This novel was first serialized in Weird Tales, December 1935 through April 1936. Margaret Brundage’s cover art depicted Zenobia giving Conan keys while he sits in a dungeon cell being like “Alms, alms for the poor.”
When later published as a novel, as originally intended, its titled changed to Conan the Conqueror, with Frank Frazetta painting a battle scene.
Four conspirators use a gem called the Heart of Ahriman to raise a mummy from the dead. He is Xaltotun, a wizard from the land of Acheron, which coexisted with Stygia until falling to Hyborian barbarians 3,000 years ago. They want his magical aid in replacing Conan with one of them, the deposed king’s son, and replacing the king of Nemedia with another, his younger brother.
Xaltoun sends a plague through Nemedia’s capital, striking down serf, merchant and knight as well as the king and his sons. The new King Tarascus declares war on Aquilonia, and they meet in a low Aquilonian valley framed by rugged cliffs.
(For those keeping track, Tarascus’s army outnumbers Conan’s, but only 50,000 to 45,000. And that’s after a civil war and all the losses in “The Scarlet Citadel”.)
In his tent, Conan wakes from a nightmare and begins to surmise that the plague in Nemedia was sorcery.
“Why did it cease when [the king] died?”“Men say he sinned — ”“Men are fools, as always,” grunted Conan. “If the plague struck all who sinned, then by Crom there wouldn’t be enough left to count the living! …“No! The black plague’s no common pestilence. It lurks in Stygian tombs, and is called forth into being only by wizards. I was a swordsman in Prince Almuric’s army that invaded Stygia, and of his thirty thousand, fifteen thousand perished by Stygian arrows, and the rest by the black plague that rolled on us.
Sure, blame Stygia for everything.
A shadowy figure casts a spell of paralysis on Conan. His aides react with a Patroclus Gambit: putting a look-alike named Vallanus in the king’s armor. Everything looks fine until a magic rockslide kills the false Conan and the knights he was leading: morale collapses and the Nemedians win. Finding Conan, Tarascus wants him slain with arrows, but Xaltoun wants him taken alive (deja vu). The wizard throws a fireball (it’s described like a grenade), leaving Conan unconscious with 0 hit points so he can be thrown in a dungeon. He also intimidates some soldiers by casting an illusion that a man’s belt is a venomous snake.
Note that when Conan is thrown in the dungeon by four slaves, to make room for him they literally have to move a skeleton chained cartoonishly to a metal ring in the wall.
A girl brings Conan three different keys, letting him escape. She says her motive is that she’s a harem girl the late king never even took to bed, and she loved Conan from afar when first she saw him, and her means was getting three of the four slave guards drunk. Without the fourth key, he’ll have to escape the long way. She also gives him a dagger, impressing him with her practical intelligence.
Soon he spies a carnivorous ape in the dungeon, which would have been let into his cell were he still present to eat.
these apes were the goblins of Hyborian legendry, and were in reality ogres of the natural world, cannibals and murderers of the nighted forests.
In reality they’re ogres, but legendry downgraded them to goblins? Huh.
He fatally stabs the ape’s heart, then gets out to where the girl Zenobia is waiting. Doing a Polonius behind curtains, Conan overhears King Tarascus telling a rogue to go throw the Heart of Ahriman stolen from Xaltoun in the sea, “so far from land that neither tide nor storm can wash it up on the beach.” Now a Reverse Polonius: Tarascus is alone so Conan leaps out of the curtains and stabs him, non-fatally. Zenobia catches up with him and explains how he can escape alone to where she has a horse waiting. He promises to come back for her. On the outskirts of the city, he encounters someone literally called “one of the Adventurers, a class of warriors peculiar to Nemedia”, whom he has to slay to escape, riding off in the Adventurer’s armor. Thus ends Chapter 6 of 22. If only Conan had found a wizard who could summon a byakhee, this wouldn’t be a novel!
Once in Aquilonia, Conan finds four soldiers trying to kill an old woman, who turns out to be a witch who can summon animals. She scries for him and they see that Valerius has already been crowned king, with many people satisfied. Next he visits a loyalist named Servius on his plantation, who explains the political situation as doomed because there was no heir to rally to. And with the king alive, the central provinces won’t rise up because they’ve already seen sorcery used against loyalists. Servius also mentions that Countess Albiona is slated for execution, which Conan departs to stop.
