Where’s that priest?”

Conan leaned forward with his hands on the pommel of his saddle. It had been five days since the hunt. Several hours out from Wedi Shebelli, they’d been met by the mine garrison’s own scouts, riding on horseback, then escorted back along a path that almost might be considered a dirt road. Several large boulders had been visibly rolled out of the way.

Valeria pulled her horse over to ride beside him. She leaned close so that they could speak without being overheard.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I found something where his wagon was camped last night, with a dead beast beside it. It was like an oversized rat with a squashed-in face.”

He grunted as she showed him something in her palm. It was a charm, made in the Stygian fashion. A miniature woven woman’s form, with one of Valeria’s distinctive blond hairs wound around its head, and the hands and feet bound. A long thorn had been driven through its body, too.

“That’s a death fetish,” he said. “Illness, foul luck too… making you slow when you need speed.”

“Thought so,” she said, “though I wasn’t sure.” She plucked the hair free, cut the bonds on the little figurine and then shredded it.

“Why would the priest have anything against you?” he said.

“I’m not Stygian, and I’m a woman,” she said, and Conan shook his head in bewilderment.

“Maybe Khafset put him up to it,” the Cimmerian said after a moment. “He has reason to hate you, and these priests of Set are mostly nobles, too. They might even be related.”

“Pity if something happened to him,” she said grimly.

“Be careful about that,” he warned. “If they find out you tried to hurt a priest of Set, they’ll flay you and salt you and then try to think up something really nasty. Fall in—and let me know if you see him again.”

The path stuck to the ridges in this bit of rolling savannah, winding to avoid going down into the more densely wooded bottoms. He turned in the saddle and called to the other scouts.

“Anyone seen the priest?”

“Priest?” several voices replied.

“That priest of Set who started out with us,” he said. “I can’t recall seeing him lately, or his wagon. The one stationed here should come out and greet the new one, part of the handover ceremonies for the garrison.”

The skirmishers looked at each other and shrugged. Valeria frowned and nodded. The priest’s absence was a mystery, and Conan didn’t like mysteries. They had a way of coming back and biting him on the arse when he least expected it.

When they arrived, more of the garrison turned out, lining the entranceway. The troops who’d be departing in two days’ time looked as notably cheerful as the new arrivals were glum, many of them smiling and nudging each other when their underofficers weren’t looking. With a regular thump of feet in hobnail sandals, the relief troops from the north marched behind Akhenset. The Stygian commander rode like a statue in the polished splendor of his chariot, to the rhythm of the drums and the occasional bray of a tall trumpet.

Conan caught several of his men looking the place over, catching one another’s eyes and snorting quietly, as if to say they’d be just as displeased if they were going to be stuck here. Compared to a place like this, Sukhmet started to look like Tarantia or Shadizar.

The community lay at the base of a range of rocky hills—ones that had been forested before the woodcutters set to harvesting them for fuel. They were increasingly covered in low thorn-bush. Here and there lines of white glinted where the underlying quartz showed through the gray-brown-green covering. Those streaks sparkled like jewels where water tumbled down the bare white rock and the sun struck wet crystal.

It was pretty, in an eerie alien way.

The settlement at foot of the hills was not. While it had a depressing similarity to Sukhmet, unlike the mud-built or rammed-earth construction of that town the mine’s buildings were mostly of mortared stone or rubble. There were a couple of inns that made the Claw and Fang Tavern look like a palace.

“This place looks like it was built… and kept up… by idiots who didn’t give a damn,” Valeria muttered.

“Built by slaves, and the people overseeing them are the chamber-pot scrapings of the Stygians,” Conan said. “Even those are counting the days until they leave.”

There was a wall all around, about twice man-height tall, formed from stones of irregular size and shape rough-mortared with clay, and a wooden fighting platform behind that. Laughable in comparison with fortifications in the cities of the civilized world. Once they were through the gates—wooden and clumsy yet very strong—there was a large ring of trampled bare dirt and a set of compounds.

One group of buildings might have been a mirror-image in half scale of the much-loathed home base of Zarallo’s mercenaries in Sukhmet. That would be where the garrison was to be quartered. A mansion of sorts, for the governor of the settlement; several smaller houses for supervisors and bureaucrats, rows of huts for the overseers, skilled workers, and those who served at their beck and call.

