The trail led to a single winding pass. Once he was a few thousand feet up, Conan appreciated the relative coolness, but when it came time to camp for the night he found himself strangely reluctant to halt.

“That damned snake,” he muttered to himself, scanning for a good spot. Even the landscape around him was strange. Parts of it reminded him of the rugged part of Cimmeria in which he’d grown up, and others were utterly unknown. The general steepness and rockiness were familiar, as was the deep cleft to his left with a river bawling over boulders, casting spray up a hundred feet toward him. The smells of wet rock were familiar, but there was no snow, no glaciers on the heights.

The vegetation had changed, some overtly, other times more subtly so. The overall scent was new to his senses, spicier somehow, and lacking the cool tang of pines.

Snakes, he thought. This place has more poisonous snakes in the space of one crofter’s farm than would cover all of Cimmeria. Otherwise the animal life was relatively sparse, and what he saw was… different—like the large eagle that flew past, giving him the eye and then moving off with a tilt of its spread pinfeathers.

As he drew closer to his prey, urgency lent speed to his passage.

I’m not just out to save Valeria’s life, he knew. If I don’t find Nebset and find a way to end the curse, what are my odds of making it out of this land alive? Not everything was his enemy, and he wasn’t under constant assault. If that happened, he’d be dead long since. So the curse couldn’t be that powerful. But if every creature might seek his blood, day or night, it was only a matter of time…

“Death is always only a matter of time,” he muttered to himself with a shrug. “Still, best to take precautions.”

The light faded faster in a narrow canyon like this—that was the same everywhere—and as it did, he cast about for a suitable place to stop. He spotted a deep cleft in the rock, almost a cave though not quite. A dead tree grew from the rock not far away. From that he kindled a torch and investigated; solid stone on three sides, some sort of dense reddish granite, smoothed by water in the long-distant past.

In the cleft lay the detritus of years, including the skull of a large monkey of some sort. He kicked it out of the space, collected fodder for his horse, and combined it with a handful of hoarded grain. Then he used his hatchet to cut more wood, roasted the last of the rhino—it wasn’t gone off, not quite—and ate, ignoring the slight rankness. He also munched down some of the roots and nuts the Sākhoen women had gathered for him.

They had provided generously. He spread his blanket of woven, soft-tanned leather strips with the fur still on, what they called a kaross. It was surprisingly comfortable even when laid on bare rock like this.

He built the fire up higher, too, right at the mouth of the cleft. It nearly filled it and would only be visible directly from across the valley. There was nothing there but sheer rock, so he was reasonably safe.

That left both the blaze and the horse between him and the night, so he laid himself down with his sword and a stout stick, and a pile of splinters and twigs next to the fire. There was no sign of rain, just high cloud now and then. Red light shone through his eyelids as he stolidly set himself to sleep.

A dream took him. He knew he was dreaming, but it was distant, abstract, like the waking world itself. Yet the dream felt intensely real. the Stygian priest he’d killed was there, dancing. Above his head he held… his head. Gripped it in his dead hands, and behind him was a man who danced as if he were the priest’s shadow.

The head on the shadow’s slim, graceful body was that of a cobra, and its yellow slit eyes were fixed on Conan. The steps of that dance were slow, sinuous, graceful… and utterly malevolent, soaked in a hatred of all that lived and possessed warm blood. Somehow those eyes looked through the glazed, dead glare of the slain priest to see the Cimmerian.

Music played through the dance, drums and something like a flute… but a flute that hissed. Then the cobra-headed man passed through the dead priest, their forms merging, or the priest was sucked into and subsumed by the snake-man. The cobra mouth gaped, fangs folding down to strike, a drop of venom glistening on each. Something else stirred in the dancing figure’s loins, a phallus that was also a serpent—

*   *   *

Conan awoke with a start and a shout. His horse was neighing and bugling, rearing against the strong line and hobbles that held it. His own convulsive motion kicked the dry pile into the fire, and it flared up with a crackle and a wash of light, bright and red in the intense darkness of pre-dawn.

A snake had wiggled through the narrow gap between the hot embers of the campfire and the rock wall. It was coiling to strike as the Cimmerian came to his feet in a flexing jump that left him crouching before it. The serpent was big, more than six feet long, and had a flared hood like the figure in his dream. Yellow eyes with slits that were windows into an infinite darkness, rustling with movement like scales on dry bones.

He leapt as it struck, and the flat head went beneath the soles of his feet by a fraction of an inch. It coiled again as he landed, and it struck—

Quick as a snake, a remote part of his mind thought.

