Alone,” Conan said aloud. “Finally free!”
The Cimmerian roared gusty mirth, alone under blue sky piled with white clouds. Then he turned his horse’s head southward, bow in his left fist, eyes and ears drinking in the manless silence, broken only by the clop of hooves, the creak of leather, and the wind soughing through tall grass and brush and trees.
As he rode cries emerged of long-tailed weaver birds building their fantastic tenements, and a crunching sound as a giraffe bent its head to the top of a tree and wound its long prehensile tongue to draw leaves and twigs into its mouth before rising to give him a glance from the height of a siege tower. The thunder of a herd of gnu as they fled, the pig-grunts of a sounder of wart-hogs in the thickets by a little seasonal stream, the darting heads and maniacal laughter of a pack of hyenas loping along at twice bowshot before they turned away.
The hot air was clear, too, of the stink of civilization. It wasn’t Cimmeria, though, and being alone in any wilderness was risky—the slightest injury might kill him, and he had to sleep sometime.
And that damned curse.
“I never want to see or smell a city again,” he declared to no one. “This is how to live. Plenty of land, no politicians, lots of animals, clean air.” His exultation lasted far longer than he would have expected.
Then it was back to the business at hand.
* * *
The game trail turned toward a creek, more than the usual trickle now that the season had started. Conan dismounted, looped the reins around a branch, and let the horses drink. Holding his sword and going down on one knee he examined the tracks in the bare moist soil leading down to the water.
“That’s it,” he muttered.
His finger traced a hoofmark. It had a nick in the shoe—an imperfection he’d seen before along the search. It was one of Valeria’s. From the state of it, she was still about three days ahead, heading straight and fast while he had deliberately dawdled.
What brought a frown to his brow was the overlay of other shod hooves. He was reasonably sure those were Nebset’s, hot on the trail of his brother’s killer. They weren’t all that much older than Valeria’s, which dismayed him. Nebset was much closer to her than he was, and Conan would have to work hard to make up the difference.
It surprised him, too. He hadn’t expected the man to follow a trail this well.
Stygian nobles hunt, but they usually have trackers to do the hard work, he thought. He’s doing a better job of chasing her than I like, curse it… and curse him.
Valeria wouldn’t expect pursuit, not out into the wilderness like this. Certainly not pursuit by a lone man, who could make better speed than a unit of scouts. Then again, she wouldn’t be as helpless in the wilderness as most sailors would, since she’d been a countrywoman and one who as a girl hunted the forests of the Tauran. She’d learned a bit more since, as well, on the long trek to Sukhmet and the return.
Yet that was like being able kill a cow in a stall as opposed to hunting lions, when it came to being wilds-wise.
Conan grunted. Nebset is a civilized man, too, from the most ancient of lands. How’s he pushing this fast?
It was time to cross the ford and take up the trail on the other side. He started to rise to his feet… and then turned that into a frantic leap backward, unleashing all the power of his long legs.
The Cimmerian’s bare back skidded across the grass when he landed, but there was no time to pause and catch his breath as the crocodile lunged out of the water in a burst of spray, a breath of carrion stink puffing over him as the great jaws slammed shut a scant few inches from his face.
Conan rolled frantically to the side as the half-ton weight of carnivorous reptile punched down where he’d been lying an instant before. In the same motion he shoulder-rolled to his feet, then turned that into a jump half his height straight up as the armored, saw-edged tail smashed sideways in a strike that would have shattered his legbones if it had connected.
Then it was hack and wiggle and dodge. The crocodile looked ungainly, but it was snake-swift, could charge faster than he could run, and it weighed about the same as a fair-sized bull. The lunge out of the water was just what he’d heard they liked to do, grab their prey and drag it in, but the dogged pursuit wasn’t.
He felt an eerie chill at its persistence.
Not natural.
The action pushed him away from the water, back toward a low rocky hill. In a flash he knew what he must do if he wanted to live. He turned and went up the slope at a bounding run. The reptilian killer was faster than he on the flat, but its splayed stumpy legs weren’t built for climbing. Conan turned, and dropped his sword. It clanged on the rocks, and he bent and snatched up a boulder the size of his own torso, wrenching it free of the soil with an effort that made his sinews crackle. It was heavier than he was, too.
The reptile came up the slope after him, nearly close enough to lunge by the time he had the rock poised overhead. The predator was pushed along by the muscular tail that made up a third of its fourteen-foot length. The four-foot jaws gaped once more, like a gateway into a world of rotting flesh, red and pustulant white. It bellowed as it lunged toward him, and he shouted back, a wordless grunting sound that seemed to push power into his back and thick-muscled arms.
Thud!
The boulder struck right at the rear of the crocodile’s mouth, where its jaws merged, and they tried to snap home by reflex. Then it was thrashing its head back and forth, its bellows turning to a strangling gargle as rock filled its throat.
