Red Nails

Red Nails pulses with the raw, savage energy that made Robert E. Howard the father of sword-and-sorcery. Conan, wandering the Stygian forests, crosses paths with Valeria, a pirate queen still bloody from killing a Stygian nobleman. Together they stumble upon Xuchotl, a city of ancient stone and older hatreds, where two races have warred for centuries over a god-thing buried in their temples. A dragon blocks their path through the mountains. That dragon learns what barbarians do when they have nothing left to lose. Howard builds the story around a question no one asks aloud: when civilization rots, what rises from the mud to take its place? The action crackles, the sorcery disturbs, and the ending cuts clean. This was Howard's final Conan story, and it reads like a man pouring everything into one last blaze.