Zub Tales

Continuing my Conan reread for Cimmerian September, the tenth published Conan story is The Devil In Iron, which arrived in the August 1934 issue of Weird Tales magazine.

This story kicks off with a fisherman exploring a mysterious island called Xapur and finding something strange in and amongst the ruins there:

Within the ruined dome, surrounded by stone-dust and bits of broken masonry, lay a man on the golden block. He was clad in a sort of skirt and a shagreen girdle. His black hair, which fell in a square mane to his massive shoulders, was confined about his temples by a narrow gold band. On his bare, muscular breast lay a curious dagger with a jeweled pommel, shagreen-bound hilt, and a broad crescent blade. It was much like the knife the fisherman wore at his hip, but it lacked the serrated edge, and was made with infinitely greater skill.

He grabs the blade, awakening an ancient evil…

Chapter two is centered on Jehungir Agha, lord of Khawarizm, and his counsellor Ghaznavi as they scheme to stop a group of outlaws called the Kozaks, who have been terrorizing their borders and staying one step ahead of the law thanks to their fearless new leader:

‘That is because of the new chief who has risen among them,’ answered Ghaznavi. ‘You know whom I mean.’

‘Aye!’ replied Jehungir feelingly. ‘It is that devil Conan; he is even wilder than the kozaks, yet he is crafty as a mountain lion.’

‘It is more through wild animal instinct than through intelligence,’ answered Ghaznavi. ‘The other kozaks are at least descendants of civilized men. He is a barbarian. But to dispose of him would be to deal them a crippling blow.’

Their plan: Use Jehungir’s irresistibly attractive slave Octavia as bait, letting Conan see her during a prisoner exchange, and then have the rumor reach him that she has escaped enslavement and headed to Xapur Island. When he heads there to find her, they’ll ambush him with archers. Things get a bit messy here as even the plotters see flaws in their strategy:

‘The chances are all that he will go alone. But we will take care of the other alternative. We will not await him on the island, where we might be trapped ourselves, but among the reeds of a marshy point which juts out to within a thousand yards of Xapur. If he brings a large force, we’ll beat a retreat and think up another plot. If he comes alone or with a small party, we will have him.’

Chapter three is on Xapur and, surprisingly, Octavia is there. She wasn’t actually supposed go to the island, but after the set-up worked she was sold to a new master, escaped, and coincidentally ends up on Xapur anyways. It’s a pretty labored as the plot works overtime to try and get all these pieces in place.

Olivia stumbles across the evil unleashed in chapter one and we’re given a few more clues about what it is, but not a full view just yet:

With a stifled cry she shrank back, and as she did so, something that even in her panic she recognized as a human arm curved about her waist. She screamed and threw all her supple young strength into a wild lunge for freedom, but her captor caught her up like a child, crushing her frantic resistance with ease. The silence with which her frenzied pleas and protests were received added to her terror as she felt herself being carried through the darkness toward the distant drum which still pulsed and muttered.

It takes until chapter four for Conan to actually appear in this Conan story! When he finally shows up, at least Howard does lavish attention on him:

The muscles of his heavy bronzed arms rippled as he pulled the oars with an almost feline ease of motion. A fierce vitality that was evident in each feature and motion set him apart from common men; yet his expression was neither savage nor somber, though the smoldering blue eyes hinted at ferocity easily wakened. This was Conan, who had wandered into the armed camps of the kozaks with no other possession than his wits and his sword, and who had carved his way to leadership among them.

Conan explores the island (not realizing Jehungir’s crew will ambush him when he tries to leave) and sees that the ruins have somehow transformed into a fortress. That freaks him out and he’s ready to retreat, except he lucks across fabric from Octavia’s outfit, and carnal instincts drive his courage:

He stood silently facing the dark towers that loomed through the trees, his eyes slits of blue bale-fire. Desire for the yellow-haired woman vied with a sullen primordial rage at whoever had taken her. His human passion fought down his ultra-human fears, and dropping into the stalking crouch of a hunting panther, he glided toward the walls, taking advantage of the dense foliage to escape detection from the battlements.

