flesh and the fanged iron.
The sight of Valeria's naked body added flame to the fire of his rage.

Tascela ignored him. Rising languidly from her seat she swept the ranks
of her subjects with a searching glance, and asked: "Where are Xamec,
Zlanath and Tachic?"

"They did not return from the catacombs, princess," answered a man.
"Like the rest of us, they bore the bodies of the slain into the crypts,
but they have not returned. Perhaps the ghost of Tolkemec took them."

"Be silent, fool!" she ordered harshly. "The ghost is a myth."

She came down from her dais, playing with a thin gold-hilted dagger. Her
eyes burned like nothing on the hither side of hell. She paused beside
the altar and spoke in the tense stillness.

"Your life shall make me young, white woman!" she said. "I shall lean
upon your bosom and place my lips over yours, and slowly--ah,
slowly!--sink this blade through your heart, so that your life, fleeing
your stiffening body, shall enter mine, making me bloom again with
youth and with life everlasting!"

Slowly, like a serpent arching toward its victim, she bent down through
the writhing smoke, closer and closer over the now motionless woman who
stared up into her glowing dark eyes--eyes that grew larger and deeper,
blazing like black moons in the swirling smoke.

The kneeling people gripped their hands and held their breath, tense for
the bloody climax, and the only sound was Conan's fierce panting as he
strove to tear his leg from the trap.

All eyes were glued on the altar and the white figure there; the crash
of a thunderbolt could hardly have broken the spell, yet it was only a
low cry that shattered the fixity of the scene and brought all whirling
about--a low cry, yet one to make the hair stand up stiffly on the
scalp. They looked, and they saw.

Framed in the door to the left of the dais stood a nightmare figure. It
was a man, with a tangle of white hair and a matted white beard that
fell over his breast. Rags only partly covered his gaunt frame,
revealing half-naked limbs strangely unnatural in appearance. The skin
was not like that of a normal human. There was a suggestion of
_scaliness_ about it, as if the owner had dwelt long under conditions
almost antithetical to those conditions under which human life
ordinarily thrives. And there was nothing at all human about the eyes
that blazed from the tangle of white hair. They were great gleaming
disks that stared unwinkingly, luminous, whit