Just visible, the mine-entrance was at the furthest point uphill, a dark arched hole in the side of the incline, glinting white in the afternoon sun because it had been cut into a formation rich in gold-bearing quartz. Right below it were a dozen long, low barracks buildings for the slaves, half-sunk into the ground and thick-walled with wooden watchtowers over the single entrance. Even at a distance, the smell of human squalor could be detected.

Everything was drab, smut-marked by the charcoal fumes that poured from a low-slung smelter with its tall chimney. There were huge wickerwork baskets of charred wood fuel stacked near it, covered by a thatch roof on a tall network of poles.

The only splash of color was the temple of Set. It wasn’t very large, a square stone box covered in painted stucco, but it had a row of the typical bottom-to-top tapering square pillars at its front, and a tall black-basalt statue stood on a platform before the columns, showing the slimly muscular figure of a kilted man. He was taking one stiff step with a sandaled left foot, hands raised, holding a crook-headed staff and a severed human head hanging by its hair. Almost certainly it was meant to represent a northerner’s head.

An altar of the same inky stone stood in front, blocky and carved in low-relief, with statues of squid-headed humanoid figures stationed at the corners. Censers smoldered at each end; trails of rotting black blood traced a path from a central depression to gutters that ran into the mouths of the squid-men. The blood swarmed with huge black flies.

The walls beneath the flat roof showed blazingly colored patterns telling stories in a mixture of stylized murals and the odd-looking pictographic Stygian script. Many of the stories focused on snakes, or things that were part snake, or things that were just things, more often than not eating human being or doing things less identifiable but just as unpleasant.

Tree-tall flagpoles at the corners of the temple lofted giant serpent shapes, inflating and hissing in the hot breeze.

Instead of a man’s visage, the rearing head of a cobra, its hood spread, rose between the statue’s shoulders. Gold-and-ruby eyes glaring down on the entire settlement, the sculpted stone showing the linen headdress of a Stygian aristocrat on its narrow skull, and the twin tails on its breast.

The smell of incense and old blood, and a somehow metallic-organic impression from the temple were strong even amid the hard stink of the nearby slave barracks.

“Crom smite me dead,” Conan said to himself. Beside the altar, surrounded by lesser clerics and flunkies, stood none other than the starved-looking priest he’d seen talking to Akhenset at the beginning of their journey.

“He must have somehow gone on ahead… but why?” He turned to Valeria. “From the look he gave you, he near broke out in hives at just being close.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like Mitra-worshipping northerners?” she suggested, tossing her head. With her helm across the saddlebow, her tawny mane whipped from side to side.

“Stygians don’t like outsiders, true,” Conan agreed, “but it’s been three thousand years since your ancestors threw down Acheron and sacked the temple of Set in Python. Besides, there’s a dozen others from those countries in this detachment.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like northern women?”

“He’ll be an unusual Stygian, then.”

That brought chuckles. The slave-trade ran in both directions, and blond females fetched high prices in Shem and Stygia both. “Anyway, a week’s travel alone through hostile country in a mule-cart, just to avoid seeing one head of tawny hair…?”

“It’s probably not as risky for him,” Valeria said. “He’s a high priest of Set… which means he’s a magician.”

Conan swore and made a gesture with his hand—not one begging help of Crom, for that bleak deity gave no aid. It was a prayer for the strength to fight a threat on his own. Sometimes Crom gave that. Several of the other skirmishers looked uneasy too. Set was hated in the northlands, but to his followers he gave riches—and great power.

Power that could kill you, and worse.

Everyone knew that.

The outgoing commander of the mine garrison waited in his chariot for Akhenset to approach. He was very similar in looks and attire, except that he was a decade or so older and looked as if eating and drinking had been his defenses against the boredom and misery of this posting. His hawk nose was lost in a pudgy mass, with dark circles under his bloodshot eyes. Akhenset drew up alongside and the two Stygian leaders clasped forearms. The fat officer ceremoniously presented his replacement with a bronze-handled mace carved in serpent-scale patterns.

All the troops cheered dutifully as Akhenset turned his chariot and flourished the weapon above his head, a symbol of the power of life and death he would wield at the mine-compound and its surroundings. As he did, his troops chanted.

“Hail to the most noble, O Akhenset, favored of emperor and god.”

“May this mace smite the enemies of Set!” he responded.

Conan suppressed a laugh as his own followers joined in the cheers, brandishing their blades aloft and speaking in their native languages. He understood some, and heard their “supplications.”

