave it a final thrust as we leaped toward him. ...

W: ‘or the Café Penny have never said anything about the manner of the Caid’s death. Not even after we'd learned and pieced together the scattered facts I have related here. Of what use to say anything now that Lakhdar is dead and beyond reach'of punishment? . . . But 7s he beyond reach of punishment? I, for one, sometimes wonder. I ‘some-

times think that the Caid Lakhdar, who could only sleep when he took enough morphine to “kill a camel”, cannot sleep even now—that on the lid of his coffin in his grave by the sea-wall the dainty feet of Mademoiselle d’Or, the golden girl, will for ever be dancing.

“Madly he implored from - Xexanoth one hour of that bygone autumn.”

She

(hain of Aforgomon

By CLARK ASHTON SMITH

What strange obsession led John Milwarp to probe into his past lives? A striking and unforgettable tale

watp and his writings should have fallen so speedily into semi-oblivion. His books, treating of Oriental life in a somewhat flowery, romantic style, were popular a few months ago. But now, in

CU IS indeed strange that John Mil-

spite of their range and penetration, their pervasive verbal sorcery, they are seldom mentioned; and they seem to have van- ished unaccountably from the shelves of bookstores and libraries. Even the mystery of Milwarp’s death, 695,

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baffling to both law and science, has evoked but a passing interest, an excite- ment quickly lulled and forgotten.

I was well acquainted with Milwarp over a term of years. But my recollection of the man is becoming strangely blurred, like an image in a misted mirror. His dark, half-alien personality, his preoccu- pation with the occult, his immense knowledge of Eastern life and lore, are things I remember with such effort and vagueness as attends the recovery of a dream. Sometimes I almost doubt that he ever existed. It is as if the man, and all that pertains to him, were being erased from human record by some mysterious acceleration of the common process of obliteration.

In his will, he appointed me his executor. I have vainly tried to interest publishers in the novel he left among his papers: a novel surely not inferior to any- thing he ever wrote. They say that his vogue has passed. Now I am publishing as a magazine story the contents ‘of the diary kept by Milwarp for a period pre- ceding his demise.

Perhaps, for the open-minded, this diary will explain the enigma of his death. It would seem that the circum- stances of that death are virtually forgot- ten, and I repeat them here as part of my endeavor to revive and perpetuate Mil- warp’s memoty.

Milwarp had returned to his house in San Francisco after a long sojourn in Indo-China. We who knew him gathered that he had gone into places seldom vis- ited by Occidentals. At the time of his demise he had just finished correcting the typescript of a novel which dealt with the more romantic and mysterious aspects of Burma.

On the morning of April 2nd, 1933, his housekeeper, a middle-aged woman, was startled by a glare of brilliant light which issued from the half-open door of

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Milwarp’s study. It was as if the whole room were in flames. Horrified, the wo- man hastened to investigate. Entering the study, she saw her master sitting in an armchair at the table, wearing the rich, somber robes of Chinese brocade which he affected as a dressing-gown. He sat stiffly erect, a pen clutched unmoving in his fingers on the open pages of a manu- script volume. About him, in a sort of nimbus, glowed and flickered the strange light; and her only thought was that his garments were on fire.

She ran toward him, crying out a warn- ing. At that moment the weird nimbus brightened intolerably, and the wan early dayshine, the electric bulbs that still burned to attest the night’s labor, were alike blotted out. It seemed to the house- keeper that something had gone wrong with the room itself; for the walls and table vanished, and a great, luminous gulf opened before her; and on the verge of the gulf, in a seat that was not his cushioned armchair but a huge and rough- hewn seat of stone, she beheld her mas- ter stark and rigid. His heavy brocaded robes were gone, and about him, from head to foot, were blinding coils of pure white fire, in the form of linked chains. She could not endure the brilliance of the chains, and cowering back, she shielded her eyes with her hands. When she dared to look again, the weird glowing had faded, the room was as usual; and Milwarp’s motionless figure was seated at the table in the posture of writing.

HAKEN and terrified as she was, the

woman found courage to approach her master. A hideous smell of burnt flesh arose from beneath his garments, which were wholly intact and without visible trace of fire. He was dead, his fingers clenched on the pen and his fea- tures frozen in a stare of tetanic agony. His neck and wrists were completely en-

THE CHAIN OF AFORGOMON

circled by frightful burns that had charred them deeply. The coroner, in his exam- ination, found that these burns, preserv- ing an outline as of heavy links, were extended in long unbroken spirals around the arms and legs and torso. The burn- ing was apparently the cause of Mil- warp’s death: it was as if iron chains, heated to incandescence, had been wrapped about him.

Small credit was given to the house- keeper's story of what she had seen. No one, however, could suggest an acceptable explanation of the bizarre mystery. There was, at the time, much aimless discussion; but, as I have hinted, people soon turned to other matters. The efforts made to solve the riddle were somewhat perfunc- tory. Chemists tried to determine the nature of a queer drug, in the form of a gtay powder with pearly granules, to which use Milwarp had become addicted. But. their tests merely revealed the presence of an alkaloid whose source and attributes were obscure to Western science.

Day by day, the whole incredible busi- ness lapsed from public attention; and those who had known Milwarp began to display the forgetfulness that was no less unaccountable than his weird doom. The housekeeper, who had held stedfastly in the beginning to her story, came at length to share the common dubiety. Her ac- count, with repetition, became vague and contradictory; detail by detail, she seemed to forget the abnormal circumstances that she had witnessed with overwhelming horror.

The manuscript volume, in which Mil- warp had apparently been writing at the time of death, was given into my charge with his other papers. It proved to be a diary, its last entry breaking off abrupt- ly. Since reading the diary, I have has- tened to transcribe it in my own hand, because, for some mysterious reason, the

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ink of the original is already fading and has become almost illegible in places.

The reader will note certain lacune, due to passages written in an alphabet which neither I nor any scholar of my ac- quaintance can transliterate. These pas- sages seem to form an integral part of the narrative, and they occur mainly to- ward the end, as if the writer had turned more and more to a language remem- bered from his ancient avatar. To the same mental reversion one must attribute the singular dating, in which Milwarp, still employing English script, appears to pass from our contemporary notation to that of some premundane world.

I give hereunder the entire dairy, which begins with an undated footnote:

Se book, unless I have been misin- formed concerning the qualities of the drug sozvara, will be the record of my former life in a lost cycle. I have had the drug in my possession for seven months, but fear has prevented me from using it. Now, by certain tokens, I perceive that the longing for knowledge will soon overcome the fear.

Ever since my earliest childhood I have: been troubled by intimations, dim, un- placeable, that seemed to argue a forgot- ten existence. These intimations partook of the nature of feelings rather than ideas or images: they were like the wraiths of dead memories. In the background of my mind there has lurked a sentiment of formless, melanchody desire for some nameless beauty long perished out of time. And, coincidentally, I have been haunted by an equally formless dread, an apprehension as of some bygone but still imminent doom.

Such feelings have persisted, undi- minished, throughout my youth and ma- turity, but nowhere have I found any clue to their causation. My travels in the mys- tic Orient, my delvings into occultism,

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have merely convinced me that these shadowy intuitions pertain to some incar- nation buried under the wreck of re- motest cycles.

