Conan’s horse was still where he’d tethered it, but it was tossing its head and rolling its eyes, sweat on its body that couldn’t have resulted from standing by water under the shade of bushes. He slung his bowcase and its quiver back to the saddle, tightened the girth.

The horse was too nervous to bother with its usual trick of swelling out its belly to leave the girth loose. Conan swung into the saddle.

“All right, Caithaona, let’s get back to our friends.”

The narrow winding path hid them from observers below, but Conan didn’t like the way it felt this time. The high steep vine-and-bush grown sides were quiet, far too quiet—few birds, no dart of the tiny rabbit-sized antelope that frequented steep spots here, no scream of a rock-hyrax before its burrow. Every detail was different from the lands where he’d been born, but the overall effect was all too familiar. Something dangerous was stalking through these rocky defiles, and everything that could do so, had gone to ground.

He glanced overhead.

Wide black wings showed against the blue afternoon sky. Vultures and kites, on patrol for the killings that were a constant of life here, as in most places. But what died would likely be bigger and more meaty than in lands less abundant with beasts.

The gulley opened out, turning rocky rather than sandy, and steeper for an instant as it went down to the belt of trees and brush at the foot of the steeps, where the rolling savannah and its thigh-high grass began. What wind there was came from behind, hot with the sun-heated surface of the rocky hills, and still it was deathly quiet save for the buzzing of insects.

There was a click of rock on rock.

His horse happened to have its haunches bunched as they went down the sloping ground, and it leaped off them, soaring down the slope and then landing in a scramble, making its rider clamp his legs hard of the barrel. Conan caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, more of a flicker of shadow than anything else. He drew and struck back behind himself to his right and upward with a quick reflex.

The heavy blade clove air with a hiss, and then there was the thunking chunk of impact in muscle and bone. The angle was awkward, but the salt smell of fresh blood told him he’d struck home, and there was an earsplitting shriek that was halfway between a man’s and that of a big cat.

The horse didn’t stop, bounding through the rocky scree and brush as fast as it could go, but he could feel it was still under control. The Stygian lancer who’d trained it was dead at the Wedi Shebelli mine, but he’d done a good job of getting it over the natural equine trait of being uneasy around spilled blood.

Conan had enough time to hunch over in the saddle and twist his head to look back. It was an animal, as he’d thought—a bull baboon, but of the giant southern savannah breed he’d heard of but not seen. It was bigger than he was, and heavier, with a huge mane around its face, wolf-like down to the amber-yellow eyes, except for the higher forehead. Its left hand-like paw must have been stretched out to grab at its prey, and now it was split to the wrist between the two middle fingers.

Blood fountained, and the animal thrashed and rolled in a cloud of dust and twigs and pebbles, shaking the limb and screaming over and over from between gaping jaws that parted wide, laden with teeth that would have done a lion credit. Then it slumped, whimpering, and the flow of blood dwindled. The sword must have severed the big veins when it cut into the wrist.

They hunt in packs, the stories say.

Conan and his mount plowed through thick brush now, where the hills met the savannah and the runoff from the slopes provided more water than further out. Flickers of movement showed to either side, khaki-brown fur almost the color of the soil half-glimpsed through leaves and blossoms and thorns and shaggy vines. He made a rough count; at least a dozen of them, and if the horse went over they’d swarm him like vultures over a corpse.

I’d be a corpse by then, too, he thought, shouting with laughter, calling out a Cimmerian battle-cry and taunt.

He bent over his mount’s neck, urging it on. The brush thinned and he saw the baboons more clearly. They ran at a rocking pace on all fours, their hand-like forepaws slapping down and their haunches—lower than their shoulders—driving them forward in bounds that made them about as fast as the horse, at least for a little way. The Cimmerian wiped his sword and slid it back into the sheath, no easy feat when a horse was galloping over rough country.

Foam began to fleck the roan gelding’s neck, spattering on his thighs and body. Caithaona couldn’t keep this up forever, either. As they came out onto the rolling grassland he pulled his Shemite bow out of the case, then an arrow, and let the knotted reins fall on the horse’s neck at the horn of the saddle. The mount checked very slightly as he leaned back, remaining obedient even with a dozen great predators after it, their breath carrying the rotten-meat stink of carnivores.

Creak of leather, hard muffled pounding of shod hooves on turf, the flatter slap of the baboons’ passage and yipping, shrieking hunting-cries from their throats.

He could see them better now; they were spread out in a semicircle with the ends of it nearly level with him. Most of the pursuit was the females of the troop, and probably a few more were somewhere behind him, looking after their young, but these were formidable hunters in their own right. Mostly of his own weight and probably stronger, one for one. A trio behind him in the middle of the formation were males, with the manes shaggy around their vulpine muzzles, but not as thick as the first Conan had struck down—that had probably been their sire, if other pack-hunters were any guide.

All had red tongues lolling over their fangs, and those amber eyes, far far too intelligent…

Conan looked ahead and swore. There was a ridge, a steep one, and they were herding him toward it.

His knees guided the horse to the left. It obeyed, but the baboons there pressed harder to cut him off. He had to cover more ground, slanting away from a straight flight. The beasts were far more keen-witted than wolves or dogs, but they’d have little experience with horse-archers.

