

Red Nails, Polished

Roberta E. Howard

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Roberta E. Howard

A Conyn the Barbarian Story

A Gender Switch Adventure

The Skull on the Crag

The man on the horse reined in his weary steed. It stood with its legs wide-braced, its head drooping, as if it found even the weight of the gold-tassled, red-leather bridle too heavy. The man drew a booted foot out of the silver stirrup and swung down from the giltworked saddle. He made the reins fast to the fork of a sapling, and turned about, hands on his hips, to survey his surroundings.

They were not inviting. Giant trees hemmed in the small pool where his horse had just drunk. Clumps of undergrowth limited the vision that quested under the somber twilight of the lofty archs formed by intertwining branches. The man shivered with a twitch of his magnificent shoulders, and then cursed.

He was tall, full-chested, and large-limbed, with compact shoulders. His whole figure reflected an unusual strength, without detracting from the masculinity of his appearance. He was all man, in spite of his bearing and his garments. The latter were incongruous, in view of his present environs. Instead of a skirt he wore short, wide-legged silk breeches, which ceased a hand's breadth short of his knees, and were upheld by a wide silken sash worn as a girdle. Flaring-topped boots of soft leather came almost to his knees, and a low-necked, wide-collared, wide-sleeved silk shirt completed his costume. On one shapely hip he wore a straight double-edged sword, and on the other a long dirk. His unruly golden hair, cut square at his shoulders, was confined by a band of crimson satin.

Against the background of somber, primitive forest he posed with an unconscious picturesqueness, bizarre and out of place. He should have been posed against a background of sea clouds, painted masts, and wheeling gulls. There was the color of the sea in his wide eyes. And that was at it should have been, because this was Valerian of the Red Brotherhood, whose deeds are celebrated in song and ballad wherever seafarers gather.

He strove to pierce the sullen green roof of the arched branches and see the sky which presumably lay above it, but presently gave it up with a muttered oath.

Leaving his horse tied, he strode off toward the east, glancing back toward the pool from time to time in order to fix his route in his mind. The silence of the forest depressed him. No birds sang in the lofty boughs, nor did any rustling in the bushes indicate the presence of small animals. For leagues he had traveled in a realm of brooding stillness, broken only by the sounds of his own flight.

He had slaked his thirst at the pool, but now felt the gnawings of hunger and began looking about for some of the fruit on which he had sustained himself since exhausting the food originally in his saddlebags.

Ahead of him, presently, he saw an outcropping of dark, flintlike rock that sloped upward into what looked like a rugged crag rising among the trees. Its summit was lost to view amidst a cloud of encircling leaves. Perhaps its peak rose above the treetops, and from it he could see what lay beyond--if, indeed, anything lay beyond but more of this apparently illimitable forest through which he had ridden for so many days.

A narrow ridge formed a natural ramp that led up the steep face of the crag. After he had ascended some fifty feet, he came to the belt of leaves that surrounded the rock. The trunks of the trees did not crowd close to the crag, but the ends of their lower branches extended about it, veiling it with their foliage. He groped on in leafy obscurity, not able to see either above or below him; but presently he glimpsed blue sky, and a moment later came out in the clear, hot sunlight and saw the forest roof stretching away under his feet.

He was standing on a broad shelf which was about even with the treetops, and from it rose a spirelike jut that was the ultimate peak of the crag he had climbed. But something else caught his attention at the moment. His foot had struck something in the litter of blown dead leaves which carpeted the shelf. He kicked them aside and looked down on the skeleton of a woman. He ran an experienced eye over the bleached frame, but saw no broken bones nor any sign of violence. The woman must have died a natural death; though why she should have climbed a tall crag to die he could not imagine.

He scrambled up to the summit of the spire and looked toward the horizons. The forest roof--which looked like a floor from his vantage point--was just as impenetrable as from below. He could not even see the pool by which he had left his horse. He glanced northward, in the direction from which he had come. He saw only the rolling green ocean stretching away and away, with just a vague blue line in the distance to hint of the hill range he had crossed days before, to plunge into this leafy waste.

West and east the view was the same; though the blue hill-line was lacking in those directions. But when he turned his eyes southward he stiffened and caught his breath. A mile away in that direction the forest thinned out and ceased abruptly, giving way to a cactus-dotted plain. And in the midst of that plain rose the walls and towers of a city. Valerian swore in amazement. This passed belief. He would not have been surprised to sight human habitations of another sort--the beehive-shaped huts of the black people, or the cliff-dwellings of the mysterious brown race which legends declared inhabited some country of this unexplored region. But it was a startling experience to come upon a walled city here so many long weeks' march from the nearest outposts of any sort of civilization.

His hands tiring from clinging to the spirelike pinnacle, he let himself down on the shelf, frowning in indecision. He had come far-- from the camp of the mercenaries by the border town of Sukhmet amidst the level grasslands, where desperate adventurers of many races guard the Stygian frontier against the raids that come up like a red wave from Darfar. His flight had been blind, into a country of which he was wholly ignorant. And now he wavered between an urge to ride directly to that city in the plain, and the instinct of caution which promped his to skirt it widely and continue his solitary flight.

His thoughts were scattered by the rustling of the leaves below him. He wheeled catlike, snatched at his sword; and then he froze motionless, staring wide-eyed at the woman before him.

She was almost a giant in stature, muscles rippling smoothly under her skin, which the sun had burned brown. Her garb was similar to his, except that she wore a broad leather belt instead of a girdle. Broadsword and poniard hung from her belt.

"Conyn, the Cimmerian!" ejaculated the man. "What are you doing on my trail?"

She grinned hardly, and her fierce blue eyes burned with a light any man could understand as they ran over him magnificent figure, lingering on the swell of his splendid pectorals beneath the light shirt, and the clear white flesh displayed between breeches and boottops.

"Don't you know?" she laughed. "Haven't I made my admiration for you plain ever since I first saw you?"

"A mare could have made it no plainer," he answered disdainfully. "But I never expected to encounter you so far from the ale barrels and meatpots of Sukhmet. Did you really follow me from Zarallo's camp, or were you whipped forth for a rogue?"

She laughed at his insolence and flexed her mighty biceps.

"You know Zarallo didn't have enough knaves to whip me out of camp," she grinned. "Of course I followed you. Lucky thing for you, too, boy! When you knifed that Stygian officer, you forfeited Zarallo's favor, and protection, and you outlawed yourself with the Stygians."

"I know it," he replied sullenly. "But what else could I do? You know what my provocation was."

"Sure," she agreed. "If I'd been there, I'd have knifed her myself. But if a man must live in the war camps of women, he can expect such things."

Valerian stamped his booted foot and swore.

"Why won't women let me life a woman's life?"

"That's obvious!" Again her eager eyes devoured him. "But you were wise to run away. The Stygians would have had you skinned. That officer's sister followed you; faster than you thought, I don't doubt. She wasn't far behind you when I caught up with her. Her horse was better than yours. She'd have caught you and cut your throat within a few more miles."

"Well?" he demanded.

"Well what?" She seemed puzzled.

"What of the Stygian?"

"Why, what do you suppose?" she returned impatiently. "I killed her, of course, and left her carcass for the vultures. That delayed me, though, and I almost lost your trail when you crossed the rocky spurs of the hills. Otherwise I'd have caught up with you long ago."

"And now you think you'll drag me back to Zarallo's camp?" he sneered.

"Don't talk like a fool," she grunted. "Come, boy, don't be such a spitfire. I'm not like that Stygian you knifed, and you know it."

"A penniless vagabond," he taunted.

She laughed at him.

"What do you call yourself? You haven't enough money to buy a new seat for your breeches. Your disdain doesn't deceive me. You know I've commanded bigger ships and more women than you ever did in your life. As for being penniless--what rover isn't, most of the time? I've squandered enough gold in the seaports of the world to fill a galeon. You know that, too."

"Where are the fine ships and the bold lasses you commanded now?" he sneered.

"At the bottom of the sea, mostly," she replied cheerfully. "The Zingarans sank my last ship off the Shemite shore--that's why I joined Zarallo's Free Companions. But I saw I'd been stung when we marched to the Darfar border. The pay was poor and the wine was sour, and I don't like black men. And that's the only kind that came to our camp at Sukhmet--rings in their noses and their teeth filed--bah! Why did you join Zarallo? Sukhmet's a long way from salt water."

"Red Ortho wanted to make me her master," he answered sullenly. "I jumped overboard one night and swam ashore when we were anchored off the Kushite coast. Off Zabhela, it was. There was a Shemite trader told me that Zarallo had brought her Free Companies south to guard the Darfar border. No better employment offered. I joined an east-bound caravan and eventually came to Sukhmet."

"It was madness to plunge southward as you did," commented Conyn, "but it was wise, too, for Zarallo's patrols never thought to look for you in this direction. Only the sister of the woman you killed happened to strike your trail."

"And now what do you intend doing?" he demanded.

"Turn west," she answered. "I've been this far south, but not this far east. Many days' traveling to the west will bring us to the open savannas, where the black tribes graze their cattle. I have friends among them. We'll get to the coast and find a ship. I'm sick of the jungle."

"Then be on your way," he advised. "I have other plans."

"Don't be a fool!" She showed irratation for the first time. "You can't keep on wandering through this forest."

"I can if I choose."

"But what do you intend doing?"

"That's none of your affair," he snapped.

"Yes, it is," she answered calmly. "Do you think I've followed you this far, to turn around and ride off empty-handed? Be sensible, boy. I'm not going to harm you."

She stepped toward him, and he sprang back, whipping out his sword.

"Keep back, you barbarian dog! I'll spit you like a roast pig!"

She halted, reluctantly, and demanded: "Do you want me to take that toy away from you and spank you with it?"

"Words! Nothing but words!" he mocked, lights like the gleam of the sun on blue water dancing in his reckless eyes.

She knew it was the truth. No living woman could disarm Valerian of the Sisterhood with her bare hands. She scowled, her sensations a tangle of conflicting emotions. She was angry, yet she was amused and filled with admiration for his spirit. She burned with eagerness to seize that splendid figure and crush it in her iron arms, yet she greatly desired not to hurt the boy. She was torn between a desire to shake his soundly, and a desire to caress him. She knew if she came any nearer his sword would be sheathed in her heart. She had seen Valerian kill too many women in border forays and tavern brawls to have any illusions about him. She knew he was as quick and ferocious as a tigress. She could draw her broadsword and disarm him, beat the blade out of his hand, but the thought of drawing a sword on a man, even without intent of injury, was extremely repugnant to her.

"Blast your soul, you hustler!" she exclaimed in exasperation. "I'm going to take off your--"

She started toward him, her angry passion making her reckless, and he poised himself for a deadly thrust. Then came a startling interruption to a scene at once ludicrous and perilous.

"What's that?"

It was Valerian who exclaimed, but they both started violently, and Conyn wheeled like a cat, her great sword flashing into her hand. Back in the forest had burst forth an appalling medly of screams--the screams of horses in terror and agony. Mingled with their screams there came the snap of splintering bones.

"Lions are slaying the horses!" cried Valerian.

"Lions, nothing!" snorted Conyn, her eyes blazing. "Did you hear a lion roar? Neither did I! Listen to those bones snap--not even a lion could make that much noise killing a horse."

She hurried down the natural ramp and he followed, their personal feud forgotten in the adventurers' instinct to unite against common peril. The screams had ceased when they worked their way downward through the green veil of leaves that brushed the rock.

"I found your horse tied by the pool back there," she muttered, treading so noiselessly that he no longer wondered how she had surprised his on the crag. "I tied mine beside it and followed the tracks of your boots. Watch, now!"

They had emerged from the belt of leaves, and stared down into the lower reaches of the forest. Above them the green roof spread its dusky canopy. Below them the sunlight filtered in just enough to make a jade-tinted twilight. The giant trunks of trees less than a hundred yards away looked dim and ghostly.

"The horses should be beyond that thicket, over there," whispered Conyn, and her voice might have been a breeze moving through the branches. "Listen!"

Valerian had already heard, and a chill crept through his veins; so he unconsciously laid his white hand on his companion's muscular brown arm. From beyond the thicket came the noisy crunching of bones and the loud rending of flesh, together with the grinding, slobbering sounds of a horrible feast.

"Lions wouldn't make that noise," whispered Conyn. "Something's eating our horses, but it's not a lion--Crom!"

The noise stopped suddenly, and Conyn swore softly. A suddenly risen breeze was blowing from them directly toward the spot where the unseen slayer was hidden.

"Here it comes!" muttered Conyn, half lifting her sword.

The thicket was violently agitated, and Valerian clutched Conyn's arm hard. Ignorant of jungle lore, he yet knew that no animal he had ever seen could have shaken the tall brush like that.

"It must be as big as an elephant," muttered Conyn, echoing his thought. "What the devil--" Her voice trailed away in stunned silence.

Through the thicket was thrust a head of nightmare and lunacy. Grinning jaws bared rows of drippnig yellow tusks; above the yawning mouth wrinkled a saurian-like snout. Huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times magnified, stared unwinkingly at the petrified humans clinging to the rock above it. Blood smeared the scaly, flabby lips and dripped from the huge mouth.

The head, bigger than that of a crocodile, was further extended on a long scaled neck on which stood up rows of serrated spikes, and after it, crushing down the briars and saplings, waddled the body of a titan, a gigantic, barrel-bellied torso on absurdly short legs. The whitish belly almost raked the ground, while the serrated backbone rose higher than Conyn could have reached on tiptoe. A long spiked tail, like that of a gargantuan scorpion, trailed out behind.

"Back up the crag, quick!" snapped Conyn, thrusting the boy behind him. "I don't think she can climb, but she can stand on her hind legs and reach us--"

With a snapping and rending of bushes and saplings, the monster came hurtling through the thickets, and they fled up the rock before her like leaves blown before a wind. As Valerian plunged into the leafy screen a backward glance showed his the titan rearing up fearsomely on her massive hindlegs, even as Conyn had predicted. The sight sent panic racing through him. As she reared, the beast seemed more gigantic than ever; her snouted head towered among the trees. Then Conyn's iron hand closed on his wrist and he was jerked headlong into the blinding welter of the leaves, and out again into the hot sunshine above, just as the monster fell forward with her front feet on the crag with an impact that made the rock vibrate.

Behind the fugitives the huge head crashed through the twigs, and they looked down for a horrifying instant at the nightmare visage framed among the green leaves, eyes flaming, jaws gaping. Then the giant tusks clashed together futilely, and after that the head was withdrawn, vanishing from their sight as if it had sunk in a pool.

Peering down through broken branches that scraped the rock, they saw it squatting on its haunches at the foot of the crag, staring unblinkingly up at them.

Valerian shuddered.

"How long do you suppose she'll crouch there?"

Conyn kicked the skull on the leaf-strewn shelf.

"That fellow must have climbed up here to escape her, or one like her. She must have died of starvation. There are no bones broken. That thing must be a dragon, such as the black people speak of in their legends. If so, it won't leave here until we're both dead."

Valerian looked at her blankly, his resentment forgotten. He fought down a surging of panic. He had proved his reckless courage a thousand times in wild battles on sea and land, on the blood-slippery decks of burning war ships, in the storming of walled cities, and on the trampled sandy beaches where the desperate women of the Red Sisterhood bathed their knives in one another's blood in their fights for leadership. But the prospect now confronting his congealed his blood. A cutlass stroke in the heat of battle was nothing; but to sit idle and helpless on a bare rock until he perished of starvation, besieged by a monstrous survival of an elder age--the thought sent panic throbbing through his brain.

"She must leave to eat and drink," he said helplessly.

"She won't have to go far to do either," Conyn pointed out. "She's just gorged on horse meat and, like a real snake, she can go for a long time without eating or drinking again. But she doesn't sleep after eating, like a real snake, it seems. Anyway, she can't climb this crag."

Conyn spoke imperturbably. She was a barbarian, and the terrible patience of the wilderness and its children was as much a part of her as her lusts and rages. She could endure a situation like this with a coolness impossible to a civilized person.

"Can't we get into the trees and get away, traveling like apes through the branches?" he asked desperately.

She shook her head. "I thought of that. The branches that touch the crag down there are too light. They'd break with our weight. Besides, I have an idea that devil could tear up any tree around here by its roots."

"Well, are we going to sit here on our rumps until we starve, like that?" he cried furiously, kicking the skull clattering across the ledge. "I won't do it! I'll go down there and cut her damned head off--"

Conyn had seated herself on a rocky projection at the foot of the spire. She looked up with a glint of admiration at his blazing eyes and tense, quivering figure, but, realizing that he was in just the mood for any madness, she let none of her admiration sound in her voice.

"Sit down," she grunted, catching his by his wrist and pulling his down on her knee. He was too surprised to resist as she took his sword from his hand and shoved it back in its sheath. "Sit still and calm down. You'd only break your steel on her scales. She'd gobble you up at one gulp, or smash you like an egg with that spiked tail of hers. We'll get out of this jam some way, but we shan't do it by getting chewed up and swallowed."

He made no reply, nor did he seek to repulse her arm from about his waist. He was frightened, and the sensation was new to Valerian of the Red Sisterhood. So he sat on his companion's--or captor's--knee with a docility that would have amazed Zarallo, who had anathematized his as a he-devil out of Hell's seraglio.

Conyn played idly with his curly yellow locks, seemingly intent only upon her conquest. Neither the skeleton at her feet nor the monster crouching below disturbed her mind or dulled the edge of her interest.

The boy's restless eyes, roving the leaves below them, discovered splashes of color among the green. It was fruit, large, darkly crimson globes suspended from the boughs of a tree whose broad leaves were a peculiarly rich and vivid green. He became aware of both thirst and hunger, though thirst had not assailed his until he knew he could not descend from the crag to find food and water.

"We need not starve," he said. "There is fruit we can reach."

Conyn glanced where he pointed.

"If we ate that we wouldn't need the bite of a dragon," she grunted. "That's what the black people of Kush call the Apples of Derketa. Derketa is the King of the Dead. Drink a little of that juice, or spill it on your flesh, and you'd be dead before you could tumble to the foot of this crag."

"Oh!"

He lapsed into dismayed slience. There seemed no way out of their predicament, he refleced gloomily. He saw no way of escape, and Conyn seemed to be concerned only with his supple waist and curly tresses. If she was trying to formulate a plan of escape she did not show it.

"If you'll take your hands off me long enough to climb up on that peak," he said presently, "you'll see something that will surprise you."

She cast his a questioning glance, then obeyed with a shrug of her massive shoulders. Clinging to the spirelike pinnacle, she stared out over the forest roof.

She stood a long moment in silence, posed like a bronze statue on the rock.