A disguised Conan sneaks into a tower in the capital, where he spies the executioner and stealthily kills him. He then rescues Albiona, but outside they’re pinned between guards chasing them and ten soldiers in front. Conan can kill three, but masked loyalists have to backstab the rest for him to make it out of the encounter.
The loyalists are led by Hadrathus, high priest of Asura, whose cult owes Conan a debt for letting them worship openly in Aquilonia.
“Our ancestors came from Vendhya, beyond the Sea of Vilayet and the blue Himelian mountains. We are sons of the East, not the South, and we have knowledge of all the wizards of the East, who are greater than the wizards of the West. And not one of them but would be a straw in the wind before the black might of Xaltotun.”
But he was conquered once, when he lost the Heart of Ahriman… and wasn’t there something about a thief throwing it in the sea? Hadrathus offers to send Clerics questing with Conan, but he says “This is a task for a fighting-man”, not an adventuring party, apparently.
Meanwhile, Valerius is informed of the violence Conan just wrought, and it turns out that Valerius has four exiled mages from Khitai in the Far East serving him (apparently Conan’s not the only Hyborian who travels that far).
Conan escapes as the “Charon” in a boat burial, with Albiona posing as the corpse. At a waterfall, an acolyte of Asura meets them with horses (and the GM fails to railroad them into accepting him into the party).
When sitting with the loyal Count Trocero, word comes that Valerius’s thief was killed by mountain bandits, whose chief Zorathus is on his way to the main port of Argos to sell the Heart of Ahriman. Conan attempts to chase him in the armor of a Free Companion. Conan’s mind starts to revert to type:
Why should he not seek forgetfulness, lose himself in the red tides of war and rapine that had engulfed him so often before? Could he not, indeed, carve out another kingdom for himself? The world was entering an age of iron, an age of war and imperialistic ambition; some strong man might well rise above the ruins of nations as a supreme conqueror. Why should it not be himself? So his familiar devil whispered in his ear, and the phantoms of his lawless and bloody past crowded upon him. But he did not turn aside
He’s stopped by a robber baron named Valbroso, who’s imprisoned Zorathus, who won’t give up a locked MacGuffin box. Dying on the rack, he tells Valbroso how to open it, just so a sharp protrusion can poison him. A Captain Beloso smashes things over Conan’s head so he can be the one to run off with the Heart. Conan is knocked unconscious in the chase and wakes up being attacked by a ghoul. He kills it and saves his pony from others.
Later, in Argos, Conan imposes on the hospitality of the merchant Publio, a contact from his Black Corsair days. He tells him about Beloso and the gem, and Publio decides to betray him. Beloso is traced to the House of Servio, where Conan finds him slain by a sorcerer of the black hand of Set. He escapes Publio’s assassins by feigning death just as he sees a Stygian galley row out to sea. But they return to report his death while Publio is being threatened by the mages from Khitai. They find Conan gone from the beach and extort a ship from Publio.
Conan’s “escape” was merely being impressed by a passing galley. Unfortunately for its owners, they have eighty black men chained as rowers and Conan recognizes them as old corsairs, so he starts shouting “I’m Amra!” Slaves start breaking free. Reaching Stygia, they find that the man who took the Heart in Argos was probably a priest named Thutothmes. He’d said to be seeking occult power to overthrow Thoth-Amon.
A Stygian city is described, and it’s all very evil and oppressive: few people out after dark! There’s a snake! Conan kills it instead of letting it eat someone, so he’s called a blasphemer. He ducks into a temple, where he kills a priest and takes his animal mask as a disguise. He joins a procession to find Thutothmes.
They might have been ghosts, moving toward that colossal pyramid that rose out of the murk of the desert. … No man could approach one of those somber piles of black stone without apprehension. The very name was a symbol of repellent horror among the northern nations, and legends hinted that the Stygians did not build them; that they were in the land at whatever immeasurably ancient date the dark-skinned people came into the land of the great river.
This is actually a relatively late pulp example of “Egyptians didn’t build the Pyramids”: it started in 1898.
