Shadows in the Moonlight

The Free Companions are shattered, their ranks butchered by the treachery of Shah Amurath the Great Lord of Akif. Conan the Cimmerian is one of only a handful to escape the massacre, and his survival is a grueling affair: hiding in fetid marsh mud, subsisting on raw snake and muskrat, crawling like a wounded beast through reeds while enemy soldiers search for him. But the mud has its own kind of mercy, and Conan emerges from it reborn for vengeance. When opportunity arrives, he takes it with both hands, carving a bloody path through Amurath's soldiers and spiriting away Olivia, a former princess of Koth reduced to slavery. They find refuge on a deserted island in the Vilayet Sea, but the island holds strange enchantments and stranger dangers that test both Conan's wits and his steel. Then the pirates come, and the killing begins anew. This is Conan at his most elemental: a force of nature in human form, smarter than any brute has a right to be, and utterly unafraid to bleed for his freedom. Howard writes with the muscular intensity of a man who believed words could cut like swords, and this story pulses with that raw, kinetic power.