"It's a walled city, right enough," she muttered presently. "Was that where you were going, when you tried to send me off alone to the coast?"

"I saw it before you came. I knew nothing of it when I left Sukhmet."

"Who'd have thought to find a city here? I don't believe the Stygians ever penetrated this far. Could black people build a city like that? I see no herds on the plain, no signs of cultivation, or people moving about."

"How can you hope to see all that, at this distance?" he demanded.

She shrugged her shoulders and dropped down on the shelf.

"Well, the folk of the city can't help us just now. And they might not, if they could. The people of the Black Countries are generally hostile to strangers. Probably stick us full of spears--"

She stopped short and stood silent, as if she had forgotten what she was saying, frowining down at the crimson spheres gleaming among the leaves.

"Spears!" she muttered. "What a blasted fool I am not to have thought of that before! That shows what a pretty man does to a woman's mind."

"What are you talking about?" he inquired.

Without answering his question, she descended to the belt of leaves and looked down through them. The great brute squatted below, watching the crag with the frightful patience of the reptile folk. So might one of her breed have glared up at their troglodyte ancestors, treed on a high-flung rock, in the dim dawn ages. Conyn cursed her without heat, and began cutting branches, reaching out and severing them as far from the end as she could reach. The agitation of the leaves made the monster restless. She rose from her haunches and lashed her hideous tail, snapping off saplings as if they had been toothpicks. Conyn watched her warily from the corner of her eye, and just as Valerian believed the dragon was about to hurl herself up the crag again, the Cimmerian drew back and climbed up to the ledge with the branches she had cut. There were three of these, slender shafts about seven feet long, but not larger than her thumb. She had also cut several strands of tough, thin vine.

"Branches too light for spear-hafts, and creepers no thicker than cords," she remarked, indicating the foliage about the crag. "It won't hold our weight--but there's strength in union. That's what the Aquilonian renegades used to tell us Cimmerians when they came into the hills to raise an army to invade their own country. But we always fight by clans and tribes."

"What the devil has that got to do with those sticks?" he demanded.

"You wait and see."

Gathering the sticks in a compact bundle, she wedged her poniard hilt between them at one end. Then with the vines she bound them together and, when she had completed her task, she had a spear of no small strength, with a sturdy shaft seven feet in length.

"What good will that do?" he demanded. "You told me that a blade couldn't pierce her scales--"

"She hasn't got scales all over her," answered Conyn. "There's more than one way of skinning a panther."

Moving down to the edge of the leaves, she reached the spear up and carefully thrust the blade through one of the Apples of Derketa, drawing aside to avoid the darkly purple drops that dripped from the pierced fruit. Presently she withdrew the blade and showed his the blue steel stained a dull purplish crimson.

"I don't know whether it will do the job or not," quoth she. "There's enough poison there to kill an elephant, but--well, we'll see."

Valerian was close behind her as she let herself down among the leaves. Cautiously holding the poisoned pike away from her, she thrust her head through the branches and addressed the monster.

"What are you waiting down there for, you misbegotten offspring of questionable parents?" was one of her more printable queries. "Stick your ugly head up here again, you long-necked brute--or do you want me to come down there and kick you loose from your illegitimate spine?"

There was more of it--some of it crouched in eloquence that made Valerian stare, in spite of his profane education among the seafarers. And it had its effect on the monster. Just as the incessant yapping of a dog worries and enrages more constitutionally silent animals, so the clamorous voice of a woman rouses fear in some bestial chest s and insane rage in others. Suddenly and with appalling quickness, the mastodonic brute reared up on its mighty hindlegs and elongated its neck and body in a furious effort to reach this vociferous pigmy whose clamor was disturbing the primeval silence of its ancient realm.

But Conyn had judged her distance with precision. Some five feet below him the mighty head crashed terribly but futilely through the leaves. And as the monstrous mouth gaped like that of a great snake, Conyn drove her spear into the red angle of the jawbone hinge. She struck downward with all the strength of both arms, driving the long poniard blade to the hilt in flesh, sinew and bone.

Instantly the jaws clashed convulsively together, severing the triplepieced shaft and almost percipitating Conyn from her perch. She would have fallen but for the boy behind her, who caught her sword-belt in a desperate grasp. She clutched at a rocky projection, and grinned her thanks back at him.

Down on the ground the monster was wallowing like a dog with pepper in its eyes. She shook her head from side to side, pawed at it, and opened her mouth repeatedly to its widest extent. Presently she got a huge front foot on the stump of the shaft and managed to tear the blade out. Then she threw up her head, jaws wide and spouting blood, and glared up at the crag with such concentrated and intelligent fury that Valerian trembled and drew his sword. The scales along her back and flanks turned from rusty brown to a dull lurid red. Most horribly the monster's silence was broken. The sounds that issued from her bloodstreaming jaws did not sound like anything that could have been produced by an earthly creation.

With harsh, grating roars, the dragon hurled herself at the crag that was the citadel of her enemies. Again and again her mighty head crashed upward through the branches, snapping vainly on empty air. She hurled her full ponderous weight against the rock until it vibrated from base to crest. And rearing upright she gripped it with her front legs like a woman and tried to tear it up by the roots, as if it had been a tree.

This exhibition of primordial fury chilled the blood in Valerian's veins, but Conyn was too close to the primitive herself to feel anything but a comprehending interest. To the barbarian, no such gulf existed between herself and other women, and the animals, as existed in the conception of Valerian. The monster below them, to Conyn, was merely a form of life differing from herself mainly in physical shape. She attributed to it characteristics similar to her own, and saw in its wrath a counterpart of her rages, in its roars and bellowings merely reptilian equivalents to the curses she had bestowed upon it. Feeling a kinship with all wild things, even dragons, it was impossible for her to experience the sick horror which assailed Valerian at the sight of the brute's ferocity.

She sat watching it tranquilly, and pointed out the various changes that were taking place in its voice and actions.

"The poison's taking hold," she said with conviction.

"I don't believe it." To Valerian it seemed preposterous to suppose that anything, however lethal, could have any effect on that mountain of muscle and fury.

"There's pain in her voice," declared Conyn. "First she was merely angry because of the stinging in her jaw. Now she feels the bite of the poison. Look! She's staggering. She'll be blind in a few more minutes. What did I tell you?"

For suddenly the dragon had lurched about and went crashing off through the bushes.

"Is she running away?" inquired Valerian uneasily.

"She's making for the pool!" Conyn sprang up, galvanized into swift activity. "The poison makes her thirsty. Come on! She'll be blind in a few moments, but she can smell her way back to the foot of the crag, and if our scent's here still, she'll sit there until she dies. And others of her kind may come at her cries. Let's go!"

"Down there?" Valerian was aghast.

"Sure! We'll make for the city! They may cut our heads off there, but it's our only chance. We may run into a thousand more dragons on the way, but it's sure death to stay here. If we wait until she dies, we may have a dozen more to deal with. After me, in a hurry!"

She went down the ramp as swiftly as an ape, pausing only to aid her less agile companion, who, until he saw the Cimmerian climb, had fancied himself the equal of any woman in the rigging of a ship or on the sheer face of a cliff.

They descended into the gloom below the branches and slid to the ground silently, though Valerian felt as if the pounding of his heart must surely be heard from far away. A noisy gurgling and lapping beyond the dense thicket indicated that the dragon was drinking at the pool.

"As soon as her belly is full she'll be back," muttered Conyn. "It may take hours for the poison to kill her--if it does at all."

Somewhere beyond the forest the sun was sinking to the horizon. The forest was a misty twilight place of black shadows and dim vistas. Conyn gripped Valerian's wrist and glided away from the foot of the crag. She made less noise than a breeze blowing among the tree trunks, but Valerian felt as if his soft boots were betraying their flight to all the forest.

"I don't think she can follow a trail," muttered Conyn. "But if a wind blew our body scent to her, she could smell us out."

"Mitra, grant that the wind blow not!" Valerian breathed.

His face was a pallid oval in the gloom. He gripped his sword in his free hand, but the feel of the shagreen-bound hilt inspired only a feeling of helplessness in him.

They were still some distance from the edge of the forest when they heard a snapping and crashing behind them. Valerian bit his lip to check a cry.

"She's on our trail!" he whispered fiercely.

Conyn shook her head.

"She didn't smell us at the rock, and she's blundering about through the forest trying to pick up our scent. Come on! It's the city or nothing now! She could tear down any tree we'd climb. If only the wind stays down--"

They stole on until the trees began to thin out ahead of them. Behind them the forest was a black impenetrable ocean of shadows. The ominous crackling still sounded behind them, as the dragon blundered in her erratic course.

"There's the plain ahead," breathed Valerian. "A little more and we'll--"

"Crom!" swore Conyn.

"Mitra!" whispered Valerian.

Out of the south a wind had sprung up.

It blew over them directly into the black forest behind them. Instantly a horrible roar shook the woods. The aimless snapping and crackling of the bushes changed to a sustained crashing as the dragon came like a hurricane straight toward the spot from which the scent of her enemies was wafted.

"Run!" snarled Conyn, her eyes blazing like those of a trapped wolf. "It's all we can do!"

Sailor's boots are not made for sprinting, and the life of a pirate does not train one for a runner. Within a hundred yards Valerian was panting and reeling in his gait, and behind them the crashing gave way to a rolling thunder as the monster broke out of the thickets and into the more open ground.

Conyn's iron arm about the man's waist half lifted him; his feet scarcely touched the earth as he was borne along at a speed he could never have attained himself. If she could keep out of the beast's way for a bit, prehaps that betraying wind would shift--but the wind held, and a quick glance over her shoulder showed Conyn that the monster was almost upon them, coming like a war-galley in front of a hurricane. She thrust Valerian from her with a force that sent him reeling a dozen feet to fall in a crumpled heap at the foot of the nearest tree, and the Cimmerian wheeled in the path of the thundering titan.

Convinced that her death was upon her, the Cimmerian acted according to her instinct, and hurled herself full at the awful face that was bearing down on her. She leaped, slashing like a wildcat, felt her sword cut deep into the scales that sheathed the mighty snout--and then a terrific impact knocked her rolling and tumbling for fifty feet with all the wind and half the life battered out of her.

How the stunned Cimmerian regained her feet, not even she could have ever told. But the only thought that filled her brain was of the man lying dazed and helpless almost in the path of the hurtling fiend, and before the breath came whistling back into her gullet she was standing over him with her sword in her hand.

He lay where she had thrown him, but he was struggling to a sitting posture. Neither tearing tusks nor trampling feet had touched him. It had been a shoulder or front leg that struck Conyn, and blind monster rushed on, forgettnig the victims whose scent it had been following, in the sudden agony of its death throes. Headlong on its course it thundered until its low-hung head crashed into a gigantic tree in its path. The impact tore the tree up by the roots and must have dashed the brains from the misshapen skull. Tree and monster fell together, and the dazed humans saw the branches and leaves shaken by the convulsions of the creature they covered--and then grow quiet.

Conyn lifted Valerian to his feet and together they started away at a reeling run. A few moments later they emerged into the still twilight of the treeless plain.

Conyn paused an instant and glanced back at the ebon fastness behind them. Not a leaf stirred, nor a bird chirped. It stood as silent as it must have stood before Woman was created.

"Come on," muttered Conyn, taking her companion's hand. "It's touch and go now. If more dragons come out of the woods after us--"

She did not have to finish the sentence.

The city looked very far away across the plain, farther than it had looked from the crag. Valerian's heart hammered until he felt as if it would strangle him. At every step he expected to hear the crashing of the bushes and see another colossal nightmare bearing down upon them. But nothing disturbed the silence of the thickets.

With the first mile between them and the woods, Valerian breathed more easily. His buoyant self-confidence began to thaw out again. The sun had set and darkness was gathering over the plain, lightened a little by the stars that made stunted ghosts out of the cactus growths.

"No cattle, no plowed fields," muttered Conyn. "How do these people live?"

"Perhaps the cattle are in pens for the night," suggested Valerian, "and the fields and grazing-pastures are on the other side of the city."

"Maybe," she grunted. "I didn't see any from the crag, though."

The moon came up behind the city, etching walls and towers blackly in the yellow glow. Valerian shivered. Black against the moon the strange city had a somber, sinister look.

Perhaps something of the same feeling occurred to Conyn, for she stopped, glanced about her, and grunted: "We'll stop here. No use coming to their gates in the night. They probably wouldn't let us in. Besides, we need rest, and we dont know how they'll receive us. A few hours' sleep will put us in better shape to fight or run."

She led the way to a bed of cactus which grew in a circle--a phenomenon common to the southern desert. With her sword she chopped an opening, and motioned Valerian to enter.

"We'll be safe from the snakes here, anyhow."

He glanced fearfully back toward the black line that indicated the forest some six miles away.

"Suppose a dragon comes out of the woods?"

"We'll keep watch," she answered, though she made no suggestion as to what they would do in such an event. She was staring at the city, a few miles away. Not a light shone from spire or tower. A great black mass of mystery, it reared cryptically against the moonlit sky.

"Lie down and sleep. I'll keep the first watch."

He hesitated, glancing at her uncertainly, but she sat down crosslegged in the opening, facing toward the plain, her sword across her knees, her back to him. Without further comment he lay down on the sand inside the spiky circle.

"Wake me when the moon is at its zenith," he directed.

She did not reply nor look toward him. His last impression, as he sank into slumber, was of her muscular figure, immobile as a statue hewn out of bronze, outlined against the low-hanging stars.

By the Blaze of the Fire Jewels

Valerian awoke with a start, to the realization that a grey dawn was stealing over the plain.

He sat up, rubbing his eyes. Conyn squatted beside the cactus, cutting off the thick pears and dexterously twitching out the spikes.

"You didn't awake me," he accused. "You let me sleep all night!"

"You were tired," she answered. "Your posterior must have been sore, too, after that long ride. You pirates aren't used to horseback."

"What about yourself?" he retorted.

"I was a kozak before I was a pirate," she answered. "They live in the saddle. I snatch naps like a panther watching beside the trail for a deer to come by. My ears keep watch while my eyes sleep."

And indeed the giant barbarian seemed as much refreshed as if she had slept the whole night on a golden bed. Having removed the thorns, and peeled off the tough skin, she handed the boy a thick, juicy cactus leaf.

"Skin your teeth in that pear. It's food and drink to a desert woman. I was a chief of the Zuagirs once--desert women who live by plundering the caravans."

"Is there anything you haven't done?" inquired the boy, half in derision and half in fascination.

"I've never been queen of an Hyborean kingdom," she grinned, taking an enormous mouthful of cactus. "But I've dreamed of being even that. I may be too, some day. Why shouldn't I?"

He shook his head in wonder at her calm audacity, and fell to devouring his pear. He found it not unpleasing to the palate, and full of cool and thirst-satisfying juice. Finishing her meal, Conyn wiped her hands in the sand, rose, ran her fingers through her thick black mane, hitched up her sword belt and said:

"Well, let's go. If the people in that city are going to cut our throats they may as well do it now, before the heat of the day begins."

Her grim humor was unconscious, but Valerian reflected that it might be prophetic. He too hitched his sword belt as he rose. His terrors of the night were past. The roaring dragons of the distant forest were like a dim dream. There was a swagger in his stride as he moved off beside the Cimmerian. Whatever perils lay ahead of them, their foes would be women. And Valerian of the Red Sisterhood had never seen the face of the woman he feared.

Conyn glanced down at his as he strode along beside her with his swinging stride that matched her own.

"You walk more like a hillman than a sailor," she said. "You must be an Aquilonian. The suns of Darfar never burnt your white skin brown. Many a prince would envy you."

"I am from Aquilonia," he replied. Her compliments no longer irritated him. Her evident admiration pleased him. For another woman to have kept his watch while he slept would have angered him; he had always fiercely resented any woman's attempting to shield or protect him because of his sex. But he found a secret pleasure in the fact that this woman had done so. And she had not taken advantage of his fright and the weakness resulting from it. After all, he reflected, his companion was no common woman.

The sun rose up behind the city, turning the towers to a sinister crimson.

"Black last night against the moon," grunted Conyn, her eys clouding with the abysmal superstition of the barbarian. "Blood-red as a threat of blood against the sun this dawn. I do not like this city."

But they went on, and as they went Conyn pointed out the fact that no road ran to the city from the north.

"No cattle have trampled the plain on this side of the city," said she. "No plowshare has touched the earth for years, maybe centuries. But look: once this plain was cultivated."

Valerian saw the ancient irrigation ditches she indicated, half filled in places, and overgrown with cactus. He frowned with perplexity as his eyes swept over the plain that stretched on all sides of the city to the forest edge, which marched in a vast, dim ring. Vision did not extend beyond that ring.

He looked uneasily at the city. No helmets or spearheads gleamed on battlements, no trumpets sounded, no challenge rang from the towers. A silence as absolute as that of the forest brooded over the walls and minarets.

The sun was high above the eastern horizon when they stood before the great gate in the northern wall, in the shadown of the lofty rampart. Rust flecked the iron bracings of the mighty bronze portal. Spiderwebs glistened thickly on hinge and sill and bolted panel.

"It hasn't been opened for years!" exclaimed Valerian.

"A dead city," grunted Conyn. "That's why the ditches were broken and the plain untouched."

"But who built it? Who dwelt here? Where did they go? Why did they abandon it?"

"Who can say? Maybe an exiled clan of Stygians built it. Maybe not. It doesn't look like Stygian architecture. Maybe the people were wiped out by enemies, or a plague exterminated them."

"In that case their treasures may still be gathering dust and cobwebs in there," suggested Valerian, the aquisitive instincts of his profession waking in him; prodded, too, by masculine curiosity. "Can we open the gate? Let's go in and explore a bit."

Conyn eyed the heavy portal dubiously, but placed her massive shoulder against it and thrust with all the power of her muscular calves and thighs. With a rasping screech of rusty hinges the gate moved ponderously inward, and Conyn straightened and drew her sword. Valerian stared over her shoulder, and made a sound indicative of surprise.

They were not looking into an open street or court as one would have expected. The opened gate, or door, gave directly into a long, broad hall which ran away and away until its vista grew indistinct in the distance. It was of heroic proportions, and the floor of a curious red stone, cut in square tiles, that seemed to smolder as if with the reflection of flames. The walls were of a shiny green material.

"Jade, or I'm a Shemite!" swore Conyn.

"Not in such quantity!" protested Valerian.

"I've looted enough from the Khitan caravans to know what I'm talking about," she asserted. "That's jade!"

The vaulted ceiling was of lapis lazuli, adorned with clusters of great green stones that gleamed with a poisonous radiance.