Many times, in my wanderings through Buddhistic lands, I had heard of the drug souvara, which is believed to restore, even for the uninitiate, the memory of other lives. And at last, after many vain efforts, I managed to procure a supply of the drug. The manner in which I ob- tained it is a tale sufficiently remarkable in itself, but of no special relevance here. So far—perhaps because of that appre- hension which I have hinted—I have not dared to use the drug.

Mv 9TH, 1933. This morning I took souvara for the first time, dis- solving the proper amount in pure dis- tilled water as I had been instructed to do, Afterward I leaned back easily in my chair, breathing with a slow, regular rhythm. I had no preconceived idea of the sensations that would mark the drug’s initial effect, since these were said to vary prodigiously with the temperament of the users; but I composed myself to await them with tranquillity, after formulating clearly in my mind the purpose of the experiment.

For a while there was no change in my awareness. I noticed a slight quick- ening of the pulse, and modulated my breathing in conformity with this. Then, by slow degrees, I experienced a sharpen- ing of visual perception. The Chinese rugs on the floor, the backs of the ser- tied volumes in my bookcases, the very wood of chairs, table and shelves, began to exhibit new and unimagined colors. At the same time there were curious alterations of outline, every object seem- ing to extend itself in a hitherto unsus- pected fashion. Following this, my sur- roundings became semi-transparent, like molded shapes of mist. I found that I

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could see through the marbled cover the illustrations in a volume of John Martin's edition of Paradise Lost, which lay before me on the table.

All this, I knew, was a mere extension of ordinary physical vision. It was only a prelude to those apperceptions of oc- cult realms which I sought through soxz- vara, Fixing my mind once more on the goal of the experiment, I became aware that the misty walls had vanished like a drawn arras. About me, like reflections in rippled water, dim sceneries wavered and shifted, erasing one another from in- stant to instant. I seemed to hear a vague but ever-present sound, more musical than the murmurs of -air, water or fire, which was a property of the unknown el- ement that environed me.

With a sense of troublous familiarity, I beheld the blurred unstable pictures which flowed past me upon this never- resting medium. Orient temples, flashing with sun-struck bronze and gold; the sharp, crowded gables and spires of medieval cities; tropic and northern for- ests; the costumes and physiognomies of the Levant, of Persia, of old Rome and Carthage, went by like blown, flying mirages. Each succeeding tableau be- longed to a more ancient period than the one before it—and I knew that each was a scene from some former existence of my own.

Still tethered, as it were, to my present self, I reviewed these visible memories, which took on tri-dimensional depth and clarity. I saw myself as warrior and troubadour, as noble and merchant and mendicant. I trembled with dead fears, I thrilled with lost hopes and raptures, and was drawn by ties that death and Lethe had broken. Yet never did I fully iden- tify myself with those other avatars: for I knew well that the memory I sought pertained to some incarnation of older

epochs,

THE CHAIN OF AFORGOMON

Still ‘the fantasmagoria streamed on, and I turned giddy with vertigo ineffable before the vastness and diuturnity of the cycles of being. It seemed that I, the watcher, was lost in a gray land where the homeless ghosts of all dead ages went fleeing from oblivion to oblivion.

The walls of Nineveh, the columns and towers of unnamed cities, rose before me and were swept away. I saw the luxuriant

plains that are now the Gobi desert. The

sea-lost capitals of Atlantis were drawn to the light in unquenched glory. I gazed on lush and cloudy scenes from the first continents of Earth. Briefly I relived the beginnings of terrestrial man—and knew that the secret I would learn was ancient- er even than these.

My visions faded into black voidness —and yet, in that void, through fathom- less eons, it seemed that I existed still like a blind atom in the space between the worlds.. About me was the darkness and repose of that night which antedated the Earth’s creation. Time flowed backward with the silence of dreamless sleep. . . .

cS illumination, when it came, was instant and complete. I stood in the full, fervid blaze of day amid royally towering blossoms in a deep garden, be- yond whose lofty, vine-clad walls I heard the confused murmuring of the great city called Kalood. Above me, at their vernal zenith, were the four small suns that illumed the planet Hestan. Jewel- colored insects fluttered about me, light- ing without fear on the rich habiliments of gold and black, enwrought with astro- nomic symbols, in which I was attired. Beside me was a dial-shaped altar of zoned agate, carved with the same sym- bols, which were those of the dreadful omnipotent time-god, Aforgomon, whom I served as a priest.

I had not even the slightest memory of myself as John Milwarp, and the long

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pageant of my terrestrial lives was as something that had never been—or was yet to be. Sorrow and desolation choked my heart as ashes fill some urn conse- crated to the dead; and all the hues and perfumes of the garden about me were redolent only of the bitterness of death. Gazing darkly upon the altar, I muttered blasphemy against Aforgomon, who, in his inexorable course, had taken away my beloved and had sent no solace for my gtief. Separately I cursed the signs upon the altar: the stars, the worlds, the suns, the moons, that meted and fulfilled the processes of time. Belthoris, my be- trothed, had died at the end of the pre- vious autumn: and so, with double’ mal- edictions, I cursed the stars and planets presiding over that season.

I became aware that a shadow had fallen beside my own on the altar, and knew that the dark -sage and sorcerer Atmox had obeyed my summons. Fear- fully but not without hope I turned to- ward him, noting first of all that he bore under his arm a heavy, sinister-looking volume with covers of black steel and hasps of adamant. Only when I had made sure of this did I lift my eyes to his face, which was little less somber and forbidding than the tome he carried.

“Greeting, O Calaspa,” he said harsh- ly. “I have come against my own will and judgment. The lore that you request is in this volume; and since you saved me in former years from the inquisitorial wrath of the time-god’s priests, I cannot refuse to share it with you. But under- stand well that even I, who have called upon names that are dreadful to utter, and have evoked forbidden presences, shall never dare to assist you in this con- juration. Gladly would I help you to hold converse with the shadow of Bel- thoris, or to animate her still unwithered body and draw it forth from the tomb. But that which you purpose is another

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matter. You alone must perform the or- dained rites, must speak the necessary words: for the consequences of this thing will be direr than you deem.”

“T care not for the consequences,” I re- plied eagerly, ‘‘if it be possible to bring back the lost hours which I shared with Belthoris. Think you that I could content myself with her shadow, wandering thin- ly back from the Borderland? Or that I could take pleasure in the fair clay that the breath of necromancy has troubled and has made to arise and walk without mind or soul? Nay, the Belthoris I would summon is she on whom the shadow of death has never yet fallen!”

It seemed that Atmox, the master of doubtful arts, the vassal of umbrageous powers, recoiled and blenched before my vehement declaration.

“Bethink you,” he said with minatory sterness, “that this thing will constitute a breach of the sacred logic of time and a blasphemy against Aforgomon, god of the minutes and the cycles. Moreover, there is little to be gained: for not in its entirety may you bring back the season of your love, but only one single hour, torn with infinite violence from its rightful period in time. . . . Refrain, I adjure you, and content yourself with a lesser sorcery.”

“Give me the book,’’ I demanded. “My service to Aforgomon is forfeit With due reverence and devotion I have worshipped the time-god, and have done in his honor the rites ordained from eter- nity; and for all this the god has be- trayed me.”

