By late afternoon, the craggy hills rose into bleak plateaus and rugged mountains. This must be the Land of No Return of which old Rimush had spoken. Conan meant to fly briefly over the near side of the mountains, to scout the passes, and then to turn north to rejoin Nzinga, Count Trocero, and their armies. He whacked his wyvern to hasten its flight, since he did not wish to be caught aloft by darkness and perchance miss his rendezvous with the ground force.
The thunder of vast wings sounded on his left. He glanced about to see Conn, his face flushed with excitement, reining up beside him. The lad's dragon, carrying less weight, was less fatigued than Conan's. Conn pointed ahead and to the right.
Following his son's indication, Conan peered through the haze and saw a curious thing. This was a mountain of chalkwhite stone, the lower slope of which had been rudely carved into the shape of an immense grinning death's head.
Conan's barbarian heritage of superstition rose within him, bringing a gasp of awe to his lips and a prickling of premonition to his skin. The Great Stone Skull, whereof Rimush had spoken!
Conan's blazing blue eyes stabbed through the murk. Ahead, a flat, barren strip of dead earth stretched to the foot of the cliff. There, the black arch of a portal yawned. Its lintel was carved like the fanged upper jaw of a skull. From the upper works peered two round ports, like the eye sockets of a skull. It was an eerie thing to see.
Then terror struck!
A shock ran through Conan's burly frame, leaving him gasping and trembling with unaccustomed weakness. His senses swam; his heart laboured, as if he had flown into an invisible cloud of poisonous vapor.
The same weird force affected his reptilian mount. The wyvern staggered, slipped to one side, and hurtled toward the sterile plain below, where the white skull brooded starkly over a haunted, shadowy land.
III
Land of Illusions
Conan jerked back the reins with a heave that would have broken a horse's jaw. The wyvern responded sluggishly, red eyes dimmed, snaky tail hanging limply. But respond it did, as its ribbed wings opened to catch the rushing wind and brake its headlong fall.
The groggy reptile came to earth with a thunder of batlike wings. Conan hastily untied the thongs that bound him to the saddle and sprang to the grassy ground below, shaking his head to clear his groggy wits. Had the wyvern flown through some updraft of noxious gas?
He peered aloft. The others of his scouting force had encountered the same aerial barrier. One by one, their stunned mounts tumbled from the sky. Foremost among these was Prince Conn. He dangled limply from the saddle-thongs, white face blank and senseless.
Conan's gut muscles tightened. The taste of fear was like vile brass on his tongue, oily and sour. Sweat started in cold globules from his brows as he watched his son plummet with his steed towards the ground. The ageing king growled a wordless, beseeching cry, scarred fist clutching and closing helplessly on empty air.
Then the rush of clean air seemed to rouse the fainting lad; his dulled eyes took in the blurred vista of dead earth swooping up towards him, then they blazed with the unquenchable fires that flamed in the gaze of his mighty sire. Recognizing his danger in an instant, the boy flung every ounce of vigor his lithe young thews contained, jerking back the reins, snapping the winged reptile to semi-alertness even as Conan had done a moment earlier.
Relief gusted through the king of Aquilonia as he watched his son bring the reptile lurching drunkenly—but safely—to earth. He sprinted to where Conn slumped in the saddle, shaken but safe. Conan ripped loose the thongs, helped Conn to earth, and crushed the boy in a fierce, inarticulate embrace.
Not all of the aerial party were so fortunate. Two of Mbega's guardsmen failed to recover from the effects of the wizardly sky barrier. They crashed to earth with a sickening crunch of snapping bones. The rest, however, managed to bring their numbed reptiles floundering to earth, though sometimes with bone-shaking impacts.
Conan's wits sharpened as the lingering effects of the uncanny barrier faded. He became aware of something wrong. Conn sensed the strangeness, too, and pointed in wordless amazement.