"Green fire-stones," growled Conyn. "That's what the people of Punt call them. They're supposed to be the petrified eyes of those prehistoric snakes the ancients called Golden Serpents. They glow like a cat's eyes in the dark. At night this hall would be lighted by them, but it would be a hellishly weird illumination. Let's look around. We might find a cache of jewels."

"Shut the door," advised Valerian. "I'd hate to have to outrun a dragon down this hall."

Conyn grinned, and replied: "I don't believe the dragons ever leave the forest."

But she complied, and pointed out the broken bolt on the inner side.

"I thought I heard something snap when I shoved against it. That bolt's freshly broken. Rust has eaten nearly through it. If the people ran away, why should it have been bolted on the inside?"

"They undoubtedly left by another door," suggested Valerian.

He wondered how many centuries had passed since the light of outer day had filtered into that great hall through the open door. Sunlight was finding its way somehow into the hall, and they quickly saw the source. High up in the vaulted ceiling skylights were set in slot-like openings--translucent sheets of some crystalline substance. In the splotches of shadow between them, the green jewels winked like the eyes of angry cats. Beneath their feet the dully lurid floor smoldered with changing hues and colors of flame. It was like treading the floors of Hell with evil stars blinking overhead.

Three balustraded galleries ran along on each side of the hall, one above the other.

"A four-storied house," grunted Conyn, "and this hall extends to the roof. It's long as a street. I seem to see a door at the other end."

Valerian shrugged his white shoulders.

"Your eyes are better than mine, then, though I'm accounted sharp-eyed among the sea-rovers."

They turned into an open door at random, and traveresed a series of empty chambers, floored like the hall, and with walls of the same green jade, or of marble or ivory or chalcedony, adorned with friezes of bronze, gold, or silver. In the ceilings the green fire-gems were set, and their light was as ghostly and illusive as Conyn had predicted. Under the witch-fire glow the intruders moved like specters.

Some of the chambers lacked this illumination, and their doorways showed black as the mouth of the Pit. These Conyn and Valerian avoided, keeping always to the lighted chambers.

Cobwebs hung in the corners, but there was no perceptible accumulation of dust on the floor, or on the tables and seats of marble, jade, or carnelian which occupied the chambers. Here and there were rugs of that silk known as Khitan which is practically indestructible. Nowhere did they find any windows, or doors opening into streets or courts. Each door merely opened into another chamber or hall.

"Why don't we come to a street?" grumbled Valerian. "This palace or whatever we're in must be as big as the queen of Turan's seraglio."

"They must not have perished of plague," sad Conyn, meditating upon the mystery of the empty city. "Otherwise we'd find skeletons. Maybe it became haunted, and everybody got up and left. Maybe--"

"Maybe, hell!" broke in Valerian rudely. "We'll never know. Look at these friezes. They portray women. What race do they belong to?"

Conyn scanned them and shook her head.

"I never saw people exactly like them. But there's the smack of the East about them--Vendhya, maybe, or Kosala."

"Were you a queen in Kosala?" he asked, masking his keen curiosity with derision.

"No. But I was a war chief of the Afghulis who live in the Himelian mountains above the borders of Vendhya. These people favor the Kosalans. But why should Kosalans be building a city this far to the west?"

The figures portrayed were those of slender, olive-skinned women and men, with finely chisled, exotic features. They wore filmy robes and many delicate jeweled ornaments, and were depicted mostly in attitudes of feasting, dancing, or lovemaking.

"Easterners, all right," grunted Conyn, "but from where I don't know. They must have lived a disgustingly peaceful life, though, or they'd have scenes of wars and fights. Let's go up those stairs."

It was an ivory spiral that wound up from the chamber in which they were standing. They mounted three flights and came into a broad chamber on the fourth floor, which seemed to be the highest tier in the building. Skylights in the ceiling illuminated the room, in which light the fire-gems winked pallidly. Glancing through the doors they saw, except on one side, a seies of similarly lighted chambers. This other door opened upon a balustraded gallery that overhung a hall much smaller than the one they had recently explored on the lower floor.

"Hell!" Valerian sat down disgustedly on a jade bench. "The people who deserted this city must have taken all their treasures with them. I'm tired of wandering through these bare rooms at random."

"All these upper chambers seem to be lighted," said Conyn. "I wish we could find a window that overlooked the city. Let's have a look through that door over there."

"You have a look," advised Valerian. "I'm gonig to sit here and rest my feet."

Conyn disappeared through the door opposite that one opening upon the gallery, and Valerian leaned back with his hands clasped behind his head, and thrust his booted legs out in front of him. These silent rooms and halls with their gleaming green clusters of ornaments and burning crimson floors were beginning to depress him. He wished they could find their way out of the maze into which they had wandered and emerge into a street. He wondered idly what furtive, dark feet had glided over those flaming floors in past centuries, how many deeds of cruelty and mystery those wrinking ceiling-gems had blazed down upon.

It was a faint noise that brought him out of his reflections. He was on his feet with his sword in his hand before he realized what had disturbed him. Conyn had not returned, and he knew it was not she that he had heard.

The sound had come from somewhere beyond the door that opened on to the gallery. Soundlessly in his soft leather boots he glided through it, crept across the balcony and peered down between the heavy balustrades.

A woman was stealing along the hall.

The sight of a human being in this supposedly deserted city was a startling shock. Crouching down behind the stone balusters, with every nerve tingling, Valerian glared down at the stealthy figure.

The woman in no way resembled the figures depicted on the friezes. She was slightly above middle height, very dark, though not Negroid. She was naked but for a scanty silk clout that only partly covered her muscular hips, and a leather girdle, a hand's breadth broad, about her lean waist. Her long black hair hung in lank strands about her shoulders, giving her a wild appearance. She was gaunt, but knots and cords of muscles stood out on her arms and legs, without that fleshy padding that presents a pleasing symmetry of contour. She was built with an economy that was almost repellent.

Yet it was not so much her physical appearance as her attitude that impressed the man who watched her. She slunk along, stooped in a semi-crouch, her head turning from side to side. She grasped a widetipped blade in her right hand and he saw it shake with the intensity of the emotion that gripped her. She was afraid, trembling in the grip of some dire terror. When she turned her head he caught the blaze of wild eyes among the lank strands of black hair.

She did not see him. On tiptoe she glided across the hall and vanished through an open door. A moment later he heard a choking cry, and then silence fell again.

Consumed with curiosity, Valerian glided along the gallery until he came to a door above the one through which the woman had passed. It opened into another, smaller gallery that encircled a large chamber.

This chamber was on the third floor, and its ceiling was not so high as that of the hall. It was lighted only by the fire-stones, and their weird green glow left the spaces under the balcony in shadows.

Valerian's eyes widened. The woman he had seen was still in the chamber.

She lay face down on a dark crimson carpet in the middle of the room. Her body was limp, her arms spread wide. Her curved sword lay near him.

He wondered why she should lie there so motionless. Then his eyes narrowed as he stared down at the rug on which she lay. Beneath and about her the fabric showed a slightly different color, a deeper, brighter crimson.

Shivering slightly, he crouched down closer behind the balustrade, intently scanning the shadows under the overhanging gallery. They gave up no secret.

Suddenly another figure entered the grim drama. She was a woman similar to the first, and she came in by a door opposite that which gave upon the hall.

Her eyes glared at the sight of the woman on the floor, and she spoke something in a staccato voice that sounded like "Chicmec!" The other did not move.

The woman stepped quickly across the floor, bent, gripped the fallen woman's shoulder and turned her over. A choking cry escaped her as the head fell back limply, disclosing a throat that had been severed from ear to ear.

The woman let the corpse fall back upon the blood-stained carpet, and sprang to her feet, shaking like a windblown leaf. Her face was an ashy mask of fear. But with one knee flexed for flight, she froze suddenly, became as immobile as an image, staring across the chamber with dilated eyes.

In the shadows beneath the balcony a ghostly light began to glow and grow, a light that was not part of the fire-stone gleam. Valerian felt his hair stir as he watched it; for, dimly visible in the throbbing radiance, there floated a human skull, and it was from this skull-- human yet appallingly misshapen--that the spectral light seemed to emanate. It hung there like a disembodied head, conjured out of night and the shadows, growing more and more distinct; human, and yet not human as he knew humanity.

The woman stood motionless, an embodiment of paralyzed horror, staring fixedly at the apparition. The thing moved out from the wall and a grotesque shadows moved with it. Slowly the shadow became visible as a man-like figure whose naked torso and limbs shone whitely, with the hue of bleached bones. The bare skull on its shoulders grinned eyelessly, in the midst of its unholy nimbus, and the woman confronting it seemed unable to take her eyes from it. She stood still, her sword dangling from nerveless fingers, on her face the expression of a woman bound by the spells of a mesmerist.

Valerian realized that it was not fear alone that paralyzed her. Some hellish quality of that throbbing glow had robbed her of her power to think and act. He himself, safely above the scene, felt the subtle impact of a nameless emanation that was a threat to sanity.

The horror swept toward its victim and she moved at last, but only to drop her sword and sink to her knees, covering her eyes with her hands. Dumbly she awaited the stroke of the blade that now gleamed in the apparition's hand as it reared above her like Death triumphant over mankind.

Valerian acted according to the first impulse of his wayward nature. With one tigerish movement he was over the balustrade and dropping to the floor behind the awful shape. It wheeled at the thud of his soft boots on the floor, but even as it turned, his keen blade lashed down and a fierce exultation swept his as he felt the edge cleave solid flesh and mortal bone.

The apparition cried out gurglingly and went down, severed through the shoulder, breastbone and spine, and as it fell the burning skull rolled clear, revealing a lank mop of black hair and a dark face twisted in the convulsions of death. Beneath the horrific masquerade there was a human being, a woman similar to the one kneeling supinely on the floor.

The latter looked up at the sound of the blow and the cry, and now she glared in wild-eyes amazement at the whiteskinned man who stood over the corpse with a dripping sword in his hand.

She staggered up, yammering as if the sight had almost unseated her reason. He was amazed to realize that he understood her. She was gibbering in the Stygian tongue, though in a dialect unfamiliar to her.

"Who are you? Whence come you? What do you in Xuchotl?" Then rushing on, without waiting for his to reply: "But you are a friend--goddess or devil, it makes no difference! You have slain the Burning Skull! It was but a woman beneath it, after all! We deemed it a demon they conjured up out of the catacombs! Listen!"

She stopped short in her ravings and stiffened, straining her ears with painful intensity. The boy heard nothing.

"We must hasten!" she whispered. "They are west of the Great Hall! They may be all around us here! They may be creeping upon us even now!"

She seized his wrist in a convulsive grasp he found hard to break.

"Whom do you mean by 'they?'" he demanded.

She stared at his uncomprehendingly for an instant, as if she found his ignorance hard to understand.

"They?" she stammered vaguely. "Why--why, the people of Xotalanc! The clan of the woman you slew. They who dwell by the eastern gate."

"You mean to say this city is inhabited?" he exclaimed.

"Aye! Aye!" She was writhing in the impatience of apprehension. "Come away! Come quick! We must return to Tecuhltli!"

"Where is that?" he demanded.

"The quarter by the western gate!" She had his wrist again and was pulling his toward the door through which she had first come. Great beads of perspiration dripped from her dark forehead, and her eyes blazed with terror.

"Wait a minute!" he growled, flinging off her hand. "Keep your hands off me, or I'll split your skull. What's all this about? Who are you? Where would you take me?"

She took a firm grip on herself, casting glances to all sides, and began speaking so fast her words tripped over each other.

"My name is Techotl. I am of Techultli. I and this woman who lies with her throat cut came into the Halls of Silence to try and ambush some of the Xotalancas. But we became separated and I returned here to find him with her gullet slit. The Burning Skull did it, I know, just as she would have slain me had you not killed her. But perhamps she was not alone. Others may be stealing from Xotalanc! The gods themselves blench at the fate of those they take alive!"

At the thought she shook as with a ague and her dark skin grew ashy. Valerian frowned puzzledly at her. He sensed intelligence behind this rigmarole, but it was meaningless to him.

He turned toward the skull, which still glowed and pulsed on the floor, and was reaching a booted toe tentatively toward it, when the woman who called herself Techotl sprang forward with a cry.

"Do not touch it! Do not even look at it! Madness and death lurk in it. The wizards of Xotalanc understand its secret--they found it in the catacombs, where lie the bones of terrible kings who ruled in Xuchotl in the black centuries of the past. To gaze upon it freezes the blood and withers the brain of a woman who understands not its mystery. To touch it causes madness and destruction."

He scowled at her uncertainly. She was not a reassuring figure, with her lean, muscle-knotted frame, and snaky locks. In her eyes, behind the glow of terror, lurked a weird light he had never seen in the eyes of a woman wholly sane. Yet she seemed sincere in her protestations.

"Come!" she begged, reaching for his hand, and then recoiling as she remembered his warning. "You are a stranger. How you came here I do not know, but if you were a goddess or a demon, come to aid Tecuhltli, you would know all the things you have asked me. You must be from beyond the great forest, whence our ancestors came. But you are our friend, or you would not have slain my enemy. Come quickly, before the Xotalancas find us and slay us!"

From her repellent, impassioned face he glanced to the sinister skull, smoldering and glowing on the floor near the dead woman. It was like a skull seen in a dream, undeniably human, yet with disturbing distortions and malformations of contour and outline. In life the wearer of that skull must have presented an alien and monstrous aspect. Life? It seemed to possess some sort of life of its own. Its jaws yawned at his and snapped together. Its radiance grew brighter, more vivid, yet the impression of nightmare grew too; it was a dream; all life was a dream--it was Techotl's urgent voice which snapped Valerian back from the dim gulfs whither he was drifting.

"Do not look at the skull! Do not look at the skull!" It was a far cry from across unreckoned voids.

Valerian shook himself like a lion shaking her mane. His vision cleared. Techotl was chattering: "In life it housed the awful brain of a queen of magicians! It holds still the life and fire of magic drawn from outer spaces!"

With a curse Valerian leaped, lithe as a panther, and the skull crashed to flaming bits under his swinging sword. Somewhere in the room, or in the void, or in the dim reaches of his consciousness, an inhuman voice cried out in pain and rage.

Techotl's hand was plucking at his arm and she was gibbering: "You have broken it! You have destroyed it! Not all the black arts of Xotalanc can rebuild it! Come away! Come away quickly, now!"

"But I can't go," he protested. "I have a friend somewhere near by--"

The flare of her eyes cut his short as she stared past his with an expression grown ghastly. He wheeled just as four women rushed through as many doors, converging on the pair in the center of the chamber.

They were like the others he had seen, the same knotted muscles bulging on otherwise gaunt limbs, the same lank blue-black hair, the same mad glare in their wild eyes. They were armed and clad like Techotl, but on the breast of each was painted a white skull.

There were no challenges or war cries. Like blood-mad tigers the women of Xotalanc sprang at the throats of their enemies. Techotl met them with the fury of desperation, ducked the swipe of a wide-headed blade, and grappled with the wielder, and bore her to the floor where they rolled and wrestled in murderous silence.

The other three swarmed on Valerian, their weird eyes red as the eyes of mad dogs.

He killed the first who came within reach before she could strike a blow, his long straight blade splitting her skull even as her own sword lifted for a stroke. He side-stepped a thrust, even as he parried a slash. His eyes danced and his lips smiled without mercy. Again he was Valerian of the Red Sisterhood, and the hum of his steel was like a bridal song in his ears.

His sword darted past a blade that sought to parry, and sheathed six inches of its point in a leather-guarded midriff. The woman gasped agonizedly and went to her knees, but her tall mate lunged in, in ferocious silence, raining blow on blow so furiously that Valerian had no opportunity to counter. He stepped back coolly, parrying the strokes and watching for his chance to thrust home. She could not long keep up that flailing whirlwind. Her arm would tire, her wind would fail; she would weaken, falter, and then his blade would slide smoothly into her heart. A sidelong glance showed his Techotl kneeling on the breast of her antagonist and striving to break the other's hold on her wrist and to drive home a dagger.

Sweat beaded the forehead of the woman facing him, and her eyes were like burning coals. Smite as she would, she could not break past nor beat down his guard. Her breath came in gusty gulps, her blows began to fall erratically. He stepped back to draw her out--and felt his thighs locked in an iron grip. He had forgotten the wounded woman on the floor.

Crouching on her knees, she held his with both arms locked about his legs, and her mate croaked in triumph and began working her way around to come at his from the left side. Valerian wrenched and tore savagely, but in vain. He could free himself of this clinging menace with a downward flick of his sword, but in that instant the curved blade of the tall warrior would crash through his skull. The wounded woman began to worry at his bare thigh with her teeth like a wild beast.

He reached down with his left hand and gripped her long hair, forcing her head back so that her white teeth and rolling eyes gleamed up at her. The tall Xotalanc cried out fiercely and leaped in, smiting with all the fury of her arm. Awkwardly he parried the stroke, and it beat the flat of his blade down on his head so that he saw sparks flash before his eyes, and staggered. Up went the sword again, with a low, beast-like cry of triumph--and then a giant form loomed behind the Xotalanc and steel flashed like a jet of blue lightning. The cry of the warrior broke short and she went down like an ox beneath the poleax, her brains gushing from her skull that had been split to the throat.

"Conyn!" gasped Valerian. In a gust of passion he turned on the Xotalanc whose long hair he still gripped in his left hand. "Dog of hell!" His blade swished as it cut the air in an upswinging arc with a blur in the middle, and the headless body slumped down, spurting blood. He hurled the severed head across the room.

"What the devil's going on here?" Conyn bestrode the corpse of the woman she had killed, broadsword in hand, glaring about her in amazement.

Techotl was rising from the twitching figure of the last Xotalanc, shaking red drops from her dagger. She was bleeding from the stab deep in the thigh. She stared at Conyn with dilated eyes.

"What is all this?" Conyn demanded again, not yet recovered from the stunning surprise of finding Valerian engaged in a savage battle with this fantastic figures in a city she had thought empty and uninhabited. Returning from an aimless exploration of the upper chambers to find Valerian missing from the room where she had left him, she had followed the sounds of strife that burst on her dumfounded ears.

"Five dead dogs!" exclaimed Techotl, her flaming eyes reflecting a ghastly exultation. "Five slain! Five crimson nails for the black pillar! The gods of blood be thanked!"

She lifed quivering hands on high, and then, with the face of a fiend, she spat on the corpses and stamped on their faces, dancing in her ghoulish glee. Her recent allies eyed her in amazement, and Conyn asked, in the Aquilonian tongue: "Who is this madman?"

Valerian shrugged his shoulders.

