Conan wandered out of his tiny village in storm-swept Cimmeria to fulfill the one chore his father entrusted to him: to go and find the rust-red iron flower from which his mother would boil the dust which was to be forged into gleaming blades on his father's anvil.

His trusted sword Thplyntyr riding at his side, his faithful dog Whympyr trotting at his heels, even the sorcery-riddled hills of Cimmeria held no fear for him this day. In days not long gone by, he had faced hordes of demon grasshoppers, scattering them beneath his sandalled feet, stolen the eggs from the zombie turtles, who, tho' they move slow as death itself, would surely have taken his very soul, had they caught him at his perilous task. All this and more he saw in visions as he lay beneath the spreading Phormika tree dreaming of the day when he would be king of his own nation and would have a bedroom of his own.

His eyes closed but for a moment. When they parted, they opened to a new world. Thru eyes clouded with the newness of waking, he thought he saw a tiger cub jump out of the very air, jaws wide, tongue rolling, claws clawing, eyes piercing so as to freeze him to the very spot until the vision passed right thru him, like the Cimmerian express wagon which roared thru his small village at each day-before-the-full-moon, but likewise did not stop.

"What means this strange apparition?" he thought, and then paused ponderously to try to recall what the word "apparition" meant. He had left the one-room Cimmerian school the day they banned swords in class. Even gutting the teacher that evening by leaping upon him bravely from the oh-so-scary dark woods hadn't fully sweetened his disposition. How his bronzed hands had smarted as the old monk fought back, parting the skin on the Kid's knuckles as the evil knowledge-priest employed his rune encrusted measuring stick to rain great blows down upon Conan, while the boy circled cat-like in the dark.

As the old man called upon the trees to aid him, hissing ominously about logs to the power of two, Thplyntyr called the sorcerer home to his dark gods.

A strong arm gripped Kid Conan by the shoulder, and he looked up to see a boy wearing a crown. A horrible scar running up one side of his face, and no jolly smile on his lips either. "I, Kid King Kull, command you to join me in my holy quest!" he cried.

"What dark magiks are these?" KC mumbled, even as the darksome stranger drew him to his feet, his steely grip tightening like the dreaded garter snake that carried away his little sister one day when he drifted off into that afternoon's daydreams while guarding her bedside. This fellow seemed no more friendly than his father that night. Conan had always suspected his father favored his little sister, and then became sure when the smithy kept bringing up the incident for days afterwards.

"The evil sorcerer Thulsa Doom, who is three thousand and a half years undead, has imprisoned Baby Belit in a magic crystal and threatens to shake the thrones of the known world with the weirdly dented rattle she has kept hidden and safe in her mouth since before the days when she first teethed.

"Come with me and together we shall wrest this holy relic from the skeletal fingers of the one who would bring civilization to Cimmeria!"

Kid Conan's thoughts reeled all together, stunning him. Two thoughts collided at once and he was struck helpless as his mother when she tried to wake him in the morning.

Instinctively Kid Conan drew his sword, and came fully awake as Cimmerian steel met the tiger's metal with a din that nearly gave him a headache.

"Hold!" Kid Kull cried, with an authority born of years of having his way all the time, "You're quarrel rests not with me! I have come from ages past to aid you in delivering your bride-to-be from the evil that even now threatens to destroy her!"

That gave Connie (as his sister used to call him) pause. As Kid King Kull unrolled a scroll before him, he saw, even thru the crude rendering of Kid Kull's krayons, the most beautiful yearling woman his eyes had beheld since he went wenching with his allowance at the annual fair. Conan still believed that creature in the dark was a shaved goat, but was thrown out when he tried to slice open the skin of the tent to let some light in.

What this royal stranger said then, he had no memory of, for the maiden on the parchment had captured his soul.

"I am with you," Connie interrupted. "Let us seek out this Thulsa Doom, and show him that even the undead have cause to fear eternity's embrace!"

Running alongside Kull as he sat regally upon his trotting burro, Conan gasped for air as only one born of the hills of Cimmeria could do. More than twenty minutes and two rest stops later they were at the base of the twin peaks of The Mountains of Tomorrow, thus called because Conan's people had always meant to go there, but never had.

A sulfurous stench rolled down from behind Kull's mount and Conan held his breath even as Whympyr rolled over as one dead.

"Skunk smells first!" Kull cautioned, and Conan chose to remain silent, his face turning purple with the exertion of retaining his senses while Thplyntyr rattled noiselessly in his scabbard.

Hand over his face, Conan dragged Whympyr to a clearing in the air, and Kid King Kull dismounted. Had the barbarian known the reason for the noble beast's exclamation, he might have been prepared for what followed, but Cimmerians are a breed of Man who shun and fear sorcery, so he knew not how to read the omen.

The very earth seemed to open and swallow all four and, they were plunged into the deepest Stygian darkness. Luckily, Kid Conan had his allowance coins hanging on his necklace to pay the ferryman, who appeared by the shore of a river of ebony, to take them to the nether side. The burro, foul but noble steed, was left behind, and KKK and Whympyr were Kid Conan's sole companions. With his fingers resting on his pommel, the black-maned youth felt much better and began to wonder if this might be a good time to lay down and take a nap, when their craft thudded into what turned out to be the opposite bank.

