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away into the dark. The gate commander leaned on the narrow sill of his tower’s watch-window and watched until she had become one with the dark night at moonset. At last he straightened, gave his head a shake, and turned. He called down.
    “They are not coming back. Close the gate.”
    Neither he nor his men had any notion that well away from their gate, meanwhile, two men dropped outside the city’s eastern wall, which they had scaled. They hurried into the night.
    A few hours later, just after dawn, the same woman and her son returned to Shadizar. Though they were unscathed, they were forlornly bereft of horses and packs; even the woman’s cloak was gone. The name she gave turned out to be false, and later no one was interested in scouring The Desert for her. Nor did the head-shaking gatemen who passed her within know that she was the fast friend of a certain huge northern hillman now assiduously sought throughout the city, and that she was considerably wealthier today than she had been on yester day.
    Away from Shadizar, riding and leading those same four horses, wended Conan the Cimmerian and Khassek of Iranistan.
    “A nicely worked out ruse and tryst, Conan,” Khassek said.
    “Ah, Hafiza is a good woman and a good friend, Khassek. Once you added that nice little bag of pearls to Ferhad’s silver pommel, she was doubly glad to help.”
    “Trebly,” Khassek said. “She emerged well ahead.”
    “Aye, and took a risk to earn her profit. Your employer sent you well supplied with wherewithal, Khassek. All that coin you’ve been spending, and twenty of
gold
you left in the Red Lion, and those pearls… are we still wealthy?”
    “
We
are not, my friend. I have been up here well over a month, seeking you in both Arenjun and Shadizar, and we will be poor men or worse by the time we reach Iranistan. But, once there—”
    “Umm. Once there,” Conan grunted. “Aye.”
    And what am I doing
, he mused,
heading off this way on a trip of months? Ah well… why not? It’s a big world, and as I told Khashtris in Khauran… I’ve a lot of it to see before I think about settling
!

IV
THE MONSTERS
    “Your sword is ready, my lord.”
    The khan smiled at his wizard, but only after bending his gaze on the sword rather in the manner of a merchant into whose stall has just wended a bumpkin with a fat purse, or of a peasant child looking at the banquet-laden board of a king.
    “Ready,” he murmured, that satrap of the Empire of Turan who ruled Zamboula in the name of mighty Yildiz upon his carven throne. He feared for his life, this khan of Zamboula, and for his succession through his son Jungir, and he had reason. That men plotted, he was sure. That somewhere was the Eye of Erlik, he had no doubt.
    “Aye,” Zafra said. “Save only that as I have said, it must be blooded to complete the spell.”
    He glanced downward, for neither man had given thought to the fact that ruler and mage were alone on the gloomy half-gallery that brooded over the doubly gloomy dungeon. “One regrets that we did not…
save
one of the Iranistani spies.”
    With his head slightly to one side, the khan looked at the slimmer, younger man around the great bony ridge of his accipital nose. The corners of his mouth twitched; it was a sensuous mouth. Abruptly he gave his head a swift downward jerk of decision.
    “Aye,” he muttered, to himself only, and his red-purfled, gold-broidered house cloak of gossamery silk swirled and fluttered susurrantly as he turned quickly to the door.
    On this side, the prisoner’s side, the door was a massive sheet of iron thick as a maiden’s finger and heavy enough to stagger an elephant from the nighted Southern lands. Nor was its dark surface relieved by a sign of handle or lock. Folding his left hand into a mallet, Zamboula’s ruler struck the slab, and stepped aside. The door had given out a dull boom and yielded not at all and Akter Khan flexed his left hand several times.
    The door swung inward. The older