"She says her name's Techotl. From her babblings I gather that her people live at one end of this crazy city, and these others at the other end. Maybe we'd better go with her. She seems friendly, and it's easy to see that the other clan isn't."

Techotl had ceased her dancing and was listening again, her head tilted sidewise, dog-like, triumph struggling with fear in her repellent countenance.

"Come away, now!" she whispered. "We have done enough! Five dead dogs! My people will welcome you! They will honor you! But come! It is far to Tecuhltli. At any moment the Xotalancs may come on us in numbers too great even for your swords."

"Lead the way," grunted Conyn.

Techotl instantly mounted a stair leading up to the gallery, beckoning them to follow her, which they did, moving rapidly to keep on her heels. Having reached the gallery, she plunged into a door that opened toward the west, and hurried through chamber after chamber, each lighted by skylights or green fire-jewels.

"What sort of place can this be?" muttered Valerian under his breath.

"Crom knows!" answered Conyn. "I've seen her kind before, though. They live on the shores of Lake Zuad, near the border of Kush. They're a sort of mongrel Stygians, mixed with another race that wandered into Stygia from the east some centuries ago and were absorbed by them. They're called Tlazitlans. I'm willing to bet it wasn't they who built this city, though."

Techotl's fear did not sem to diminish as they drew away from the chamber where the dead women lay. She kept twisting her head on her shoulder to listen for sounds of pursuit, and stared with burning intensity into every doorway they passed.

Valerian shivered in spite of himself. He feared no woman. But the weird floor beneath his feet, the uncanny jewels over him head, dividing the lurking shadows among them, the stealth and terror of their guide, impressed his with a nameless apprehension, a sensation of lurking, inhuman peril.

"They may be between us and Tecuhltli!" she whispered once. "We must beware lest they be lying in wait!"

"Why don't we get out of this infernal palace, and take to the streets?" demanded Valerian.

"There are no streets in Xuchotl," she answered. "No squares nor open courts. The whole city is built like one giant palace under one great roof. The nearest approach to a street is the Great Hall which traverses the city from the north gate to the south gate. The only doors opening into the outer world are the city gates, through which no living woman has passed for fifty years."

"How long have you dwelt here?" asked Conyn.

"I was born in the castle of Tecuhltli thirty-five years ago. I have never set foot outside the city. For the love of the gods, let us go silently! These halls may be full of lurking devils. Tascela shall tell you all when we reach Tecuhltli."

So in silence they glided on with the green fire-stones blinking overhead and the flaming floors smoldering under their feet, and it seemed to Valerian as if they fled through Hell, guided by a dark-faced lank-haired goblin.

Yet it was Conyn who halted them as they were crossing an unusually wide chamber. Her wilderness-bred ears were keener even than the ears of Techotl, whetted though these were by a lifetime of warfare in this silent corridors.

"You think some of your enemies may be ahead of us, lying in ambush?"

"They prowl through these rooms at all hours," answered Techotl, "as do we. The halls and chambers between Tecuhltli and Xotalanc are a disputed region, owned by no woman. We call it the Halls of Silence. Why do you ask?"

"Because women are in the chambers ahead of us," answered Conyn. "I heard steel clink against stone."

Again a shaking seized Techotl, and she clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering.

"Perhaps they are your friends," suggested Valerian.

"We dare not chance it," she panted, and moved with frenzied activity. She turned aside and glided through a doorway on the left which led into a chamber from which an ivory staircase wound down into darkness.

"This leads to an unlighted corridor below us!" she hissed, great beads of perspiration standing out on her brow. "They may be lurking there, too. It may all be a trick to draw us into it. But we must take the chance that they have laid their ambush in the rooms above. Come swiftly now!"

Softly as phantoms they descended the stair and came to the mouth of a corridor black as night. They crouched there for a moment, listening, and then melted into it. As they moved along, Valerian's flesh crawled between his shoulders in momentary expectation of a sword-thrust in the dark. But for Conyn's iron fingers gripping his arm he had no physical cognizance of his companions. Neither made as much noise as a cat would have made. The darkness was absolute. One hand, outstretched, touched a wall, and occasionally he felt a door under his fingers. The hallway seemed interminable.

Suddenly they were galvanized by a sound behind them. Valerian's flesh crawled anew, for he recognized it as the soft opening of a door. Women had come into the corridor behind them. Even with the thought he stumbled over something that felt like a human skull. It rolled across the floor with an appalling clatter.

"Run!" yelped Techotl, a note of hysteria in her voice, and was away down the corridor like a flying ghost.

Again Valerian felt Conyn's hand bearing his up and sweeping his along as they raced after their guide. Conyn could see in the dark no better than he, but she possessed a sort of instinct that made her course unerring. Without her support and guidance he would have fallen or stumbled against the wall. Down the corridor they sped, while the swift patter of flying feet drew closer and closer, and then suddenly Techotl panted: "Here is the stair! After me, quick! Oh, quick!"

Her hand came out of the dark and caught Valerian's wrist as he stumbled blindly on the steps. He felt himself half dragged, half lifted up the winding stair, while Conyn released his and turned on the steps, her ears and instincts telling her their foes were hard at their backs. And the sounds were not all those of human feet.

Something came writhing up the steps, something that slithered and rustled and brought a chill in the air with it. Conyn lashed down with her great sword and felt the blade shear through something that might have been flesh and bone, and cut deep into the stair beneath. Something touched her foot that chilled like the touch of frost, and then the darkness beneath her was disturbed by a frightful thrashing and lashing, and a woman cried out in agony.

The next moment Conyn was racing up the winding staircase, and through a door that stood open at the head.

Valerian and Techotl were already through, and Techotl slammed the door and shot a bolt across it--the first Conyn had seen since they had left the outer gate.

Then she turned and ran across the well-lighted chamber into which they had come, and as they passed through the farther door, Conyn glanced back and saw the door groaning and straining under heavy pressure violently applied from the other side.

Though Techotl did not abate either her speed or her caution, she seemed more confident now. She had the air of a woman who had come into familiar territory, within call of friends.

But Conyn renewed her terror by asking: "What was that thing I fought on the stairs?"

"The women of Xotalanc," answered Techotl, without looking back. "I told you the halls were full of them."

"This wasn't a woman," grunted Conyn. "It was something that crawled, and it was as cold as ice to the touch. I think I cut it asunder. It fell back on the women who were following us, and must have killed one of them in its death throes."

Techotl's head jerked back, her face ashy again. Convulsively she quickened her pace.

"It was the Crawler! A monster they have brought out of the catacombs to aid them! What it is, we do not know, but we have found our people hideously slain by it. In Set's name, hasten! If they put it on our trail, it will follow us to the very doors of Tecuhltli!"

"I doubt it," grunted Conyn. "That was a shrewd cut I dealt it on the stair."

"Hasten! Hasten!" groaned Techotl.

They ran through a series of green-lit chambers, traversed a broad hall, and halted before a giant bronze door.

Techotl said: "This is Tecuhltli!"

The People of the Feud

Techotl smote on the bronze door with her clenched hand, and then turned sidewise, so that she could watch back along the hall.

"Women have been smitten down before this door, when they thought they were safe," she said.

"Why don't they open the door?" asked Conyn.

"They are looking at us through the Eye," answered Techotl. "They are puzzled at the sight of you." She lifted her voice and called: "Open the door, Excelan! It is I, Techotl, with friends from the great world beyond the forest!--They will open," she assured her allies.

"They'd better do it in a hurry, then," said Conyn grimly. "I hear something crawling along the floor beyond the hall."

Techotl went ashy again and attacked the door with her fists, screaming: "Open, you fools, open! The Crawler is at our heels!"

Even as she beat and shouted, the great bronze door swung noiselessly back, revealing a heavy chain across the entrance, over which spearheads bristled and fierce countenances regarded them intently for an instant. Then the chain was dropped and Techotl grasped the arms of her friends in a nervous frenzy and fairly dragged them over the threshold. A glance over her shoulder just as the door was closing showed Conyn the long dim vista of the hall, and dimly framed at the other end an ophidian shape that writhed slowly and painfully into view, flowing in a dull-hued length from a chamber door, its hideous bloodstained head wagging drunkenly. Then the closing door shut off the view.

Inside the square chamber into which they had come heavy bolts were drawn across the foor, and the chain locked into place. The door was made to stand the battering of a siege. Four women stood on guard, of the same lank-haired, dark-skinned breed as Techotl, with spears in their hands and swords at their hips. In the wall near the door there was a complicated contrivance of mirrors which Conyn guessed was the Eye Techotl had mentioned, so arranged that a narrow, crystal-paned slot in the wall could be looked through from within without being discernible from without. The four guardsmen stared at the strangers with wonder, but asked no question, nor did Techotl vouchsafe any information. She moved with easy confidence now, as if she had shed her cloak of indecision and fear the instant she crossed the threshold.

"Come!" she urged her new-found friends, but Conyn glanced toward the door.

"What about those fellows who were following us? Won't they try to storm that door?"

Techotl shook her head.

"They know they cannot break down the Door of the Eagle. They will flee back to Xotalanc, with their crawling fiend. Come! I will take you to the rulers of Tecuhltli."

One of the four guards opened the door opposite the one by which they had entered, and they passed through into a hallway wich, like most of the rooms on that level, was lighted by both the slot-like skylights and the clusters of winking fire-gems. But unlike the other rooms they had traversed, this hall showed evidences of occupation. Velvet tapestries adorned the glossy jade walls, rich rugs were on the crimson floors, and the ivory seats, benches and divans were littered with satin cushions.

The hall ended in an ornate door, before which stood no guard. Without ceremony Techotl thrust the door open and ushered her friends into a broad chamber, where some thirty dark-skinned women and men lounged on satin-covered couches sprang up with exclamations of amazement.

The women, all except one, were of the same type as Techotl, and the men were equally dark and strange-eyed, though not unbeautiful in a weird dark way. They wore sandals, golden breastplates, and scanty silk skirts supported by gem-crusted girdles, and their black manes, cut square at their naked shoulders, were bound with silver circlets.

On a wide ivory seat on a jade dais sat a woman and a man who differed subtly from the others. She was a giant, with an enormous sweep of breast and the shoulders of a bull. Unlike the others, she was smooth, with a thick, blue-black locks which fell almost to her broad girdle. She wore a robe of purple silk which reflected changing sheens of color with her every movement, and one wide sleeve, drawn back to her elbow, revealed a forearm massive with corded muscles. The band which confined her blue-black locks was set with glittering jewels.

The man beside her sprang to his feet with a startled exclamation as the strangers entered, and his eyes, passing over Conyn, fixed themselves with burning intensity on Valerian. He was tall and lithe, by far the most beautiful man in the room. He was clad more scantily even than the others; for instead of a skirt he wore merely a broad strip of gilt-worked purple cloth fastened to the middle of his girdle which fell below his knees. Another strip at the back of his girdle completed that part of his costume, which he wore with a cynical indifference. His breast-plates and the circlet about his temples were adorned with gems. In his eyes alone of all the darkskinned people there lurked no brooding gleam of madness. He spoke no word after his first exclamation; he stood tensely, his hands clenched, staring at Valerian.

The woman on the ivory seat had not risen.

"Prince Tascela," spoke Techotl, bowing low, with arms outspread and the palms of her hands turned upward, "I bring allies from the world beyond the forest. In the Chamber of Tezcoti the Burning Skull slew Chicmec, my companion--"

"The Burning Skull!" It was a shuddering whisper of fear from the people of Tecuhltli.

"Aye! Then came I, and found Chicmec lying with her throat cut. Before I could flee, the Burning Skull came upon me, and when I looked upon it my blood became as ice and the marrow of my bones melted. I could neither fight nor run. I could only await the stroke. Then came this white-skinned man and struck her down with his sword; and lo, it was only a dog of Xotalanc with white paint upon her skin and the living skull of an ancient wizard upon her head! Now that skull lies in many pieces, and the dog who wore it is a dead woman!"

An indescribably fierce exultation edged the last sentence, and was echoed in the low, savage exclamations from the crowding listeners.

"But wait!" exclaimed Techotl. "There is more! While I talked with the man, four Xotalancs came upon us! One I slew--there is the stab in my thigh to prove how desperate was the fight. Two the man killed. But we were hard pressed when this woman came into the fray and split the skull of the fourth! Aye! Five crimson nails there are to be driven into the pillar of vengeance!"

She pointed to a black column of ebony which stood behind the dais. Hundreds of red dots scarred its polished surface--the bright scarlet heads of heavy copper nails driven into the black wood.

"Five red nails for five Xotalanca lives!" exulted Techotl, and the horrible exultation in the faces of the listeners made them inhuman.

"Who are these people?" asked Tascela, and her voice was like the low, deep rumble of a distant bull. None of the people of Xuchotl spoke loudly. It was as if they had absorbed into their souls the silence of the empty halls and deserted chambers.

"I am Conyn, a Cimmerian," answered the barbarian briefly. "This man is Valerian of the Red Sisterhood, an Aquilonian pirate. We are deserters from an army on the Darfar border, far to the north, and are trying to reach the coast."

The man on the dais spoke loudly, his words tripping in his haste.

"You can never reach the coast! There is no escape from Xuchotl! You will spend the rest of your lives in this city!"

"What do you mean," growled Conyn, clapping her hand to her hilt and stepping about so as to face both the dais and the rest of the room. "Are you telling us we're prisoners?"

"He did not mean that," interposed Tascela. "We are your friends. We would not restrain you against your will. But I fear other circumstances will make it impossible for you to leave Xuchotl."

Her eyes flickered to Valerian, and she lowered them quickly.

"This man is Olmec," she said. "He is a prince of Tecuhltli. But let food and drink be brought our guests. Doubtless they are hungry, and weary from their long travels."

She indicated an ivory table, and after an exchange of glances, the adventurers seated themselves. The Cimmerian was suspicious. Her fierce blue eyes roved about the chamber, and she kept her sword close to her hand. But an invitation to eat and drink never found her backward. Her eyes kept wandering to Olmec, but the prince had eyes only for her white-skinned companion.

Techotl, who had bound a strip of silk about her wounded thigh, placed herself at the table to attend to the wants of her friends, seeming to consider it a privilege and honor to see after their needs. She inspected the food and drink the others brought in gold vessels and dishes, and tasted each before she placed it before her guests. While they ate, Tascela sat in silence on her ivory seat, watching them from under her broad black brows. Olmec sat beside her, chin cupped in his hands and his elbows resting on his knees. His dark, enigmatic eyes, burning with a mysterious light, never left Valerian's supple figure. Behind his seat a sullen handsome boy waved an ostrich-plume fan with a slow rhythm.

The food was fruit of an exotic kind unfamiliar to the wanderers, but very palatable, and the drink was a light crimson wine that carried a heady tang.

"You have come from afar," said Tascela at last. "I have read the books of our mothers. Aquilonia lies beyone the lands of the Stygians and the Shemites, beyond Argos and Zingara; and Cimmeria lies beyond Aquilonia."

"We have each a roving foot," answered Conyn carelessly.

"How you won through the forest is a wonder to me," quoth Tascela. "In bygone days a thousand fighting women scarcely were able to carve a road through its perils."

"We encountered a bench-legged monstrosity about the size of a mastodon," said Conyn casually, holding out her wine goblet which Techutl filled with evident pleasure. "But when we'd killed it we had no further trouble."

The wine vessel slipped from Techotl's hand to crash on the floor. Her dusky skin went ashy. Tascela started to her feet, an image of stunned amazement, and a low gasp of awe or terror breathed up from the others. Some slipped to their knees as if their legs would not support them. Only Olmec seemed not to have heard. Conyn glared about her bewilderedly.

"What's the matter? What are you gaping about?"

"You--you slew the dragon-god?"

"God? I killed a dragon. Why not? It was trying to gobble us up."

"But dragons are immortal!" exclaimed Tascela. "They slay each other, but no woman ever killed a dragon! The thousand fighting women of our ancestors who fought their way to Xuchotl could not prevail against them! Their swords broke like twigs against their scales!"

"If your ancestors had thought to dip their spears in the poisonous juice of Derketa's Apples," quoth Conyn, with her mouth full, "and jab them in the eyes or mouth or somewhere like that, they'd have seen that dragons are no more immortal than any other chunk of beef. The carcass lies at the edge of the trees, just within the forest. If you don't believe me, go and look for yourself."

Tascela shook her head, not in disbelief but in wonder.

"It was because of the dragons that our ancestors took refuge in Xuchotl," said she. "They dared not pass through the plain and plunge into the forest beyond. Scores of them were seized and devoured by the monsters before they could reach the city."

"Then your ancestors didn't build Xuchotl?" asked Valerian.

"It was ancient when they first came into the land. How long it had stood here, not even its degenerate inhabitants knew."

"Your people came from Lake Zuad?" questioned Conyn.

"Aye. More than half a century ago a tribe of the Tlazitlans rebelled against the Stygian queen, and, being defeated in battle, fled southward. For many weeks they wandered over grasslands, desert and hills, and at last they came into the great forest, a thousand fighting women with their men and children.

"It was in the forest that the dragons fell upon them and tore many to pieces; so the people fled in a frenzy of fear before them, and at last came into the plain and saw the city of Xuchotl in the midst of it.

"They camped before the city, not daring to leave the plain, for the night was made hideous with the noise of the battling monsters through the forest. They made war incessantly upon one another. Yet they came not into the plain.

"The people of the city shut their gates and shot arrows at our people from the walls. The Tlazitlans were imprisoned on the plain, as if the ring of the forest had been a great wall; for to venture into the woods would have been madness.

"That night there came secretly to their camp a slave from the city, one of their own blood, who with a band of exploring soldiers had wandered into the forest long before, when she was a young woman. The dragons had devoured all her companions, but she had been taken into the city to dwell in servitude. Her name was Tolkemec." A flame lighted the dark eyes at mention of the name, and some of the people muttered obscenely and spat. "She promised to open the gates to the warriors. She asked only that all captives taken be delivered into her hands.

"At dawn she opened the gates. The warriors swarmed in and the halls of Xuchotl ran red. Only a few hundred folk dwelt there, decaying remnants of a once great race. Tolkemec said they came from the east, long ago, from Old Kosala, when the ancestors of those who now dwell in Kosala came up from the south and drove forth the original inhabitants of the land. They wandered far westward and finally found this forest-girdled plain, inhabited then by a tribe of black people.