The rest of the chapter meanders quite a bit with Conan finding sleeping citizens amongst the ruin, not understanding how they got there and then hearing the sound of an enemy moving around, but not finding them. The story definitely feels sluggish here.

In chapter five Conan comes across an ornate room and he sees what he assumes is a sculpture of a giant snake, until he touches it, prompting this intense description:

An icy chill congealed the blood in his veins and lifted the short hair on his scalp. Under his hand there was not the smooth, brittle surface of glass or metal or stone, but the yielding, fibrous mass of a living thing. He felt cold, sluggish life flowing under his fingers.

His hand jerked back in instinctive repulsion. Sword shaking in his grasp, horror and revulsion and fear almost choking him, he backed away and down the glass steps with painful care, glaring in awful fascination at the grisly thing that slumbered on the copper throne. It did not move.

Leaving that room and exploring elsewhere, we finally encounter the ancient evil teased previously. It’s a being named Khosatral Khel that looks a giant glossy-skinned humanoid. When Conan hears Khosatral’s voice, it puts him in a strange trance and he sees the creature’s origin. There are some interesting bits of lyrical prose here but, once again, the plot feels sluggish instead of motivated and moving.

Chapter six opens with Jehungir Agha and his men getting sick of waiting for Conan to come back and setting forth on their own to find him. At the same time, Conan finally confronts Khosatral and realizes he’s in way over his head:

There was a fleeting concussion, a fierce writhing and intertwining of limbs and bodies, and then Conan sprang clear, every thew quivering from the violence of his efforts; blood started where the grazing fingers had torn the skin. In that instant of contact he had experienced the ultimate madness of blasphemed nature; no human flesh had bruised his, but metal animated and sentient; it was a body of living iron which opposed his.

Khosatral loomed above the warrior in the gloom. Once let those great fingers lock and they would not loosen until the human body hung limp in their grasp. In that twilit chamber it was as if a man fought with a dream-monster in a nightmare.

The rest of the story is a pitched battle between Conan, Khosatral, and Jehungir and his men, with the giant snake and saving Octavia thrown in for good measure.

The way to pierce Khosatral’s impenetrable skin is the magical dagger that the fisherman took and Conan glimpsed in his trance, and once he gets that the big bad guy gets wrecked pretty quick and turns into…dead evil goop? It’s not exactly clear:

Khosatral reeled and fell. In the shape of a man he reeled, but it was not the shape of a man that struck the loam. Where there had been the likeness of a human face, there was no face at all, and the metal limbs melted and changed…. Conan, who had not shrunk from Khosatral living, recoiled blenching from Khosatral dead, for he had witnessed an awful transmutation; in his dying throes Khosatral Khel had become again the thing that had crawled up from the Abyss millenniums gone. Gagging with intolerable repugnance, Conan turned to flee the sight.

Fantasy illustrator Boris Vallejo did a great job representing Conan about to fight Khel with the magic dagger:

This 12,000 word story feels like an awkward mix of ingredients from previous Conan tales – There’s an ancient enemy being reawakened like Black Colossus, an island with a lost secret like Pool of the Black One, a supernatural foe in a forgotten city of sleeping citizens like Xuthal of the Dusk, an iron statue-esque foe like Iron Shadows in the Moon, a treasure guarded by a creature like Tower of the Elephant, and even an out of body origin vision like Queen of the Black Coast. It’s not bad, by any means, but also feels like it’s trying to jam too much together in ways that don’t quite flow from scene to scene.

All that said, once again John Buscema and Alfredo Alcala really elevate the material in their comic adaptation from Savage Sword of Conan #15. Every page is a stunner:

If you haven’t read the original Conan prose stories, I recommend the Del Rey 3-book set, which has each story unedited and essays that add context around their publication.