From aloft they had seen a dead plain of sterile earth or sand stretching to meet the face of the white mountain which was grotesquely hewn into the likeness of a grinning skull. Now they stood knee-deep in the lush grass of a velvety meadow, spangled with small flowers, white and blue and scarlet. In the middle distance, a herd of long-horned cattle placidly cropped the herbage. The meadow sloped away up to the cliff as before.
But now that cliff presented a wholly different aspect. Conan's volcanic gaze narrowed and a tingle of supernatural awe prickled his nape. For the cliff, which from the air seemed to have been carven into the form of a skull, now appeared as the facade of a splendid, ornate palace.
Across the front of the cliff marched a row of slender pilasters. These upheld a broad architrave carved in reliefs of nymphs and satyrs and many-headed gods. From the centre of this architectural mass jutted a shady portico, in back of which a tall portal led into the interior of the cliff.
Conan's face mirrored his disbelief. The burly barbarian trusted his senses; but now he wondered which was the illusion: the skull-shape seen from aloft, or the exotic, ornate splendor that now confronted him. He asked himself whether the barrier into which he had flown might not have been made of some mephitic gas, which blurred his sight or cast illusions upon his mind.
Behind him, Mbega's blacks, having recovered from the effects of the aerial barrier, were dismounting and hobbling their reptilian mounts.
Still doubtful, Conan bent to touch the swaying grasses, his massive scarred hands awkwardly gentle with the small, starry flowers. He lifted his head, drawing the clean air deeply into his lungs. The heavy smell of perfumed flowers and of lush grass was strong in his nostrils.
He peered at the cliff. In the ruddy light of the setting sun, veins of quartz sparkled; the ornate white-marble facade was clear and distinct to his eyes. Every detail was sharp and unambiguous.
He shrugged. It may have been a zone of poisonous vapor that had stimulated fantastic visions; or else…But nothing was to be gained by standing here in speculation. Conan's bent was to resolve such puzzles not by arguing theories with himself, but by investigating the source of the enigma at first hand.
As he started forward, a sharp cry of 'Angalia!' made him turn. It was Mkwawa, the officer in command of the guardsmen, pointing. Spear points came up, their blades flashing redly in the setting sun as the warriors snapped to alertness.
Figures were drifting through the pillar-fronted palace, coming toward them through the swaying grass. They were women: dusky, sinuous, with smiling red lips and eyes like black jewels. Little crystal bells were woven through the coils of their hair, so that each lithe figure was surrounded by a faintly chiming music. They were young, well formed, and thinly veiled.
Mkwawa looked a question at Conan. The king frowned, then shrugged.
'The beasts are still groggy from the bad air we flew through,' he said. 'Let us give them a rest ere we venture aloft again. Meanwhile, perchance we can learn something from these women, who do not seem dangerous. Tell half your men to go with me as a guard, whilst the rest care for the wyverns. Detail one man to fly back to the army, to set them on our trail.'
The black officer snapped out his orders. Presently Conan, Conn, and their dozen guardsmen started for the enigmatic cliffside palace. Conan tugged the ends of his fierce moustache in thought. His face settled into an impassive bronzen mask, but inwardly he was troubled. Was this an elaborate trap? He had not lived to reach his late fifties without acquiring a strong vein of wary suspiciousness. Something, certainly, was wrong about a place that changed its entire appearance in a few heartbeats.
IV
Golden Wine
It was the evening of the third day after Conan's arrival at the rock-cut palace—actually, a small cave-city. Its name, he had learned, was Yanyoga. Queen Lilit had promised the visitors a splendid feast as soon as
she could make the arrangements, and the time of the feast had come.
On the marble floor of a great hall, among a select company of the queen's kinsmen and ministers, Conan sprawled on a nest of silken cushions and worked away at a horn of honey-hearted wine. The barbarian felt curiously lazy and relaxed. His belly was filled with subtly flavored viands. The golden wine was thin and cold, and through his veins it sang its heady song. To one side of the hall, Conan's black guardsmen also feasted.
