`No use to try to follow a demon,’ grunted Conan, drawing a short woodsman’s ax from his girdle. `I tried tracking him after he killed Soractus. I lost his trail within a dozen steps. He might have grown himself wings and flown away, or sunk down through the earth to Hell. I don’t know. I’m not going after the mule, either. It’ll either wander back to the fort, or to some settler’s cabin.’
As he spoke Conan was busy at the edge of the trail with his ax. With a few strokes he cut a pair of saplings nine or ten feet long, and denuded them of their branches. Then he cut a length from a serpent-like vine that crawled among the bushes near by, and making one end fast to one of the poles, a couple of feet from the end, whipped the vine over the other sapling and interlaced it back and forth. In a few moments he had a crude but strong litter.
`The demon isn’t going to get Tiberias’ head if I can help it,’ he growled. `We’ll carry the body into the fort. It isn’t more than three miles. I never liked the fat fool, but we can’t have Pictish devils making so cursed free with white men’s heads.’
The Picts were a white race, though swarthy, but the border men never spoke of them as such.
Balthus took the rear end of the litter, onto which Conan unceremoniously dumped the unfortunate merchant, and they moved on down the trail as swiftly as possible. Conan made no more noise laden with their grim burden than he had made when unencumbered. He had made a loop with the merchant’s belt at the end of the poles, and was carrying his share of the load with one hand, while the other gripped his naked broadsword, and his restless gaze roved the sinister walls about them. The shadows were thickening. A darkening blue mist blurred the outlines of the foliage. The forest deepened in the twilight, became a blue haunt of mystery sheltering unguessed things.
They had covered more than a mile, and the muscles in Balthus’ sturdy arms were beginning to ache a little, when a cry rang shuddering from the woods whose blue shadows were deepening into purple.
Conan started convulsively, and Balthus almost let go the poles.
`A woman!’ cried the younger man. `Great Mitra, a woman cried out then!’
`A settler’s wife straying in the woods,’ snarled Conan, setting down his end of the litter. `Looking for a cow, probably, and -stay here!’
He dived like a hunting wolf into the leafy wall. Balthus’ hair bristled.
`Stay here alone with this corpse and a devil hiding in the woods?’ he yelped. `I’m coming with you!’
And suiting action to words, he plunged after the Cimmerian. Conan glanced back at him, but made no objection, though he did not moderate his pace to accommodate the shorter legs of his companion. Balthus wasted his wind in swearing as the Cimmerian drew away from him again, like a phantom between the trees, and then Conan burst into a dim glade and halted crouching, lips snarling, sword lifted.
`What are we stopping for?’ panted Balthus, dashing the sweat out of his eyes and gripping his short sword.
`That scream came from this glade, or near by,’ answered Conan. `I don’t mistake the location of sounds, even in the woods. But where-‘
Abruptly the sound rang out again – behind them; in the direction of the trail they had just quitted. It rose piercingly and pitifully, the cry of a woman in frantic terror – and then, shockingly, it changed to a yell of mocking laughter that might have burst from the lips of a fiend of lower Hell.
`What in Mitra’s name-‘ Balthus’ face was a pale blur in the gloom.
With a scorching oath Conan wheeled and dashed back the way he had come, and the Aquilonian stumbled bewilderedly after him. He blundered into the Cimmerian as the latter stopped dead, and rebounded from his brawny shoulders as though from an iron statue. Gasping from the impact, he heard Conan’s breath hiss through his teeth. The Cimmerian seemed frozen in his tracks.
Looking over his shoulder, Balthus felt his hair stand up stiffly. Something was moving through the deep bushes that fringed the trail – something that neither walked nor flew, but seemed to glide like a serpent. But it was not a serpent. Its outlines were indistinct, but it was taller than a man, and not very bulky. It gave off a glimmer of weird light, like a faint blue flame. Indeed, the eery fire was the only tangible thing about it. It might have been an embodied flame moving with reason and purpose through the blackening woods.
Conan snarled a savage curse and hurled his ax with ferocious will. But the thing glided on without altering its course. Indeed it was only a few instants’ fleeting glimpse they had of it – a tall, shadowy thing of misty flame floating through the thickets. Then it was gone, and the forest crouched in breathless stillness.
With a snarl Conan plunged through the intervening foliage and into the trail. His profanity, as Balthus floundered after him, was lurid and impassioned. The Cimmerian was standing over the litter on which lay the body of Tiberias. And that body no longer possessed a head.
`Tricked us with its damnable caterwauling!’ raved Conan, swinging his great sword about his head in his wrath. `I might have known! I might have guessed a trick! Now there’ll be five heads to decorate Zogar’s altar.’
`But what thing is it that can cry like a woman and laugh like a devil, and shines like witch-fire as it glides through the trees?’ gasped Balthus, mopping the sweat from his pale face.
`A swamp devil,’ responded Conan morosely. `Grab those poles. We’ll take in the body, anyway. At least our load’s a bit lighter.’
With which grim philosophy he gripped the leathery loop and stalked down the trail.
2 The Wizard of Gwawela
Fort Tuscelan stood on the eastern bank of Black River, the tides of which washed the foot of the stockade. The latter was of logs, as were all the buildings within, including the donjon (to dignify it by that appellation), in which were the governor’s quarters, overlooking the stockade and the sullen river. Beyond that river lay a huge forest, which approached jungle-like density along the spongy shores. Men paced the runways along the log parapet day and night, watching that dense green wall. Seldom a menacing figure appeared, but the sentries knew that they too were watched, fiercely, hungrily, with the mercilessness of ancient hate. The forest beyond the river might seem desolate and vacant of life to the ignorant eye, but life teemed there, not alone of bird and beast and reptile, but also of men, the fiercest of all the hunting beasts.
There, at the fort, civilization ended. Fort Tuscelan was the last outpost of a civilized world; it represented the westernmost thrust of the dominant Hyborian races. Beyond the river the primitive still reigned in shadowy forests, brush-thatched huts where hung the grinning skulls of men, and mud-walled enclosures where fires flickered and drums rumbled, and spears were whetted in the hands of dark, silent men with tangled black hair and the eyes of serpents. Those eyes often glared through the bushes at the fort across the river. Once darkskinned men had built their huts where that fort stood; yes, and their huts had risen where now stood the fields and log cabins of fair-haired settlers, back beyond Velitrium, that raw, turbulent frontier town on the banks of Thunder River, to the shores of that other river that bounds the Bossonian marches. Traders had come, and priests of Mitra who walked with bare feet and empty hands, and died horribly, most of them; but soldiers had followed, and men with axes in their hands and women and children in ox-drawn wains. Back to Thunder River, and still back, beyond Black River the aborigines had been pushed, with slaughter and massacre. But the darkskinned people did not forget that once Conajohara had been theirs.
The guard inside the eastern gate bawled a challenge. Through a barred aperture torchlight flickered, glinting on a steel head-piece and suspicious eyes beneath it.
`Open the gate,’ snorted Conan. `You see it’s 1, don’t you?’
Military discipline put his teeth on edge.
The gate swung inward and Conan and his companion passed through. Balthus noted that the gate was flanked by a tower on each side, the summits of which rose above the stockade. He saw loopholes for arrows.
The guardsmen grunted as they saw the burden borne between the men. Their pikes jangled against each other as they thrust shut the gate, chin on shoulder, and Conan asked testily: `Have you never seen a headless body before?’
The face of the soldiers were pallid in the torchlight.