Free Conan the Cimmerian: The Complete Tales of Robert E. Howard by Robert E. Howard

where they had laid him. They put a goblet to his bloody lips and he drank like a man half dead of thirst.

    "Good!" he grunted, falling back. "Slaying is cursed dry work."

    They had stanched the flow of blood, and the innate vitality of the barbarian was asserting itself.

    "See first to the dagger wound in my side," he bade the court physicians.

    "Rinaldo wrote me a deathly song there, and keen was the stylus."

    "We should have hanged him long ago," gibbered Publius. "No good can come of poets–who is this?"

    He nervously touched Ascalante's body with his sandalled toe.

    "By Mitra!" ejaculated the commander. "It is Ascalante, once count of Thune! What devil's work brought him up from his desert haunts?"

    "But why does he stare so?" whispered Publius, drawing away, his own eyes wide and a peculiar prickling among the short hairs at the back of his fat neck. The others fell silent as they gazed at the dead outlaw.

    "Had you seen what he and I saw," growled the king, sitting up despite the protests of the leeches, "you had not wondered. Blast your own gaze by looking at–" He stopped short, his mouth gaping, his finger pointing fruitlessly. Where the monster had died, only the bare floor met his eyes.

    "Crom!" he swore. "The thing's melted back into the foulness which bore it!"

    "The king is delirious," whispered a noble. Conan heard and swore with barbaric oaths.

    "By Badb, Morrigan, Macha and Nemain!" he concluded wrathfully. "I am sane! It was like a cross between a Stygian mummy and a baboon. It came through the door, and Ascalante's rogues fled before it. It slew Ascalante, who was about to run me through. Then it came upon me and I slew it–how I know not, for my ax glanced from it as from a rack. But I think that the Sage Epemitreus had a hand in it–"

    "Hark how he names Epemitreus, dead for fifteen hundred years!" they whispered to each other.

    "By Ymir!" thundered the king. "This night I talked with Epemitreus! He called to me in my dreams, and I walked down a black stone corridor carved with old gods, to a stone stair on the steps of which were the outlines of Set, until I came to a crypt, and a tomb with a phoenix carved on it–"

    "In Mitra's name, lord king, be silent!" It was the high priest of Mitra who cried out, and his countenance was ashen.

    Conan threw up his head like a lion tossing back its mane, and his voice was thick with the growl of the angry lion.

    "Am I a slave, to shut my mouth at your command?"

    "Nay, nay, my lord!" The high priest was trembling, but not through fear of the royal wrath. "I meant no offense." He bent his head close to the king and spoke in a whisper that carried only to Conan's ears.

    "My lord, this is a matter beyond human understanding. Only the inner circle of the priestcraft know of the black stone corridor carved in the black heart of Mount Golamira, by unknown hands, or of the phoenix-guarded tomb where Epemitreus was laid to rest fifteen hundred years ago. And since that time no living man has entered it, for his chosen priests, after placing the Sage in the crypt, blocked up the outer entrance of the corridor so that no man could find it, and today not even the high priests know where it is. Only by word of mouth, handed down by the high priests to the chosen few, and jealously guarded, does the inner circle of Mitra's acolytes know of the resting place of Epemitreus in the black heart of Golamira. It is one of the Mysteries, on which Mitra's cult stands."

    "I can not say by what magic Epemitreus brought me to him," answered Conan. "But I talked with him, and he made a mark on my sword. Why that mark made it deadly to demons, or what magic lay behind the mark, I know not; but though the blade broke on Gromel's helmet, yet the fragment was long enough to kill the horror."

    "Let me see your sword," whispered the high priest from a throat gone suddenly dry.

    Conan held out the broken weapon and the high priest cried out and fell to his knees.

    "Mitra