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He idealizes the king whom Conan killed to get the crown, remembering only that he occasionally patronized the arts, and forgetting the evils of his reign, and he is making the people forget. Already
"Some day, somehow, I will find the Ring again, and when I do, by the serpent-fangs of Set, you shall pay—"
"He sings songs that make men mad. Hang him in his jester's garb to the highest tower in the city.
"By Mitra, I had almost believed those countries to have been fabulous."
Men said that he had a whole library of dark works bound in skin flayed from living human victims,
"I strangled him on his throne the night I took the royal city," answered Conan.
Pelias.
"The scaled people see what escapes the mortal eye," answered Pelias, cryptically. "You see my fleshly guise; he saw my naked soul." An icy trickle disturbed Conan's spine, and he wondered if, after all, Pelias were a man, or merely another demon of the pits in a mask of
"By the ivory hips of Ishtar, who is our doorman? Lo, it is no less than the noble Shukeli, who hanged my young men by their feet and skinned them with squeals of laughter! Do you sleep, Shukeli? Why do you lie so stiffly, with your fat belly sunk in like a dressed pig's?" "He is dead," muttered Conan, ill at ease to hear these wild words. "Dead or alive," laughed Pelias, "he shall open the door for us." He clapped his hands sharply and cried, "Rise, Shukeli! Rise from hell and rise from the bloody floor and open the door for your masters! Rise, I say!"
"By Crom!" ejaculated Conan.
"The sword that slays the king cuts the cords of the empire." —Aquilonian proverb.
"Ishtar preserve us!" shrieked Strabonus, paling. "It is King Conan!"
You can not conquer me—if you hack me in pieces, the bits of flesh and bone will reunite and haunt you to your doom!
"This fellow is no deader now than he was a few minutes agone. Into what madhouse have we strayed?"
"Oh, Conan!" she wailed, snuggling up as close to him as she could. "I'm afraid! This is a city of ghosts and dead men! Let us go back into the desert! Better to die there, than to face these terrors!"
Thalis's laugh was like poisoned honey in the darkness.
Natala jerked it forth and struck blindly and with all her girlish power.
She had never guessed the punishing power of hard-woven silk cords. Their caress was more exquisitely painful than any birch twigs or leather thongs. They whistled venomously as they cut the air.
