along the hall beyond the bronze
door, and through chamber after chamber shimmering in the green fire.
They saw no one, heard no sound. After they crossed the Great Hall which
bisected the city from north to south, their caution was increased by
the realization of their nearness to enemy territory. But chambers and
halls lay empty to their wary gaze, and they came at last along a broad
dim hallway and halted before a bronze door similar to the Eagle Door of
Tecuhltli. Gingerly they tried it, and it opened silently under their
fingers. Awed, they stared into the green-lit chambers beyond. For fifty
years no Tecuhltli had entered those halls save as a prisoner going to a
hideous doom. To go to Xotalanc had been the ultimate horror that could
befall a man of the western castle. The terror of it had stalked through
their dreams since earliest childhood. To Yanath and Topal that bronze
door was like the portal of hell.

They cringed back, unreasoning horror in their eyes, and Conan pushed
past them and strode into Xotalanc.

Timidly they followed him. As each man set foot over the threshold he
stared and glared wildly about him. But only their quick, hurried
breathing disturbed the silence.

They had come into a square guardroom, like that behind the Eagle Door
of Tecuhltli, and, similarly, a hall ran away from it to a broad chamber
that was a counterpart of Olmec's throne room.

Conan glanced down the hall with its rugs and divans and hangings, and
stood listening intently. He heard no noise, and the rooms had an empty
feel. He did not believe there were any Xotalancas left alive in
Xuchotl.

"Come on," he muttered, and started down the hall.

He had not gone far when he was aware that only Yanath was following
him. He wheeled back to see Topal standing in an attitude of horror, one
arm out as if to fend off some threatening peril, his distended eyes
fixed with hypnotic intensity on something protruding from behind a
divan.

"What the devil?" Then Conan saw what Topal was staring at, and he felt
a faint twitching of the skin between his giant shoulders. A monstrous
head protruded from behind the divan, a reptilian head, broad as the
head of a crocodile, with down-curving fangs that projected over the
lower jaw. But there was an unnatural limpness about the thing, and the
hideous eyes were glazed.

Conan peered behind the couch. It was a great serpent which lay there
limp in death, but such a serpent as he had nev