Beyond, wearing his meticulously polished cuirass, young Conn sprawled on the cushions. He ogled a troop of dancing girls whose sinuous bodies wove a graceful sequence of suggestive postures. Their only garments were strings of beads about their waists and loins. Conan grinned indulgently at his son's fixed gaze but said nothing. 'Twould be only a matter of time before the lad broached his first maidenhead. Conan had not been much older when he began his roamings, in the course of which he had quickly shed the grim puritanism of a Cimmerian village.
The queen of this cavern-palace, Lilit, sat apart from her guests on an onyx dais. Although Conan had questioned her at length, she professed to know nothing of Thoth-Amon or of the skull-like appearance of the cliff as seen from the air. This land, she explained, had many geysers and fumaroles, whence noxious vapors seeped into the air from underground chambers.
That explanation, Conan thought, would have to serve for the time being, albeit his suspicions were not altogether lulled. Still, Queen Lilit, speaking the Shemish trade language current among the black nations, had told a plausible story of how she and her subjects came to be there.
A few centuries before, she said, a mighty king in Vendhya had sent forth a fleet on a trading mission to Iranistan. A typhoon had blown this fleet far off its course across the Southern Ocean, and the battered survivors had made landfall not many leagues from where they now were. They had found a race of small, yellow-skinned aborigines, whom they had enslaved and who now served them as serfs. The men of the expedition had wedded the slave girls who had been sent from Vendhya as part of the cargo. These folk and their descendants had carved Yanyoga out of the soft, chalky rock of this cliff face.
The palace, Conan thought, was really too ostentatious and exotic for his taste, for he preferred a more austere style of: life. The royal palace in Tarantia, built on a magnificent scale by his unlamented predecessor Numedides, was itself too showy for his liking. From his private apartments in the palace he had long ago banished the silken draperies and carpets and the bejewled sculptures, preferring bare stonewalls and rush-strewn floors like those he had known as a boy in his rugged Cimmerian homeland.
This place savored of those he had known in his early manhood: the palace of King Yildiz of Turan, whom he had served as a mercenary, at Aghrapur; that at Shamballah, the capital of the mysterious valley of Meru, beyond the lonely steppes of Hyrkania; and that of King Shu of Kusan, in far Khitai. Here, too, were lavishly ornamented, fantastically carven walls, columns, and lintels. Remembering his brief enslavement in Shamballah, the City of Skulls, Conan lost himself in a reverie over old times and lost comrades and distant wars. Or was the honey-flavored wine befuddling his wits?
He fell into a light doze. Thus he did not notice when Conn, after stealing a quick glance at his nodding sire, slipped from his place and quietly left the hall.
Nor did he see the gaunt, grim-faced, swarthy man who observed all with gloating eyes from the shadow of a column. This man's wasted form was swathed in faded emerald green. Although this man had, to the eye of the beholder, aged by decades since their last meeting, Conan would have known him at once as his ancient foe Thoth-Amon.
Conn was young and lusty, and his blood ran hot. One dancing girl in particular had caught his eyes. She was some years older than he, with full breasts like golden fruit and red lips ripe for kissing. Her jewel-bright gaze held his, and her gliding body was all warm animal flesh.
When the dance ended, the boy observed how the girl lingered, looking back at him from the shadow of a distant pillar. Catching his eye from across the hall, she had licked her lips and run her hand over her belly and thighs in a suggestive manner.
Inwardly trembling, Conn wove through the feasters after the dancing girl. It was now or never, he thought.
He was not altogether ignorant of women. Back in Aquilonia, more than one buxom kitchen maid or serving girl had sought to catch the eye of the king's son. Beyond a few inexpert caresses and flustered kisses, however, none of these liaisons had culminated in what Conn, like most boys, regarded as the ultimate test of manhood. Well, this was his chance to prove his masculinity at last!
The girl was still standing in the shadow of the column.
He slid his strong young arm around her slender waist and drew her to him, trying to plant a kiss, but she laughed and eluded his efforts.
'Not here!' she breathed. 'The queen…'
'Where, then?'