Conan snatched up his sword two-handed and struck at the shoulder-joint of the monster’s left forelimb with a twisting slash that combined the power of shoulders and back and gut and legs into a cleaving blow. The impact cut through the scales and then made the familiar crack of steel hammering home in parting bone.
An instant later the beast’s tail swept his feet out from under him and he landed on his shoulders, rolling down the slope in painful contact with rocks that tore at his mostly bare flesh. At that, he knew he was lucky it had hit across his calves, and from the rear. If it had been from the front it would have snapped bone because legs didn’t naturally bend that way.
He landed at the base of the hill, winded and battered and bleeding, but hale enough to stand quickly. A glance showed that the killer beast was dying, and that its thrashing death-throes were dangerous in themselves.
The diamond concentration of a life-or-death struggle hadn’t allowed attention for everything else. Abruptly he became conscious the fact that one of his pack horses had torn itself free from the leading-rein, and was bucking in circles as it kicked itself free of the pack-saddle across its back. It spewed sacks of trail-biscuit and jerky in showers of edibles, and when he approached it ran off, rending the air with the horse version of panicked screams.
The other three horses were rearing and snorting and shaking their heads, shifting their hindquarters with the reflex of animals whose main weapon was a backward kick. He swore, then advanced with his hands spread.
Calming them took a quarter-hour of soothing with his voice, then stroking their sweat-wet necks and feeding them handfuls of the biscuit, which they found reassuring. Their eyes were still rolling when he’d finished, but they weren’t as likely to try to follow their brother-gelding in his headlong dash across the countryside.
“Which will end in a lion’s belly,” he snarled, “and serves the cowardly beast right.” He kept his tone low, however, so as not to spook the other mounts. Then he looked at the ford, and up and down the tree-lined river, and sighed.
“A man lives as long as he lives,” he said to himself. “Not a day more, not a day less.”
* * *
The horses weren’t enthusiastic about getting their hooves wet, not after seeing and smelling what had come out of this stretch of water.
“Sooo, boys, sooo,” he crooned, as he led them forward. “The vicious beast is dead.”
A glance over at the hillside showed that was true, save for a few slight jerks of its tail as it lay on its back with its pale belly to the sky. Its jaws were still agape, with flowing blood slowing to a trickle that matched the spot where its foreleg had been cut off near what would have been a shoulder on something less primeval. That hung by a scrap of tough hide.
“I cut off its leg and jammed a two-hundred-pound boulder down its throat, and it’s still twitching,” Conan said, with a grin that belied his bloody, mud-covered, battered self. “This country is interesting, but when I settle down, it won’t be in a place that has crocodiles in the rivers.”
The cool water felt good on the raw parts of his body as he walked into the purling flow with his hand firmly on the lead horse’s bridle. Halfway across he ducked under and came up blowing, though he was uneasily conscious that he was sending the scent and taste of blood downstream. From what he’d heard, crocodiles were solitary hunters, with the bigger bulls staking out the best hunting ground, digging nests into the banks of rivers and patrolling up and down. Not least against rivals of their own kind encroaching, except during their mating season.
Given the dead wizard’s curse, though, the animals might not be following their natural behaviors. That monumental pile of catastrophes back when they were shepherding the Stygian refugees certainly argued for it.
Cutting the wizard’s head off solved the immediate problem, he observed, but it doesn’t seem to have stopped him in the long run.
On the other side of the swollen creek he checked the tracks again. As before, Valeria heading straight south, and Nebset following swiftly behind.
When they were back in the savannah and safely away from the water, he rummaged for a moment in one of the saddlepacks and came up with a stone jar of ointment that he then slathered over his wounds. That stung badly, but the men who’d been with Zarallo longest swore by it. Unfortunately for the Argossean healer who mixed it up, it hadn’t helped him when he was close-coupled with a harlot in a Sukhmet alley, then knifed by the woman’s pimp.
Ironically, they said it was also good against the pox you caught from women of the night.
He transferred his saddle to one of the spare horses. Conan was a bigger load than the pack saddles, and the animals would last longer with the weight shared between them. Cimmerians kept horses, but not many—their land was too bleak, too densely forested, and too hilly for them to be of much use. Oxen pulled plows and carts and sledges and timber, and the shaggy local ponies were mostly for chiefs or messengers in a hurry.
Men could run down horses anyway, over a course longer than a few days.
Since leaving his clan, Conan had acquired considerable horse-craft, and he knew how fragile the big beasts could be. He had sixty pounds on Valeria, who was a big woman, say fifty on Nebset, who was three inches taller than her but slender in the way Stygian nobles usually were. That extra weight on the horse’s back was going to slow him, and losing that third horse would make it worse because he couldn’t switch off as often.
Pacing himself and his beasts was going to be tricky.
