Conan blinked.
He’d been heading south on this track… only now, he was heading north, back toward the hills. He pulled the horse to a halt and ignored its resentful snort, shaking his head. Then he caught himself just before he heeled it into motion again.
“Sorcery,” he whispered.
Even the word sounded too much like a snake.
It was one of the very few things he genuinely feared. The impulse was strong, to spur the horse and simply leave all this. Sweat dripped from his body and ran down his flanks, more than the wet heat of the jungle could cause. He cast himself out of the saddle, walked over to a smooth-barked forest giant with buttresses on the base of its trunk and slammed his fist into it, over and over until the pain brought himself back to himself.
He looked at the bloodied knuckles ruefully.
Well, I already had scars a-plenty there. Then he turned in the deep gloom and thought to himself, South. I march south.
Each step was like walking through water, then through amber honey. He paused to rest, exhausted. When he looked northward, Conan realized he’d only come two miles since the last pause. He rose, went a dozen paces—
—and saw that he was leading the horse northward.
His roar of frustration and rage sent fleeing in terror a chattering flock of black monkeys with white ruffs around their necks, up the big trees until they were dots that vanished into the sea of flower-starred green that was the lower edge of the canopy. Flights of white-and-gray parrots moved, too, through the almost solid dimness of the jungle.
Insects buzzed and whirred, including ones that bit.
Conan ignored them. He had to keep his mind on one thing, and one only. Keep moving south. Fortunately, there was only this trail—he thought it was cut by elephants. He no longer needed to do much tracking.
Occasionally he would stop and pay attention to the spoor. Nebset was down to one horse, like him… and Valeria. The contrast between the woman’s tracks and the Stygian noble’s had shrunk again. He thought she was about one day ahead, now.
As much as he found her alluring, wanted to take her to bed, Conan knew it was more than that. She was his comrade at arms, had stood at his back when it was needed. Infuriating at times, certainly, but there was a code they shared. It demanded that he continue.
South. South. South.
He stopped with a grunt. He was heading north. Fortunately, he’d only lost a hundred yards or so. The horse snorted resentfully when he turned it around yet again. Couldn’t he make up his mind?
Perhaps I could just let it pick its way, he thought. Then, No. If he let his mind drift away like that, he’d turn the horse without noticing until miles had been eaten. So he plodded forward.
The beast let out a terrified squeal.
It reared and the reins burned painfully through his hand. Conan ignored that; there was a racking snarl. He drew his sword and pivoted in a blur. That required no thought, no maddening overriding of a portion of his mind. This he needn’t think about. This was draw…
Draw and strike.
The heavy broadsword sang through the air, a song like a childhood lullaby to the Cimmerian as his left hand joined right on the long hilt. He’d been striking by instinct at the sound he’d heard behind him, but now he saw the target.
It was a leopard, black-spotted yellow grace, in a soaring leap that would have landed on his back. Forelegs spread and claws out to grip, and jaws gaping in the killing bite that would have struck at the back of his neck. The long hind legs were deadly, too, ready to scoop out a man’s guts like a gralloched deer if they locked into your stomach.
Blade met body with the sweet certainty of a stroke going exactly where it should, with all the power of Conan’s arms and shoulders behind it, and the weight of his blurring-fast turn. Even then the cat tried to dodge, twisting in mid-air, but it had no point of contact on the ground to use as leverage. Steel hammered into flesh and bone, an infinitely familiar sensation.
The leopard felt to be a hundred and twenty pounds, a middling-big male. Conan’s sword caught it at the junction of neck and shoulder, and with all his frustrated rage behind the blow. Its head and one leg fell separately from the rest of the carcass. A gout of blood caught him in the face and flew into his open shouting mouth, salty rankness that had him spitting and wiping.
It landed where his horse had been. The corpse was kicking and blood still flowing with the pulse that meant the heart hadn’t quite stopped yet, though it did as he watched, panting. The sound of hoofbeats faded away to the northward, the horse just disappearing around a long slow bend in the trail.
He took a couple of steps after it. The beast would probably stop to drink at that stream that crossed the trail about a mile back, and he could—
Conan turned his back to the sight of the vanishing beast and faced south again.
