Red Nails is a sword-and-sorcery novella by Robert E. Howard, part of his Conan cycle. It follows Conan and the pirate Valeria into a hidden, roofed city in the jungle, where an isolated people live amid strange customs and danger. It is worth listening for its tense atmosphere and classic weird fantasy adventure.
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Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
Red Nails
By ROBERT E. HOWARD
One of the strangest stories ever written—the tale of a barbarian adventurer, a woman pirate, and a weird roofed city inhabited by the most peculiar race of men ever spawned
1. The Skull on the Crag
Tƒŧ woman on the horse reined in her weary steed. It stood with its legs wide-braced, its head drooping, as if it found even the weight of the gold-tasseled, red-leather bridle too heavy. The woman drew a booted foot out of the silver stirrup and swung down from the giltworked saddle. She made the reins fast to the fork of a sapling, and turned about, hands on her hips, to survey her surroundings.
Nearly four years ago, WEIRD TALES published a story called
"The Phoenix on the Sword," built around a barbarian adventurer named Conan, who had become king of a country by sheer force of valor and brute strength. The author of that story was Robert E. Howard, who was already a favorite with the readers of this magazine for his stories of Solomon Kane, the dour English Puritan and redresser of wrongs. The stories about Conan were speedily acclaimed by our readers, and the barbarian's weird adventures became immensely popular. The
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