Conan leapt again, but his time backward, into the full depth of the cleft in the rock, his skin against the stone. The snake came at him in a blur, and he could never dodge it again, not pinned in like this.

But his arms could brace, and he could swing his legs up. That made it miss, and even as it flashed beneath him he was pounding a heel downward. His foot struck, hard enough to send a jarring flash of pain up from his heel through his groin and into the small of his back.

Even as his foot smashed down he threw himself forward, doing a roll across his kaross and pivoting erect with his back to the fire, close enough for the glow to singe the little hairs on the backs of his muscled legs. Its back broken, the snake writhed. He checked to make sure it hadn’t managed to fang him in that brief instant of contact.

Then he picked up the stick beside the kaross, the one he hadn’t had time to snatch up when something—probably the horse, or perhaps his dreadful dream, or both—woke him. With considerable satisfaction, he slammed the bludgeon down on the snake’s head, over and over. That left a wet spot on the rock, a combination of blood and brain-matter and venom.

Carefully avoiding that, he took his knife and cut the body just behind what was notionally its neck. Then he squatted by the fire and set to skinning and gutting it. The meat would make breakfast. Somehow, consuming the flesh of his opponent lent additional satisfaction.

An inner sense, and the feel of his surroundings, told him that it was about an hour before dawn. The time of sunrise and sunset changed much less here than in the land of his birth. The air had that particularly still, dead quality that this time of night usually evoked. That let the roar of a lion carry clearly across miles, a lonely sound. The sobbing laughter of a pack of hyenas followed it.

He continued with his task until he had a pound or two of meat, ready to grill on skewers taken from the little pile of firewood. Then he threw the rest of the body into the night, over the edge of the trail and down the near-vertical slope. That provoked another snort and roll of the eyes from his long-suffering horse.

The smashed remains of the snake’s head followed after that. He used two sticks to pick it up, and threw the sticks after it.

As he made his simple preparations for the beginnings of the day, smelling the good scent of grilling meat sizzling, he considered what lay ahead.

“Valeria cannot be under the same curse, else how is she still alive?” he murmured to the horse, who paid him little mind. “She must be alive, or that Stygian dog wouldn’t have kept going southward.”

Then he chuckled. “No, Nebset wants to kill her himself—not have a snake or a lion do it for him,” he said to the first gray sign of dawn. “Stygians put great stock in blood vengeance. He will accept no less.” Unless Conan could stop him.

He began to eat the grilled snake, then cracked a nut like an elongated triangle between thumb and forefinger before he popped the white nutmeat into his mouth.

“Probably wants to rape her before he kills her, too,” he said, and laughed aloud. “Since his dung-munching brother never managed to get on top of her before she killed him.”

If he tried that, even with an ambusher’s surprise on his side, the Stygian would probably be dead before Conan got within sword’s length of him. Though he might not be quite that stupid.

In any case Conan had his own score to settle, and killing Nebset would be likely to make Valeria look more kindly on his suit.

“I want to kill him for my own sake,” he added, and the horse nodded. “I could probably have persuaded Valeria to try for the coast some other way, if the progeny of a dog and a goat hadn’t led me on this chase.”

Conan laughed again—were ifs and buts all candied nuts, everyone would be fat, as the Argossean saying went. He walked out to the edge of the trail, looking down at the river far below. There were probably a lot of snakes down there in the rocky slope, too. The thought prompted him to make water over it, after checking that the wind wouldn’t blow it back at him.

Then he went back to tie on his loincloth, don his breeks and sword-belt and boots, and saddle the horse. He led it for the first few miles—he could have ridden, but there was no need to take chances on this narrow way, and the horse was worn. He passed the crest of this line of hills, and then the land in front of him flattened a little and the trail widened, kinking around the side of it.

Conan gave a long whistle.

The view southward unfolded. The hill stretched to his right and left and ended a short distance in front of him. Beyond that it was a sea of green as the jungle stretched as far as the eyes could see. The tops tossed in the morning breeze, which for a wonder wasn’t uncomfortably warm. Huge flights of birds took wing, twisting skyward in skeins like twisting smoke, and troops of long-tailed monkeys went past like schools of fish in a true ocean, rising now and then into sight.

The odd taller tree pushed through the canopy, and their huge girths even at the top showed him just how big even the ordinary ones were. Down there with timber towering densely a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet, the air would be still and wet, but out of the baking sun at least.

“Today or tomorrow, Nebset,” he shouted. “Today or tomorrow you die, and your dead cousin the priest with you!”