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- Herausgeber: Titan Books
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Serie: The Heroic Legends Series
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Capturing the electric short fiction energy that led Robert E. Howard to be one of the top fantasy writers of the century, with exclusive serialized eBook stories starring Conan, Solomon Kane, and more by many of today's top writers in fantasy and sword-and-sorcery. After killing his latest employer, a bored Conan wanders Stygia. His wanderlust is brought to an end when he is bitten by an asp. Though he attempts to extract the venom, it's no use. At death's door, the Cimmerian is saved by an otherworldly woman and a skull-headed tarantula. Conan awakens being attended to by the merchant Khal, an acolyte of the strange goddess who saved his life. Khal came to Conan's aid because Conan has been blessed by The Lady of the Desert; the Cimmerian is fated for something extraordinary. As it happens, fate is a seductive priestess with a legend to tell and coin to offer. Will Conan answer her call to adventure?
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Leave us a Review
Copyright
Map
Conan: The Halls of Immortal Darkness
1Days of Iron and Melancholy
2The Night City
3In the Halls of Immortal Darkness
4The Pit and the Dark
About the Author
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CONAN: THE HALLS OF IMMORTAL DARKNESS
E-book edition ISBN: 9781803366470
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: August 2024
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© 2024 Conan Properties International (“CPI”). CONAN, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, CONAN THE CIMMERIAN, HYBORIA, THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN and related logos, names and character likenesses thereof are trademarks or registered trademarks of CPI. ROBERT E. HOWARD is a trademark or registered trademark of Robert E. Howard Properties LLC. Heroic Signatures is a trademark of Cabinet Licensing LLC. Laird Barron asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
CONAN:THE HALLSOF IMMORTALDARKNESS
LAIRD BARRON
Days of Iron and Melancholy
Drawn by a supernatural prescience of death, vultures circled the palace all afternoon. Cousin crows nodded in gleeful anticipation atop balcony roosts.
Their patience was rewarded as violence ensued below them with an overture of screams and clashing metal. As a flourish to sixty-or-so heartbeats of merciless carnage, Conan the Cimmerian impaled the head of his erstwhile employer, a degenerate southern prince, upon the tip of a pike. He flung aside his own stifling helm and ring mail and donned a leather war harness taken from one of the slaughtered soldiers who lay strewn about the courtyard. This wasn’t the first occasion he’d turned on an unworthy master—his wrists and ankles bore the scars of crucifixion once endured as punishment for bellicose defiance of tyranny.
That experience in mind, he had decided that his sojourn in Stygia was best concluded before kin of the prince arrived to exact vengeance.
So be it, he thought fiercely, as decreed by Fate! Barbarian nomad, thief, soldier, warlord… and now a freebooter once again.
Conan departed. In his wake, servants cowered in doorways, while several buxom maidens he’d come to know during his brief, fraught tenure as a palace guard waved farewell and blew fond goodbye kisses—then glared at one another.
Vultures and crows descended to partake of the grisly repast.
The Cimmerian strode north, dark mane loose over broad shoulders, blue eyes glinting with grim cheer, leaving a set of bloody tracks behind him. At his back lay orchards, fields, and an expanse of boggy, subtropical forest. Before him, a sweep of arid land, dusty gold at sunset. The tang of alkali and the subtler fragrance of desert flowers filled his nostrils in prophecy of the journey ahead.
* * *
Days blazed like the refracting surface of a diamond. Nights chilled his marrow, vaguely reminding him of the gelid winters of his childhood home, where glaciers had ravaged the land and laid it open in places as if by Crom’s carving knife.
It was good.
This high desert lay between southern and northern kingdoms, alternating swathes of hardpan and salt flats, these in turn broken by tors thrust up among barren hills. A land of scrub, bleached bones picked clean by carrion birds and the wild dogs who haunted the gulches. Conan drank spring water in the shadows of cliffs and chewed tough meat of small, skittering lizards that, while fleet, were not so swift as his flung knife. The road he chose was seldom frequented save by deserters from local armies turned to banditry, and occasional foolish merchants seeking shortcuts, who served as prey. It was easy to avoid the rare traveler, and he did so. His recent experiences had soured him on the company of “civilized” men.
Wanderlust kindled within his breast. Agreeable companions for his melancholy were the wild dogs, lizards, and wind soughing in timeless lament.
* * *
On the morning of the fourth day, Conan rose from a sweet dream of his mischievous lover Valeria. He stretched and hadn’t yet pulled on his boots, and so missed an asp the color of the pebbles where it coiled.
