This story was originally published in the August, 1929 issue of Weird Tales.
King Kull is an outcast from the barbarian tribes of Atlantis who usurped the throne of Valusia, dominant power of his age. A Pictish emissary arrives. He asks Kull to come alone to a state feast to be recognized as king of kings. Kull is a meditative sort, and ponders how strange it is that his ambition has cost him the ancient friendship of kin and made him friend of the Atlanteans’s ancient enemies.
Strange to him were the intrigues of court and palace, army and people. All was like a masquerade, where men and women hid their real thoughts with a smooth mask.
Who was he, a straightforward man of the seas and the mountain, to rule a race strangely and terribly wise with the mysticisms of antiquity? An ancient race—
He decides the invitation is not a trap and attends the feast of the Pictish statesman Ka-nu. Dismissing everyone else, Ka-nu tells Kull that he could bring the Atlantean tribes under Valusian rule as well as its hegemonic alliances with other empires and the Picts, despite his name being accursed as an outcast:
I know whereof I speak. And then warfare will cease, wherein there is no gain; I see a world of peace and prosperity — man loving his fellow man — the good supreme. All this can you accomplish — if you live!”
Ka-nu mysteriously refuses to reveal what the threat is, but shows that he has a holy gem stolen from the Serpent temple and says he’ll send Brule the Spear-Slayer to help Kull. He returns introspectively to the City of Wonders:
“You are young,” said the palaces and the temples and the shrines, “but we are old. The world was wild with youth when we were reared. You and your tribe shall pass, but we are invincible, indestructible. We towered above a strange world, ere Atlantis and Lemuria rose from the sea;
Later, Brule climbs in a palace window, into a room Kull has stationed 18 guards outside of. He says the strange words “Ka nama kaa lajerama!” He shows the baffled king a hidden door in his own palace, warning him that it’s full of such, and night and day he is watched by many eyes. In a room at the base of a flight of stairs they spy on… the same 18 guards! Kull sneaks back to the study, and those guards are still outside the door. He demands to know what sorcery is this.
“we are but barbarians — infants compared to the Seven Empires. Not even they themselves know how old they are. Neither the memory of man nor the annals of the historians reach back far enough to tell us when the first men came up from the sea and built cities on the shore. But Kull, men were not always ruled by men!”
A Councilor Tu skulks with a dagger along the stairs. He tries to kill Kull, but is killed instead. As he dies, his human features are replaced by a serpent’s head!
The tale goes that when the first humans came to be, there were already civilized serpent men. In time they were decadent and defeated, and they were cast out into the wastelands, where the survivors all learned a magic charm to change their appearance. So they returned when humans were too decadent to care about the old wars, wearing the faces of any human they willed in order to continue ruling the world.
Brule backstabs Kull and gets killed, also turning into a serpent man! Just as Kull meditates paranoid on how many men are even human, the real Brule steps through the secret door again. He reassures Kull that no serpent man can speak the shibboleth “Ka nama kaa lajerama.”
“Through the dim corridors of memory those words lurk; though you never heard them in this life, yet in the bygone ages they were so terribly impressed upon the soul mind that never dies, that they will always strike dim chords in your memory, though you be reincarnated for a million years to come. For that phrase has come secretly down the grim and bloody eons, since when, uncounted centuries ago, those words were watch-words for the race of men who battled with the grisly beings of the Elder Universe.
“the bird-women, the harpies, the bat-men, the flying fiends, the wolf-people, the demons, the goblins — all [gone] save such as this being that lies at our feet, and a few of the wolf-men. Long and terrible was the war, lasting through the bloody centuries, since first the first men, risen from the mire of apedom, turned upon those who then ruled the world.”
The Picts had a legend that when their ancestors first seized land from the Valusians, the king came out to meet them in battle, where he died and turned into a serpent man. From that clue, Ka-nu pieced together that every time a human becomes king, the serpent men kill and replace him. So he tried to help Kull avoid that fate, and end the wars between peoples they use to distract us.
The next day, there’s a new Tu in the palace, and Kull sits on the throne keeping his own counsel.
Always he had seen their faces as masks, but before he had looked on them with contemptuous tolerance, thinking to see beneath the masks shallow, puny souls, avaricious, lustful, deceitful; now there was a grim undertone, a sinister meaning, a vague horror that lurked beneath the smooth masks.
Was it the real Kull who sat upon the throne or was it the real Kull who had scaled the hills of Atlantis, harried the far isles of the sunset, and laughed upon the green roaring tides of the Atlantean sea? How could a man be so many different men in a lifetime? For Kull knew that there were many Kulls and he wondered which was the real Kull. After all, the priests of the Serpent went a step further in their magic, for all men wore masks, and many a different mask with each different man or woman; and Kull wondered if a serpent did not lurk under every mask.
He’s starting to think of even himself as an illusion.
He declares “Ka nama kaa lajerama!”, and every noble in the hall recoils. Slaying them, another illusion falls: the council room is actually the room called Accursed, disused since an earlier king died in it, and when they rush to the real council room, another Kull is addressing the true human versions of the same nobles! Kull kills the impostor and declares:
Here I swear that I shall hunt the serpent-men from land to land, from sea to sea, giving no rest until all be slain, that good triumph and the power of Hell be broken.
As you can guess from the precocious reference to Hell, the serpent men of this imagined prehistory are supposed to remind us of the Serpent Adam and Eve knew. But the references to Atlantis, Lemuria, and predecessors thereto is based on Theosophy, and that carried with it secondhand Hindu-Buddhist concepts like maya (illusion). Those religions have their own serpent men: nagas. Nagas are ambivalent figures, sometimes divine and sometimes loathed,* and in Southeast Asian traditions of receiving civilization from India, the first Indian may be met by an indigenous leader identified as a naga. So Howard was mixing cultural symbols and their emotional valence to make a new myth.
*The positive view is more common, but for instance the Mahabharata starts with a frame story where all nagas/cobras are loathsome things the king wants to exterminate.
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