Dimma, the Mist Mage, knows nothing of Conan, but the vile necromancer's plans require his death. Thayla, beautiful Queen of the Pili, would rather take Conan to her bed, but her own plots mean he must die. Even the lovely Cheen will let nothing stop her from recovering the sacred talisman of her people, and Conan must use all his battle prowess to stay alive.

The intense psychological portrait of a hitman—the anti-Jason Bourne—as he stalks his prey from Boston to LA. He wants you to know him, maybe even admire him, but only for his excellence in his craft. Perhaps he was even born for it. "A natural killer," his mentor—a middleman named Vespucci—said he was. He proved it with his first professional hit: a Fifth Circuit Court judge in Boston, executed with a sheet of Saran Wrap in the stairwell of her own courthouse. He's proved his merit often, usually with a Glock semiautomatic, but he's improvised too, with his bare hands, the heel of a shoe, knives, even a sewing machine. He is the consummate assassin, at the top of his form, immune to the psychological strains of his chosen profession. He is what the Russians call a Silver Bear. He calls himself Columbus. It's the name Vespucci gave him, ten years ago, when he discovered a dark, new world of fences, clients, marks, jobs, jack. Not that his real name meant much to him anyway. He never knew his father or his mother, a prostitute who became dangerously involved back in the seventies with an earnest young congressman named Abe Mann, then a rising star in the Democratic Party. The magnetic Abe Mann has since become the Speaker of the House. He is currently running for the Democratic nomination in an exhausting presidential campaign, weaving his way across the country. Columbus is not far behind. But as he pieces together his past and prepares the seamless assassination of his mark, the criminal underworld he has always ruled begins unraveling violently around him.

Conan the Cimmerian must venture into the nightmare world of the dead to retrieve the Silver Lotus, a powerful weapon that can undo the the dreaded incantation that holds the city of Queen Rufia under the spell of the undead witch Zeriti. Original.

Conan travels with Illyana, a sorceress, into the Ibars Mountains, in search of the second magical jewel of Kurag, currently in the hands of Eremius, an evil necromancer

"In the harsh deserts of Stygia, a sorcerer grasps for the immortal power that lies beneath the shifting sands. In his way stand Conan and his unlikely allies: Alvazar, a rogue interested in little more than wine, women and more wine; and Ohala, daughter of a mystical order of warrior women sworn to retrieve a very dangerous book" -- Page [4] of cover.

After a gambling dispute erupts into violence and death, Conan of Cimmeria is condemned to the hellish mine pits of Brythunia where no man has ever escaped--or survived. But Conan breaks free and disappears into the wilderness, far from civilization, and into the eager arms of Songa, a forest maiden. Still the demon-goddess Ninga has seized control of Brythunia and her insatiable appetite for human sacrifice threatens to devour the world. Only one man can strike at the very heart of Ninga's religion of blood. A man who carries death in his eyes.