He advanced and reached for her, and Conan struck aside his hand with a force that might have broken his arm. The man reeled back, clutching the numbed member, his eyes clouding.
“What rebellion of ghosts is this?” he muttered. “Barbarian, I command ye—begone! Fade! Dissipate! Fade! Vanish!”
“I’ll vanish your head from your shoulders!” snarled the infuriated Cimmerian, his saber gleaming in his hand. “Is this the welcome you give strangers? By Crom, I’ll drench these hangings in blood!”
The dreaminess had faded from the other’s eyes, to be replaced by a look of bewilderment.
“Thog!” he ejaculated. “You are real! Whence come you? Who are you? What do you in Xuthal?”
“We came from the desert,” Conan growled. “We wandered into the city at dusk, famishing. We found a feast set for some one, and we ate it. I have no money to pay for it. In my country, no starving man is denied food, but you civilized people must have your recompense—if you are like all I ever met. We have done no harm and we were just leaving. By Crom, I do not like this place, where dead men rise, and sleeping men vanish into the bellies of shadows!”
The man started violently at the last comment, his yellow face turning ashy.
“What do you say? Shadows? Into the bellies of shadows?”
“Well,” answered the Cimmerian cautiously, “whatever it is that takes a man from a sleeping-dais and leaves only a spot of blood.”
“You have seen? You have seen?” The man was shaking like a leaf; his voice cracked on the high-pitched note.
“Only a man sleeping on a dais, and a shadow that engulfed him,” answered Conan.
The effect of his words on the other was horrifying. With an awful scream the man turned and rushed from the chamber. In his blind haste he caromed from the side of the door, righted himself, and fled through the adjoining chambers, still screaming at the top of his voice. Amazed, Conan stared after him, the girl trembling as she clutched the giant’s arm. They could no longer see the flying figure, but they still heard his frightful screams, dwindling in the distance, and echoing as from vaulted roofs. Suddenly one cry, louder than the others, rose and broke short, followed by blank silence.
“Crom!”
Conan wiped the perspiration from his forehead with a hand that was not entirely steady.
“Surely this is a city of the mad! Let’s get out of here, before we meet other madmen!”
“It is all a nightmare!” whimpered Natala. “We are dead and damned! We died out on the desert and are in hell! We are disembodied spirits—ow!” Her yelp was induced by a resounding spank from Conan’s open hand.
“You’re no spirit when a pat makes you yell like that,” he commented, with the grim humor which frequently manifested itself at inopportune times. “We are alive, though we may not be if we loiter in this devil-haunted pile. Come!”
They had traversed but a single chamber when again they stopped short. Some one or something was approaching. They faced the doorway whence the sounds came, waiting for they knew not what. Conan’s nostrils widened, and his eyes narrowed. He caught the faint scent of the perfume he had noticed earlier in the night. A figure framed itself in the doorway. Conan swore under his breath; Natala’s red lips opened wide.
It was a woman who stood there staring at them in wonder. She was tall, lithe, shaped like a goddess; clad in a narrow girdle crusted with jewels. A burnished mass of night-black hair set off the whiteness of her ivory body. Her dark eyes, shaded by long dusky lashes, were deep with sensuous mystery. Conan caught his breath at her beauty, and Natala stared with dilated eyes. The Cimmerian had never seen such a woman; her facial outline was Stygian, but she was not dusky-skinned like the Stygian women he had known; her limbs were like alabaster.
But when she spoke, in a deep rich musical voice, it was in the Stygian tongue.
“Who are you? What do you in Xuthal? Who is that girl?”
“Who are you?” bluntly countered Conan, who quickly wearied of answering questions.
“I am Thalis the Stygian,” she replied. “Are you mad, to come here?”
“I’ve been thinking I must be,” he growled. “By Crom, if I am sane, I’m out of place here, because these people are all maniacs. We stagger in from the desert, dying of thirst and hunger, and we come upon a dead man who tries to stab me in the back. We enter a palace rich and luxuriant, yet apparently empty. We find a meal set, but with no feasters. Then we see a shadow devour a sleeping man—” He watched her narrowly and saw her change color slightly. “Well?”
“Well what?” she demanded, apparently regaining control of herself.
“I was just waiting for you to run through the rooms howling like a wild woman,” he answered. “The man I told about the shadow did.”
She shrugged her slim ivory shoulders. “That was the screams I heard, then. Well, to every man his fate, and it’s foolish to squeal like a rat in a trap. When Thog wants me, he will come for me.”
“Who is Thog?” demanded Conan suspiciously.
She gave him a long appraising stare that brought color to Natala’s face and made her bite her small red lip.
“Sit down on that divan and I will tell you,” she said. “But first tell me your names.”
“I am Conan, a Cimmerian, and this is Natala, a daughter of Brythunia,” he answered. “We are refugees of an army destroyed on the borders of Kush. But I am not desirous of sitting down, where black shadows might steal up on my back.”
With a light musical laugh, she seated herself, stretching out her supple limbs with studied abandon.
“Be at ease,” she advised. “If Thog wishes you, he will take you, wherever you are. That man you mentioned, who screamed and ran—did you not hear him give one great cry, and then fall silent? In his frenzy, he must have run full into that which he sought to escape. No man can avoid his fate.”
Conan grunted non-committally, but he sat down on the edge of a couch, his saber across his knees, his eyes wandering suspiciously about the chamber. Natala nestled against him, clutching him jealously, her legs tucked up under her. She eyed the stranger woman with suspicion and resentment. She felt small and dust-stained and insignificant before this glamorous beauty, and she could not mistake the look in the dark eyes which feasted on every detail of the bronzed giant’s physique.
“What is this place, and who are these people?” demanded Conan.
“This city is called Xuthal; it is very ancient. It is built over an oasis, which the founders of Xuthal found in their wanderings.
They came from the east, so long ago that not even their descendants remember the age.
“Surely there are not many of them; these palaces seem empty.”
“No; and yet more than you might think. The city is really one great palace, with every building inside the walls closely connected with the others. You might walk among these chambers for hours and see no one. At other times, you would meet hundreds of the inhabitants.”
“How is that?” Conan inquired uneasily; this savored too strongly of sorcery for comfort.
“Much of the time these people lie in sleep. Their dream-life is as important—and to them as real—as their waking life. You have heard of the black lotus? In certain pits of the city it grows. Through the ages they have cultivated it, until, instead of death, its juice induces dreams, gorgeous and fantastic. In these dreams they spend most of their time. Their lives are vague, erratic, and without plan. They dream, they wake, drink, love, eat and dream