“A stern chase is a long chase,” he said. That was a maxim he’d picked up while pirating on the Western Sea.
* * *
After an hour Conan stopped under a wide-spreading acacia to let noon and its greater heat pass. Hobbling the horses to graze and feeding them more biscuits, he gnawed on hardtack, jerky and dried fruits that tasted like mildly sweet leather, washing them down with lukewarm draughts from a waterskin. Then he took a nap.
When he woke the sun was further to the west. He looked at it longingly; the sea was that way, and the sea-road led wherever you wanted.
Valeria had better be more friendly when I catch up to her.
After I’ve killed Nebset.
Conan led the horses out, but this time he didn’t swing into the saddle. Instead he hung his sword from the saddlebow and traveled beside the horse on his own two feet, first walking quickly, then trotting, then a slow run, then the same thing in reverse. Over and over again, the long coarse grass brushing against his thighs. This was the hunter’s pace, the pace that could run any animal to death if kept up long enough. It would spare the horses, making up for the loss of the remount to crocodile-inspired panic.
It was a relief to really stretch his legs this way, and his deep chest swelled and sank in rhythm with the pumping of his right fist. His left hand rested on the saddle, helping to steady his run. His eyes were on the ground up ahead, reading the signs—a campfire under a tree that left a burn-scar, horse-droppings, hoofmarks, brush cut for firewood.
He grunted laughter in time with the panther-light fall of his feet and springy stride. There was one good thing about being last in the line of pursuit. Valeria probably didn’t realize she was being chased, and neither did Nebset.
Nebset wants to kill Valeria; I want to kill Nebset—each person in this chain wants to kill the one in front of him.
It’s a race of killers
His grin grew sharklike. He’d seen a mosaic once in—it was that city-state between Zamora and Corinthia, where he’d been hired to break into the mansion of Nabondius, the Red Priest. So long ago that he’d forgotten the city’s name, though some memories were vivid still. There had been rogues enough, but it was some of the art that had struck him, young and heedless though he’d been.
One painting had shown an undersea scene—though he’d never yet seen the ocean. It showed a line of fish, each bigger than the last, and each chasing the one ahead of it with gaping mouth and curved rows of teeth.
That was Nabondius, Conan thought. For all he claimed to be but a student of the natural arts, he was a treacherous snake—but he had an eye for a joke.
* * *
He made camp hours after sunset. It was two days later, when the three-quarter moon set and it was too dark even for his night-keen eyes to be sure he hadn’t wandered from the trail.
“I’m catching up,” he said to himself. “Two miles to Nebset’s one, and he’s still three days behind Valeria, I’d bet on it. I’ll get to him first, and then the reunion.”
The country had altered over the course of his travel. Things had grown steadily greener as he went south; the grass was taller than his belly button now, and a brighter color, starred here and there with flowering bushes that had huge crimson blossoms the size of his hand. They swarmed with the vicious southern bees but gave off a soft, languorous scent that made him recoil despite its sweetness.
The game was thicker and included more elephants—there were herds with scores or hundreds of the hulking gray-brown beasts, like hills that walked, and he gave those a wide berth. He hoped those hadn’t been caught up in the sorcery, and might have prayed to Crom, but as usual that would have done him no good.
The patches of forest were bigger and taller, fewer of the flat-topped thorny acacias and bulbous baobabs and more towering giants. Their edges were thick with brush and vines starred with flowers, their interiors gloomy but open where the high canopy shadowed out lesser plants.
Rain became more frequent but no great hardship; he was used to traveling in the wet, and the coolness was pleasant when the thick drops fell.
The campsite he chose was an obvious one, in the side of a hill and under a clifflike overhang that would provide a little shelter if needful, which the towering clouds in the west said it might be. More hills stretched to the east. A small spring leaked from a crack just above head-height, and the red-black rock was mostly hidden by a thick wall of vines.
It was so obvious a campsite that it had been used, repeatedly… from the tracks and the fresh ash, and from the bush that had been their improvised latrine, it had been used by both of the people he was following.
Good enough for them, good enough for me.
He watered the bush himself, grinning at the thought of how some peoples he’d met considered the number three sacred. Retying his loincloth, he went back to squat by his campfire—there was a semicircular pile of rocks to keep the light from showing to anyone further out, needful in the extreme since this was a little above the level of the rolling countryside.
Around noon, near as he could estimate, he pulled out a small cooking pot and shaved handfuls of jerked game-meat into it, and then filled it with water and added some salt. The board-hard sun-dried meat turned to mush by now, and he added hardtack biscuit that he broke up with the hilt of his dagger.
It was fuel rather than food, but it stopped his belly clamoring after a hard day of running and riding. He scrubbed out the pot, drank deeply from the spring, and lay down on his blanket roll. There was no need to cover himself in this climate, only to close his eyes…