Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8 — page 25: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST | 21 And here and there among the stones were spots of raw bright color, as if a careless hand had splashed with a crimson brush. ; Again Conan looked on death and destruction. Before him lay his spear- men, nor did they rise to salute him, From the jungle-edge to the river-bank, among the rotting pillars and along the broken piers they lay, torn and man- gled and half-devoured, chewed travesties of men. All about the bodies and pieces of bodies were swarms of huge footprints, like those of hyenas. Conan came silently upon the pier, approaching the galley above whose deck was suspended something that glimmered ivory-white in the faint twilight. Speechless the Cimmerian looked on the Queen of the Black Coast as she hung from the yard-arm of her own galley. Between the yard and her white throat stretched a line of crimson clots that shone like blood in the gray light. 4. The Attack from the Air The shadows were black around him, The dripping jaws gaped wide, Thicker than rain the red drops fell; But my love was fiercer than Death’s black spell, Nor all the iron walls of hell Could keep me from his side. —The Song of Bélit. The jungle was a black colossus that locked the ruin-littered glade in ebon arms. The moon had not risen; the stars were flecks of hot amber in a breath- ress sky that reeked of death. On the pyramid among the fallen towers sat Conan the Cimmerian like an iron statue, chin propped on massive fists. Out in the black shadows stealthy feet padded and red eyes glimmered. The dead lay as they had fallen. But on the deck of the Tigress, on a pyre of broken benches, spear-shafts and leopardskins, lay the Queen of the Black Coast in her last sleep, wrapped in Conan’s scarlet cloak. Like a true queen she lay, with her plunder heaped high about her: silks, cloth-of-gold, silver braid, casks of gems and golden coins, silver ingots, jeweled daggers, and teocallis of gold wedges. But of the plunder of the accursed city, only the sullen waters of Zarkheba could tell, where Conan had thrown it with a heathen curse. Now he sat grimly on the pyramid, waiting for his unseen foes. The black fury in his soul drove out all fear. What shapes would emerge from the blackness he knew not, nor did he care. ! He no longer doubted the visions of the black lotus. He understood that while waiting for him in the glade, N’Gora and his comrades had been terror- stricken by the winged monster swooping upon them from the sky, and Gomi ehboo Ss.coO |