The Conquering Sword of Conan Read Free

somewhere between decadent and decayed. The situation inevitably led to a final destruction, usually at the hands of the barbarians who were always, conveniently, at the gates, waiting for such a moment. In
Red Nails
, however, Howard dispensed with the barbarians and made sure his city was utterly isolated.
Red Nails
would thus be the story of a decaying process that would be carried to its logical conclusion. Written at a time when Howard’s mother’s health was declining at an alarming rate, her body slowly decaying under her son’s eyes toward a conclusion that was as inevitable as it was obvious, the last Conan story is a tale which is particularly rich in resonance with the terrible events that were happening in Howard’s life and mind at the time he was composing the story. (For a fuller explanation of the background to each story, see “Hyborian Genesis Part III” at the end of this volume.)
    With the Conan stories, Howard ensured his literary legacy. His suicide at age thirty cut short a career that had promised to be an exceptional one. Less than a month before his death, he wrote Lovecraft: “I find it more and more difficult to write anything but western yarns. . . . I have always felt that if I ever accomplished anything worthwhile in the literary field, it would be with stories dealing of the central and western frontier.” Howard would probably have become an important writer in that field, but fate decided otherwise. However, the Conan stories transcend by their very nature the genre they are derived from, whether it be western, history, or high-adventure. By displacing them from their historical context and cloaking them in a Hyborian guise, Howard gave those stories a universality they would not have had in another form. They became timeless, as truthful today as they were seventy years ago.
    “Scratch the veneer at your own risk,” I wrote concerning the stories found in the first volume. You are about to discover that the veneer is almost nonexistent in most of the tales of this last opus.
    This is Howard at his rawest.
    At his best.
    Patrice Louinet

2005

The Servants of Bit-Yakin

I
    PATHS OF INTRIGUE
    The cliffs rose sheer from the jungle, towering ramparts of stone that glinted jade blue and dull crimson in the rising sun, and curved away and away to east and west above the waving emerald ocean of fronds and leaves. It looked insurmountable, that giant palisade with its sheer curtains of solid rock in which bits of quartz winked dazzlingly in the sunlight. But the man who was working his tedious way upward was already half way to the top.
    He came of a race of hillmen, accustomed to scaling forbidding crags, and he was a man of unusual strength and agility. His only garment was a pair of short red silk breeks, and his sandals were slung to his back, out of his way, as were his sword and dagger.
    He was a powerfully built man, supple as a panther. His skin was brown, bronzed by the sun, his square-cut black mane confined by a silver band about his temples. His iron muscles, quick eye and sure foot served him well here, for it was a climb to test these qualities to the utmost. A hundred and fifty feet below him waved the jungle. An equal distance above him the rim of the cliffs was etched clear-cut against the morning sky.
    He labored like one driven by the necessity of haste, yet he was forced to move at a snail’s pace, clinging like a fly on a wall. His groping hands and feet found niches and knobs, precarious holds at best, and sometimes he virtually hung by his finger nails. Yet upward he went, clawing, squirming, fighting for every foot. At times he paused to rest his aching muscles, and, shaking the sweat out of his eyes, twisted his head to stare searchingly out over the jungle, combing the green expanse for any trace of human life or motion.
    Now the summit was not far above him, and he observed, only a few feet above his head, a break in the sheer stone of the cliff. An instant later