Inside the pyramid, he gets separated from the priests and stumbles into a room with an ivory-skinned woman. He refuses to answer her, as speech would give away his alien origin.
“You are not a priest,” she said. “You are a fighting-man. Even with that mask that is plain. There is as much difference between you and a priest as there is between a man and a woman.
(The term “fighting man” instead of “fighter” in the earliest versions of Dungeons & Dragons is universally mocked, yet I’ve almost never seen "fighter" in a pre-1974 fantasy story. Tolkien’s Return of the King does have an orc say “There’s a great fighter about”.)
He grabs her throat, which is “cold as marble”, and they start to talk. She offers to lead him to Thutothmes and the stolen object, which makes him suspicious. It begins to dawn on him that she is Akivasha, “that ancient, evil, beautiful princess still lived the world over in song and legend, though ten thousand years had rolled their cycles since the daughter of Tuthamon had reveled in purple feasts amid the black halls of ancient Luxur.” (Thoth-Amon, Tuthamon, Thutothmes… Howard’s Egyptian names are getting annoyingly narrow.)
She tells him to let her drink his blood and love her, to which he throws her and says “Damned vampire!”
Conan knowing every type of monster by name feels like a very D&D attitude for a protagonist. But the description of psychological horror is kind of good:
To so many dreamers and poets and lovers she was not alone the evil princess of Stygian legend, but the symbol of eternal youth and beauty, shining for ever in some far realm of the gods. And this was the hideous reality. This foul perversion was the truth of that everlasting life. Through his physical revulsion ran the sense of a shattered dream of man’s idolatry, its glittering gold proved slime and cosmic filth.
In the pyramid’s catacombs, Thutothmes is preparing to resurrect all the elites mummified there, who stretch back 10,000 years. But before even the first, the mages from Khitai burst in. Demanding the Heart starts a fight, which the Khitans conduct entirely with Sticks to Snakes. They also have a lot of hit points, but the Stygian high priest has his death touch. Finally, Conan leaps out of the shadows and kills the fight’s sole survivor to steal the Heart. Oh, but that time it sat on the first mummy to be resurrected had an effect: he sits up all fleshy. The priest Thoth-mekri, 3,000 years dead, turns out to be a nice fellow who guides Conan out of the pyramid and lets him keep the Heart. Soon he’s back on the pirate ship, sailing for Zingara.
Xaltotun has been aloof since Aquilonia fell, and one of the original conspirators rushes into a council to tell the two kings that he is being hailed as arch-priest by mountain folk whose race was here before the Hyborians and summoning mirages of land and city as they were 3,000 years ago: “I tell you he would restore Acheron by his magic, by the sorcery of a gigantic blood-sacrifice such as the world has never seen. He would enslave the world, and with a deluge of blood wash away the present and restore the past!”
Xaltotun bursts in and kills him with a spell. Wizard and kings prepare for Conan’s rebel army from the west. Examining the terrain, they determine that he relies on a strategic river crossing to bring his forces to bear, but Xaltotun can take the long time to cast a spell causing rain and flood. Uncanny beings are heard in the wizard’s tent.
The next day, they learn there was no flood. But hope comes when a local named Tiberias offers to show Valerius the goat pass around Thermopylae, letting part of the army strike King Conan from behind. However, he leads them into a canyon to be ambushed by a rabble of people Valerius has harmed by his misrule. Whoa, secondary hero out of nowhere!
Xaltotun prepares to turn the tide of battle by sacrificing a virgin when the witch and high priest of Asura appear at the altar. The priest boasts that he dispeled Xaltotun’s rain magic and cast fog to trap Valerius. Holding the Heart, he intends to undo Xaltotun’s resurrection: “You shall go down the dark road to Acheron, which is the road of silence and the night. The dark empire, unreborn, shall remain a legend”.
The battle is mopped up with Conan defeating Tarascus in single combat, giving him quarter. He orders him to give the slave girl Zenobia as his ransom, and she’ll be made queen of Aquilonia.
This was the only Conan novel that Robert E. Howard wrote, at the behest of a British publisher that went out of business between accepting and publishing it. The form loses some of the compelling pacing of the better short stories, but I think Howard showed himself a skilled novelist by bringing back nearly everything he introduces back in the final chapter.
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