Sword and Sorcery at its best.

The wind had been rising, whipping gusts of rain before it.  Now, after midnight, the damp sea wind howled through the cobbled alleys that led away from the harbor.  It swung the painted wooden signs above the doors of inns and taverns.  Starved mongrels cowered, shivering, in doorways against the wind and rain.

At this late hour, the revelers were done.  Few lights burned in the houses of Kordava, capital of Zingara on the Western Ocean.  Heavy clouds obscured the moon, and tattered rags of vapor scudded across the gloomy sky like ghosts.  It was a dark, secretive hour–the time of night when hard-eyed men whisper of treason and robbery; when masked assassins slink through nighted chambers, envenomed daggers bright in their black-gloved hands. A night for conspiracy; a night for murder.

 

–L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, Conan the Buccaneer

 

These first two paragraphs in Chapter One of Conan the Buccaneer sum up what Sword and Sorcery fantasy is all about–visceral feelings of dark intrigue in the raw elements of a world that once was.

Great stuff.