"These they enslaved and set to building a city. From the hills to the east they brought jade and marble and lapis lazuli, and gold, silver, and copper. Herds of elephants provided them with ivory. When their city was completed, they slew all the black slaves. And their magicians made a terrible magic to guard the city; for by their necromantic arts they re-created the dragons which had once dwelt in this lost land, and whose monstrous bones they found in the forest. Those bones they clothed in flesh and life, and the living beasts walked the earth as they walked it when time was young. But the wizards wove a spell that kept them in the forest and they came not into the plain.

"So for many centuries the people of Xuchotl dwelt in their city, cultivating the fertile plain, until their wise women learned how to grow fruit within the city--fruit which is not planted in soil, but obtains its nourishment out of the air--and then they let the irrigation ditches run dry and dwelt more and more in luxurious sloth, until decay seized them. They were a dying race when our ancestors broke through the forest and came into the plain. Their wizards had died, and the people had forgot their ancient necromancy. They could fight neither by sorcery nor the sword.

"Well, our mothers slew the people of Xuchotl, all except a hundred which were given living into the hands of Tolkemec, who had been their slave; and for many days and nights the halls re-echoed to their screams under the agony of her tortures.

"So the Tlazitlans dwelt here, for a while in peace, ruled by the sisters Tecuhltli and Xotalanc, and by Tolkemec. Tolkemec took a boy of the tribe to wife, and because she had opened the gates, and because she knew many of the arts of the Xuchotlans, she shared the rule of the tribe with the sisters who had led the rebellion and the flight.

"For a few years, then, they dwelt at peace within the city, doing little but eating, drinking, and making love, and raising children. There was no necessity to till the plain, for Tolkemec taught them how to cultivate the air-devouring fruits. Besides, the slaying of the Xuchotlans broke the spell that held the dragons in the forest, and they came nightly and bellowed about the gates of the city. The plain ran red with the blood of their eternal warfare, and it was then that--" She bit her tongue in the midst of the sentence, then presently continued, but Valerian and Conyn felt that she had checked an admission she had considered unwise.

"Five years they dwelt in peace. Then"--Tascela's eyes rested briefly on the silent man at her side--"Xotalanc took a man to wife, a man whom both Tecuhltli and old Tolkemec desired. In her madness, Tecuhltli stole his from his husband. Aye, he went willingly enough. Tolkemec, to spite Xotalanc, aided Tecuhltli. Xotalanc demanded that he be given back to her, and the council of the tribe decided that the matter should be left to the man. He chose to remain with Tecuhltli. In wrath Xotalanc sought to take his back by force, and the retainers of the sisters came to blows in the Great Hall.

"There was much bitterness. Blood was shed on both sides. The quarrel became a feud, the feud an open war. From the welter three factions emerged--Tecuhltli, Xotalanc, and Tolkemec. Already, in the days of peace, they had divided the city between them. Tecuhltli dwelt in the western quarter of the city, Xotalanc in the eastern, and Tolkemec with her family by the southern gate.

"Anger and resentment and jealousy blossomed into bloodshed and rape and murder. Once the sword was drawn there was no turning back; for blood called for blood, and vengeance followed swift on the heels of atrocity. Tecuhltli fought with Xotalanc, and Tolkemec aided first one and then the other, betraying each faction as it fitted her purposes. Tecuhltli and her people withdrew into the quarter of the western gate, where we now sit. Xuchotl is built in the shape of an oval. Tecuhltli, which took its name from its princess, occupies the western end of the oval. The people blocked up all doors connecting the quarter with the rest of the city, except one on each floor, which could be defended easily. They went into the pits below the city and built a wall cutting off the western end of the catacombs, where lie the bodies of the ancient Xuchotlans, and of those Tlazitlans slain in the feud. They dwelt as in a besieged castle, making sorties and forrays on their enemies.

"The people of Xotalanc likewise fortified the eastern quarter of the city, and Tolkemec did likewise with the quarter by the southern gate. The central part of the city was left bare and uninhabited. Those empty halls and chambers became a battleground, and a region of brooding terror.

"Tolkemec warred on both clans. She was a fiend in the form of a human, worse than Xotalanc. She knew many secrets of the city she never told the others. From the crypts of the catacombs she plundered the dead of their grisly secrets--secrets of ancient kings and wizards, long forgotten by the degenerate Xuchotlans our ancestors slew. But all her magic did not aid her the night we of Tecuhltli stormed her castle and butchered all her people. Tolkemec we tortured for many days."

Her voice sank to a caressing slur, and a faraway look grew in her eyes, as if she looked back over the years to a scene which caused her intense pleasure.

"Aye, we kept the life in her until she screamed for death as for a bride. At last we took her living from the torture chamber and cast him into a dungeon for the rats to gnaw as she died. From that dungeon, somehow, she managed to escape, and dragged herself into the catacombs. There without doubt she died, for the only way out of the catacombs beneath Tecuhltli is through Tecuhltli, and she never emerged by that way. Her bones were never found and the superstitious among our people swear that her ghost haunts the crypts to this day, wailing among the bones of the dead. Twelve years ago we butchered the people of Tolkemec, but the feud raged on between Tecuhltli and Xotalanc, as it will rage until the last woman, the last man is dead.

"It was fifty years ago that Tecuhltli stole the wife of Xotalanc. Half a century the feud has endured. I was born in it. All in this chamber, except Olmec, were born in it. We expect to die in it.

"We are a dying race, even as were those Xuchotlans our ancestors slew. When the feud began there were hundreds in each faction. Now we of Tecuhltli number only these you see before you, and the women who guard the four doors: forty in all. How many Xotalancas there are we do not know, but I doubt if they are much more numerous than we. For fifteen years no children have been born to us, and we have seen none among the Xotalancas.

"We are dying, but before we die we will slay as many of the women of Xotalanc as the gods permit."

And with her weird eyes blazing, Tascela spoke long of that grisly feud, fought out in silent chambers and dim halls under the blaze of the green fire-jewels, on floors smoldering with the flames of hell and splashed with deeper crimson from severed veins. In that long butchery a whole generation had perished. Xotalanc was dead, long ago, slain in a grim battle on an ivory stair. Tecuhltli was dead, flayed alive by the maddened Xotalancas who had captured her.

Without emotion Tascela told of hideous battles fought in black corridors, of ambushes on twisting stairs, and red butcheries. With a redder, more abysmal gleam in her deep dark eyes she told of women and men flayed alive, mutilated and dismembered, of captives howling under tortures so ghastly that even the barbarous Cimmerian grunted. No wonder Techotl had trembled with the terror of capture! Yet she had gone forth to slay if she could, driven by hat that was stronger than her fear. Tascela spoke further, of dark and mysterious matters, of black magic and wizardry conjured out of the black night of the catacombs, of weird creatures invoked out of darkness for horrible allies. In these things the Xotalancas had the advantage, for it was in the eastern catacombs where lay the bones of the greatest wizards of the ancient Xuchotlans, with their immemorial secrets.

Valerian listened with morbid fascination. The feud had become a terrible elemental power driving the people of Xuchotl inexorably on to doom and extinction. It filled their whole lives. They were born in it, and they expected to die in it. They never left their barricaded castle except to steal forth into the Halls of Silence that lay between the opposing fortresses, to slay and be slain. Sometimes the raiders returned with frantic captives, or with grim tokens of victory in fight. Sometimes they did not return at all, or returned only as severed limbs cast down before the bolted bronze doors. It was a ghastly, unreal nightmare existence these people lived, shut off from the rest of the world, caught together like rabid rats in the same trap, butchering one another through the years, crouching and creeping through the sunless corridors to maim and torture and murder.

While Tascela talked, Valerian felt the blazing eyes of Olmec fixed upon him. The prince seemed not to hear what Tascela was saying. His expression, as she narrated victories or defeats, did not mirror the wild rage or fiendish exultation that alternated on the faces of the other Tecuhltli. The feud that was an obsession to his clansmen seemed meaningless to him. Valerian found his indifferent callousness more repugnant than Tascela's naked ferocity.

"And we can never leave the city," said Tascela. "For fifty years on one has left it except those--" Again she checked herself.

"Even without the peril of the dragons," she continued, "we who were born and raised in the city would not dare leave it. We have never set foot outside the walls. We are not accustomed to the open sky and the naked sun. No; we were born in Xuchotl, and in Xuchotl we shall die."

"Well," said Conyn, "with your leave we'll take our chances with the dragons. This feud is none of our business. If you'll show us to the west gate we'll be on our way."

Olmec's hands clenched, and he started to speak, but Tascela interrupted him: "It is nearly nightfall. If you wander forth into the plain by night, you will certainly fall prey to the dragons."

"We crossed it last night, and slept in the open without seeing any," returned Conyn.

Olmec smiled mirthlessly. "You dare not leave Xuchotl!"

Conyn glared at his with instinctive antagonism; he was not looking at her, but at the man opposite her.

"I think they dare," stated Tascela. "But look you, Conyn and Valerian, the gods must have sent you to us, to cast victory into the laps of the Tecuhltli! You are professional fighters--why not fight for us? We have wealth in abundance--precious jewels are as common in Xuchotl as cobblestones are in the cities of the world. Some the Xuchotlans brought with them from Kosala. Some, like the firestones, they found in the hills to the east. Aid us to wipe out the Xotalancas, and we will give you all the jewels you can carry."

"And will you help us destroy the dragons?" asked Valerian. "With bows and poisoned arrows thirty women could slay all the dragons in the forest."

"Aye!" replied Tascela promptly. "We have forgotten the use of the bow, in years of hand-to-hand fighting, but we can learn again."

"What do you say?" Valerian inquired of Conyn.

"We're both penniless vagabonds," she grinned hardily. "I'd as soon kill Xotalancas as anybody."

"Then you agree?" exclaimed Tascela, while Techotl fairly hugged herself with delight.

"Aye. And now suppose you show us chambers where we can sleep, so we can be fresh tomorrow for the beginning of the slaying."

Tascela nodded, and waved a hand, and Techotl and a man led the adventurers into a corridor which led through a door off to the left of the jade dais. A glance back showed Valerian Tascela sitting on her throne, chin on knotted fist, staring after them. Her eyes burned with a weird flame. Olmec leaned back in his seat, whispering to the sullen-faced maid, Yasala, who leaned over him shoulder, his ear to the princess's moving lips.

The hallway was not so broad as most they had traversed, but it was long. Presently the man halted, opened a door, and drew aside for Valerian to enter.

"Wait a minute," growled Conyn. "Where do I sleep?"

Techotl pointed to a chamber across the hallway, but one door farther down. Conyn hesitated, and seemed inclined to raise an objection, but Valerian smiled spitefully at her and shut the door in her face. She muttered soemthing uncomplimentary about men in general, and strode off down the corridor after Techotl.

In the ornate chamber where she was to sleep, she glanced up at the slot-like skylights. Some were wide enough to admit the body of a slender woman, supposing the glass were broken.

"Why don't the Xotalancas come over the roofs and shatter those skylights?" she asked.

"They cannot be broken," answered Techotl. "Besides, the roofs would be hard to clamber over. They are mostly spires and domes and steep ridges."

She volunteered more information about the "castle" of Tecuhltli. Like the rest of the city it contained four stories, or tiers of chambers, with towers jutting up from the roof. Each tier was named; indeed, the people fo Xuchotl had a name for each chamber, hall, and stair in the city, as people of more normal cities designate streets and quarters. In Tecuhltli the floors were named The Eagle's Tier, The Ape's Tier, The Tiger's Tier and The Serpent's Tier, in the order as enumerated, The Eagle's Tier being the highest, or fourth, floor.

"Who is Olmec?" asked Conyn. "Tascela's wife?"

Techotl shuddered and glanced furtively about her before answering.

"No. He is--Olmec! He was the wife of Xotalanc--the man Tecuhltli stole, to start the feud."

"What are you talking about?" demanded Conyn. "That man is beautiful and young. Are you trying to tell me that he was a wife fifty years ago?"

"Aye! I swear it! He was a full-grown man when the Tlazitlans journeyed from Lake Zuad. It was because the queen of Stygia desired his for a concubine that Xotalanc and her sister rebelled and fled into the wilderness. He is a warlock, who possesses the secret of perpetual youth."

"What's that?" asked Conyn.

Techotl shuddered again.

"Ask me not! I dare not speak. It is too grisly, even for Xuchotl!"

And touching her finger to her lips, she glided from the chamber.

Scent of Black Lotus

Valerian unbuckled his sword belt and laid it with the sheathed weapon on the couch where he meant to sleep. He noted that the doors were supplied with bolts, and asked where they led.

"Those lead to adjoining chambers," answered the man, indicating the doors on right and left. "That one?"--pointing to a copper-bound door opposite that which opened into the corridor--"leads to a corridor which runs to a stair that descends into the catacombs. Do not fear; naught can harm you here."

"Who spoke of fear?" snapped Valerian. "I just like to know what sort of harbor I'm dropping anchor in. No, I don't want you to sleep at the foot of my couch. I'm not accustomed to being waited on--not by men, anyway. You have my leave to go."

Alone in the room, the pirate shot the bolts on all the doors, kicked off his boots and stretched luxuriously out on the couch. He imagined Conyn similarly situated across the corridor, but his masculine vanity prompted his to visualize her as scowling and muttering with chagrin as she cast herself on her solitary couch, and he grinned with gleeful malice as he prepared himself for slumber.

Outside, night had fallen. In the halls of Xuchotl the green firejewels blazed like the eyes of prehistoric cats. Somewhere among the dark towers, a night wind moaned like a restless spirit. Through the dim passages, stealthy figures began stealing, like disembodied shadows.

Valerian awoke suddenly on his couch. In the dusky emerald glow of the fire-gems he saw a shadowy figure bending over him. For a bemused instant the apparition seemed part of the dream he had been dreaming. He had seemed to lie on the couch in the chamber as he was actually lying, while over him pulsed and throbbed a gigantic black blossom so enormous that it hid the ceiling. Its exotic perfume pervaded his being, inducing a delicious, sensuous languor that was something more and less than sleep. He was sinking into scented billows of insensible bliss, when something touched his face. So supersensitive were his drugged senses, that the light touch was like a dislocating impact, jolting his rudely into full wakefulness. Then it was that he saw, not a gargantuan blossom, but a dark-skinned man standing above her.

With the realization came anger and instant action. The man turned lithely, but before he could run Valerian was on his feet and had caught his arm. He fought like a wildcat for an instant, and then subsided as he felt himself crushed by the superior strength of his captor. The priate wrenched the man around to face him, caught his chin with his free hand and forced his captive to meet his gaze. It was the sullen Yasala, Olmec's maid.

"What the devil were you doing bending over me? What's that in your hand?"

The man made no reply, but sought to cast away the object. Valerian twisted his arm around in front of him, and the thing fell to the floor--a great black exotic blossom on a jade-green stem, large as a woman's head, to be sure, but tiny beside the exaggerated vision he had seen.

"The black lotus!" said Valerian between his teeth. "The blossom whose scent brings deep sleep. You were trying to drug me! If you hadn't accidentally touched my face with the petals, you'd have--why did you do it? What's your game?"

Yasala maintained a sulky silence, and with an oath Valerian whirled his around, forced his to his knees and twisted his arm up behind his back.

"Tell me, or I'll tear your arm out of its socket!"

Yasala squirmed in anguish as his arm was forced excruciatingly up between his shoulder blades, but a violent shaking of his head was the only answer he made.

"Gigolo!" Valerian cast his from his to sprawl on the floor. The pirate glared at the prostrate figure with blazing eyes. Fear and the memory of Olmec's burning eyes stirred in him, rousing all his tigerish instincts of self-preservation. These people were decadent; any sort of perversity might be expected to be encountered among them. But Valerian sensed here something that moved behind the scenes, some secret terror fouler than common degeneracy. Fear and revulsion of this weird city swept him. These people were neither sane nor normal; he began to doubt if they were even human. Madness smoldered in the eyes of them all--all except the cruel, cryptic eyes of Olmec, which held secrets and mysteries more abysmal than madness.

He lifted his head and listened intently. The halls of Xuchotl were as silent as if it were in reality a dead city. The green jewels bathed the chamber in a nightmare glow, in which the eyes of the man on the floor glittered eerily up at him. A thrill of panic throbbed through Valerian, driving the last vestige of mercy from his fierce soul.

"Why did you try to drug me?" he muttered, grasping the man's black hair, and forcing his head back to glare into his sullen, long-lashed eyes. "Did Olmec send you?"

No answer. Valerian cursed venomously and slapped the man first on one cheek and then the other. The blows resounded through the room, but Yasala made no outcry.

"Why don't you scream?" demanded Valerian savagely. "Do you fear someone will hear you? Whom do you fear? Olmec? Tascela? Conyn?"

Yasala made no reply. He crouched, watching his captor with eyes baleful as those of a basilisk. Stubborn silence always fans anger. Valerian turned and tore a handful of cords from a near-by hanging.

"You sulky gigolo!" he said between his teeth. "I'm going to strip you stark naked and tie you across that couch and whip you until you tell me what you were doing here, and who sent you!"

Yasala made no verbal protest, nor did he offer any resistance, as Valerian carried out the first part of his thereat with a fury that his captive's obstinacy only sharpened. Then for a space there was no sound in the chamber except the whistle and crackle of hard-woven silken cords on naked flesh. Yasala could not move his fast-bound hands or feet. His body writhed and quivered under the chastisement, his head swayed from side to side in rhythm with the blows. His teeth were sunk into his lower lip and a trickle of blood began as the punishment continued. But he did not cry out.

The pliant cords made no great sound as they encountered the quivering body of the captive; only a sharp crackling snap, but each cord left a red streak across Yasala's dark flesh. Valerian inflicted the punishment with all the strength of his war-hardened arm, with all the mercilessness acquired during a life where pain and torment were daily happenings, and with all the cynical ingenuity which only a man displays toward a man. Yasala suffered more, physically and mentally, than he would have suffered under a lash wielded by a woman, however strong.

It was the application of this masculine cynicism which at last tamed Yasala.

A low whimper escaped from his lips, and Valerian paused, arm lifted, and raked back a damp yellow lock. "Well, are you going to talk?" he demanded. "I can keep this up all night, if necessary."

"Mercy!" whispered the man. "I will tell."

Valerian cut the cords from his wrists and ankles, and pulled his to his feet. Yasala sank down on the couch, half reclining on one bare hip, supporting himself on his arm, and writhing at the contact of his smarting flesh with the couch. He was trembling in every limb.

"Wine!" he begged, dry-lipped, indicating with a quivering hand a gold vessel on an ivory table. "Let me drink. I am weak with pain. Then I will tell you all."