The outermost of the left wing of the pack’s formation was a big rangy female who must be two hundred pounds if she was an ounce. Her build recalled legends of man-wolves, or the ghouls said to haunt the frontiers of Argos and Zingara. Her panting jaws were open wide, tongue lolling, strings of slaver blown away by the passage of her galloping pace. Conan stood a little in the saddle and let his knees work like springs. When a Shemite or Hyrkanian did this, their upper bodies hardly seemed to move.

But they’re born to it, Conan thought. It’s where the arrow goes that matters at seventh and last.

The shaft went past the angle of his jaw, and a flat snap followed as he let the string roll off his fingers. Raw strength wasn’t enough to draw a heavy bow like this—he needed to know the trick of putting his gut and lower back into it, not just his arms and shoulders. And…

Snap.

The shaft came close enough to the she-baboon’s nose to give her a startling whap on the sensitive spot. She leapt six feet into the air, squalling and slapping at the injured organ, tumbled half a dozen paces with the momentum and the bad landing… and then was on her feet and galloping twice as hard. Perhaps it was a personal matter for her now.

Conan wasted less than a second in unkind thoughts about horse archery, and put another shaft to the string.

“Let them get closer,” he muttered.

The ground rose, and his horse was laboring now. The baboons weren’t carrying riders, it was, and he was a big man with a fair weight of gear along. The steep drop toward which the pack had been herding him was off to the right, but the hill was still bad enough. A little further left, toward where it was just a low swell…

The two baboons on that side curved in toward him, close enough that he could hear their panting over the drum of hooves and creak of leather and the slapping of their own paws on the ground. They ignored the bow as he raised it—it hadn’t really hurt their packmate the last time, after all.

Snap.

The lead baboon jumped again, but this time there was a hard wet slapping sound as the arrow punched into her torso. She went over in a squalling tumble of dust and bits of savannah grass, and then in a horribly human gesture wrenched the arrow free and collapsed, coughing up gouts of blood and lung with a racking sound. The animal behind her tried to halt in a skidding plume. That froze her while Conan pulled another shaft to the angle of his jaw and shot.

Snap.

This one went right through the beast’s throat and out in a double flash of red. Conan put his head down and clapped his heels into his mount’s flanks. Up the rise and over it, and he was into the rolling savannah proper, with only a few high hills on the northwestern horizon to make him certain of his course.

He looked behind and swore.

The baboons were further back, but they were spreading out in the same sickle-shaped formation and keeping up the chase. Albeit a little slower, which was fortunate since he had to let his horse cut its pace, too, or it was going to drop dead on him.

He bared his teeth at the sight. This was not natural, because the baboons were acting as if this was an assault. Predators didn’t fight their prey, not in the human sense. They killed for food, or for fun if it was easy. If the prey was too dangerous or if it moved off their territory, they just went away and killed something else. Wolves and lion-prides only fought their own kind over pack-boundaries and mating.

Set… curse… you. The last words of the Stygian priest-magician echoed through his mind; and with them came the memory of the lion charging him.

And that rhino going after Valeria, he thought.

Then he remembered the lion just looking at him this morning, and slowly grinned. There might be a curse, but it couldn’t have been mighty enough to turn all the animals in this land against him. He’d have been torn to bits, smashed to paste, devoured, or all three if that was so. Those lions would have attacked him, instead of just licking their chops.

In that case, perhaps two could play at the game.

Conan looked ahead, scanning the land and his own memories. All these flat-topped thorn trees looked alike, but there were four over by that rock, and there were the vultures… He booted the horse up from a canter to a shambling gallop—all it could do after the mad dash from the hills of the cave. The wind was from the west, and the horse began to whinny and toss its head as it scented predator, but it knew what was chasing them, too.

The lions were napping, scattered in the shade of the trees. At the drum of hooves, one of them leapt to her feet, and a cub squalled and ran for the shelter of a nearby boulder. That cry of fear and distress had them all up, and more cubs following the first. Ten pairs of yellow eyes—eight females and two big maned males, probably brothers—locked on him, and lips drew back over teeth he could see clearly, probably amid growls he couldn’t hear.

Conan shrieked out a Cimmerian war-cry, the type used in a charge. He’d screamed the same challenge when he went up the scaling-ladder to Velitrium’s wall, when he was still a youth of fifteen years.

The lions milled about, angry and confused…

Then they got a sight and scent of the great plains baboons that were following him. That was something they understood; an enemy, like a pack of hyenas, out to take their food and kill their young.

Conan put his head down over the horse’s neck and flogged backward with the loose ends of the reins, left-right-left. The mount barely needed it, with another set of meat-eaters within sight and hearing and smell. A roar went up from the two male brothers, shatteringly loud at only a few dozen feet away, a sound that made the hair bristle along his spine—because it said, at a level far below thought, this beast eats men.

The stance in the saddle let him look backward as the giant baboons realized what they were galloping into. A lioness and a baboon went over, rolling in a cloud of dust, until the great cat managed to get its hind legs up and rip downward in a shower of blood and bright pink intestines. All three of the male baboons leapt for a maned lion, and they went over in a tangle of paws and jaws as the brother danced around the tangle, striking with both paws in blurring-fast slaps—slaps tipped with long, sharp claws.

Conan turned his face westward and grinned wider as the chorus of growls and shrieks, roars of anger, and screams of pain fell behind him. After a while he let the horse shamble to a walk, and later swung down out of the saddle to lead it for a while. It would need a few days in the remount herd before it could be ridden again.

If it didn’t die before he got back to the rendezvous.

He bellowed laughter at the sky, sending a flight of birds up from a nearby thicket.

“The curse has missed again!”