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city gnawed like a cancer—slowly being reborn as a subterranean warren for Kordava’s impoverished and social outcasts.
    From its earliest days, this district had been known as the Pit. The name was as suitable as it was inevitable. To the Pit settled the dregs of Kordava’s populace: the poor and the misfit, the broken and the degenerate, those who preyed upon the mighty and the miserable. Criminals of all classes stalked the eternally shadowed streets brazenly; the city guard dared not enter the Pit, no more than could they have ferreted out their man in the labyrinthine ways of the buried city. Sailors on liberty and soldiers with their pay swaggered into the Pit in search of any sort of entertainment or vice their tastes might demand, for on the whole of the Western Ocean there were no waterfront dives with a notoriety more lurid than those of the Pit. It was said that in no pantheon was there a Hell peopled by demons and damned more depraved than those who dwelt within the Pit. Zingaran humor typically found a more scurrilous pun, equally appropriate. Conan had visited the Pit once during his brief career in the Zingaran army. That he had returned with no worse than a bad hangover and a purse depleted by his own free spending was no shoddy tribute.
    Today Conan returned to the Pit boldly and upon a lathered horse, descending with his new companions along one of the numerous tunnels that led down to the buried streets of the old city. A hard ride from the area of the Dancing Floor had outdistanced any pursuit, and there were none in the crowded streets of market day to dispute their passage. Once returned to the Pit, a thousand of the guard might storm after Mordermi—and have less chance of taking him than of seizing laughter on the wind.
    It was midmorning, so that wan pools of daylight filtered through skylights and airshafts overhead to augment the infrequent smears of streetlights. At this hour, the streets within the Pit were largely deserted, in contrast to those of the city above. For the Pit was a realm of night, just as its denizens were creatures of the night.
    A few wine shops and brothels remained open; tired-faced whores loitered in their doorways, alert for any marketday rubes who might come early to sample the forbidden pleasures of the city. Streetlights, left burning in the perpetual gloom, shed their yellow light on only dirty pavement. Opium dens and gambling dives were boarded over upon the dreams of their addicts. Behind shuttered windows of the brothels, their inmates used their pallets for sleeping. Within clandestine little rooms, thieves and assassins slumbered with such pangs of conscience as they might feel. Outside the barred doorway of the vice den where Conan had seen her perform on stage with a Kushite dwarf, a six-year-old wearily poured slops into the gutter.
    Architecturally—although such considerations were of little moment to Conan—the Pit was a living museum. An antiquarian would have noted with great enthusiasm the stuccoed façades and elaborate iron grillwork of another age, the ornate windows of stained glass and lozenge-paned streetlights that here and there had escaped destruction. Conan saw only filthy desolation and shabby efforts to patch together ruined structures that were better left to moulder. Skylights leaked barely enough daylight to break the gloom into varying depths of shadow. Airshafts did little to dispel the noxious miasma of smoke and decay and human misery.
    A story or more overhead, the omnipresent ceiling loomed like a sooty and starless firmament, shored up and vaulted over to support the world of daylight that moved unthinkingly above. Oddly truncated, the partially restored buildings of the old city were obliterated against the floor of the new city overhead. A subtle metastasis, some of these renovated structures opened into the cellars of the buildings of the new city; certain others masked cellars of their own that pierced to secret depths