Perhaps he alone had escaped the toils of this uncanny trap, all because the magical illusion could not be reproduced in a reflecting surface. This illusion was like a meticulously detailed mirage superimposed on reality.
Conn’s brain reeled as he strove to understand these revelations. He knew the ancient myths of the serpent-folk. The god of the Aquilonians was Mitra the Light-Bringer, who in the legends of the West had slain Set the Old Serpent. But the reality behind the legend was older and grimmer.
It had not been the sword of an immortal god that had crushed down the Snake of Old Night, but ordinary men, battling the hissing minions of Set in a million-year war. The first men, newly sprung from their apelike forebears, had at first groveled beneath the lash of their serpentine masters. From this state of thralldom the heroes of the dawn had risen to break their shackles and to lead their people to many hard-fought victories.
The serpent-folk, the old myths whispered, had received from their father, Set, the power to becloud the minds of men, so that to human eyes they looked like ordinary human beings. Kull, the hero-king of ancient Valusia, had narrowly triumphed over the arisen serpent, when he discovered that the reptile folk were living unsuspected amidst the very cities of men.
Now, it seemed, the last survivors of this age-old war had fled the length of the world to its uttermost rim. Here, in the unknown mountains between the jungle and the sea, they had bided their time unmolested.
The boy’s eyes flashed with the realization that he, alone of all men living, had guessed the secret.
SIX: The Skull-Faced Man
“Hold!” thundered a deep voice.
Lilit’s hand was arrested in midair as the resonant command rolled through the incense-misted hall. The point of the dagger halted inches from Conan’s breast.
Queen Lilit turned to confront the gaunt, stooped figure, swathed in robes of faded and spotted emerald-green, who had interrupted her slaying of the unconscious Cimmerian. Her lips writhed back, exposing sharp white teeth. Eyes like dark gems lashed malignant fires. The pointed tip of a pink tongue flickered between her teeth.
“Who commands here, Stygian? You or I?”
Thoth-Amon faced the queen unblinkingly. Age had come upon the archimage since Conan had smashed the Black Ring in the battle at Nebthu months before. With the loss of his power base, the earth’s mightiest sorcerer had been harried south before the iron legions of Aquilonia—south to Zembabwei, where his last human ally reigned on a bloody throne.
Now the sanguinary reign of the wizard-king Nenaunir had been toppled in flame and thunder. Again Thoth-Amon fled before the Cimmerian’s vengeance. Conan had pursued him to the world’s uttermost edge.
With each defeat, Thoth-Amon’s centuries bore more heavily upon him. Now his form was old, shrunken, and frail. His face was like a skull, the dusky skin wrinkled and leathery. But still his burning gaze held terrific power; still his voice, backed by the unyielding iron of a disciplined will, was an insidious tool of persuasion.
Hither he had fled to take refuge with his last allies, the prehuman serpent-folk. For centuries he had held them pent in this southern realm. He held them back by bribe and division and magical spell; for, though he and they both worshiped mighty Set, he had no intention of letting them regain their rule over the human race. The empire of evil he dreamed of rearing over the West, he intended to rule alone.
Now, however, he had lost all his human confederates. In desperation had he sought the homeland of the serpent-folk, offering himself as an ally instead of an opponent. They had taken him in—not, he knew, from friendship or compassion, for these sentiments were alien to their kind—but to use him in rebuilding their long-vanished empire. His sovereignty over the servants of Set he had lost; but Conan of Aquilonia he was determined not to lose.
“Vengeance is mine, Lilit,” he said, his somber gaze unreadable. “In all else, I yield to you; but in this I am adamant. The Cimmerian is my captive.”
The serpent-woman eyed him obliquely. “I know your cunning heart, jackal of Stygia,” she hissed. “You think to sacrifice him to Father Set and thus, by offering the greatest champion of Mitra on earth, to regain the favored position your failures in the past have lost to you. But I, too, have plans for the Cimmerian …”
Those plans, however, were never revealed. Even as the queen opened her mouth to utter them, she staggered from a sudden blow from behind. With unbelieving eyes, she stared down at the point of a bronze-bladed spear protruding… scarlet and dripping… from between her breasts.
Her spine arched, while her frozen features blurred and dissolved into the head of a serpent. She fell forward on the dais, writhing in slow, undulant spasms of death. Thoth-Amon turned quickly to confront the band of gigantic black women who had burst suddenly into the shadowy hall.
“By Mamajambo’s war club!” exclaimed the princess Nzinga, wrenching out the spear she had thrown. “We have come just in time!”
The gray-bearded Trocero, followed by a file of Mbega’s warriors, crowded into the hall, to see Nzinga bending over the slowly writhing body of the dying serpent-queen.
“What monstrous sorcery is this?” she demanded of him fiercely. “We see from a distance a cliff like a great skull; but when we come nigh, it changes to a gorgeous palace, and the dry soil changes to a lush meadow. Now we find the lord Conan snoring like a besotted drunkard, and this woman-thing bending over him with a knife, and an old man in green …”
“Thoth-Amon, by all the gods!” gasped the count.
“Oh, aye?” the black girl murmured, absently, her gaze turning again to the figure that writhed slowly in its death spasms on the steps before them. “And what hell-spawned devil is this?”
Trocero’s fine features were drawn and harrowed. His voice sank to a thin whisper.
“The—snake—that—speaks!” he muttered.
The girl turned fierce eyes on him, her hand flashing to hilt of her broadsword.
“Old man, you speak of that which no man should name aloud! Can it be, though, that the old black myths were—true?”
“The proof of it lies wriggling at your feet,” the Aquilonian noble said quietly. “Look! Even as we fence with words, it… changes …”
The Amazon girl watched as long as she could, then turned away and shut her eyes as if to blot the very memory from her mind. On the steps before them, the unthinkable monstrosity that had been a queenly, radiant, voluptuous woman, died.
And then it was that the hissing hordes fell on them, quite suddenly, from the shadows of the colonnade. And Trocero and Nzinga had work to do with spear and knife and sword, and were too busy for further speech.
In the swift succession of inexplicable events, neither the Aquilonian nobleman nor the Amazonian warrior-girl had noticed the strangest and most inexplicable of all.
For Conan and Thoth-Amon were nowhere to be seen.
Both the sprawling, unconscious Cimmerian and his sorcerous arch-enemy had vanished, as if they had melted into thin air.
SEVEN: At the Edge of the World
Conan awoke suddenly from his drugged slumber. He came awake all at once, like a cat whose delicate senses have been roused to alertness by the presence of a foe. The Cimmerian had retained this savage trait through all the long years from his boyhood in the northern wastes. Decades of kingship over a sophisticated realm had laid but a thin veneer of civilization over his primitive soul.