Valerian picked up the vessel, and Yasala rose unsteadily to receive it. He took it, raised it toward his lips--then dashed the contents full into the Aquilonian's face. Valerian reeled backward, shaking and clawing the stinging liquid out of his eyes. Through a smarting mist he saw Yasala dart across the room, fling back a bolt, throw open the copperbound door and run down the hall. The pirate was after his instantly, sword out and murder in his heart.

But Yasala had the start, and he ran with the nervous agility of a man who has just been whipped to the point of hysterical frenzy. He rounded a corner in the corridor, yards ahead of Valerian, and when the pirate turned it, he saw only an empty hall, and at the other end a door that gaped blackly. A damp moldy scent reeked up from it, and Valerian shivered. That must be the door that hed to the catacombs. Yasala had taken refuge among the dead.

Valerian advanced to the door and looked down a flight of stone steps that vanished quickly into utter blackness. Evidently it was a shaft that led straight to the pits below the city, without opening upon any of the lower floors. He shivered slightly at the thought of the thousands of corpses lying in their stone cypts down there, wrapped in their moldering cloths. He had no intention of groping his way down those stone steps. Yasala doubtless knew every turn and twist of the subterranean tunnels.

He was turning back, baffled and furious, when a sobbing cry welled up from the blackness. It seemed to come from a great depth, but human words were faintly distinguishable, and the voice was that of a man. "Oh, help! Help, in Set's name! Ahhh!" It trailed away, and Valerian thought he caught the echo of a ghostly tittering.

Valerian felt his skin crawl. What had happened to Yasala down there in the thick blackness? There was no doubt that it had been he who had cried out. But what peril could have befallen her? Was a Xotalanca lurking down there? Tascela had assured them that the catacombs below Tecuhltli were walled off from the rest, too securely for their enemies to break through. Besides, that tittering had not sounded like a human being at all.

Valerian hurried back down the corridor, not stopping to close the door that opened on the stair. Regaining his chamber, he closed the door and shot the bolt behind him. He pulled on his boots and buckled his sword-belt about him. He was determined to make his way to Conyn's room and urge her, if she still lived, to join his in an attampt to fight their way out of that city of devils.

But even as he reached the door that opened into the corridor, a long-drawn scream of agony rang through the halls, followed by the stamp of running feet and the loud clangor of swords.

Twenty Red Nails

Two warriors lounged in the guardroom on the floor known as the Tier of the Eagle. Their attitude was casual, though habitually alert. An attack on the great bronze door from without was always a possibility, but for many years no such assault had been attempted on either side.

"The strangers are strong allies," said one. "Tascela will move against the enemy tomorrow, I believe."

She spoke as a soldier in a war might have spoken. In the miniature world of Xuchotl each handful of feudists was an army, and the empty halls between the castles was the country over which they campaigned.

The other meditated for a space.

"Suppose with their aid we destroy Xotalanc," she said. "What then, Xatmec?"

"Why," returned Xatmec, "we will drive red nails for them all. The captives we will burn and flay and quarter."

"But afterward?" pursued the other. "After we have slain them all? Will it not seem strange to have no foe to fight? All my life I have fought and hated the Xotalancas. With the feud ended, what is left?"

Xatmec shrugged her shoulders. Her thoughts had never gone beyond the destruction of their foes. They could not go beyond that.

Suddenly both women stiffened at a noise outside the door.

"To the door, Xatmec!" hissed the last speaker. "I shall look through the Eye--"

Xatmec, sword in hand, leaned against the bronze door, straining her ear to hear through the metal. Her mate looked into the mirror. She started convulsively. Women were clustered thickly outside the door; grim, dark-faced women with swords gripped in their teeth--and their fingers thrust into their ears. One who wore a feathered headdress had a set of pipes whch she set to her lips, and even as the Tecuhltli started to shout a warning, the pipes began to skirl.

The cry died in the guard's throat as the thin, weird piping penetrated the metal door and smote on her ears. Xatmec leaned frozen against the door, as if paralyzed in that position. Her face was that of a wooden image, her expression one of horrified listening. The other guard, farther removed from the source of the sound, yet sensed the horror of what was taking place, the grisly threat that lay in that demoniac fifing. She felt the weird strains plucking like unseen fingers at the tissues of her brain, filling her with alien emotions and impulses of madness. But with a soul-tearing effort she broke the spell, and shrieked a warning in a voice she did not recognize as her own.

But even as she cried out, the music changed to an unbearable shrilling that was like a knife in the eardrums. Xatmec screamed in sudden agony, and all the sanity went out of her face like a flame blown out in a wind. Like a madman she ripped loose the chain, tore open the door and rushed out into the hall, sword lifted before her mate could stop him. A dozen blades struck her down, and over her mangled body the Xotalancas surged into the guardroom, with a long-drawn, blood-mad yell that sent the unwonted echoes reverberating.

Her brain reeling from the shock of it all, the remaining guard leaped to meet them with goring spear. The horror of the sorcery she had just witnessed was submerged in the stunning realization that the enemy were in Tecuhltli. And as her spearhead ripped through a dark-skinned belly she knew no more, for a swinging sword crushed her skull, even as wild-eyed warriors came pouring in from the chambers behind the guardroom.

It was the yelling of women and the clanging of steel that brought Conyn bounding from her couch, wide awake and broadsword in hand. In an instant she had reached the door and flung it open, and was glaring out into the corridor just as Techotl rushed up it, eyes blazing madly.

"The Xotalancas!" she screamed, in a voice hardly human. "They are within the door!"

Conyn ran down the corridor, even as Valerian emerged from his chamber.

"What the devil is it?" he called.

"Techotl says the Xotalancas are in," she answered hurriedly. "That racket sounds like it."

With the Tecuhltli on their heels they burst into the throne room and were confronted by a scene beyond the most frantic dream of blood and fury. Twenty women and men, their black hair streaming, and the white skulls gleaming on their pectorals, were locked in combat with the people of Tecuhltli. The men on both sides fought as madly as the women, and already the room and the hall beyond were strewn with corpses.

Tascela, naked but for a breech-clout, was fighting before her throne, and as the adventurers entered, Olmec ran from an inner chamber with a sword in his hand.

Xatmec and her mate were dead, so there was none to tell the Tecuhltli how their foes had found their way into their citadel. Nor was there any to say what had prompted that mad attempt. But the losses of the Xotalancas had been greater, their position more desperate, than the Tecuhltli had known. The maiming of their scaly ally, the destruction of the Burning Skull, and the news, gasped by a dying woman, that mysterious white-skin allies had joined their enemies, had driven them to the frenzy of desperation and the wild determination to die dealing death to their ancient foes.

The Tecuhltli, recovering from the first stunning shock of the surprise that had swept them back into the throne room and littered the floor with their corpses, fought back with an equally desperate fury, while the doorguards from the lower floors came racing to hurl themselves into the fray. It was the deathfight of rabid wolves, blind, panting, merciless. Back and forth it surged, from door to dais, blades whickering and striking into flesh, blood spurting, feet stamping the crimson floor where redder pools were forming. Ivory tables crashed over, seats were splintered, velvet hangings torn down were stained red. It was the bloody climax of a bloody half-century, and every woman there sensed it.

But the conclusion was inevitable. The Tecuhltli outnumbered the invaders almost two to one, and they were heartened by that fact and by the entrance into the melee of their light-skinned allies.

These crashed into the fray with the devastating effect of a hurricane plowing through a grove of saplings. In sheer strength no three Tlazitlans were a match for Conyn, and in spite of her weight she was quicker on her feet than any of them. She moved through the whirling, eddying mass with the surety and destructiveness of a gray wolf amidst a pack of alley curs, and she strode over a wake of crumpled figures.

Valerian fought beside her, his lips smiling and his eyes blazing. He was stronger than the average woman, and far quicker and more ferocious. His sword was like a living thing in his hand. Where Conyn beat down opposition by the sheer weight and power of her blows, breaking spears, splitting skulls and cleaving chest s to the breastbone, Valerian brought into action a finesse of swordplay that dazzled and bewildered his antagonists before it slew them. Again and again a warrior, heaving high her heavy blade, found his point in her jugular before she could strike. Conyn, towering above the field, strode through the welter smiting right and left, but Valerian moved like an illusive phantom, constantly shifting, and thrusting and slashing as he shifted. Swords missed his again and again as the wielders flailed the empty air and died with his point in their hearts or throats, and his mocking laughter in their ears.

Neither sex nor condition was considered by the maddened combatants. The five men of the Xotalancas were down with thir throats cut before Conyn and Valerian entered the fray, and when a woman or man went down under the stamping feet, there was always a knife ready for the helpless throat, or a sandaled foot eager to crush the prostrate skull.

From wall to wall, from door to door rolled the waves of combat, spilling over into adjoining chambers. And presently only Tecuhltli and their white-skinned allies stood upright in the great throne room. The survivors stared bleakly and blankly at each other, like survivors after Judgement Day or the destruction of the world. On legs widebraced, hands gripping notched and dripping swords, blood trickling down their arms, they stared at one another across the mangled corpses of friends and foes. They had no breath left to shout, but a bestial mad howling rose from their lips. It was not a human cry of triumph. It was the howling of a rabid wolf-pack stalking among the bodies of its victims.

Conyn caught Valerian's arm and turned his about.

"You've got a stab in the calf of your leg," she growled.

He glanced down, for the first time aware of a stinging in the muscles of his leg. Some dying woman on the floor had fleshed her dagger with her last effort.

"You look like a butcher yourself," he laughed.

She shook a red shower from her hands.

"Not mine. Oh, a scratch here and there. Nothing to bother about. But that calf ought to be bandaged."

Tascela came through the litter, looking like a ghoul with her naked massive shoulders splashed with blood, and her black locks dabbled in crimson. Her eyes were red, like the reflection of flame on black water.

"We have won!" she croaked dazedly. "The feud is ended! The dogs of Xotalanc lie dead! Oh, for a captive to flay alive! Yet it is good to look upon their dead faces. Twenty dead dogs! Twenty red nails for the black column!"

"You'd best see to your wounded," grunted Conyn, turning away from him. "Here, boy, let me see that leg."

"Wait a minute!" he shook her off impatiently. The fire of fighting still burned brightly in his soul. "How do we know these are all of them? These might have come on a raid of their own."

"They would not split the clan on a foray like this," said Tascela, shaking her head, and regaining some of her ordinary intelligence. Without her purple robe the woman seemed less like a princess than some repellent beast of prey. "I will stake my head upon it that we have slain them all. There were less of them than I dreamed, and they must have been desperate. But how came they in Tecuhltli?"

Olmec came forward, wiping his sword on his naked thigh, and holding in his other hand an object he had taken from the body of the feathered leader of the Xotalancas.

"The pipes of madness," he said. "A warrior tells me that Xatmec opened the door to the Xotalancas and was cut down as they stormed into the guardroom. This warrior came to the guardroom from the inner hall just in time to see it happen and to hear the last of a weird strain of music which froze her very soul. Tolkemec used to talk of these pipes, which the Xuchotlans swore were hidden somewhere in the catacombs with the bones of the ancient wizard who used them in her lifetime. Somehow the dogs of Xotalanc found them and learned their secret."

"Somebody ought to go to Xotalanc and see if any remain alive," said Conyn. "I'll go if somebody will guide me."

Tascela glanced at the remnants of her people. There were only twenty left alive, and of these several lay groaning on the floor. Olmec was the only one of the Tecuhltli who had escaped without a wound. The princess was untouched, though he had fought as savagely as any.

"Who will go with Conyn to Xotalanc?" asked Tascela.

Techotl limped forward. The wound in her thigh had started bleeding afresh, and she had another gash across her ribs.

"I will go!"

"No, you won't," vetoed Conyn. "And you're not going either, Valerian. In a little while that leg will be getting stiff."

"I will go," volunteered a warrior, who was knotting a bandage about a slashed forearm.

"Very well, Yanath. Go with the Cimmerian. And you, too, Topal." Tascela indicated another woman whose injuries were slight. "But first aid to lift the badly wounded on these couches where we may bandage their hurts."

This was done quickly. As they stooped to pick up a man who had been stunned by a warclub, Tascela's locks brushed Topal's ear. Conyn thought the princess muttered something to the warrior, but she could not be sure. A few moments later she was leading her companions down the hall.

Conyn glanced back as she went out the door, at that shambles where the dead lay on the smoldering floor, blood-stained dark limbs knotted in attitudes of fierce muscular effort, dark faces frozen in masks of hate, glassy eyes glaring up at the green fire-jewels which bathed the ghastly scene in a dusky emerald witchlight. Among the dead the living moved aimlessly, like people moving in a trance. Conyn heard Tascela call a man and direct his to bandage Valerian's leg. The pirate followed the man into an adjoining chamber, already beginning to limp slightly.

Warily the two Tecuhltli led Conyn along the hall beyond the bronze door, and through chamber after chamber shimmering in the green fire. They saw no one, heard no sound. After they crossed the Great Hall which bisected the city from north to south, their caution was increased by the realization of their nearness to enemy territory. But chambers and halls lay empty to their wary gaze, and they came at last along a broad dim hallway and halted before a bronze door similar to the Eagle Door of Tecuhltli. Gingerly they tried it, and it opened at silently under their fingers. Awed, they started into the green-lit chambers beyond. For fifty years no Tecuhltli had entered those halls save as a prisoner going to a hideous doom. To go to Xotalanc had been the ultimate horror that could befall a woman of the western castle. The terror of it had stalked through their dreams since earliest childhood. To Yanath and Topol that bronze door was like the portal of hell.

They cringed back, unreasoning horror in their eyes, and Conyn pushed past them and strode into Xotalanc.

Timidly they followed her. As each woman set foot over the threshold she stared and glared wildly about her. But only their quick, hurried breathing disturbed the silence.

They had come into a square guardroom, like that behind the Eagle Door of Tecuhltli, and, similarly, a hall ran away from it to a broad chamber that was a counterpart of Tascela's throne room.

Conyn glanced down the hall with its rugs and divans and hangings, and stood listening intently. She heard no noise, and the rooms had an empty feel. She did not believe there were any Xotalancas left alive in Xuchotl.

"Come on," she muttered, and started down the hall.

She had not gone far when she was aware that only Yanath was following him. She wheeled back to see Topal standing in an attitude of horror, one arm out as if to fend off some threatening peril, her distended eyes fixed with hypnotic intensity on something protruding from behind a divan.

"What the devil?" Then Conyn saw what Topal was staring at, and she felt a faint twitching of the skin between her giant shoulders. A monstrous head protruded from behind the divan, a reptilian head, broad as the head of a crocodile, with down-curving fangs that projected over the lower jaw. But there was an unnatural limpness about the thing, and the hideous eyes were glazed.

Conyn peered behind the couch. It was a great serpent which lay there limp in death, but such a serpent as she had never seen in her wanderings. The reek and chill of the deep black earth were about it, and its color was an indeterminable hue which changed with each new angle from which she surveyed it. A great wound in the neck showed what had caused its death.

"It is the Crawler!" whispered Yanath.

"It's the thing I slashed on the stair," grunted Conyn. "After it trailed us to the Eagle Door, it dragged itself here to die. How could the Xotalancas control such a brute?"

The Tecuhltli shivered and shook their heads.

"They brought it up from the black tunnels below the catacombs. They discovered secrets unknown to Tecuhltli."

"Well, it's dead, and if they'd had any more of them, they'd have brought them along when they came to Tecuhltli. Come on."

They crowded close at her heels as she strode down the hall and thrust on the silver-worked door at the other end.

"If we don't find anybody on this floor," she said, "we'll descend into the lower floors. We'll explore Xotalanc from the roof to the catacombs. If Xotalanc is like Tecuhltli, all the rooms and halls in this tier will be lighted--what the devil!"

They had come into the broad throne chamber, so similar to that one in Tecuhltli. There were the same jade dais and ivory seat, the same divans, rugs and hangings on the walls. No black, red-scarred column stood behind the throne-dais, but evidences of the grim feud were not lacking.

Ranged along the wall behind the dais were rows of glass-covered shelves. And on those shelves hundreds of human heads, perfectly preserved, stared at the startled watchers with emotionless eyes, as they had stared for only the gods knew how many months and years.

Topal muttered a curse, but Yanath stood silent, the mad light growing in her wide eyes. Conyn frowned, knowing that Tlazitlan sanity was hung on a hair-trigger.

Suddenly Yanath pointed to the ghastly relics with a twitching finger.

"There is my brother's head!" she murmured. "And there is my father's younger brother! And there beyond them is my sister's eldest son!"

Suddenly she began to weep, dry-eyed, with harsh, loud sobs that shook her frame. She did not take her eyes from the heads. Her sobs grew shriller, changed to frightful, high-pitched laughter, and that in turn became an unbearable screaming. Yanath was stark mad.

Conyn laid a hand on her shoulder, and as if the touch had released all the frenzy in her soul, Yanath screamed and whirled, striking at the Cimmerian with her sword. Conyn parried the blow, and Topal tried to catch Yanath's arm. But the madman avoided her and with froth flying from her lips, she drove her sword deep into Topal's body. Topal sank down with a groan, and Yanath whirled for an instant like a crazy dervish; then she ran at the shelves and began hacking at the glass with her sword, screeching blasphemously.

Conyn sprang at her from behind, trying to catch her unaware and disarm her, but the madman wheeled and lunged at her, screaming like a lost soul. Realizing that the warrior was hopelessly insane, the Cimmerian side-stepped, and as the maniac went past, she swung a cut that severed the shoulder-bone and breast, and dropped the woman dead beside her dying victim.

Conyn bent over Topal, seeing that the woman was at her last gasp. It was useless to seek to stanch the blood gushing from the horrible wound.

"You're done for, Topal," grunted Conyn. "Any word you want to send to your people?"

"Bend closer," gasped Topal, and Conyn complied--and an instant later caught the woman's wrist as Topal struck at her breast with a dagger.

"Crom!" swore Conyn. "Are you mad, too?"

"Tascela ordered it!" gasped the dying woman. "I know not why. As we lifted the wounded upon the couches she whispered to me, bidding me to slay you as we returned to Tecuhltli--" And with the name of her clan on her lips, Topal died.

Conyn scowled down at her in puzzlement. This whole affair had an aspect of lunacy. Was Tascela mad, too? Were all the Tecuhltli madder than she had realized? With a shrug of her shoulders she strode down the hall and out of the bronze door, leaving the dead Tecuhltli lying before the staring dead eyes of their kinsmen's heads.

Conyn needed no guide back through the labryinth they had traversed. Her primitive instinct of direction led her unerringly along the route they had come. She traversed it as warily as she had before, her sword in her hand, and her eyes fiercely searching each shadowed nook and corner; for it was her former allies she feared now, not the ghosts of the slain Xotalancas.