“I can take Nebset’s horse and Nebset’s gear,” he growled, and it was a sound almost as bestial as what the leopard had made. “I will take his life.”
* * *
That nearly killed me, Conan thought.
The attacks had come more frequently, and he felt as if sorcery surrounded him on every side, submerging him in its darkness. To calm his mind, he told himself that this meant he was getting close. That Nebset was feeling fear.
He managed to keep himself going south by main force of will.
Unfortunately, that nearly caused him to blunder into Nebset’s camp in the night, ready to be hacked down like a child. He stopped short of that and restrained an impulse to beat his head on the ground. Instead he turned aside from the trail, going right into the mostly open space where the jungle giants shaded out most undergrowth. His feet squelched slightly in the damp muck beneath, and dangling vines and lianas brushed at his face as he moved.
He stopped again, going to one knee and panting with his left hand pressed to the leaf-mold. Putting his other hand to his sword-hilt he slowly drew the blue Aquilonian steel. The weight and rough wire-and-leather grip and the sheer solid realness of it helped clear his mind. The night was dark, and the double canopy of leaves high above served as well as thick overcast. He was used to the dimness, however, and the red flicker of Nebset’s campfire was all the brighter in the middle distance. Judging from the height, the ground rose perhaps a hundred feet between here and there.
From the blurring, there was some thick brush between them, as well. As he came closer he went down on his belly and crawled, parting the growth ahead of him with slow gentle movements of the blade and eeling through. The Cimmerian had stalked dangerous beasts and still more dangerous men this way, many a time. He was still alive and for the most part they weren’t.
The thought of what might be crawling through the night with him, unseen until it sank deadly fangs into his flesh, made that flesh crawl a little until he banished the thought with a harder grip on the sword.
One of Set’s epithets was “he who is stealth in the night.”
Conan reflected grimly that two could play at that game.
Breathe, move, tense stillness. Another short crawl, pause, crawl. It wasn’t possible to move utterly silent in the darkness, especially in thick-grown country like this. It was possible to use the natural noises to disguise his, however, as long as he was patient enough. It was a pattern of human-style sounds that grabbed attention, and moving irregularly with frequent stops broke that pattern. His movement blended into the background.
Closer, closer, and a smell of roasting meat reminded Conan of how hungry he was. His stomach twisted. That was a familiar sensation, one he’d felt off and on from childhood, and he didn’t let it distract him. Instead, he used it for focus.
The ground changed under him. It was drier, and occasional rocks jabbed at him. A low hill, and the top was clear—the soil too thin to support the giant trees, or even much brush. A six-foot shelf of rock, lit from underneath by the flames, and then the jungle resumed on the other side. In fact it towered higher than the hill all around.
There was one figure visible.
The camp was as any single traveler might make it. The fire beneath the rise of rock, the bedroll laid not far from that, a bow and a spear nearby and the sheathed kopesh-sword laid across the woven-hide blanket. Meat-gobbets sizzled on skewers held between two rocks, and the man’s tethered horse nosed disconsolately at a pile of vegetation cut and heaped up before it.
The narrow hawk-face of the Stygian noble, so like his brother’s—
And not unlike that priest’s, Conan observed.
—was unmistakable. The linen headdress was thrown beside the sword on the kaross, and the stubble was plain on the man’s long head. He’d managed to shave, as well, save for the chin-beard bound with gold bands.
Nebset knelt now, holding up something that glittered, his eyes locked on it. A little closer, and Conan saw that it was an amulet—a serpent icon, coiled to fit an arm and startlingly lifelike, with yellow topaz eyes that caught the firelight with a numbing flicker. The Stygian laid it down before him, kneeling, chanting softly with his arms spread wide, though it took Conan a moment to penetrate the archaic dialect.
“Under a nighted pyramid
Great Set coils asleep;
And in the shadows of the tombs
His faithful people creep…
From the nighted gulfs
That never saw the sun
Send me a servant for my hate
Oh scaled and shining One!”
For a moment, listening, Conan could have sworn he saw Valeria, riding her horse down a jungle trail.
Aha, that’s how he’s been tracking her so closely!