“Up yours, least noble, O Akhen-snake-screwer!”

Valeria chimed in with enthusiasm, and gave scatological advice with a broad grin as she waved her sword.

“May your mace bugger you well!”

Conan thrust his own heavier blade skyward. “Crom give you what you deserve!” he bellowed. It was nicely ambiguous, and very unlikely that anyone within a thousand miles could speak Cimmerian.

The departing officer looked noticeably happier as his driver turned the chariot back to his own forces. Those were carrying their field-gear on their backs, while their baggage-carts, families, and camp-followers were all waiting on the south side of the open space—it would be an exaggeration to call it a square. Some of them started to leave the instant the hand-over was official, sidling slowly along the wall to avoid attracting attention, then hurrying through the gate and out of sight.

The priest of Set stood by the altar and gestured imperiously, both hands in the air.

Overseers prodded a coffle of slaves forward toward him, ones brought from the half-cave kennels where they were kept. Conan blinked slightly at the sight of them, simply because he wouldn’t have thought wretches that thin could walk. They were caked in filth, with weeping sores around their shackles and elsewhere, some with fever-bright eyes and others with consumptive coughs. This was the reason they’d come south with hundreds of replacements.

These wretches were about to serve one last purpose.

Sounds came from behind, and Conan looked over his left shoulder. The incoming coffles had been herded up to the northwestern part of the open space, close to the mouth of the mine. They were squatting there.

Under minimal guard.

That’s asking for trouble, Conan thought. I wouldn’t have them here at all, especially if the priest is going to do what I think he’s going to do.

The chain that linked the sacrifices by the collar was unlocked and withdrawn. The slave drivers’ whips cracked on backs thick with off-white scars. As they saw their destination, the doomed men and women flinched back, some staggering and gripping each other, but the high priest stepped forward himself and locked eyes with the foremost.

He began chanting.

Murmurs rose from the Free Companions and some of the newly arrived slaves. Conan was too far distant to entirely make out the priest’s words, but somehow it didn’t sound like ordinary Stygian, or like any language he’d ever heard—and he’d run into scores of them. He strained his wilderness-bred ears to catch something.

“… y’mg shggath, ur-coei, teliki…”

The lead slave’s face went blank and he stood erect, stepping forward almost briskly. The priest of Set smiled. Conan snarled at the sight, and several of his men began murmuring prayers as they looked aside. Valeria watched gravely and her face was white, especially around the lips. Some of this magic had been directed at her, through the little image crowned with a hair from her head.

Four muscular acolytes in black kilts seized the slave by wrists and ankles and spread-eagled him across the altar. Lesser priests shook the frames of their sistrums, and metal clattered on metal with a discordant hint of harmonies that normal men didn’t want to hear.

“Io, Setesh! Setesh! Setesh!” the high priest shouted.

“Io, Setesh!” the Stygian crowd shouted back, wiggling their heads back and forth.

Like snakes, Conan thought. For a moment he could have sworn that he saw something behind the altar—a burning plain, a moon set in a lake of liquid obsidian before the cyclopean towers of a city…

He shook his head violently and the image vanished like the shadow of a dream-memory. He focused again as the high priest drew a curved dagger and struck, swiftly and with skill. The slave shrieked, returned to himself for an instant, then the sound ended in a gurgle. Two more strokes, then the priest’s free hand shot into the gaping hole the knife had opened. When he withdrew it, he was holding up a heart, hand stretched up toward the statue.

Still it beat, once, twice, three times.

The priest flung his arms wide and screamed another clotted set of syllables. Conan’s vision blurred again, and for an instant he could have sworn that the squid-faced stone monstrosities at the corners of the altar turned their heads.

“Lir and Manannán mac Lir!” Conan swore.

Two deities of rivers and streams, more given to helping humans directly than mighty, distant Crom. The Cimmerian shivered. He didn’t consider himself a reckless man, and there were few men or beasts he feared. Things of the otherworld were a different matter.

The body was tumbled off the altar and down the steps. Conan had heard that in parts of Stygia the hierophants feasted on the bodies of the sacrifices. He didn’t know if that was true, or the sort of lurid story people loved to whisper in corners. What he did know was that even if he had favored cannibalism, he wouldn’t have wanted to eat that particular body.

The acolytes seized another slave and the ritual began again. As the sacrifice screeched, Conan thought he heard other screams, coming from behind. He tore his eyes from the grisly spectacle.