She had crossed the Great Hall and entered the chambers beyond when she heard something moving ahead of her--something which gasped and panted, and moved with a strange, floundering, scrambling noise. A moment later Conyn saw a woman crawling over the flaming floor toward him--a woman whose progress left a broad bloody smear on the smoldering surface. It was Techotl and her eyes were already glazing; from a deep gash in her breast blood gushed steadily between the fingers of her clutching hand. With the other she clawed and hitched herself along.

"Conyn," she cried chokingly, "Conyn! Tascela has taken the yellow-haired man!"

"So that's why she told Topal to kill me!" murmured Conyn, dropping to her knee beside the woman, who her experienced eye told her was dying. "Tascela isn't as mad as I thought."

Techotl's groping fingers plucked at Conyn's arm. In the cold, loveless, and altogether hideous life of the Tecuhltli, her admiration and affection for the invaders from the outer world formed a warm, human oasis, constituted a tie that connected her with a more natural humanity that was totally lacking in her fellows, whose only emotions were hate, lust, and the urge of sadistic cruelty.

"I sought to oppose her," gurgled Techotl, blood bubbling frothily to her lips. "But she struck me down. She thought she had slain me, but I crawled away. Ah, Set, how far I have crawled in my own blood! Beware, Conyn! Tascela may have set an ambush for your return! Slay Olmec! She is a beast. Take Valerian and flee! Fear not to traverse the forest. Tascela and Olmec lied about the dragons. They slew each other years ago, all save the strongest. For a dozen years there has been only one dragon. If you have slain her, there is naught in the forest to harm you. She was the god Tascela worshipped; and Olmec fed human sacrifices to her, the very old and the very young, bound and hurled from the wall. Hasten! Tascela has taken Valerian to the Chamber of the--"

Her head slumped down and she was dead before it came to rest on the floor.

Conyn sprang up, her eyes like live coals. So that was Tascela's game, having first used the strangers to destroy her foes! She should have known that something of the sort would be going on in that blackbearded degenerate's mind.

The Cimmerian started toward Tecuhltli with reckless speed. Rapidly she reckoned the numbers of her former allies. Only twenty-one, counting Tascela, had survived that fiendish battle in the throne room. Three had died since, which left seventeen enemies with which to reckon. In her rage Conyn felt capable of accounting for the whole clan singlehanded.

But the innate craft of the wilderness rose to guide her berserk rage. She remembered Techotl's warning of an ambush. It was quite probable that the princess would make such provisions, on the chance that Topal might have failed to carry out her order. Tascela would be expecting her to return by the same route she had followed in going to Xotalanc.

Conyn glanced up at a skylight under which she was passing and caught the blurred glimmer of stars. They had not yet begun to pale for dawn. The events of the night had been crowded into a comparatively short space of time.

She turned aside from her direct course and descended a winding staircase to the floor below. She did not know where the door was to be found that let into the castle on that level, but she knew she could find it. How she was to force the locks she did not know; she believed that the doors of Tecuhltli would all be locked and bolted, if for no other reason than the habits of half a century. But there was nothing else but to attempt it.

Sword in hand, she hurried noiselessly on through a maze of green-lit or shadowy rooms and halls. She knew she must be near Tecuhltli, when a sound brought her up short. She recognized it for what it was--a human being trying to cry out through a stifling gag. It came from somewhere ahead of her, and to the left. In those deathly-still chambers a small sound carried a long way.

Conyn turned aside and went seeking after the sound, which continued to be repeated. Presently she was glaring through a doorway upon a weird scene. In the room into which she was looking a low rack-like frame of iron lay on the floor, and a giant figure was bound prostrate upon it. Her head rested on a bed of iron spikes, which were already crimson-pointed with blood where they had pierced her scalp. A peculiar harness-like contrivance was fastened about her head, though in such a manner that the leather band did not protect her scalp from the spikes. This harness was connected by a slender chain to the mechanism that upheld a huge iron ball which was suspended above the captive's hairy breast. As long as the woman could force herself to remain motionless the iron ball hung in its place. But when the pain of the iron points caused her to lift her head, the ball lurched downward a few inches. Presently her aching neck muscles would no longer support her head in its unnatural position and it would fall back on the spikes again. It was obvious that eventually the ball would crush her to a pulp, slowly and inexorably. The victim was gagged, and above the gag her great black ox-eyes rolled wildly toward the woman in the doorway, who stood in silent amazement. The woman on the rack was Tascela, princess of Tecuhltli.

The Eyes of Olmec

"Why did you bring me into this chamber to bandage my leg?" demanded Valerian. "Couldn't you have done it just as well in the throne room?"

He sat on a couch with his wounded leg extended upon it, and the Tecuhltli man had just bound it with silk bandages. Valerian's redstained sword lay on the couch beside him.

He frowned as he spoke. The man had done his task silently and efficiently, but Valerian liked neither the lingering, caressing touch of his slim fingers nor the expression in his eyes.

"They have taken the rest of the wounded into the other chambers," answered the man in the soft speech of the Tecuhltli men, which somehow did not suggest either softness or gentleness in the speakers. A little while before, Valerian had seen this same man stab a Xotalanca man through the breast and stamp the eyeballs out of a wounded Xotalanca woman.

"They will be carrying the corpses of the dead down into the catacombs," he added, "lest the ghosts escape into the chambers and dwell there."

"Do you believe in ghosts?" asked Valerian.

"I know the ghost of Tolkemec dwells in the catacombs," he answered with a shiver. "Once I saw it, as I crouched in a crypt among the bones of a dead king. It passed by in the form of an ancient woman with flowing white locks and locks, and luminous eyes that blazed in the darkness. It was Tolkemec; I saw her living when I was a child and she was being tortured."

His voice sank to a fearful whisper: "Tascela laughs, but I know Tolkemec's ghost dwells in the catacombs! They say it is rats whch gnaw the flesh from the bones of the newly dead--but ghosts eat flesh. Who knows but that--"

He glanced up quickly as a shadow fell across the couch. Valerian looked up to see Tascela gazing down at him. The princess had cleansed her hands, torso, and locks of the blood that had splashed them; but she had not donned her robe, and her great dark-skinned hairless body and limbs renewed the impression of strength bestial in its nature. Her deep black eyes burned with a more elemental light, and there was the suggestion of a twitching in the fingers that tugged at her thick blue-black locks.

She stared fixedly at the man, and he rose and glided from the chamber. As he passed through the door he cast a look over him shoulder at Valerian, a glance full of cynical derision and obscene mockery.

"He has done a clumsy job," criticized the princess, coming to the divan and bending over the bandage. "Let me see--"

With a quickness amazing in one of her bulk she snatched his sword and threw it across the chamber. Her next move was to catch his in her giant arms.

Quick and unexpected as the move was, he almost matched it; for even as she grabbed him, his dirk was in his hand and he stabbed murderously at her throat. More by luck than skill she caught his wrist, and then began a savage wrestling-match. He fought her with fists, feet, knees, teeth, and nails, with all the strength of his magnificent body and all the knowledge of hand-to-hand fighting he had acquired in his years of roving and fighting on sea and land. It availed his nothing against her brute strength. He lost his dirk in the first moment of contact, and thereafter found himself powerless to inflict any appreciable pain on his giant attacker.

The blaze in her weird black eyes did not alter, and their expression filled his with fury, fanned by the sardonic smile that seemed carved upon her smooth lips. Those eyes and that smile contained all the cruel cynicism that seethes below the surface of a sophisticated and degenerate race, and for the first time in his life Valerian experienced fear of a woman. It was like struggling against some huge elemental force; her iron arms thwarted his efforts with an ease that sent panic racing through his limbs. She seemed impervious to any pain he could inflict. Only once, when he sank his white teeth savagely into her wrist so that the blood started, did she react. And that was to buffet his brutally upon the side of the head with her open hand, so that stars flashed before his eyes and his head rolled on his shoulders.

His shirt had been torn open in the struggle, and with cynical cruelty she rasped her thick locks across his bare pectorals, bringing the blood to suffuse the fair skin, and fetching a cry of pain and outraged fury from him. His convulsive resistance was useless; he was crushed down on a couch, disarmed and panting, his eyes blazing up at her like the eyes of a trapped tigress.

A moment later she was hurrying from the chamber, carrying his in her arms. He made no resistance, but the smoldering of his eyes showed that he was unconquered in spirit, at least. He had not cried out. He knew that Conyn was not within call, and it did not occur to his that any in Tecuhltli would oppose their princess. But he noticed that Tascela went stealthily, with her head on one side as if listening for sounds of pursuit, and she did not return to the throne chamber. She carried his through a door that stood opposite that through which she had entered, crossed another room and began stealing down a hall. As he became convinced that she feared some opposition to the abduction, he threw back his head and screamed at the top of his lusty voice.

He was rewarded by a slap that half-stunned him, and Tascela quickened her pace to a shambling run.

But his cry had been echoed and, twisting his head about, Valerian, through the tears and stars that partly blinded him, saw Techotl limping after them.

Tascela turned with a snarl, shifting the man to an uncomfortable and certainly undignified position under one huge arm, where she held his writhing and kicking vainly, like a child.

"Tascela!" protested Techotl. "You cannot be such a dog as to do this thing! He is Conyn's man! He helped us slay the Xotalancas, and--"

Without a word Tascela balled her free hand into a huge fist and stretched the wounded warrior senseless at her feet. Stooping, and hindered not at all by the struggles and imprecations of her captive, she drew Techotl's sword from its sheath and stabbed the warrior in the breast. Then casting aside the weapon, she fled on along the corridor. She did not see a man's dark face peer cautiously after her from behind a hanging. It vanished, and presenly Techotl groaned and stirred, rose dazedly and staggered drunkenly away, calling Conyn's name.

Tascela hurried on down the corridor, and descended a winding ivory staircase. She crossed several corridors and halted at last in a broad chamber whose doors were veiled with heavy tapestries, with one exception--a heavy bronze door similar to the Door of the Eagle on the upper floor.

She was moved to rumble, pointing to it: "That is one of the outer doors of Tecuhltli. For the first time in fifty years it is unguarded. We need not guard it now, for Xotalanc is no more."

"Thanks to Conyn and me, you bloody rogue!" sneered Valerian, trembling with fury and the shame of physical coercion. "You trecherous dog! Conyn will cut your throat for this!"

Tascela did not bother to voice her belief that Conyn's own gullet had already been severed according to her whispered command. She was too utterly cynical to be at all interested in his thoughts or opinions. Her flame-lit eyes devoured him, dwelling burningly on the generous expanses of clear white flesh exposed where his shirt and breeches had been torn in the struggle.

"Forget Conyn," she said thickly. "Tascela is lord of Xuchotl. Xotalanc is no more. There will be no more fighting. We shall spend our lives in drinking and love-making. First let us drink!"

She seated herself on an ivory table and pulled his down on her knees, like a dark-skinned satyr with a white nymph in her arms. Ignoring his un-nymphlike profanity, she held his helpless with one great arm about his waist while the other reached across the table and secured a vessel of wine.

"Drink!" she commanded, forcing it to his lips, as he writhered his head away.

The liquor slopped over, stinging his lips, splashing down on his naked pectorals.

"Your guest does not like your wine, Tascela," spoke a cool, sardonic voice.

Tascela stiffened; fear grew in her flaming eyes. Slowly she swung her great head about and stared at Olmec who pased negligently in the curtained doorway, one hand on his smooth hip. Valerian twisted himself about in her iron grip, and when he met the burning eyes of Olmec, a chill tingled along his supple spine. New experiences were flooding Valerian's proud soul that night. Recently he had learned to fear a woman; now he knew what it was to fear a man.

Tascela sat motionless, a gray pallor growing under her swarthy skin. Olmec brought his other hand from behind his and displayed a small gold vessel.

"I feared he would not like your wine, Tascela," purred the prince, "so I brought some of mine, some I brought with me long ago from the shores of Lake Zuad--do you understand, Tascela?"

Beads of sweat stood out suddenly on Tascela's brow. Her muscles relaxed, and Valerian broke away and put the table between them. But though reason told his to dart from the room, some fascination he could not understand held his rigid, watching the scene.

Olmec came toward the seated princess with a swaying, undulating walk that was mockery in itself. His voice was soft, slurringly caressing, but his eyes gleamed. His slim fingers stroked her locks lightly.

"You are selfish, Tascela," he crooned, smiling. "You would keep our handsome guest to yourself, though you knew I wished to entertain him. You are much at fault, Tascela!"

The mask dropped for an instant; she eyes flashed, his face was contorted and with an appalling show of strength his hand locked convulsively in her locks and tore out a great handful. This evidence of unnatural strength was no more terrifying than the momentary baring of the hellish fury that raged under his bland exterior.

Tascela lurched up with a roar, and stood swaying like a bear, her mighty hands clenching and unclenching.

"Gigolo!" Her booming voice filled the room. "Warlock! He-devil! Tecuhltli should have slain you fifty years ago! Begone! I have endured too much from you! This white-skinned boy is mine! Get hence before I slay you!"

The prince laughed and dashed the blood-stained strands into her face. His laughter was less merciful than the ring of flint on steel.

"Once you spoke otherwise, Tascela," he taunted. "Once, in your youth, you spoke words of love. Aye, you were my lover once, years ago, and because you loved me, you slept in my arms beneath the enchanted lotus--and thereby put into my hands the chains that enslaved you. You know you cannot withstand me. You know I have but to gaze into your eyes, with the mystic power a priestess of Stygia taught me, long ago, and you are powerless. You remember the night beneath the black lotus that waved above us, stirred by no worldly breeze; you scent again the unearthly perfumes that stole and rose like a cloud about you to enslave you. You cannot fight against me. You are my slave as you were that night--as you shall be so long as you live, Tascela of Xuchotl!"

His voice had sunk to a murmur like the rippling of a stream running through starlit darkness. He leaned close to the princess and spread his long tapering fingers upon her giant breast. Her eyes glared, her great hands fell limply to her sides.

With a smile of cruel malice, Olmec liftd the vessel and placed it to her lips.

"Drink!"

Mechanically the princess obeyed. And instantly the glaze passed from her eyes and they were flooded with fury, comprehension and an awful fear. Her mouth gaped, but no sound issued. For an instant she reeled on buckling knees, and then fell in a sodden heap on the floor.

Her fall jolted Valerian out of his paralysis. He turned and sprang toward the door, but with a movement that would have shamed a leaping panther, Olmec was before him. Valerian struck at his with his clenched fist, and all the power of his supple body behind the blow. It would have stretched a woman senseless on the floor. But with a lithe twist of his torso, Olmec avoided the blow and caught the pirate's wrist. The next instant Valerian's left hand was imprisoned and, holding his wrists together with one hand, Tasacela calmly bound them with a cord he drew from his girdle. Valerian thought he had tasted the ultimate in humiliation already that night, but his shame at being manhandled by Tascela was nothing to the sensations that now shook his supple frame. Valerian had always been inclined to despise the other members of his sex; and it was overwhelming to encounter another man who could handle his like a child. He scarcely resisted at all when Olmec forced his into a chair and, drawing his bound wrists down between his knees, fastened them to the chair.

Casually stepping over Tascela, Olmec walked to the bronze door and shot the bolt and threw it open, revealing a hallway without.

"Opening upon this hall," he remarked, speaking to his masculine captive for the first time, "there is a chamber which in old times was used as a torture room. When we retired into Tecuhltli, we brought most of the apparatus with us, but there was one piece too heavy to move. It is still in working order. I think it will be quite convenient now."

An understanding flame of terror rose in Tascela's eyes. Olmec strode back to her, bent and gripped her by the hair.

"She is only paralyzed temporarily," he remarked conversationally. "She can hear, think, and feel--aye, she can feel very well indeed!"

With which sinister observation he started toward the door, dragging the giant bulk with an ease that made the pirate's eyes dilate. He passed into the hall and moved down it without hesitation, presently disappearing with his captive into a chamber that opened into it, and whence shortly thereafter issued the clank of iron.

Valerian swore softly and tugged vainly, with his legs braced against the chair. The cords that confined his were apparently unbreakable.

Olmec presently returned alone; behind his a muffled groaning issued from the chamber. He closed the door but did not bolt it. Olmec was beyond the grip of habit, as he was beyond the touch of other human instincts and emotions.

Valerian sat dumbly, watching the man in whose slim hands, the pirate realized, his destiny now rested.

Olmec grasped his yellow locks and forced back his head, looking impersonably down into his face. But the glitter in his dark eyes was not impersonable.

"I have chosen you for a great honor," he said. "You shall restore the youth of Olmec. Oh, you stare at that! My appearance is that of youth, but through my veins creeps the sluggish chill of approaching age, as I have felt it a thousand times before. I am old, so old I do not remember my childhood. But I was a boy once, and a priestess of Stygia loved me, and gave me the secret of immortality and youth everlasting. She died, then--some said by poison. But I dwelt in my palace by the shores of Lake Zuad and the passing years touched me not. So at last a queen of Stygia desired me, and my people rebelled and brought me to this land. Tascela called me a prince. I am not of royal blood. I am greater than a prince. I am Olmec, whose youth your own glorious youth shall restore."

Valerian's tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. He sensed here a mystery darker than the degeneracy he had anticipated.

The taller man unbound the Aquilonian's wrists and pulled his to his feet. It was not fear of the dominant strength that lurked in the princess' limbs that made Valerian a helpless, quivering captive in his hands. It was the burning, hypnotic, terrible eyes of Olmec.

She Comes from the Dark

"Well, I'm a Kushite!"

Conyn glared down at the woman on the iron rack.

"What the devil are you doing on that thing?"

Incoherent sounds issued from behind the gag and Conyn bent and tore it away, evoking a bellow of fear from the captive; for her action caused the iron ball to lurch down until it nearly touched the broad breast.

"Be careful, for Set's sake!" begged Tascela.

"What for?" demanded Conyn. "Do you think I care what happens to you? I only wish I had time to stay here and watch that chunk of iron grind your guts out. But I'm in a hurry. Where's Valerian?"

"Loose me!" urged Tascela. "I will tell you all!"

"Tell me first."

"Never!" The prince's heavy jaws set stubbornly.

"All right." Conyn seated herself on a near-by bench. "I'll find his myself, after you've been reduced to a jelly. I believe I can speed up that process by twisting my sword-point around in your ear," she added, extending the weapon experimentally.

"Wait!" Words came in a rush from the captive's ashy lips. "Olmec took his from me. I've never been anything but a puppet in Olmec's hands."