Then, in that high-climbing, luxuriant garden beneath the four suns, Atmox opened the adamantine clasps of the steel- bound volume; and, turning to a certain page, he laid the book reluctantly in my hands. The page, like its fellows, was of some unholy parchment streaked with musty discolorations and blackening at the

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margin with sheer antiquity; but. upon it shone unquenchably the dread charac- ters a primal archimage had written with an ink bright as the new-shod ichor of demons. Above this page I bent in my madness, conning it over and over till I was dazzled by the fiery runes; and, shut- ting my eyes, I saw them burn on a red darkness, still legible, and writhing like hellish worms.

Hollowly, like the sound of a far bell, I heard the voice of Atmox: “You have learned, O Calaspa, the unutterable name of that One whose assistance can alone restore the fled hours. And you have learned the incantation that will rouse that hidden power, and the sacrifice need- ed for its propitiation. Knowing these things, is your heart still strong and your purpose firm?”

The name I had read in the wizard volume was that of the chief cosmic power antagonistic to Aforgomon; the in- cantation and the required offering were those of a foul demonolatry. Neverthe- less, I did not hesitate, but gave resolute affirmative answer to the somber query of Atmox.

Pees that I was inflexible, he bowed his head, trying no more to dissuade me. Then, as the flame-runed volume had bade me do, I defiled the altar of Aforgomon, blotting certain of its prime symbols with dust and spittle. While Atmox looked on in silence, I wounded my right arm to its deepest vein on the sharp-tipped gnomon of the dial; and, letting the blood drip from zone to zone, from orb to orb on the graven agate, I made unlawful sacrifice, and intoned aloud, in the name of the Lurking Chaos, Xexanoth, an abominable ritual composed by a backward repetition and jumbling of litanies sacred to the time-god.

Even as I chanted the incantation, it seemed that webs of shadow were woven

THE CHAIN OF AFORGOMON

foully athwart the suns; and the ground shook a little, as if colossal demons trod the world’s rim, striding stupendously from abysses beyond. The garden walls and trees wavered like a wind-blown re- flection in a pool; and I grew faint with the loss of that life-blood I had poured out in demonolatrous offering. Then, in my flesh and in my brain, I felt the in- tolerable racking of a vibration like the long-drawn shock of cities riven by earth- quake, and coasts crumbling before some chaotic sea; and my flesh was torn and harrowed, and my brain shuddered with the toneless discords sweeping through me from deep to deep.

I faltered, and confusion gnawed at my inmost being. Dimly I heard the prompt- ing of Atmox, and dimmer still was the sound of my own voice that made answer to Xexanoth, naming the impious necro- mancy which was to be effected only through its power. Madly I implored from Xexanoth, in despite of time and its ordered seasons, one hour of that bygone autumn which I had shared with Beltho- ris; and imploring this, I named no spe- cial hour: for all, in memory, had seemed of an equal joy and gladness,

As the words ceased upon my lips, I thought that darkness fluttered in the air like a great wing; and the four suns went out, and my heart was stilled as if in death. Then the light returned, falling obliquely from suns mellow with full- tided autumn; and nowhere beside me was there any shadow of Atmox; and the altar of zoned agate was bloodless and undefiled. I, the lover of Belthoris, wit- ting not of the doom and sorrow to come, stood happily with my beloved before the altar, and saw her young hands crown its ancient dial with the flowers we had plucked from the garden.

Dreadful beyond all fathoming are the mysteries of time. Even I, the priest and initiate, though wise in the secret doc-

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trines of Aforgomon, know little enough of that elusive, ineluctable process where- by the present becomes .the past and the future resolves itself into the present. All men have pondered the riddles of dura- tion and transience; have wondered, vain- ly, to what bourn the lost days and the sped cycles are consigned. Some have dreamt that the past abides unchanged, becoming eternity as it slips from our mortal ken; and others have deemed that time is a stairway whose steps crumble one by one behind the climber, falling in- to a gulf of nothing.

Howsoever this may be, I know that

she who stood: beside me. was the Bel- thoris on whom no shadow of mortality had yet descended. The hour was one new-born in a golden season; and the minutes to come were pregnant with all wonder and surprize belonging to the un- tried future. Taller was. my beloved than the frail, unbowed lilies of the garden. In her eyes was the sapphire of moonless evenings sown with small golden stars. Her lips were strangely curved, but only blitheness and joy had gone to their shaping. She and I had been betrothed from our child- hood, and the time of the marriage-rites was now approaching. Our intercourse was wholly free, according to the custom of that world. Often she came to walk with me in my garden and to decorate the altar of that god whose revolving moons and suns would soon bring the season of our felicity.

The moths that flew about us, winged with aerial cloth-of-gold, were no lighter than our hearts. Making blithe holiday, we fanned our frolic mood to a high flame of rapture. We were akin to the full-hued, climbing flowers, the swift- darting insects, and our spirits blended and soared with the perfumes that were drawn skyward in the warm air. Un- heard by us was the loud murmuring of

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the mighty city of Kalood lying beyond my garden walls; for us the many-peo- pled planet known as Hestan no longer existed; and we dwelt alone in a universe of light, in a blossomed heaven. Exalted by love in the high harmony of those mo- ments, we seemed to touch eternity; and even I, the priest of Aforgomon, forgot the blossom-fretting days, the system-de- vouring cycles.

- In the sublime folly of passion, I swore then that death or discord could never mar the perfect communion of our hearts. After we had wreathed the altar, I sought the rarest, the most delectable flowers: frail-curving cups of wine-washed pearl, of moony azure and white with scrolled purple lips; and these I twined, between kisses and laughter, in the black maze of Belthoris’ hair; saying that another shrine than that of time should receive its due offering. —

Tenderly, with a lover’s delay, I lin- gered over the wreathing; and, ere I had finished, there fluttered to the ground be- side us a great, crimson-spotted moth whose wing had somehow been broken in its airy voyaging through the garden. And Beithoris, ever tender of heart and pitiful, turned from me and took up the moth in her hands; and some ‘of. the bright blossoms dropped from her hair unheeded. Tears welled from her deep blue eyes; and seeing that the moth was sorely hurt and would never fly again, she refused to be comforted; and no longer would she respond to my passion- ate wooing. I, who grieved less for the moth than she, was somewhat vexed; and between her sadness and my vexation, there grew between us some tiny, tem- porary rift... .

Then, ere love had mended the mis- understanding; then, while we stood be- fore the dread altar of time with sun- dered hands, with eyes averted from each other, it seemed that a shroud of

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darkness descended upon the garden. I heard the crash and crumbling of shat- tered worlds, and a black flowing of ruin- ous things that went past me through the

-darkness. The dead leaves of winter were

blown about me, and there was a falling of tears or rain. . . . Then the vernal suns came back, high-stationed in cruel splendor; and with them came the knowl-

‘edge of all that had been, of Belthoris’

death and my sorrow, and the madness that had Jed to forbidden sorcery. Vain now, like all other hours, was the resum- moned hour; and doubly irredeemable was my loss. My blood dripped heavily on the dishallowed altar, my faintness grew deathly, and I saw through murky mist the face of Atmox beside me; and the face was like that of some commina- tory demon. . .

