“They’re both wounded,” Aberius protested desperately. “Like as not, neither will last an hour.”
“It’s still a chance.” Conan let his voice swell. “A chance for a king’s treasure in gold and jewels. Who’s for gold? Who’s for the Red Hawk?” He risked unsheathing his sword and raising it overhead. “Gold! The Red Hawk!”
In an instant every man save Aberius was waving his weapon in the air. “Gold!” they bellowed. “Gold!” “The Red Hawk!” “Gold!”
Aberius twisted his thin mouth sourly. “Gold!” he shouted, pushing his spear aloft. “The Red Hawk!” His beady eyes glared murder at Conan.
“Good, then!” Conan shouted over their cries. “Off with you, to rest and drink! Till dawn!”
“Dawn!” they roared. “Gold!”
Conan waited until they were well on their way back to the fires, then returned to Karela. She stared at him as if stricken. He put out a hand to touch her, but she jerked her arm away and stalked toward her tent without a word. Conan stared after her in consternation.
“I said once you had a facile tongue,” Hordo said, sheathing his sword. “You’ve more than that, Conan of Cimmeria. Belikes you’ll be a general, someday. Mayhap even a king. If you live to get out of these mountains. If any of us do.”
“What’s the matter with her?” Conan demanded. “I told her I did this for me, not her. I did not break the oath she demanded.”
“She thinks you try to supplant her,” Hordo replied slowly. “As chief of the band.”
“That’s foolish!”
Hordo did not seem to hear. “I hope she does not yet realize that what was done tonight can never be undone. Mitra grant her time before she must know that.”
“What are you muttering about, you one-eyed old ruffian?” Conan said. “Did one of those blows tonight addle your brains?”
“You do not see it either, do you?” The bearded man’s voice was sad. “What has been shattered can be mended, but the cracks are always there, and those cracks will break again and again until there is no mending.”
“Once there’s gold in their purses, they’ll be as loyal as they ever were. On the morrow, Hordo, we must bury these creatures as well as our own dead. There must be no vultures aloft to warn whoever sent them out.”
“Of course.” Hordo sighed. “Rest you well, Cimmerian, and pray you we live to rest another night.”
“Rest you well, Hordo.”
After the one-eyed bandit disappeared toward the camp fires, Conan peered toward Karela’s pavilion, beneath the loom of the cliff. Her shadow moved on the striped walls. She was washing herself. Then the lamps were extinguished.
Muttering curses under his breath Conan found a cloak and wrapped himself in it beneath the shelter of a boulder. Rest you well, indeed. Women!
Imhep-Aton rose from his place on the mountainside above the bandit camp and turned into the darkness. When he reached a place where the shadows against the stone seemed to darken, he walked on, through the shadow-wall and into a large, well-lit cave. His mount and his packhorse were tethered at the rear of it. His blankets were spread by the fire where a rabbit roasted on a spit. Nearby sat the chest containing the necessities of his thaumaturgies.
The mage rubbed his eyes, then stretched, massaging the small of his back. One spell had been needed to gain the eyes of an eagle, a second to make the night into day to his sight, still a third to let him hear what was said in the camp. Maintaining all three at once had given him a pain that ran from his head all the way down his backbone.
Yet it was worth the discomfort. The fools thought they ruled where their horses’ hooves trod. He wondered what they would think if they knew they were but dogs, to corner a bear and die holding its attention while he, the hunter, moved in for the kill.
Laughing, the necromancer bent to his supper.
XVI
Seated on his golden serpent throne, Amanar watched the four dancing girls flexing their sinuosities across the mosaic floor for his enjoyment. Naked but for golden bells at ankles and wrists, they spun and writhed with wild abandon, in the sweat of fear for his displeasure, the tinkle of the bells a counterpoint to the flutes of four human musicians who kept their eyes on their own feet. There were few human servants within the keep, and none ever raised their eyes from the ground.
