The Hour of the Dragon

Оглавление

Howard Robert Ervin. The Hour of the Dragon

1. O Sleeper, Awake!

2. A Black Wind Blows

3. The Cliffs Reel

4 'From What Hell Have You Crawled?'

5. The Haunter of the Pits

6. The Thrust of a Knife

7. The Rending of the Veil

8. Dying Embers

9 'It is the King or His Ghost!'

10. A Coin from Acheron

11. Swords of the South

12. The Fang of the Dragon

13 'A Ghost Out of the Past'

14. The Black Hand of Set

15. The Return of the Corsair

16. Black-Walled Khemi

17 'He Has Slain the Sacred Son of Set!'

18 'I Am the Woman Who Never Died'

19. In the Hall of the Dead

20. Out of the Dust Shall Acheron Arise

21. Drums of Peril

22. The Road to Acheron

Отрывок из книги

Men cried out on Mitra, and muttered against the king; for somehow, throughout the kingdom, the word was whispered that the king was secretly addicted to loathsome practises and foul debauches in the seclusion of his nighted palace. And then in that palace death stalked grinning on feet about which swirled the monstrous vapors of the plague. In one night the king died with his three sons, and the drums that thundered their dirge drowned the grim and ominous bells that rang from the carts that lumbered through the streets gathering up the rotting dead.

That night, just before dawn, the hot wind that had blown for weeks ceased to rustle evilly through the silken window curtains. Out of the north rose a great wind that roared among the towers, and there was cataclysmic thunder, and blinding sheets of lightning, and driving rain. But the dawn shone clean and green and clear; the scorched ground veiled itself in grass, the thirsty crops sprang up anew, and the plague was gone – its miasma swept clean out of the land by the mighty wind.

.....

Many of Conan's ways were inexplicable to the civilized people he ruled, and one of them was his insistence on sleeping alone in his chamber or tent. Pallantides hastened from the pavilion, clanking in the armor he had donned at midnight after a few hours' sleep. He cast a swift glance over the camp, which was beginning to swarm with activity, mail clinking and men moving about dimly in the uncertain light, among the long lines of tents. Stars still glimmered palely in the western sky, but long pink streamers stretched along the eastern horizon, and against them the dragon banner of Nemedia flung out its billowing silken folds.

Pallantides turned toward a smaller tent near by, where slept the royal squires. These were tumbling out already, roused by the trumpets. And as Pallantides called to them to hasten, he was frozen speechless by a deep fierce shout and the impact of a heavy blow inside the king's tent, followed by the heart-stopping crash of a falling body. There sounded a low laugh that turned the general's blood to ice.

.....