Ma 13TH. I, John Milwarp, write this date and my name with an odd dubiety. My visionary experience under the drug soxzvara ended with that rilling of my blood on the symboled dial, that glimpse of the terror-distorted face of Atmox. All this was in another world, in a life removed from the present by births and deaths without number; and yet, it seems, not wholly have I returned from the twice-ancient past. Memories, broken but strangely vivid and living, press upon me from the existence of which my vision was a fragment; and portions of the lore of Hestan, and scraps of its history, and words from its lost language, arise un- bidden in my mind.

Above all, my heart is still shadowed by the sorrow of Calaspa. His desperate necromancy, which would seem to others no more than a dream within a dream, is stamped as with fire on the black page of recollection. I know the awfulness of the god he had blasphemed; and the foulness of the demonolatry he had-done, and the sense of guilt and despair under which

THE CHAIN OF AFORGOMON

he swooned. It is ¢his that I have striven all my life to remember, this which I have been doomed to re-experience. And I fear with a great fear the farther knowl- edge which a second experiment with the drug will reveal to me.

oe next entry of Milwarp’s diary be- gins with a strange dating in English script: “The second day of the moon Occalat, in the thousand-and-ninth year of the Red Eon.” This dating, perhaps, is repeated in the language of Hestan: for, directly beneath it, a line of unknown ciphers is set apart. Several lines of the subsequent text are in the alien tongue; and then, as if by an unconscious rever- .sion, Milwarp continues the diary in English. There is no reference to another experiment with souvara; but apparently such had been made, with a continued re- vival of his lost memories.

. . . What genius of the nadir gulf had tempted me to this thing and had caused me to overlook the consequences? Verily, when I called up for myself and Belthoris an hour of former autumn, with all that was attendant upon the hour, that bygone interim was likewise evoked and repeated for the whole world Hestan, and the four suns of Hestan, From the full midst of spring, all men had stepped backward into autumn, keeping only the memory of things prior to the hour thus resurrected, and knowing not the events future to the hour. But, returning to the present, they recalled with amazement the unnatural necromancy; and fear and bewilderment were upon them; and none could interpret the meaning.

For a brief period, the dead had lived again; the fallen leaves had returned to the bough; the heavenly bodies had stood at a long-abandoned station; the flower had gone back into the seed, the plant in- to the root. Then, with eternal disorder

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set among all its cycles, time had re- sumed its delayed course.

No movement of any cosmic body, no year or instant of the future, would be precisely as it should have been. The error and discrepancy I had wrought would bear fruit in ways innumerable. The suns would find themselves at fault; the worlds and atoms would go always a little astray from their appointed bourn.

It was of these matters that Atmox spoke, warning me, after he had stanched my bleeding wound. For he too, in that relumined hour, had gone back and had lived again through a past happening. For him the hour was one in which he had descended into the nether vaults of his house. There, standing in a many- pentacled circle, with burning of unholy incense and uttering of accurst formule, he had called upon a malign spirit from the bowels of Hestan and had questioned it concerning the future. But the spirit, black and voluminous as the fumes of pitch, refused to answer him directly and pressed furiously with its clawed mem- bers against the confines of the circle. It said only: “Thou hast summoned me at thy peril. Potent are the spells thou hast used, and strong is the circle to with- stand me, and I am restrained by time and space from the wreaking of my anger upon thee. But haply thou shalt summon me again, albeit in the same hour of the Same autumn; and in that summoning the laws of time shall be broken, and a rift shall be made in space; and through the rift, though with some delay and divaga- tion, I will yet win to thee.”

Saying no more, it prowled restlessly about the circle; and its eyes burned down upon Atmox like embers in a high-lifted sooty brazier; and ever and anon its fanged mouth was flattened on the spell- defended air. And in the end he could dismiss it only after a double ee of the form of exorcism.

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As he told me this tale in the garden, Atmox trembled; and his eyes searched the narrow shadows wrought by the high suns; and he seemed to listen for the noise of some evil thing that burrowed toward him beneath the earth.

| ae day of the moon Occalat. Stricken with terrors beyond those of Atmox, I kept apart in my mansion amid the city of Kalood. I was still weak with the loss of blood I had yielded to Xexa- noth; my senses were full of strange shadows; my servitors, coming and going after me, were as phantoms, and scarcely I heeded the pale fear in their eyes or heard the dreadful things they whispered.

. . Madness and chaos, they told me, were abroad in Kalood; the, divinity of Aforgomon was angered. All men thought that some baleful doom impend- ed because of that unnatural confusion which had been wrought among the hours of time.

This afternoon they brought me the story of Atmox’s death. In bated tones they told me how his neophytes had heard a roaring as of a loosed tempest in the chamber where he sat alone with his wizard volumes and paraphernalia. Above the roaring, for a little, human screams had sounded, together with a clashing as of hurled censers and braziers, a crashing as of overthrown tables and tomes. Blood rilled from under the shut door of the chamber, and, rilling, it took from in- stant to instant the form of dire ciphers that spelt an unspeakable name. After the noises had ceased, the neophytes wait- ed a long while ere they dared to open the door. Entering at last, they saw the floor and the walls heavily bespattered with blood, and rags of the sorcerer’s rai- ment mingled everywhere with the sheets of his torn volumes of magic, and the shreds and manglings of his flesh strewn amid broken furniture, and his brains

WEIRD TALES

daubed in a horrible paste on the high ceiling.

Hearing this tale, I knew that the earthly demon feared by Atmox had found him somehow and had wreaked its wrath upon him. In ways unguess- able, it had reached him through the chasm made in ordered time and space by one hour repeated through necro- mancy. And because of that lawless chasm, the magician’s power and lore had utterly failed to defend him from the demon... .

Re" day of the moon Occalat. At- mox, I am sure, had not betrayed me: for in so doing, he must have betrayed his own implicit share in my crime. . Howbeit, this evening the priests came to my house ere the setting of the western- most sun: silent, grim, with eyes averted as if from a foulness innominable. Me, their fellow, they enjoined with loth ges- tures to accompany them. . . .

Thus they took me from my house and along the thoroughfares of Kalood to- ward the lowering suns. The streets were empty of all other passers, and it seemed that no man desired to mect or behold the blasphemer. . . .

Down the avenue of gnomon-shaped pillars, I was led to the portals of Aforgomon’s fane: those awfully gaping portals arched in the likeness of some de- vouring chimera’s mouth. . . .

Qa day of the moon Occalat. They had thrust me into an oubliette be- neath the temple, dark, noisome and soundless except for the maddening, measured drip of water beside me. There I lay and knew not when the night passed and the morning came, Light was ad- mitted only when my captors opened the iron door, coming to lead me before the tribunal... .

. . . Thus the priests condemned me,

W. T.—S

THE CHAIN OF AFORGOMON

speaking with one voice in whose dread- ful volume the tones of all were indis- tinguishably blended. Then the aged high-priest Helpenor called aloud upon Aforgomon, offering himself as a mouth- piece to the god, and asking the god to pronounce through him the doom that was adequate for such enormities as those of which I had been judged guilty by my fellows.