Amanar luxuriated in the fear he felt emanating from the four women, enjoying that as much as he did the luscious curves they flaunted shamelessly before him. The fifth girl, golden-eyed Yasmeen, had been the first to find herself given screaming to Sitha—threats produced more fear if it was known they would be carried out—and she had somehow managed to cut her own throat with the huge S’tarra’s sword.
It had been all the necromancer could do to keep her alive long enough to be sacrificed to Morath-Aminee, and there had been little pleasure for him in the haste of it. He had taken precautions to make certain there would be no repetition of the unfortunate incident. Through lidded eyes Amanar watched his possessions dance for his favor.
“Master?”
“Yes, Sitha?” the mage said without shifting his gaze. The heavily muscled S’tarra stood bowed at one side of the throne, but its scarlet eyes watched the dancing girls greedily.
“The map, master. It flashes.”
Amanar uncoiled from the throne and strode out of the chamber with Sitha at his heels. The girls continued to dance. He had given no command to cease, and they dared not without it.
Close beside the throne chamber was a small room with only two furnishings. A silver mirror hung on one gray stone wall. Against the other a great sheet of clear crystal leaned on a polished wooden frame, etched with a map of the mountains surrounding the keep. In the crystal a flashing red light moved slowly along a valley, triggered by the wards Amanar had set. Lower animals would, not set off the warning, nor would his S’tarra. Only men could do that.
Turning to the mirror Amanar muttered cryptic words and made cabalistic gestures that left a faint glow in the air. As the glow faded, the silver mirror grew clear as a window, a window that looked down from an eagle’s height on men riding slowly along a mountain valley.
One of the men made a gesture, as if pointing to something on the ground. They were tracking. Amanar spoke further esoteric phrases, and the vision of the mirror raced ahead, seeking. Like a falcon sensing prey, the image stopped, then swooped. On a badly wounded S’tarra, stumbling, falling, rising to struggle forward again. Amanar returned the mirror to the mounted party that followed his servant.
Near thirty men, well armed, and one woman. The mage could not tell whether the woman or a heavily muscled youth with fierce blue eyes commanded. Amanar rubbed his chin thoughtfully with an over-long hand.
“The girl Velita, Sitha,” he said. “Fetch her here immediately.”
The big S‘tarra bowed himself from the room, leaving Amanar to study the image in the mirror. S’tarra used their wounded, those too badly hurt to heal, as fresh meat. This one would not have been allowed to leave his patrol; therefore the patrol no longer existed. Since these men followed, it was likely they had destroyed the patrol, and that was no small feat. It was also unlikely that they followed to no purpose.
“The girl, master.” Sitha appeared in the door grasping Velita by her hair so that the dark-eyed girl perforce must walk on the balls of her feet. Her hands hung passively at her sides, though, and she shivered in terror both of that which gripped her and of the man she faced.
“Let her down,” Amanar commanded impatiently. “Girl, come here and look into this mirror. Now, girl!”
She stumbled forward—though with her grace it seemed more a step of her dancing—and gasped when she saw the images moving before her. For a moment the necromancer thought she would speak, but then her jaw tightened and she closed her eyes.
“You spoke a name once, girl,” Amanar said. “A man who would rescue you. Conan. Is that man among these you see?” She did not move a muscle, or utter a sound. “I mean the man no ha
rm, girl. Point him out to me, or I will have Sitha whip you.”
A low moan rose in her throat, and she opened her large eyes long enough to roll them in terror at the huge S’tarra behind her. “I cannot,” she whispered. Her body trembled, and tears streamed down her face in silent sobs, but she would speak no more.
Amanar made an exasperated noise. “Fool girl. All you do is delay me for a few moments. Take her, Sitha. Twenty strokes.”
Fanged mouth open in a wide grin, the massive S’tarra gathered her hair once more in its fist, lifting her painfully as they left. Tears rolled down her face all the harder, yet still her sobs were soundless.
The mage studied the images further. She had actually answered his question, in part at least, though she likely thought she had protected the man. But she had named this Conan a thief, and thieves did not ride with more than a score of armed men at their backs.