"Cromm's bladder!" Connie cried, leaping ashore cat-like, head over heels. Rising bruised but undaunted, Conan glanced over his shoulder to witness Kid King Kull pocketing the change for the ride from the deathly boatman. Inwardly Kid Conan swore that Kull could pay for the return trip, if he hadn't followed the schoolmonk to Cromm's kingdom by then.

Thru endless yucky caverns they wandered, killing monstrous spiders, gigantic albino apes, undead statues and some lesser gods till Conan was nigh unto boredom. Nevertheless, Kid King Kull kept on, stopping neither to look behind, nor to relieve himself. Conan's admiration for him swelled by the moment, tho' he was nearly unbearably ready to burst with admiration already.

"Couldn't we mark our trail as the snow wolves of the foothills do?" Conan ventured. But if Kull heard, he replied not, for at that moment they emerged into a cavern whose walls glowed with a slime-green light. The Cimmerian pre-warrior's head fell backwards as he tried to gauge the height of the ceiling, but the weirdling glow made all the walls and ceiling seem unsolid. Boundless in height and breadth, yet suffocatingly close as they appeared to pulse like a thing alive.

"You!" said a dark figure a stone's throw away on a stone throne at the far end of the room.

"Yes, me!" said Kid King Kull, "And I have brought One whom you will recognize in the eons to come: Kid Conan! Together we shall oppose your evil scheme! Prepare to meet the tiger and the dragon!"

Looking quickly around for a dragon, which Kid Conan never had gotten to kill, he started to wonder, admittedly too late, whether the kid king was all there or not.

Doom was really skinny. Conan could see this as his pantherish eyes adjusted as only a hill-born Cimmerian's could in the shimmering light, and in fact the obvious villain was just dried bones under a tattered, hooded robe. Anything he ate would've just fallen on the floor after he swallowed.

Thplyntyr was out and Conan was swinging like mad. He bellowed like a man possessed. He kind of hoped that would scare Doom. It sure scared Whympyr. He dropped a pint on the spot and went behind a boulder, shivering until the very walls shook and chunks of the ceiling began to fall all around the heroes.

It was then Conan spied the crystal sphere at the wizard's bony feet. His eyes met Kull's as the king cried "Kid Conan! Let's get 'im!" And with that Kull bounded forward, the power of his totem, the tiger, carrying him forward in great leaps and bounds. He even wrinkled up his nose like a tiger.

Doom cast a dried-out leather pouch into a something-or-other full of burning coals and instantly the air was filled with coils of serpentine smoke. Glancing to his left, Conan saw Kull reeling in the clutches of the demon smoke. Though seemingly mere vapors, the blood-red tentacles were squeezing the life out of the poor guy.

Maybe they were a little more orange than blood-red, Kid Conan thought, but there was some purple wreathed in there too. He was hard-pressed to say what the exact color was, as he pondered on the really scary adventure's color scheme.

Seeing Doom's attention riveted on Kid King Kull, Kid Conan sprinted up to the whatchamacallit full of glowing coals and called up his inner resources to quench the fire. The steam smelled pretty foul, but when Doom screamed, Conan sensed he had instinctively done the right thing.

"Demons of Set!" came the answering cry of Doom, rattling Baby Belit's security relic at the crumbling chunks of the cavern's canopy, "Rise up and destroy the unbelievers!"

The superstitious barbarian was believing pretty good right about then, so he knew Kull would get the worst of it again. Quickly, he smacked Doom with his trusty blade a couple times, till he fell down and stopped moving. Then he smashed the crystal prison, freeing Baby Belit, as wafts of ammonia slithered out from between the shimmering shivering shuddering sheer shards of the sphere's shuck, shattering, and scattering like shuffling shells.

Kull came up gasping and holding his throat. Still blowing smoke rings, he picked up the Baby Belit, and leapt to a falling boulder which had mystically transmuted into the winged horse it had once been, before the time the gods were still aborning.

The rattle, now laying silently across the unmoving joints of Doom’s unthinking fingers, moved almost imperceptibly, rattled weakly, and then came suddenly to life, leaping through the air into Baby Belit's outstretched hand.

"On your way to becoming a king someday, you'll kill, plunder, whore, rob, and become the most admired hero in all the known world!" were Kid King Kull's prophetic words of flapful parting. Catching these fading words, Kid Conan's warrior's heart swelled with pride, just as his head swelled as he caught the air-borne horse's front left foot just above his right ear.

Passing out as only a hill-born Cimmerian can, he welcomed the engulfing blackness, even as he felt Whympyr licking his face, especially his eyes. Eyelids gummed together with saliva, stars spinning before him, the flower-picking-hardened barbarian fought to regain consciousness.

"Cromm Cromm Cromm...comes from the land of Where-Are-You From..." he heard himself utter, finding himself looking up at the tree where he had met Kid King Kull. He knew that it had all been real, as the coins had magically been restrung on his necklace. This was surely a sign from the Gods.

Next! Kid Conan battles his father, the sinewy smithy, to raise his allowance in "The Inheritance!"

Copyright 2002 by Maxim Hurwicz