Instantly, it seemed, the god descended into Helpenor; and the figure of the high- priest appeared to dilate prodigiously be- neath his mufflings; and the accents that issued from his mouth were like thunders of the upper heaven:

“O Calaspa, thou hast set disorder amid all future hours and eons through this evil necromancy. Thereby, moreover, thou hast wrought thine own doom: fet- tered art thou for ever to the hour thus unlawfully repeated, apart from its due place in time. According to hieratic rule, thou shalt meet the death of the fiery chains: but.deem not that this death is more than the symbol of thy true punish- ment. Thou shalt pass hereafter through other lives in Hestan, and shalt climb midway in the cycles of the world sub- sequent to Hestan in time and space. But through all thine incarnations the chaos thou hast invoked will attend thee, widen- ing ever like a rift. And always, in all thy lives, the rift will bar thee from re- union with the soul of Belthoris; and always, though merely by an hour, thou shalt miss the love that should otherwise have been oftentimes regained.

“At last, when the chasm has widened overmuch, thy soul shall fare no farther in the onward cycles of incarnation. At that time it shall be given thee to re- member clearly thine ancient sin; and re- membering, thou shalt perish out of time. Upon the body of that latter life shall be found the charred imprint of the chains, as the final token of thy bondage. But

W.T.—4

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they that knew thee will soon forget, and thou shalt belong wholly to the cycles limited for thee by thy sin.”

M2 29TH. I write this date with infinite desperation, trying to con- vince myself that there is a John Milwarp who exists on Earth, in the Twentieth Century. For two days running, I have not taken the drug soxvara; and yet I have returned twice to that oubliette of Aforgo- mon’s temple, in which the priest Cal- aspa awaits his doom. Twice I have been immersed in its stagnant darkness, hear- ing the slow drip of water beside me, like a clepsydra that tells the black ages of the damned.

Even as I write this at my library table, it seems that an ancient midnight plucks at the lamp. The bookcases turn to walls of oozing, nighted stone. There is no longer a table . . . nor one who writes

. and I breathe the noisome dank- ness of a dungeon lying unfathomed by any sun, in a lost world.

| Pee day of the moon Occalat. Today, for the last time, they took me from my prison. Helpenor, together with three others, came and led me to the adyturn of the god. Far beneath the outer temple we went, through spacious crypts unknown to the common worshippers. There was no word spoken, no glance ex- changed between the others and me; and it seemed that they already regarded me as one cast out from time and claimed by oblivion.

We came ultimately to that sheer-fall- ing gulf in which the spirit of Aforgo- mon is said to dwell. Lights, feeble and far-scattered, shone around it like stars on the rim of cosmic vastness, shedding no tay into the depths. There, in a seat of hewn stone overhanging the frightful verge, I was placed by the executioners; and a ponderous chain of black unrusted

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metal, stapled in the solid rock, was ‘wound about and about me, circling my naked body and separate limbs, from head to foot.

To this doom, others had been con-

demned for heresy or impiety . . . though never for a sin such as mine. After the chaining of the victim, he was left for a stated interim, to ponder his crime—and haply to confront the dark divinity of Aforgomon. At length, from the abyss into which his position forced him to peer, a light would dawn, and a bolt of strange flame would leap upward, strik- ing the many-coiled chain about him and heating it instantly to the whiteness of candescent iron. The source and nature of the flame were mysterious, and many ascribed it to the god himself rather than to mortal agency.

Even thus they have left me, and have gone away. Long since the burden of the massy links, cutting deeper and deeper into my flesh, has become an agony. I am dizzy from gazing downward into the

WEIRD TALES

abyss—and yet I cannot fall. Beneath, immeasurably beneath, at recurrent inter- vals, I hear a hollow and solemn sound. Perhaps it is the sigh of sunken waters

. of cavern-straying winds . . . or the respiration of One that abides in the darkness, meting with his breath the slow minutes, the hours, the days, the ages. . . . My terror has become heavier than the chain, my vertigo is born of a two- fold gulf. .

Eons have es by and all the worlds have ebbed into nothingness, like wreck- age borne on a chasm-falling stream, tak- ing with them the lost face of Belthoris. I am poised above the gaping maw of the Shadow. . . . Somehow, in another world, an exile phantom has written these words

. a phantom who must fade utterly from time and place, even as I, the doomed priest Calaspa. I cannot remem- ber the name of the phantom.

Beneath me, in the black depths, there is an awful brightening. . .

(isillusionment

By VICTORIA BEAUDIN JOHNSON

Slow moving, from the tomb of years, Unbidden shadows come to me;

I greet them with a hollow voice, Nor hide the tears that they must see.

.We muse on al! that might have been;

Too well we know how strange it seems That Age, the ghost of yesterday,

Communes with shades of perished dreams.

You who have faith and youth and love, Can not discern this spectral host;

Too dazed with hope you can not see These shadows talking to a ghost.

“It was a bloody, staggering confusion of men and swords.”

reat Brain of Kaldar

By EDMOND HAMILTON

A superb tale of distant Kaldar, world of the great star Antares

1. On a Far World

HE sun that was shining in the sky was a colossal crimson sun, an incredible orb whose arc filled a

third of the heavens. It was not the familiar yellow sun of earth but was the

giant sun Antares, lying far across the starry universe from earth. Yet the man who stood on a terrace in its red blaze of light was an earthman.

Tall, lean; browned, dressed in a short

tunic of woven black metal and wearing 707

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a long sword at his side, Stuart Merrick looked thoughtfully. at that huge. rising sun. He turned abruptly as a girl came up to him, a slender feminine figure dressed like himself in the brief metal tunic.

Her dark eyes were alight in her finely chiseled, ruddy face as she greeted him, slipping her arm through his.

“You are not dreaming again of that far world from which you came, my Chan?”

Merrick smiled. ‘No, Narna. This world of Kaldar is my world, now.” He motioned with his hand at the scene that lay before them in the crimson sunlight.

They stood on the terrace of a mighty pyramidal building of black metal, and before them stretched a great city of such pyramids. This black city was laced with gardens of blood-red vegetation and over it hummed sleek, shining air-boats, com- ing and going.

Miles out from the city’s edge rose a stupendous wall of black metal moun- tains. And out beyond the enclosing mountain-wall, Merrick knew, stretched the crimson jungles that covered so much of this little-explored world of Kaldar. :

The city before Merrick was his city, the city Corla of which he was Chan, or ruler. For Stuart Merrick, an adventurer whom a group of experimenting earth- scientists had projected across space to this distant world, had by his courage and the strength of his sword-arm won for himself the rulership of this race.

He, an earthman, ruler of a race on a world of Antares! It seemed unreal to Merrick even now. But the unreality of it vanished, as always, as he felt on his arm the warm fingers of his wife Narna, the Corlan girl whom he loved and had fought for and won.

She looked up at him now and said, “Here come Holk and Jurul. Everything must be ready for the start.”

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Two. Corlan warriors were striding across the terrace, one a big, grizzled, bear-like figure, the other slender and wiry.

“The air-boat is ready, Chan Merrick,” reported Holk, the bigger warrior, “but

-before we start on this trip north to visit

the Dorta people, I wish you’d order one change made.”