Moving even closer, the Cimmerian noticed little stakes that were set out in a shape like a horseshoe backed against the upthrust jut of rock. Placed along the perimeter, they surrounded the campsite. Wooden, but each was carved and painted in the likeness of a man’s body, posed in the stiff Stygian style—hands clenched in fists beside the body and one foot advanced, with a stylized kilt and linen headdress. On each the head was not that of a man.
It was a cobra with its hood flared out.
Certain his prey could not see him, Conan reached toward one, and pain flared—not in the hand, but in his head, and then his entire body; a white agony that blanked out vision. When it died away he was half a dozen paces back from where he had been. He waited with bared teeth until he could move again.
I could run forward, he thought. Break through that barrier… but then Nebset could spear me like a fish before I recovered.
Perhaps…
He smiled grimly. There was a game he’d played in the forests of his homeland, with a rope made of twisted vines. The vines here were much bigger and stronger.
Conan backed another hundred paces and looked upward at the silhouettes of the trees surrounding the little clearing. It was too dark to see clearly, but he could determine outlines. When he went to the one he selected, lianas dangled temptingly from the branches high above. He tested one, and then the one beside it. Sheathed his sword, bent his knees, and leapt.
The vine stayed firm when his hands clamped home.
He froze to see if he had been heard.
Nothing.
Grunting, he climbed upward—take the vine between the soles of his feet with his knees drawn up, clamp and push upward with his legs, grab on with both hands, repeat, repeat, repeat. Hard effort that left his sweat streaming in the hot moist night.
Three-quarters of the way to the branch he was aiming for, the vine began to sag beneath his weight. He reached over quickly, grabbing the other vine just as the first gave way, and fell rustling downward into the darkness at the base of the huge tree.
Again he froze, but down below, the figure didn’t move.
The second vine held. Conan puffed out relief and began to climb again. The vine grew thicker. The branch he aimed for was wider than his own thighs. He hauled himself up to sit with a leg on either side. With difficulty he hugged the limb with both legs and locked one foot with the other ankle.
Taking a deep breath, he began hauling the vine up hand-over-hand, laying a loop over the branch every time he had another eight feet or so. As before he stopped and started, stopped and started, to avoid raising the alarm. The weight steadily decreased, which was fortunate, for the first few lengths required back-cracking effort, and his grip couldn’t span the entire thickness of the bigger upper end.
At last it all lay before him, the smaller bottom end in his fists. He climbed upright, balancing easily on the branch, took a firmer grip and ran outward for twenty paces, then leapt. A long sickening swoop, and he didn’t know if the vine would hold or leave him a broken bag of bones on the jungle floor.
Shock.
It hammered at his wrists, flexing his body like a whip and snapping his teeth together with a click. Then he was tracing an arc through the air, away from Nebset’s campsite, up and up until he was nearly as high as the branch again.
He aimed at the red dot of firelight.
The return arc would take him right over the campsite.
If it doesn’t, I’ll feel like I’m an idiot.
More likely, he would feel dead.
There was a moment of pain as he flashed past the perimeter, and then he let the vine go and fell. Fell twelve feet, the impact hammering up through his feet and into his back, leaving him in a deep crouch with his heels touching his backside. The sword flew into his hand as he spat blood from a cut on the inside of his mouth, opened by his own teeth.
Nebset’s back was to him, but suddenly it wasn’t the amulet that rested before him. It was the priest of Set, the one from the ford… standing with his head held over the ragged stump of his neck. Something loomed behind him, shining and dark at the same time, and the dead lips moved.
“My slayer comes.” The voice was in Conan’s head, more than his ears. “The one who would deny us vengeance for your kinsman!”
Nebset reacted with a swift sideways leap and roll that left him on his feet with the blade of the kopesh in his hand.
“You!” he hissed, eyes wide.
“Me,” Conan snarled in agreement, taking the long hilt of the broadsword in both hands and stalking forward. He struck—
—and it wasn’t Nebset before him. Instead a giant serpent lunged at him, and the amulet Gagooli had given him burned hot on his left wrist. The Cimmerian dodged with a yell, and it was the Stygian’s sword coming at him. He dodged again.
