"Robert E. Howard - Conan - Hour of the Dragon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Howard Robert E)

watched with fierce intensity, his lips moving in soundless invocation.

It was as if a globe of living fire nickered and burned on the dead, withered bosom. And breath
sucked in, hissing, through the clenched teeth of the watchers. For as they watched, an awful
transmutation became apparent. The withered shape in the sarcophagus was expanding, was growing,
lengthening. The bandages burst and fell into brown dust. The shiveled limbs swelled,
straightened. Their dusky hue began to fade.

"By Mitra!" whispered the tall, yellow-haired man on the left. "He was not a Stygian. That part at
least was true."

Again a trembling finger warned for silence. The hound outside was no longer howling. He
whimpered, as with an evil dream, and then that sound, too, died away in silence, in which the



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yellow-haired man plainly heard the straining of the heavy door, as if something outside pushed
powerfully upon it. He half turned, his hand at his sword, but the man in the ermine robe hissed
an urgent warning: "Stay! Do not break the chain! And on your life do not go to the door!"

The yellow-haired man shrugged and turned back, and then he stopped short, staring. In the Jade
sarcophagus lay a living man: a tall, lusty man, naked, white of skin, and dark of hair and beard.
He lay motionless, his eyes wide open, and blank and unknowing as a newborn babe's. On his breast
the great jewel smoldered and sparkled.

The man in ermine reeled as if from some let-down of extreme tension.

"Ishtar!" he gasped. "It is Xaltotun!тАФand he lives! Valerius! Tarascus! Amalric! Do you see? Do
you see? You doubted meтАФ but I have not failed! We have been close to the open gates of hell this
night, and the shapes of darkness have gathered close about usтАФaye, they followed him to the very
doorтАФbut we have brought the great magician back to life."

"And damned our souls to purgatories everlasting, I doubt not," muttered the small, dark man,
Tarascus.

The yellow-haired man, Valerius, laughed harshly.

"What purgatory can be worse than life itself? So we are all damned together from birth. Besides,
who would not sell his miserable soul for a throne?"

"There is no intelligence in his stare, Orastes," said the large man.

"He has long been dead," answered Orastes. "He is as one newly awakened. His mind is empty after
the long sleepтАФnay, he was dead, not sleeping. We brought his spirit back over the voids and gulfs
of night and oblivion. I will speak to him."

He bent over the foot of the sarcophagus, and fixing his gaze on the wide dark eyes of the man