From within his serpent-embroidered black robe he produced the things he needed for this simple task. A red chalk scribed a five-pointed star on the stone floor. From a pouch he poured a small mound of powder on each of the points. His left hand stretched forth, and from each fingertip a spark flew to flare the powders to blinding flame. Five thin streams of acrid red smoke rose toward the distant ceiling.
Amanar muttered words in a dead tongue, made a gesture with his left hand. The smoke was suddenly sucked back down onto the pentagram, swirling and billowing as if whipped by a great wind, yet confined to the five-pointed star. He spoke one further word, and with a sharp crack the smoke was gone. In its place was a hairless gray shape no higher than his knee. Vaguely ape-like in form, with sharply sloping forehead and knuckles brushing the stone floor, its shoulders bore bony wings covered with taut gray hide.
The creature chattered at him, baring fangs that seemed to fill half its simian face, and sprang for the mage. At the boundary of the pentagram it suddenly shrieked, and was thrown back in a shower of sparks to crumple in the center of the star. Unsteadily it rose, claws clicking on the stone. The bat-like wings quivered as if for flight. “Free!” it barked shrilly.
Amanar’s lip curled in disgust and anger. He was far beyond dealing with these minor demons personally. That the girl had forced him to it was a humiliation he would assuage personally, to her great discomfort.
“Free!” the demon demanded again.
“Be silent, Zath!” the necromancer commanded. The gray form recoiled, and Amanar allowed himself a small smile. “Yes, I know your name. Zath! An you fail to do as I command, I’ll use the power that gives me. Others of your kind have from time to time annoyed me, and have found themselves trapped in material bodies. Bodies of solid gold.” Amanar threw back his head and laughed.
The ape-like creature shuddered. Its dead-white eyes watched the sorcerer malevolently from beneath bony eyebrow ridges, but it said, “Zath do what?”
“These two,” Amanar said, touching the images of Conan and Karela. “Discover for me their names, and why they follow one of my S’tarra.”
“How?” the demon shrilled.
“Play no games with me,” Amanar snapped. “Think you I do not know? If you are close enough to an ordinary man to hear his speech, you can hear his thoughts as well. And you may as well stop trying me. You know it will not work.”
The demon chattered his fangs angrily. “Zath goes.” With a thunderous clap, it disappeared. A wind ruffled Amanar’s robe as air rushed into the pentagram.
The sorcerer dusted his hands as though he had touched something demeaning, and turned back to the mirror. For a time the images rode on, then suddenly one of their number pointed aloft. Consternation swept across their faces. Crossbows were raised, bolts loosed at the sky.
A snap sounded in the chamber, and the ape-like demon was back in the pentagram, flexing its wings and fondling a crossbow quarrel. “Try to kill Zath,” it giggled, and added contemptuously, “With iron.” The demon amused itself by poking the quarrel through its bony arm. The crossbow arrow left no wound.
“What of that which I sent you for?” Amanar demanded.
The demon glared at him a moment before speaking. “Big man named Conan. Woman named Karela, called Red Hawk. They come for pendants, for girl. Free!”
Amanar smiled at the images on the mirror, recovering now from their encounter with Zath and riding on. The lovely Velita’s thief, and the famed Red Hawk at the same time, with her band. There were many uses to which such beings could be put.
“Ahead of these people,” he said to the demon without taking his eyes from the mirror, “is one of my S’tarra. It is wounded, but yet lives. You may feed. Now, go.” The necromancer’s smile was far from pleasant.
The slopes of the twisting valley steepened and grew bleaker as the bandits rode. Conan eyed a thornbush, of which there were even fewer here than had been along the trail earlier. It was stunted and bent as if something in air or soil distorted the dark branches into an unwholesome simulacrum of the plant it had once been. All the scrub growth they passed grew more like that the further they went along the wounded snake-creature’s trail.
“Fitting country,” Hordo muttered just loud enough for Conan to hear. His lone eye watched Karela warily, where she rode at the column’s head. “First snake-men, then that flying Mitra-alone-knows-what.”
“It didn’t hurt anyone,” Conan said flatly, “and it went away.” He was not about to say anything that might dissuade the others from turning back, but at the same time he could not entirely dispel his own sense of unease.