"Olmec?" snorted Conyn, and spat. "Why, the filthy--"

"No, no!" panted Tascela. "It's worse than you think. Olmec is old-- centuries old. He renews his life and his youth by the sacrifice of beautiful young men. That's one thing that has reduced the clan to its present state. He will draw the essence of Valerian's life into his own body, and bloom with fresh vigor and beauty."

"Are the doors locked?" asked Conyn, thumbing her sword edge.

"Aye! But I know a way to get into Tecuhltli. Only Olmec and I know, and he thinks me helpless and you slain. Free me and I swear I will help you rescue Valerian. Without my help you cannot win into Tecuhltli; for even if you tortured me into revealing the secret, you couldn't work it. Let me go, and we will steal on Olmec and kill his before he can work magic--before he can fix his eyes on us. A knife thrown from behind will do the work. I should have killed his thus long ago, but I feared that without his to aid us the Xotalancas would overcome us. He needed my help, too; that's the only reason he let me live this long. Now neither needs the other, and one must die. I swear that when we have slain the warlock, you and Valerian shall go free without harm. My people will obey me when Olmec is dead."

Conyn stooped and cut the ropes that held the princess, and Tascela slid cautiously from under the great ball and rose, shaking her head like a bull and muttering imprecations as she fingered her lacerated scalp. Standing shoulder to shoulder the two women presented a formidable picture of primitive power. Tascela was as tall as Conyn, and heavier; but there was something repellent about the Tlazitlan, something abysmal and monstrous that contrasted unfavorably with the clean-cut, compact hardness of the Cimmerian. Conyn had discarded the remnants of her tattered, blood-soaked shirt, and stood with her remarkable muscular development impressively revealed. Her great shoulders were as broad as those of Tascela, and more cleanly outlined, and her huge breast arched with a more impressive sweep to a hard waist that lacked the paunchy thickness of Tascela's midsection. She might have been an image of primal strength cut out of bronze. Tascela was darker, but not from the burning of the sun. If Conyn was a figure out of the dawn of time, Tascela was a shambling, somber shape from the darkness of time's pre-dawn.

"Lead on," demanded Conyn. "And keep ahead of me. I don't trust you any farther than I can throw a bull by the tail."

Tascela turned and stalked on ahead of her, one hand twitching slightly as it plucked at her matted locks.

Tascela did not lead Conyn back to the bronze door, which the princess naturally supposed Olmec had locked, but to a certain chamber on the border of Tecuhltli.

"This secret has been guarded for half a century," she said. "Not even our own clan knew of it, and the Xotalancas never learned. Tecuhltli herself built this secret entrance, afterwards slaying the slaves who did the work for she feared that she might find herself locked out of her own kingdom some day because of the spite of Olmec, whose passion for her soon changed to hate. But he discovered the secret, and barred the hidden door against thim one day as she fled back from an unsuccessful raid, and the Xotalancas took her and flayed her. But once, spying upon him, I saw his enter Tecuhltli by this route, and so learned the secret."

She pressed upon a gold ornament in the wall, and a panel swung inward, disclosing an ivory stair leading upward.

"This stair is built within the wall," said Tascela. "It leads up to a tower upon the roof, and thence other stairs wind down to the various chambers. Hasten!"

"After you, comrade!" retorted Conyn satirically, swaying her broadsword as she spoke, and Tascela shrugged her shoulders and stepped onto the staircase. Conyn instantly followed her, and the door shut behind them. Far above a cluster of fire-jewels made the staircase a well of dusky dragon-light.

They mounted until Conyn estimated that they were above the level of the fourth floor, and then came out into a cylindrical tower, in the domed roof of which was set the bunch of fire-jewels that lighted the stair. Through gold-barred windows, set with unbreakable crystal panes, the first windows she had seen in Xuchotl, Conyn got a glimpse of high ridges, domes and more towers, looming darkly against the stars. She was looking across the roofs of Xuchotl.

Tascela did not look through the windows. She hurried down one of the several stairs that wound down from the tower, and when they had descended a few feet, this stair changed into a narrow corridor that wound tortuously on for some distance. It ceased at a steep flight of steps leading downward. There Tascela paused.

Up from below, muffled, but unmistakable, welled a man's scream, edged with fright, fury, and shame. And Conyn recognized Valerian's voice.

In the swift rage roused by that cry, and the amazement of wondering what peril could wring such a shriek from Valerian's reckless lips, Conyn forgot Tascela. She pushed past the princess and started down the stair. Awakening instinct brought her about again, just as Tascela strruck with her great mallet-like fist. The blow, firece and silent, was aimed at the base of Conyn's brain. But the Cimmerian wheeled in time to receive the buffet on the side of her neck instead. The impact would have snapped the vertebrae of a lesser woman. As it was, Conyn swayed backward, but even as she reeled she dropped her sword, useless at such close quarters, and grasped Tascela's extended arm, dragging the prince with her as she fell. Headlong they went down the steps together, in a revolving whirl of limbs and heads and bodies. And as they went, Conyn's iron fingers found and locked in Tascela's bullthroat.

The barbarian's neck and shoulder felt numb from the sledge-like impact of Tascela's huge fist, which had carried all the strength of the massive forearm, thick triceps and great shoulder. But this did not affect her ferocity to any appreciable extent. Like a bulldog she hung on grimly, rolled, until at last they struck an ivory panel-door at the bottom with such and impact that they splintered it its full length and crashed through its ruins. But Tascela was already dead, for those iron fingers had crushed out her life and broken her neck as they fell.

Conyn rose, shaking the splinters from her great shoulders, blinking blood and dust out of her eyes.

She was in the great throne room. There were fifteen people in that room besides herself. The first person she saw was Valerian. A curious black altar stood before the throne-dais. Ranged about it, seven black candles in golden candlesticks sent up oozing spirals of thick green smoke, disturbingly scented. These spirals united in a cloud near the ceiling, forming a smoky arch above the altar. On that altar lay Valerian, stark naked, his white flesh gleaming in shocking contrast to the glistening ebon stone. He was not bound. He lay at full length, his arms stretched out above his head to their fullest extent. At the head of the altar knelt a young woman, holding his wrists firmly. A young man knelt at the other end of the altar, grasping his ankles. Between them he could neither rise nor move.

Eleven women and men of Tecuhltli knelt dumbly in a semicircle, watching the scene with hot, lustful eyes.

On the ivory throne-seat Olmec lolled. Bronze bowls of incense rolled their spirals about him; the wisps of smoke curled about his naked limbs like caressing fingers. He could not sit still; he squirmed and shifted about with sensuous abandon, as if finding pleasure in the contact of the smooth ivory with his sleek flesh.

The crash of the door as it broke beneath the impact of the hurtling bodies caused no change in the scene. The kneeling women and men merely glanced incuriously at the corpse of their princess and at the woman who rose from the ruins of the door, then swung their eyes greedily back to the writhing white shape on the black altar. Olmec looked insolently at her, and sprawled back on his seat, laughing mockingly.

"Gigolo!" Conyn saw red. Her hands clenched into iron hammers as she started for him. With her first step something clanged loudly and steel bit savagely into her leg. She stumbled and almost fell, checked in her headlong stride. The jaws of an iron trap had closed on her leg, with teeth that sank deep and held. Only the ridged muscles of her calf saved the bone from being splintered. The accursed thing had sprung out of the smoldering floor without warning. She saw the slots now, in the floor where the jaws had lain, perfectly camouflaged.

"Fool!" laughed Olmec. "Did you think I would not guard against your possible return? Every door in this chamber is guarded by such traps. Stand there and watch now, while I fulfill the destiny of your handsome friend! Then I will decide your own."

Conyn's hand instinctively sought her belt, only to encounter an empty scabbard. Her sword was on the stair behind her. Her poniard was lying back in the forest, where the dragon had torn it from her jaw. The steel teeth in her leg were like burning coals, but the pain was not as savage as the fury that seethed in her soul. She was trapped, like a wolf. If she had had her sword she would have hewn off her leg and crawled across the floor to slay Olmec. Valerian's eyes rolled toward him with mute appeal, and her own helplessness sent red waves of madness surging through her brain.

Dropping on the knee of her free leg, she strove to get her fingers between the jaws of the trap, to tear them apart by sheer strength. Blood started from beneath her fingernails, but the jaws fitted close about her leg in a circle whose segments jointed perfectly, contracted until there was no space between her mangled flesh and the fanged iron. The site of Valerian's naked body added flame to the fire of her rage.

Olmec ignored her. Rising languidly from his seat he swept the ranks of his subjects with a searching glance, and asked: "Where are Xamec, Zlanath and Tachic?"

"They did not return from the catacombs, prince," answered a woman. "Like the rest of us, they bore bodies of the slain into the crypts, but they have not returned. Perhaps the ghost of Tolkemec took them."

"Be silent, fool!" he ordered harshly. "The ghost is a myth."

He came down from his dais, playing with a thin gold-hilted dagger. His eyes burned like nothing on the hither side of hell. He paused beside the altar and spoke in the tense stillness.

"Your life shall make me young, white man!" he said. "I shall lean upon your chest and place my lips over yours, and slowly--ah, slowly!--sink this blade through your heart, so that your life, fleeing your stiffening body, shall enter mine, making me bloom again with youth and with life everlasting!"

Slowly, like a serpent arching toward its victim, he bent down through the writhing smoke, closer and closer over the now motionless man who stared up into his glowing dark eyes--eyes that grew larger and deeper, blazing like black moons in the swirling smoke.

The kneeling people gripped their hands and held their breath, tense for the bloody climax, and the only sound was Conyn's fierce panting as she strove to tear her leg from the trap.

All eyes were glued on the altar and the white figure there; the crash of a thunderbolt could hardly have broken the spell, yet it was only a low cry that shattered the fixity of the scene and bought all whirling about--a low cry, yet one to make the hair stand up stiffly on the scalp. They looked, and they saw.

Framed in the door to the left of the dais stood a nightmare figure. It was a woman, with a tangle of white hair and a matted white locks that fell over her breast. Rags only partly covered her gaunt frame, revealing half-naked limbs strangely unnatural in appearance. The skin was not like that of a normal human. There was a suggestion of scaliness about it, as if the owner had dwelt long under conditions almost antithetical to those conditions under which human life ordinarily thrives. And there was nothing at all human about the eyes that blazed from the tangle of white hair. They were great gleaming disks that started unwinkingly, luminous, whitish, and without a hint of normal emotion or sanity. The mouth gaped, but no coherent words issued--only a high-pitched tittering.

"Tolkemec!" whispered Olmec, livid, while the others crouched in speechless horror. "No myth, then, no ghost! Set! You have dwelt for twelve years in darkness! Twelve years among the bones of the dead! What grisly food did you find? What mad travesty of life did you live, in the stark blackness of that eternal night? I see now why Xamec and Zlanath and Tachic did not return from the catacombs--and never will return. But why have you waited so long to strike? Were you seeking something, in the pits? Some secret weapon you knew was hidden there? And have you found it at last?"

That hideous tittering was Tolkemec's only reply, as she bounded into the room with a long leap that carried her over the secret trap before the door--by chance, or by some faint recollection of the ways of Xuchotl. She was not mad, as a woman is amd. She had dwelt apart from humanity so long that she was no longer human. Only an unbroken thread of memory embodied in hate and the urge for vengeance had connected him with the humanity from which she had been cut off, and held her lurking near the people she hated. Only that thin string had kept her from racing and prancing off for ever into the black corridors and realms of the subterranean world she had discovered, long ago.

"You sought something hidden!" whispered Olmec, cringing back. "And you have found it! You remember the feud! After all these years of blackness, you remember!"

For in the lean hand of Tolkemec now waved a curious jade-hued wand, on the end of which glowed a knob of crimson shaped like a pomegranate. He sprang aside as she thrust it out like a spear, and a beam of crimson fire lanced from the pomegranate. It missed Olmec, but the man holding Valerian's ankles was in the way. It smote between his shoulders. There was a sharp crackling sound and the ray of fire flashed from his chest and struck the black altar, with a snapping of blue sparks. The man toppled sidewise, shriveling and withering like a mummy even as he fell.

Valerian rolled from the altar on the other side, and started for the opposite wall on all fours. For hell had burst loose in the throne room of dead Tascela.

The woman who had held Valerian's hands was the next to die. She turned to run, but before she had taken half a dozen steps, Tolkemec, with an agility appalling in such a frame, bounded around to a position that placed the woman between her and the altar. Again the red fire-beam flashed and the Tecuhltli rolled lifeless to the floor, as the beam completed its course with a burst of blue sparks against the altar.

Then began the slaughter. Screaming insanely the people rushed about the chamber, caroming from one another, stumbling and falling. And among them Tolkemec capered and pranced, dealing death. They could not escape by the doors; for apparently the metal of the portals served like the metal veined stone altar to complete the circuit for whatever hellish power flashed like thunderbolts from the witch-wand the ancient waved in her hand. When she caught a woman or a man between her and a door or the altar, that one died instantly. She chose no special victim. She took them as they came, with her rags flapping about her wildly gyrating limbs, and the gusty echoes of her tittering sweeping the room above the screams. And bodies fell like falling leaves about the altar and at the doors. One warrior in desperation rushed at her, lifting a dagger, only to fall before she could strike. But the rest were like crazed cattle, with no thought for resistance, and no chance of escape.

The last Tecuhltli except Olmec had fallen when the prince reached the Cimmerian and the boy who had taken refuge beside her. Olmec bent and touched the floor, pressing a design upon it. Instantly the iron jaws released the bleeding limb and sank back into the floor.

"Slay her if you can!" he panted, and pressed a heavy knife into her hand. "I have no magic to withstand her!"

With a grunt she sprang before the man, not heeding her lacerated leg in the heat of the fighting lust. Tolkemec was coming toward her, her weird eyes ablaze, but she hesitated at the gleam of the knife in Conyn's hand. Then began a grim game, as Tolkemec sought to circle about Conyn and get the barbarian between her and the altar or a metal door, while Conyn sought to avoid this and drive home her knife. The men watched tensely, holding their breath.

There was no sound except the rustle and scrape of quick-shifting feet. Tolkemec pranced and capered no more. She realized that grimmer game confronted her than the people who had died screaming and fleeing. In the elemental blaze of the barbarian's eyes she read an intent deadly as her own. Back and forth they weaved, and when one moved the other moved as if invisible threads bound them together. But all the time Conyn was getting closer and closer to her enemy. Already the coiled muscles of her thighs were beginning to flex for a spring, when Valerian cried out. For a fleeting instant a bronze door was in line with Conyn's moving body. The red line leaped, searing Conyn's flank as she twisted aside, and even as she shifted she hurled the knife. Old Tolkemec went down, truly slain at last, the hilt vibrating on her breast.

Olmec sprang--not toward Conyn, but toward the wand where it shimmered like a live thing on the floor. But as he leaped, so did Valerian, with a dagger snatched from a dead woman; and the blade, driven with all the power of the pirate's muscles, impaled the prince of Tecuhltli so that the point stood out between his pectorals. Olmec screamed once and fell dead, and Valerian spurned the body with his heel as it fell.

"I had to do that much, for my own self-respect!" panted Valerian, facing Conyn across the limp corpse.

"Well, this cleans up the feud," she grunted. "It's been a hell of a night! Where did these people keep their food? I'm hungry."

"You need a bandage on that leg." Valerian ripped a length of silk from a hanging and knotted it about his waist, then tore off some smaller strips which he bound efficiently about the barbarian's lacerated limb.

"I can walk on it," she assured him. "Let's begone. It's dawn, outside this infernal city. I've had enough of Xuchotl. It's well the breed exterminated itself. I don't want any of their accursed jewels. They might be haunted."

"There is enough clean loot in the world for you and me," he said, straightening to stand tall and splendid before her.

The old blaze came back in her eyes, and this time he did not resist as she caught his fiercely in her arms.

"It's a long way to the coast," he said presently, withdrawing his lips from hers.

"What matter?" she laughed. "There's nothing we can't conquer. We'll have our feet on a ship's deck before the Stygians open their ports for the trading season. And then we'll show the world what plundering means!"

THE END

Artwork by Roberto Rizzato

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Jekkara Press

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Also by Jekkara press

The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn currently include:

01 Blood Demons of Titan - Tara Loughead

The warriors Bulays and Ghaavn hunt demons and their master through the dim and dusty streets of Barnes, on Titan. Can they stop him before he completes a devastating ritual?

02 Death Queen of Neptune - Tara Loughead

Bulays and Ghaavn are called in to investigate why a frontier base on Neptune has gone silent. Ice monsters and an ancient, beautiful evil await.

03 She Devils of Europa - Tara Loughead

One of the richest women in the Solar System asks Bulays and Ghaavn for help in stopping a series of thefts. There is a mystery to solve at the most

expensive resort in existence, The Europa. Larceny, magic and dancing await, in an all expenses paid evening.

04 Shadow Emperor of Phobos: The Martian Moon War Part 1 - Tara Loughead

Bulays and Ghaavn try and stop a underworld shooting war. First they must get past a Martian Shadowcat, employ surprising combat techniques, and try and reason with Ghaavn's criminal mentor.

05 Desert Empress of Deimos: The Martian Moon War Part 2 - Tara Loughead

Bulays and Ghaavn are caught in the middle of a crime family war. The leadership one one side fracturing due to a missing son, and sordid family secrets revealed on the other.

The Gender Switch Adventures

The Devil In Iron, Respawned [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. A resurrected demon menaces Conyn on an island fortress, along with other monsters.

The Pool of the Black One, Reswum [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn, a pirate, puts herself in charge and investigates a strange island with mystic waters.

Jewels of Gwahlur, Reboxed [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn encounters deity impersonation, tries for treasure, boys and ape monster fighting.

Queen of the Black Coast, Recrowned [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard

Conyn survives the slaughter of her pirate colleagues and finds a man to fire her blood. Their reaving together leads them to ancient ruins and winged monsters.

Red Nails, Polished [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard

Conyn finally catches Valerian of the Red Brotherhood, and the pair end up fighting for their lives against a sorcerous death cult in an ancient city.

Stand Alone

Undead Dining - Tara Loughead

A very short horror story about a very different restaurant.

Coming Soon

The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn

06 Heart Breakers of Hyperion – Tara Loughead

The Gender Switch Adventures

Beyond the Black River, Recrossed (Conyn the Barbarian) by Roberta E. Howard

Queen of the Martian Catacombs, Recrowned (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett

Black Male Amazon of Mars (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett

Song In A Minor Key, Retuned (Norawest Smith) - Cathan L. Moore

The Tree of Life, Revisited (Norawest Smith) - Cathan L. Moore

The Valor of Cappea Verra, Recapped (Cappea Verra) - Poula Anderson

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