An upward strike brought a clang of steel and Nebset staggered backward. Conan placed himself for a lunge—and then had to leap aside as a six-foot serpent struck at him from the side. His backhand strike flashed through the snake, but the creature wasn’t there, and his sword buried itself in the dirt. He barely managed to get the blade up again in time to block a chop from the curved end of the kopesh. Another snake… and something prompted him to strike again, and this time it was a serpent of flesh, and its blood bathed him as he dodged the Stygian noble’s next slash.
He did dodge, but only just.
The keen edge kissed the skin of his ribs. A shallow slash appeared.
Clang and clatter, and he was backing away.
Around and behind and beside Nebset other figures loomed: a giant serpent swaying in a way that meant things, things no man should know, a squid-headed monster with bat wings that crouched and gibbered words that twisted at the mind, more and more and more, blinding his sight to the deadly steel reaching for his life.
He backed a little more, and then twisted aside. As he neared the perimeter of carven stakes, a paw slashed at him out of the night, taking a patch of skin with it. Blood ran down his back, distracting him nearly enough for the kopesh to chop into the side of his neck. The missed stroke left Nebset over-extended, but a sudden swirl of biting insects swarmed about Conan’s head and made him miss in his turn.
The amulet burned, and he was tempted to rip it off and throw it aside. He didn’t, because he realized with a chill that it was indeed blocking most of the dead magician’s power. Without it he’d already be dead.
The sweat seemed to turn cold on his torso.
Nebset struck and struck, clang and clatter and sparks in the darkness. Conan blocked, but that was a lifetime’s training. The active part of his warrior’s mind was elsewhere, feeling the impalpable menace of the slain magician’s regard, ready to throw a deadly challenge at any instant—or an illusion he dared not disregard, because it might be all too real.
That distraction would kill him, too—the Stygian wasn’t the warrior he was, but he was better than good. A moment’s inattention and it would be death by blade, even if the slain priest’s spell didn’t kill him directly. Minutes of leap and duck and strike went by, like a fight in a dream. In a nightmare, one that led to only one conclusion.
The Abomean amulet clamped tighter, as if it was trying to tug him aside from the fight. Then he realized where it was trying to tug him.
Around Nebset other figures loomed.
Recklessly he turned his back on Nebset and leapt to where the snake amulet had lain. Nebset shouted in horror as he realized what Conan sought to do, and his sword took a sliver from the Cimmerian’s heel as he cast himself forward recklessly.
Conan’s blade flashed through the image of the dead-alive priest, finding no more resistance than air might make.
It struck the amulet with the clang of metal cleaving metal.
There was a flash of something that wasn’t quite light. Behind him Nebset screamed in horror again—horror and an agony—and he felt a huge weight lifted from his shoulders. One he hadn’t realized was there.
No, from my soul, he thought as he wheeled and met Nebset’s slashing attack.
But it was no more than a sword, and the Stygian no more than a man—though still a skilled one. Blood ran from Nebset’s nose and ears and eyes, some backlash of the magical bond the Aquilonian broadsword had severed. Conan cut, backhand, forehand, then again.
It ended with a jarring thump, and the kopesh spun into the night—taking the right hand and wrist of the wielder with it as it arced through the air and vanished, to land with a clatter.
Nebset screeched, and fell to his knees, left hand clutching at his spouting right wrist in a futile attempt to staunch the flow. Conan stepped forward and cut sideways with every ounce of force in him. A thud and crunch, and the nobleman’s head followed his hand. The corpse fell at the Cimmerian’s feet.
“It took too long, but it’s done,” he panted.
A moment more, and he gripped the body by one ankle. slinging it after the head. The severed amulet followed, and the ring of little wooden statues, though he used a stick of firewood for that rather than touching them with his bare skin. The Stygian’s horse was snorting and backing, but its line held until it calmed, and Conan looked around.
“Well, I have a ride again,” he said to himself, “and a better one than that Darfari nag.” A sniff told him that the grilling meat was about ready, and a clay jug by the bedroll proved to have red Stygian wine.
“Everything I need,” he mused to himself. “Except a woman.”
His eyes turned southward as he blew on the skewer and took a bite.