“It was hit,” the one-eyed man went on. “Two bolts at least, but never a quiver out of it. ’Tis only luck the rest of these rogues didn’t turn tail on the moment.”
“Mayhap you should turn back, Hordo.” He twisted in his saddle to peer down the line of mounted bandits straggled behind him on the winding valley floor. Greed drove them forward, but since the strange creature was seen flying above them, seeming to follow them, every man watched the gray skies and stony slopes with sullen eyes. From time to time a man would touch his bandaged wounds and look thoughtfully back the way they had come.
Conan shook his black-maned head at the bearded brigand. “If she says she has decided to turn back, they’ll follow her gratefully; if she pushes on, they’ll begin dropping away one by one.”
“You of all men should know she’ll not turn from this trail. Not so long as you go on.”
Conan was spared answering by a loud hail from Aberius. The weasel-faced bandit had been riding ahead of them to track the wounded snake-creature. Now he sat his horse where the trail wound around a rock spire ahead, waving his arm over his head.
“Halloo!”
Karela galloped forward without a word.
“I hope he’s lost the track,” Hordo muttered. Conan booted his horse ahead. After a moment the one-eyed man followed.
The red-haired woman turned her horse aside as Conan rode up. He looked at what Aberius had been showing her. The reptilian creature they had been following lay sprawled on its back, dead, in the shadow of the stone spire. Its chain mail had been torn off, and its chest ripped open.
“Scavengers have been at it already,” Hordo muttered. “It’s too bad the other one crawled off somewhere to die.” He did not sound as if he thought it too bad at all.
“No vultures in the sky,” Conan said thoughtfully. “And never have I heard of jackals that rip out a heart and leave the rest.”
Aberius’ horse whinnied as he jerked at the reins. “Mitra! The Cimmerian’s right. Who knows what slew him? Perhaps that foul thing that flew over us and took no mind of crossbow bolts.” His beady eyes darted wildly, as if expecting the apparition to appear again, from behind a rock.
“Be silent, fool!” Karela snapped. “It died of the wounds it took last night, and your approach frightened a badger or some such off its feeding.”
“It makes no matter,” Aberius said slyly. “I can track this carrion no further.”
The woman’s green-eyed gaze was contemptu
ously amused. “Then I’ve no more need of you, have I? I’ll wager I can find where it was going myself.”
“It’s time to leave these accursed mountains.” The pinch-faced man swiveled his head to the other bandits, waiting down the trail. Enough fear of the Red Hawk remained to keep them back from her council.
Karela did not deign to acknowledge his whine. “Since loosing its bonds, the creature has kept a straight line. When the twists of the land took it aside, it found its way back again. We’ll keep the same way.”
“But—” Aberius swallowed the rest of his words as Hordo pushed his horse closer. Karela started ahead, ignoring them.
“An I hear any tales,” the one-eyed man grated, “other than that you frighted some slinking vermin from this corpse, I’ll see you cold carrion beside it.” Conan caught his eye as he turned to follow Karela, and for a moment the bearded bandit looked abashed. “She needs one hound at least to remain faithful, Cimmerian. The way is forward, Aberius. Forward, you worthless rogues!” he bellowed. He met Conan’s eyes again, then kicked his horse into a gallop.
For a time Conan sat his horse, watching the faces of the passing brigands as they came in view of the bloody, scaled corpse. Each recoiled, muttering or with an oath, as he rounded the spire and got a clear look at what lay there, but the greed in their eyes was undiminished. They rode on.
Muttering his own oath, Conan spurred after Karela and Hordo.
XVII
Haranides wearily raised his hand to signal a halt to the bedraggled column behind him. The site among the boulders at the face of the cliff had been a camp. An attempt had been made to hide the face, but a thin tendril of smoke still rose from ashes not covered well enough with dirt.
“Dismount the men, Aheranates,” the captain commanded, wincing as he did so himself. A hillman’s lance had left a gouge along his ribs that would be a long time in healing. “Take a party of ten and see if you can find which way they went without mucking up the tracks too badly.”