'Come—'
Slipping out of his embrace but sliding her fingers into his, the girl led Conn through the entrance of the hall into the dim wilderness of corridors and chambers beyond. Without even thinking of a possible trap, since his brain teemed with images of quite another sort, the boy followed her into the darkness.
One by one, the other feasters also rose and departed, leaving Conan dozing alone on his cushions. The honey wine made a puddle on the marble floor where the great buffalo horn had fallen from his lax fingers.
Slender, swarthy serving men appeared in the almost empty hall. On silent feet they glided among the cushions abandoned by the absent feasters. The black guardsmen had left their spears and bronze battle-axes and hardwood clubs behind, not thinking to need these in the amorous encounters they expected. One by one, the serving men gathered these up, passing them out of the hall. Two went to where Conan lay snoring on his cushions. Supple hands relieved him, too, of his Aquilonian longsword and dagger.
The serving men glanced up to where Queen Lilit sat enthroned, observing all with a small; secret smile. In a sibilant, whispering language very different from that wherein they had conversed with their guests, the queen and her servants spoke. They and Conan were the only persons left in the hall.
Lilit rose and glided gracefully down the steps to where Conan sprawled, drunkenly snoring. From the servant who held the Cimmerian's weapons, she selected the long poniard. Drawing the weapon from its sheath, she smiled down at the oblivious Cimmerian.
Then, quick as the flick of a serpent's tongue, the blade flashed towards his heart.
V
Children of the Serpent
In the dimness of a secluded apartment, lit by a pair of flickering rushlights, Conn caught the slave girl in his arms. His hot panting kisses fell on her neck and shoulders as he forced her down upon a divan draped with silken stuffs.
Pausing above the reclining dancer, the prince cast off his girdle and tugged impatiently at the fastenings of his cuirass. This armour was a back-and-breast of highly polished steel. It was a little tight, since Conn had grown in the twelvemonth since the royal armorer had hammered it out to his measure. It was the first piece of plate armour that Conan had owned. His pride in that cuirass had led him to spend many hours, when the rest of the Aquilonian force was resting from its arduous trek, in polishing it free of any trace of rust.
While the naked girl writhed languidly, purring, on the divan, Conn at last got the straps unbuckled. He squirmed out of the cuirass. Too fond of the armour to drop it carelessly on the floor and mar its silvery surface, even in this moment of passion, he set it down carefully.
As he did, in the feeble illumination of the rushlights, he saw the reflection of the girl in the polished surface of the breastplate. And in this mirror he saw the girl as she really was.
The girl's body was still human—though less so than it had appeared to his direct vision. But atop that body, where a smiling face should have been, was a mask of spine-chilling horror. For the head of the girl was the scaled, slope-browed, wedge-shaped head of a snake,
with lidless, slit-pupiled eyes, fanged jaws, and flickering, forked tongue.
Conn acted without thought. Millions of years of primitive instinct lay in the deeper, dormant layers of his mind. One look into those soulless eyes, and a thousand aeons of primordial instinct were triggered into life.
The boy sprang away from the couch to where his girdle lay. Steel rasped against leather as he tore his sword from the scabbard and sprang forward again. Light winked on the gleaming steel as Conn, white-faced with horror, drove the blade between the soft, round breasts of the serpent-woman.
He drew the sword out, dripping blood, and drove it in again and again.
The girl died, but not easily. She died in long, writhing spasms. As life ebbed, her body lost much of the human semblance it had worn. Dull grey scales took the place of warm brown skin. Conn turned his eyes away, revolted, before the final revelation. Dropping his sword with a clatter, he stumbled to a corner and was suddenly sick, in an uncontrollable spasm of revulsion.
When it was over, he felt weak but purged. His mind cleared. Now he knew what it was all about. The girl-thing had lured him outside, as others of its kind had doubtless lured away Mbega's blacks and perhaps his father as well. They had lured them into an amorous embrace, in order to open their serpentine jaws and sink envenomed fangs into their deluded would-be lovers.
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.
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