As Conan’s gaze shifted to the burden the creature carried, young Conn waved frantically to him. It was too dark to make out expressions, while the sough of rushing air and the drumming thunder of vast wings would have drowned all speech. But Conan’s answering wave carried an unspoken message.
On and on they flew. Burdened by the Cimmerian’s great weight, the wyvern carrying Conan seemed to have trouble maintaining altitude. A score of times it began to sink toward the darkling plain below. Every time, a sharp command from its rider and a whack of his spear shaft sent it laboring upward again.
Weary with his exertions, Conan even dozed for a time. This did not require superhuman courage; the grip of the reptile’s claws, if far from comfortable, was not acutely painful. But where a lesser man might have been paralyzed with terror, Conan was sustained by a crude, fatalistic philosophy developed in his wandering years. According to his belief, when one’s situation is utterly hopeless, one might as well not waste one’s strength in worrying. Instead, one should leave one’s fate to the gods and save one’s strength for a more promising moment.
FOUR: The Topless Towers
The swift waxing of the tropical dawn shining on his heavy eyelids, together with a change in the rhythm of the wyvern’s laboring wings, awakened Conan. He glanced downward.
Hundreds of feet below, the grass-matted plain had given way to tropical jungle, still veiled in the purple gloom of night. On the misty horizon, the dawn lit up the sky like the blaze of a furnace. A minor river snaked its way through the thick jungle. On the inner side of one serpentine curve of this stream, the greenery had been hacked down to make room for cultivated fields. And in the midst of this tract of farmland lay a fantastic city.
All of stone it was, walled about with megalithic ramparts. Inside the wall, soaring into the ruddy glow of the dawn, rose a score of more queer, curve-walled towers, like colossal chimneys. Conan’s keen gaze, raking these enigmatic structures, confirmed the legend of the towers without doors or windows. Moreover, the towers had no roofs; black emptiness yawned where their roofs would have been.
Conan felt a tingle of supernatural awe. With a sword in his strong right hand, he would fearlessly face any peril or foe. But the uncanny—the sorcerous—roused primal superstitious dread in the breast of the giant Cimmerian. The heritage of his savage ancestors awoke within him at the cold breath of the eerie and the Unknown.
His long years of wandering had carried him over much of the length and breadth of the known world. From snowy Asgard to the black kingdoms beyond Kush in the South, from the wild shores of Pictland in the West to legended Khitai in the mysterious East, he had brawled and battled and buccaneered his red road. Once, nearly twenty years before, he had briefly penetrated the kingdom of Zembabwei. He had stopped at the twin kings’ northern capital to take service as a guard to a northward-bound caravan. But never had he seen the Forbidden City, Old Zembabwei, itself: a city from which foreigners were rigidly excluded.
From many mouths he had heard hints and rumors of the Forbidden City in the trackless jungles to the south. There, it was said men worshiped Set, the Old Serpent, under the name of Damballah. The black altars of Damballah ran crimson with the blood of human sacrifices. It was whispered that, on the night of sacrifice, the very moon itself burned red with the blood of those whose souls were offered up in pain and torment to the Old Serpent.
The flying wyvern descended in a slow spiral into Zembabwei. No man of the West could say for certain when this ancient city had been built. Surely it was long ago, perhaps before the advent of man on this planet. Legends hinted that the bloodsoaked cornerstone of Old Zembabwei had been laid by the uncanny serpent-men of Valusia, those children of Set and Yig and dark Han and serpent-bearded Byatis, who had ruled the quaking fens and thick fern-jungles of the prehuman world. Kull, the great hero-king, reputed founder of Conan’s own race, crushed the remnants of the serpent folk, who had outlived their age to linger into the era of Atlantis and Valusia. But that was an age ago.
Such things did not matter to Conan at this grim moment. Well he knew that the uncanny city was a haunt of primal terrors and a sinkhole of the blackest sorcery. It was a fitting lair for Thoth-Amon, the devil-priest of Stygia, to crawl to in order to lick his wounds. This, Conan thought, would be the last battle.
FIVE: The Skull Throne
On the height of Old Zembabwei rose the citadel, the heart of the city, ringed about with those strangely shapen and topless towers. At the summit of the hill, the royal palace and the temple of Damballah frowned at each other across a stone-paved plaza.
As the wyverns bearing Conan and Conn sank with thunderbeating wings to deposit their captives, the plaza was ringed by a host of stalwart blacks armed with iron-bladed spears and shields of rhinoceros hide. Gorgeous plumes of ostrich, ibis, flamingo, and other birds nodded from their shaven pates. The wind of the wyverns’ wings whipped these plumes like a gale, and the blacks squinted against the dust thus stirred up.
The flying reptiles dropped their burdens to the stony pave and then, in obedience to their drivers’ commands, rose once more into the air. They alighted on the rims of two of the doorless towers, where more blacks seized their reins and led them out of sight below the rims. As Conan climbed stiffly to his feet and helped Conn up, he realized that the mysterious towers were nought but stables for the Zembabwans’ scaly flying steeds.
Conan and the boy stared about them at the motionless ranks of black warriors who watched with impassive faces like masks of cavern ebony.
“We meet again, dog of Cimmeria,” said a smooth, heavy voice.
Conan turned to face the dark, burning eyes of his old enemy.
“For the last time, jackal of Stygia,” he said grimly.
Thoth-Amon stood near a great throne made of human skulls mortared together with some dark, tarry substance.
The Stygian sorcerer was still a tall, powerful, commanding figure, but Conan’s keen eye thought he saw signs of encroaching age in the swarthy, hawklike features of his greatest adversary. That visage was graven with many fine lines, and there was an expression of fatigue—even of exhaustion—in the droop of the firm mouth. The feverish glitter in those black eyes was unlike their usual catlike, unwinking concentration. The powerful body under the emerald-green robe seemed a little shrunken, stooped, and paunchy.
Conan wondered if Thoth-Amon’s mighty powers were at last on the wane. The unnatural vitality which had for generations animated the prince of the world’s black magicians seemed to have guttered low. Perhaps the dark gods he worshiped had withdrawn their support after the debacle at Nebthu, when the White Druid, with the help of the Heart of Ahriman, had broken the Black Ring. Or, perhaps, the magical powers that had so long enabled Thoth-Amon, like a few other great magicians, to hold age at bay, had at last become exhausted, and the earthly term of the sorcerer’s life was at last approaching. In any case, Thoth-Amon had begun to look old.
“For the last time, you say?” came Thoth-Amon’s sonorous voice, speaking Aquilonian with scarcely a trace of accent. “So be it! From this encounter, but one shall emerge alive, and that will be myself. Nor shall we fence with words. I will slay you where you stand, and your cub beside you. Your demoralized army will be scattered by the hordes of blacks that I can summon. The West shall yet fall, and Set shall again extend his beneficent rule over the earth, when I sit as emperor in Tarantia. Prepare for death!”