An hour later, Conan halted.

For once it wasn’t because some unseen thorn-thick branch had nearly taken out his eye. As far as he could tell, he had reached where the shriek had come from—from his best estimate, he was within a hundred paces of it, more or less, and had no way whatsoever of telling which way the source had gone.

He snarled silently at the thought, but crouched a little lower and made his breathing slow, deep… and quiet. He was down in the thick forest at the bottom of the steep valley, and there were rustles and clicks and hoots aplenty. Down here, past the edge of the canopy the undergrowth wasn’t as dense.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud-thud-thud…

Drum? It was faint, but not faint enough to be the echo of the blood in his ears.

No, not quite, he thought. Something like a drum, though.

Curse these cliffs! The echoes make it harder…

This way, yes.

He moved as quickly as he dared, then halted again as a sharp scent revealed a vine bleeding pitch-like sap. A few cuts, and he fashioned a trio of torches with heads made of vine wrapped around long branches. They went over his back in an improvised sling.

The Abomean warriors.

As he made his way through the nighted forest there was a little more light filtering down. The clouds had parted, showing a nearly full moon still climbing in the sky. It was about an hour to its peak. Even with the canopy, it made easier his progress.

The throb of the not-quite-drum grew louder, though echoes still blurred it—louder, and more insistent. The beat was quickening, gradually but certainly. He bared his teeth again, this time in frustration at how little he knew. Did it have something to do with the moon? Picts killed their enemies at set phases of the moon, sometimes. Or was it happenstance?

Louder still, and the time between beat and echo he could tell he was close. Dropping flat and continuing on his belly he crept forward, bush to bush, along behind a fallen, rotting log—which turned out to house a lot of stinging insects with bites like little lances of fire. It didn’t alter his steady careful approach, and the moonlight in the circular clearing ahead was brighter and brighter.

Thump.

Thump-thump-thump-thump…

Carefully he used one finger to part the tall grass—or possibly some sort of forest reed—in front of him.

Apes, he thought. Kerchaki, she’d called them.

Killer apes.

They didn’t look precisely like the Vilayet monsters he’d seen before. About the same size, which meant big, taller than him even when upright on short, thick bowed legs. And like them with arms that hung down to their knees, densely furred, though with black hair rather than silver-gray. Shelf-like ridges of bone over pronounced jaws with nostril-slits above, thin lips drawn back to show that those jaws were full of fangs that would do a panther credit.

From what he could see, a dozen females and their cubs were located in a clump, huddled in what looked like a big nest made of piled-up grass and boughs.

Ah, he thought. Like a giant heap of kindling.

A plan began to form in his mind.

The five adult males were dancing in a circle, whirling, leaping, screeching, waving crude clubs or banging together big rocks held in their fists resulting in showers of sparks. Slaver ran down their jaws, and their faces were framed in hair—great clumps on their cheeks that hung down to their collarbones, and stiff roaches on top of their long, loaf-shaped heads almost like a lion’s mane.

Their scent carried over the warm humid air, rank with musk and dirt.

The dance wasn’t quite the animal riot it seemed. It moved around a center, and Irawagbon was there, bound with a clumsy welter of vines to a fallen tree-trunk. He could see her eyes glitter in the moonlight, and her face was stark but the fear carefully controlled. The long lean muscles in her arm tensed and relaxed as she worked to try to move the coil up over her shoulders.

It couldn’t succeed, but it did his heart good to see it, proof that she was a real warrior and never gave up. The scatter of bones nearby, chewed and often broken open, showed the fate that faced her. Some of them were human, others animals, with big cats in the majority. The skulls were lined up in rows, long-since picked to gleaming cleanness by insects, and some starting to crumble into the dirt.

This had been a place of ritual for a long, long time.

There was one male who wasn’t dancing. He was the largest, and from the silver shot through his black hair and fur, the oldest. The twin plumes that fell from his cheeks were solid white. He crouched near Irawagbon and beat at the earth with two heavy sticks.

Not just earth, Conan thought as he carefully set aside the cup of stiff leather lined with dirt and holding the still-hot embers. That must be hollow… maybe buried hollow logs?

The sound boomed and thuttered through the hot, insect-shrilling night. A bat went overhead, intent on its own concerns, like any such creature back home… except that this one had a wingspan as long as his outstretched arm. It struck something, and parts rained down around Conan as it flapped on.

The dance altered. Instead of circling, the males started to run inward and prance back, their screams interspersed with growls and their fur bristling, arms reaching high overhead. Conan glanced up. Yes, the moon was nearly at its zenith, which the apemen could probably tell by the way shadows fell in this place they visited each month by night. They’d keep their dance going, then a final rush, tearing the sacrificial victim into gobbets and devouring them raw.

Not now…

Not now…

Now! he thought.

He gripped one of the torches from the sling over his back and thrust it into the cup of embers.

Whoosh!