“What's that, Holk?” Merrick asked. “Is something the matter with the air- boat?”

“No, it’s its captain,” Holk replied. ‘I'd like you to replace Rogor with another captain before we start north.”

“What's the matter with Rogor?” Merrick wanted to know. ‘“He’s one of the best flyers in Corla.”

The big Holk nodded grimly. “Yes, and he’s also one of your best enemies. He’s been heard to say that it was shame we let ourselves be ruled by you, a man from another world.”

“It is true, Chan,” put in the quieter warrior, _Jucul, “that Rogor has no love for you.’

“But that doesn’t say that he’s ais

loyal,” Merrick told them, laughing. “Forget your worries, and we'll get started.”

As he and Narna walked after the two warriors to the air-boat waiting to take them on a trip north to the allied race of the Dortas, Merrick smiled at the girl. “Holk and Jurul see traitors everywhere,” he told her.

Narna answered soberly, ‘They have reason to, my Chan. More than one in Corla still hates you because you are from a different world.”

wus they stepped up onto the deck of the long, torpedo-shaped _air-

boat, they were met by a keen-faced, ath- letic Corlan who wore the insignia of captain on his tunic. Merrick returned the man’s salute with a little longer

THE GREAT BRAIN OF KALDAR

scrutiny than usual, for this was Rogor, whom Holk distriisted.

“All is ready to start, Chan,” Rogor reported. He hesitated a moment, and then added, ‘And I wish to thank you.”

“To thank me? For what?” Merrick asked.

“For letting me retain command of your air-boat on this trip,” Rogor an- swered. “I know that some people have whispered I was disloyal, and I have been anxious.”

Merrick felt half ashamed that he had even listened to Holk’s suspicions, as he met the man’s frank eyes. “There is no doubt as to-your loyalty, Rogor,” he told the captain.

Quickly Rogor snapped orders to the crew, and as the propulsion-motors at the stern hummed loudly, the craft slanted up into the red sunlight. It circled high over Corla’s sky-storming pyramids, then headed north. Soon it crossed the stu- pendous scarps and peaks and chasms of the black metal mountains that encircled the city. Ahead stretched a sea of crim- son jungle, dense and unbroken as far as the eye could reach. Towering trees with scarlet foliage, weird, puffy moss- gtowths of immense size, hid the ground from sight. Merrick knew this great red jungle covered most of the world of Kaldar.

He wondered, as he had wondered many times before, what weird and alien things might not be wrapped in the con- cealing fastnesses of this mysterious jun- gle. He was gripped again by desire to explore the hidden secrets of this unex- plored planet.

Night came down as the air-boat ar- rowed northward over the unending jun- gles. No sooner had Antares’ blazing disk dipped behind the horizon than dark- ness was upon Kaldar.

Up from the east came a crimson, dull- glowing moon to light the night. It was

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one of Kaldar’s five wonderful moons, four of which were ‘red and one green. In their light as they rose, Merrick saw down in the dark jungle over which they were flying, glistening, moving things he knew were the terrible protoplasm-mon- sters that dwelled there.

At last Merrick retired to the small cabin assigned him and Narna. Holk and Jurul parted sleepily from him at the door of their own cabin. The helmsman still crouched watchfully at the wheel of the air-boat, back at the stern.

Ms last sensation as he fell asleep was the sound of the wind humming outside the air-boat’s cabin. When he awoke, he did not know how long he had slept, but his awakening was sudden.

It was a cry in Narna’s voice that woke him. He strove to spring up, and dis- covered that he was bound hand and foot, his hands tied behind his back. He squirmed up into a sitting position and as he did so heard a mocking laugh.

The cabin was fully lighted, the air- boat still humming through the night. Across the cabin two of the crew were holding Narna. Holk and Jurul lay at the door, bound like himself. And over Merrick, staring triumphantly down into his face, stood Rogor.

“Well, Chan Merrick, do you not recognize your faithful servant?’ asked Rogor mockingly.

Merrick’s stupefied brain endeavored to comprehend. ‘‘Rogor, what does this mean?”

“It means,” said Rogor coolly, “that I and the friends I picked for this craft’s crew are no longer taking your orders.”

Merrick saw the explanation. “By heaven, then, you are a traitor!”

“A traitor to you, the stranger from another world who usurped the rule of Corla, yes!” Rogor told him.

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“A traitor, just as Holk said!” Mer- rick repeated, still hardly able to believe.

Then a sense of unutterable bitterness possessed him. ‘This is my fault, Holk,” he said. “It wouldn’t have happened if I had listened to you.”

“It's the fault of that black-hearted wretch there whose neck I'll snap between by fingers when I get loose,” Holk growled.

Merrick looked steadily at the traitor. “What are you going to do with us? You and your followers can’t return to Corla.”’

“I don’t expect to,” Rogor told him calmly. ‘‘Did you ever hear of the great brain of Kaldar?”

Merrick’s uncomprehending look was answer.

“I see you never did. Well, it is rumored there is a power, a being they call the great brain, in the northeast of Kaldar. We are now speeding in that direction. I am going to find this brain and ally myself with it and so will not need to return to Corla. Narna goes with me, both as an added revenge against you and because I find her beautiful.

“As for you. and these two fools,” Rogor continued, ‘“‘we disembarrass our- selves of you here and now. It is simple —we merely toss you over the rail.”

Merrick made a sudden tremendous effort to break his bonds. They held, and in a moment his cracking muscles re- laxed.

“All right, take them out and heave them overside,” Rogor coolly told his followers.

“Good-bye, Narna,” said Merrick, his eyes steady on the girl’s as the men picked him up.

“Good-bye, Chan Merrick, but if you die be sure that I will not be long be- hind,” she told him steadily.

“A touching farewell, surely,” Rogor observed. ‘“Take them on out.”

Merrick felt himself carried out of the

WEIRD. TALES ||

cabin. The fresh rush of air in the dark- ness outside smote against his face. He and his friends were lifted up and their bodies were balanced on the deck-rail a moment as the men prepared to drop them over.

It couldn’t be happening, Merrick told himself! He hadn’t crossed the universe and fought all this world’s perils to end in this way! He would wake up in a mo- ment and he and the others would laugh at this dream. But even as he told hitn- self this, the men gave a mighty heave and Merrick heard the wind scream past his ears as he plunged downward through the dark.

2. Unseen Men

Ve fall was of short duration, for the air-boat apparently had been flying fairly low over the jungle at the moment they were tossed over. But it en- dured long enough for him to envision swiftly, as he streamed downward into the darkness, the stunning shock that would end all things for him when he struck.

He struck—a soft, deep mass into whose yielding substance he sank un- harmed! He lay for a moment stupefied by the fact that he was still living and conscious. Then as he stirred his bound limbs he found that he lay upon a great mass of puffy fiber, and instantly realized that by sheer good fortune he had landed in the darkness upon one of the huge moss-growths, that had cushioned his fall.

He heard a choking utterance in a deep voice from close beside him in the dark, At once he remembered the two friends who had been tossed over the rail with him.

“Holk! Jurul!” he called into the darkness. ‘“‘Are you all right?”

“Is that you, Chan Merrick?”. came Holk’s muffled voice. “I’ve got - my

THE GREAT BRAIN OF KALDAR

mouth full of this cursed stuff, but I’m all right, it seems.’ “I too, Chan,” voice. live?” “We were pitched over just right to fall on this moss-growth,” Merrick told them. “It was one chance in a thousand.” He rolled over as he spoke and now could see a little point of light diminish- ing in the moonlit heavens northeastward. “There goes the air-boat!’” he ex- claimed. “With Rogor commanding it and Narna in his power. If I’d only lis- tened to you, Holk!” he added in bitter self-reproach.

“I’m more to blame than you, Chan Merrick,” Holk growled, “for I thought Rogor a traitor but failed to watch him. But don’t fear—wherever he’s taking Narna, whether to that great brain he spoke of or elsewhere, we'll follow and find them.”

“We can’t follow far,” cut in Jurul’s quiet voice, “‘until your thick head finds some way to get us loose of these bonds.”

“My thick ’ Holk swore in the darkness. ‘“When I do get loose, Jurul, the first thing I'll do is to teach you some respect for your betters.

“Roll over to my side, Chan Merrick,”

he continued, ‘‘and I'll try gnawing your bonds. I'll settle with Jurul later.” ' Merrick rolled across the soft moss until he bumped into Holk’s prone form. By dint of much squirming and twisting he managed to bring his bound hands against Holk’s face.

The big warrior at once began chewing on the bonds. The tough cords: proved refractory, and Merrick heard him grumbling and growling as he ground them between his teeth.

Merrick, his eyes becoming slowly ac- customed now to the dim moonlight of the glade in which they lay, was sudden- ly aware that the innumerable little noises

came Jurul’s atid “But how comes it that we still

711

of the small forms of life about them had ceased. A heavy silence had abruptly in- vaded this part of the jungle. The small flying and hopping things had apparently all deserted their vicinity, and Merrick wondered about this as Holk chewed on. Then a sound came to his ears that he had not heard before, a heavy, smooth, rus- tling sound.

“Holk, listen!” he said suddenly. “Does it sound to you like something coming?”

Holk paused. The rustling grew loud- er.. “By the sun, it’s one of the proto- plasm-monsters!’’ the big warrior ex- claimed. ‘The thing has sensed us and is coming toward us!”

Merrick’s blood went cold. There were no creatures on Kaldar more feared by the Corlans than these mindless masses of protoplasm that glided through the jun- gles, engulfing all living things they met.

“Quick, let’s roll away from the thing!” Jurul exclaimed.

“We could never escape it that way!” Merrick told him. “Go on chewing, Holk—our only chance is to get free of our bonds before the thing reaches us!”

Holk chewed desperately. The rustling sounds became louder and louder, and they heard small twigs and bushes crack- ing in the dark as the tide of mindless life rolled over them. Merrick, his heart hammering, watched the far edge of the moonlit glade in which they lay.

He saw in a few moments a little sil- ver rivulet of what seemed glistening jelly flow out from the dark jungle into the glade. It grew wider, thicker, and other rivulets or arms of protoplasm emerge into the glade all along the edge. They merged, became a wave of proto- plasm slowly rolling across the glade to the moss-growth on which the three bound humans lay. The wave thickened into a wall of protoplasm six feet high and thirty in width, the extent of its far-

712

ther mass unguessable, flowing smoothly out of the tangled vegetation.

Merrick, with Holk still chewing mad- ly on his bonds, felt his hair stand on end as the incredible thing approached. No weapon could kill or even harm these mindless things—any wounds made in them simply flowed together again. Now from the huge mass a big glistening ten- tacle or pseudopod looped across the ground to the three men.

Merrick heard Holk shout at that mo- ment and felt his hands free behind him. He fumbled frantically at the bonds on his feet. He untied them swiftly and was tearing at the cords on Holk’s wrists when the great pseudopod swept around them. It strove to draw them back toward the central glistening mass, to be there smothered and ingested. But Merrick tore loose from the slimy grip and managed to loosen Holk’s bonds.

Two more pseudopods looped around them as Holk scrambled to his feet. With a great effort they wrenched loose. Holk swiftly picked up Jurul’s bound form and he and Merrick sprang away from the questing tentacles.

They threw themselves into a tangle of brush, and soon were out of hearing of the slow, unearthly monster. Then Holk unbound Jurul, who stood stiffly up.

M2 saw that the eastern sky was now paling and flushing red, the mighty circle of blazing Antares lifting above the horizon. He stood looking northeastward with fierce, haggard eyes.

“The air-boat was going northeastward when we last saw it,’ he said, “and Rogor said that in that direction lay his destination, the great brain of Kaldar.”

“And what is that?” Holk wanted to know. “Cursed if I think there’s a great brain or anything else in these benighted jungles!”

Jurul said, “I’ve heard talk in Corla,

WEIRD TALES

rumors about the mysterious, all-wise, all- powerful great brain. Sometimes it’s spoken of as a brain, sometimes as a city, sometimes as a race of people. No one knows what fact lies behind the vague rumors—Rogor probably knew no more.”

“Well, whether it’s a brain or city or people, we're going to find it,” Merrick said doggedly. ‘For there Narna will bes

“And there Rogor,” Holk said grimly.

“I'll get my hands yet around his pipe- stem of a throat.”

“Rogor is mine when we find him,” Merrick said with deadly emphasis. “But we'll not find him by waiting here. We know the direction, northeast, so we may as well start.” :

They started through the jungle with- out further discussion. The huge red sun was now lifting higher into the sky.

Through the hot hours of morning and early afternoon they pressed northeast- ward through the almost impenetrable tangle of the jungle. They encountered more of the fearsome protoplasm mon- sters but managed to evade the hideous creatures.

They had also to avoid other of Kal- dar’s weird forms of life, great flying things with leathery wings, creeping fungi, monstrous worm-creatures. ‘The strain of meeting these and the fight through the red vegetation had wearied them. They had seen no sign yet that they were nearing their destination, or even that it had any existence. Then there came from close ahead the rustling, gliding sound they knew well, and at the same moment a human cry of panic.

“By the sun, it’s one of those cursed protoplasm-monsters and it’s got a hu- man!” Holk cried.

“The only other humans in this part of Kaldar are Narna and Rogor and ‘his followers!” Merrick cried excitedly. “Quick—come on!”

THE GREAT BRAIN OF KALDAR

They raced ahead, emerged from the thicker vegetation into a fairly open grove of huge red-barked trees, and stopped at sight of an amazing scene. A protoplasm- monster of great size had thrown out the looping pseudopods that had apparently grasped its prey. From inside the coiling pseudopods came the human victim's call for help. But the person or being in the pseudopods’ grip was absolutely invisible! They could see the tentacles curling around a solid form, could hear the hu- man’s agonized shouts, but could not see him!

“By the sun, we've gone crazy!” Holk exclaimed. ‘There’s a man in the grip of those tentacles but he can’t be seen!”

“An invisible man? Impossible!” cried Jurul.

The pseudopods looped tighter and another choking scream came to their ears.

“Invisible or not, it zs a man in that thing’s grip!” Merrick cried. ‘‘And we're going to save him!”

He rushed forward, Holk and Jurul close behind him.