It caught instantly, flaring up. He carefully didn’t look, to keep as much of his night-vision as he could. In the same instant he cleared the bush ahead of him in a single raking stride, charging for the other side of the clearing.

Lost in their dance of blood-frenzy, the kerchaki took crucial seconds to react. By then he’d lit another torch, thrown them into the piled brush of the females’ nest, and lit another to keep in his hand as he wheeled frantically around to face them.

The dry grass and wood caught with a roar. The females snatched up their young and fled in every direction, shrieking. One of them was burning, too, and she went into the darkness under the trees like a screaming comet with a tail of flames.

The dancing males turned and saw him.

They reacted in near unison with a charge, aborted by the fire with heat he felt more and more on his back. Conan snarled satisfaction. He’d wagered that the kerchaki had an animal’s reflexive fear of fire, and it looked as if he was right. They circled at the edge of the firelight, snarling and mouthing and making little four-step advances and then recoiling again. He turned smoothly to face each, flourishing the torch, firelight ruddy on the steel of the sword in his right fist.

The thud-thud beat stopped. That brought a slight mental stutter, for it had woven itself into his very heartbeat during the brief spell of frenzied action. Conan gave what had been the center of the sacrifice-dance a flicker of a look.

The senior male there—probably the chief of this band—had roused from his trance-like focus. Now every hair on his body and head stood erect as he drummed again—but this time with his fists on his own chest. The bristling made him tower even more massive against the backdrop of the night. The firelight turned his eyes and fangs and the silver tips of his fur blood-red as he charged, slapping a palm down every third step or so.

The others scattered out of his way.

This one is not going to stop because he’s afraid of flames, Conan thought as he set himself. The charge ended with a leap, arms spread wide with head-sized hands ready to grip and tear, great jaws gaping.

Conan dove into it, flickering forward when some corner of his mind knew the big bowed legs were tensing as they landed. His warrior’s mind drew the curve of the leap so that he knew where the beast-man would be. His left hand rammed forward like Valeria’s as she used her slim blade, but his didn’t bear steel. It had a yard of hardwood with a ball of burning sap on the end, and it went home in the gaping fanged mouth.

The kerchaki patriarch’s scream was loud, even with that gag, and he wasted a crucial second snatching the tormenting thing out of his mouth, clawing with both those enormous hands.

Conan used that moment to attack with whirling speed, his right hand matching the strike he’d made with his left. The broadsword flashed forward—there was no time to be precise about the target—just through the torso below the massive ribcage. A soft heavy resistance he knew of old slowed his wrist for a moment, and then a grip with the strength of a god clamped on him with bruising, wrenching force.

He released the hilt and had just time enough to brace knees and arms against the beast-man’s massive body as the arms closed around him. For a moment he felt like a child, or a rat in the jaws of a dog. A grunting strain, and muscle crackling along his arms and shoulders and arched back, a sensation like the strain just before he would break.

Then the kerchaki threw him aside.

Conan flew through the air like a tossed doll, but managed to gather himself and hit rolling, and not to have all the wind knocked out of him. The man-ape grabbed at the broadsword and wrenched it out. It looked like a mere dagger in the giant paw, though it was heavy enough that most men could only have used it two-handed, and long enough that the top of the hilt was above his navel when the point was on the ground. The creature started to roar out another challenge, but this one was accompanied by a fan-shape of blood droplets stretching out half the distance to Conan.

Then the little red-shot eyes under the shelf of bone rolled up, and it collapsed forward like a falling tree. He could feel the massive thudding impact through the ground beneath his body, and the outstretched arm came nearly to his feet.

Levering himself erect, he fought breath back into his chest and snatched up his sword once again, ignoring the kerchaki chieftain’s dying twitches and the cloud of the death-stench. He nodded once, respectfully. This had been a worthy foe, and he noted the details—one day his women would sing of this fight, and of the foeman he’d slain as an enemy chief, not just a beast.

Broad strides took him to where Irawagbon was struggling more vehemently against the vines wrapped around her, her teeth and eyes showing white in the fire-shot dark. She nearly had her left arm free by the time he came within reach.

“Hold still!” he barked, and he swung the heavy sword with a surgeon’s precise movement. Long strands of the vines fell back, lopped free with the tip of the blade. She shook the rest free and he tossed her the bundled sword-belt. She caught it.

“I’m always giving you weapons,” he said.

“I need much-much,” she replied, flashing him a smile, and then taking a long breath and letting it out slowly as she buckled it back on. “Old saying,” she went on in her basic Stygian. “Brave die once, coward many time.”

He nodded, familiar with it. Versions of that were present in every language and land he’d ever encountered.

“Is stinky lie,” she said. “I brave as dung, and I die big-big many time tonight!”

He answered her grin, and she looked up at the stars.

“Shrine that way,” she went on, pointing south and a little west. “Go!” With that she sprinted easily in the moonlit night, and Conan followed. Pulling alongside her, he held out his water bag.

She sucked at it greedily, without slowing her pace.