Sie heavy clubs crashed through the jelly-like tentacles and momen- tarily severed them. Unhurt, the proto- plasm quickly flowed together again, but in the meantime Merrick was pawing the ground in search of the invisible victim the tentacles had held.

His hands encountered the warm body of a man. The body was absolutely in- visible to Merrick but was solid and real as his own. While Holk and Jurul rained blows on the looping pseudopods, he picked up the body he could not see.

He yelled then for Holk and Jurul to flee, and they sprang for the thicker veg- etation. The monster’s reformed tenta- cles flowed after them, but they ran on until they were out of danger, and then Merrick laid down his invisible burden.

Merrick felt the man. He was living,

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stirring feebly. His body, to the touch, was quite tangible and real, and he wore a tunic and sword. Yet he was completely unseeable by their eyes.

“An invisible man!” Holk exclaimed, thunderstruck. “By the sun, it’s unbe- lievable!”’

“It’s real enough,” Merrick said, “though I admit that I too can hardly believe in this man’s existence.”

“Why, no one has ever dreamed of such a thing being possible on Kaldar! A man you can not see!” Jurul said, mar- veling.

Merrick felt the unseen man stir more strongly under his hands. “He’s coming round,” he said. “I don’t think he’s badly.

He was interrupted by a sharp cry from Holk, a rush of feet and scuffle of bodies. He looked up bewilderedly to see Holk and Jurul apparently fighting frenziedly with the empty air. They were striking out fiercely, their fists stopping in mid- air as though encountering solidity of some sort.

Then Merrick felt himself gripped by hands. He could see no one at all about him, but he and Holk and Jurul were rapidly being overcome and held help- less. Out of the air came many voices and the sound of many feet, and Merrick was aware that they were being attacked and overwhelmed by a throng of unseen men.

3. The City of Invisibility

Va ceased his useless struggles in a moment. Not only was it evi- dent that he could not free himself of his unseen captors, but his first frenzy of panic at being assailed by beings he could not see was passing. It was now apparent to him that the invisible men around him must simply be others like the invite man they had just rescued.

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He squirmed in the unseen grip and saw that Holk and Jurul too were held helpless. They presented a weird spectacle, their bodies half upright in a strained, twisted position, apparently without sup- port. Holk’s face was crimson with rage and with the efforts he had made to free himself.

“Holk, it’s no use struggling any more now,” Merrick called to him. “They’ve got us for the time.”

“Curse them, if I could only see them I'd be able to wring the necks of a few!” the big warrior panted. “I can fight any- thing I can see, but when it comes to phantoms——”

“They’re not phantoms, they’re sim- ply other invisible men like the one we just saved,” Merrick said. ‘‘Listen, do you hear them talking?”

The invisible men around them were now conversing excitedly. Merrick could understand what they were saying, for they spoke the language used by all races on Kaldar, human and unhuman. He gathered that they were helping up the invisible man they had saved from the protoplasm-monster, and asking him if . he was hurt. He assured them he was not, and -then Merrick heard him ap- proach.

The invisible man spoke to Merrick, his voice seeming to issue from the empty air but a few inches away.

“I am Durklun, son of Nath, co-ruler of the Talas,” he said. “Why did you three save me from the protoplasm-mon- ster?”

Merrick answered into nothingness. “Simply because it was evident you were a man, though an invisible one, and need- ed help.”

The invisible Durklun’s voice sounded puzzled. “But why should you save one of us Talas? Are you not men of the great brain?”

Merrick shook his head. “We never

WEIRD TALES

heard of the great brain until a few hours ago, though we are now searching for it.”

Another invisible man spoke. “Do not trust them, Durklun,” he advised. ‘They are visible men, and the only visible men are the creatures of the brain.”

“They do not speak or look like men of the brain, Zur,” answered Durklun’s voice. “But there is a way in which we can soon find out. I will examine their skulls.”

Merrick suddenly felt the hair on the back of his skull parted, invisible fingers searching and feeling his cranium.

Then he saw Holk and Jurul similarly examined by the invisible man. Holk swore at the indignity.

Then came the bodiless voice of Durk- lun. “They are xot men of the brain! Their skulls are without mark or scar! Release them!” ;

The unseen hands let go of Merrick and Holk and Jurul.

The invisible Durklun again spoke to Merrick. ‘‘For this rough treatment I apologize,” he said. “I became separated from the rest of my hunting-party, and was attacked by that monster. When Zur and my followers found you with me they thought you men of the brain. But you are not men of the brain, and neither are you of our race of Talas, since you are visible. Of what race then can you be?”

“We are of Corla, a powerful race of humans far to the south,’ Merrick told him. “I am Merrick, Chan of Corla, and these are two of my warriors. We three were cast from our air-boat by a traitor, but chance saved our lives. This traitor. abducted my wife and claimed he was go- ing to ally himself to the great brain of Kaldar; so we have been following to locate the brain and find my wife and her abductor.”

Durklun’s voice held wonder. “We Talas never dreamed that there. were any:

THE GREAT BRAIN OF KALDAR

other humans than us, except the men of the brain!”

“But are you really human?” Merrick asked. “None of us ever imagined that human beings could exist who were in- visible.”

“All of the Talas-are invisible, yet hu- man,” Durklun told him. ‘‘Long ago the wise men of our race discovered a method of making matter invisible. To protect us from our enemies, they used this proc- ess on all our race and made them all in- visible. We are born invisible, of invis- ible parents. Our bodies are completely transparent to light, and that is why you can not see us. But we ourselves see by other vibrations than light, and so we can see each other and also can see you and everything else.”

Holk swore his amazement. ‘“‘A whole invisible people! Who'd have believed it if we hadn’t seen it?”

“Ask them about the great brain, Chan Merrick,” put in Jurul.

Merrick nodded, turned back to the in- visible Durklun. ‘The rumored great brain of Kaldar really exists, then?’ he said.

“We know well that it exists,” Durk- Jun answered, “for the great brain is the most deadly enemy which we Talas have.”

“That is why,” put in the unseen Zur,

“we thought when we first saw you that you were more men the brain had sent against us.’

“How far is it from here to the brain’s place?” Merrick asked eagerly. ‘“We must get there as soon as possible.”

“The city of the brain is but a day’s march beyond our own city,”” Durklun re- plied, “but you must not go there. The humans who fall into the power of the brain meet a fate whose horror you can not yet imagine.”

“I’ve encountered terrors before and survived,” Merrick said grimly. * “My wife is there, and there I’m going.’

715.

“At least,” Durklun urged, “come with us to our city and get weapons and infor- mation to aid you in your quest.”

Merrick hesitated. Every fiber in his body urged him to waste no time in fol- lowing Rogor and Narna, but he saw the force of the invisible man’s suggestion.

“All right, we'll do it,” he told Durk- lun. ‘‘But we stay at the city of the Talas only long enough to learn what we can.”

“That is well,’ Durklun said, ‘though if you were wise you would give up your hopeless quest altogether, since to ap- proach the brain’s mysterious city is to court an end much worse than death.”

NE hee gave an order and Merrick

heard the invisible men group them- selves in obedience to it in a column. Some of the Talas linked hands with Mer- rick and Holk and Jurul, and they started thus through the jungles.

For two hours they and their invisible