by Roland Green
The water dragon’s body began feeding on itself. Yet, dim as its mind was, it knew enough not to flee beyond the Mountain of Skulls. Then the magic that fed its essence would no longer reach it, and the essence would begin to devour the dragon’s flesh to sustain itself.
The dragon grew famished, likewise savage of temper. It also grew cunning, so that in spite of its hunger it did not at once fling itself upon the mortal who swam into its home water.
It waited, instead, until the mortal was close to the imagined safety of the rock, and had all its attention turned ahead.
Then the dragon struck from behind.
Had the dragon not been dim-eyed from age and hungry in both body and essence, Conan would have died the moment after it struck.
As it was, the dragon’s jaws slammed shut on the bag floating behind him. Those jaws were also weakened and missing more than a few teeth, but they were nearly as long and as broad as the Cimmerian’s torso, and still strong enough to snap rope like thread.
The bag, however, was too large to be swallowed in one gulp. The dragon shifted its grip on this unexpectedly awkward prey, and bit down again. This time its upper jaw encountered the point of the Cimmerian’s sword.
As Conan scrambled on to the rocky shelf, the dragon’s head broke water. Its bellow mingled pain, rage, frustration, and hunger. The mouth gaped, showing Conan an array of yellowed, broken, and missing teeth. The gape also revealed the barbarian’s sword rammed deep into the creature’s upper jaw.
Conan supposed that it might do him some good there, although he would much rather have held it in his hand. At the moment, it seemed only to enrage a creature who needed no help in this matter.
Conan drew his dagger, then held himself as motionless as a statue, even making his breathing shallow. Movement could well be the only thing the water dragon could sense. If its rheumy yellow eyes saw nothing moving—
But the water dragon was craftier than the barbarian expected. Somewhere within the reptilian brain, a thought formed: the bag was unfit to eat and dangerous beside. But there had been a second prey swimming with the bag, who might now be resting on the shelf.
The dragon sank out of sight. Conan remained motionless. The dragon might be swimming off to free its mouth of his sword. Its departure might also be a ruse—
Ten paces from where Conan stood, the water dragon lunged out of the pool. It lunged so hard and so accurately that its rough-scaled snout grazed the Cimmerian’s ankle.
He still did not move, even as the scales ripped skin from flesh. Blood flowed—practically in front of the dragon’s nose. Its powers of scent had declined along with everything else, but it could still smell fresh blood.
Its tail lashed, driving more of its body out of the water. Conan had to move now, before those jaws clamped on his ankle in a grip not to be broken even by the Cimmerian’s strength.
Instead of moving back, he moved forward. The water dragon saw something vast and dark looming up in its vision and jerked its head aside. A dagger thrust meant to drive through to the dragon’s brain took only one eye.
The dragon, howled, screamed, and hissed so furiously that Conan half expected the cave to collapse and bury him under the rubble. The creature thrashed about so wildly that Conan had to retreat farther to avoid the swinging tail.
Then head, tail, and all four clawed legs were flailing about, driving the dragon up the shelf. Conan had no choice but to move toward the opening at the rear of the shelf. It was partly blocked, which might not keep the creature from passing through but would certainly slow it enough to let the Cimmerian strike a few telling blows.
He might even be lucky enough to regain his sword before the dragon’s jaws bent it double!
Then Conan had a clear look at the archway— and that look shook not only his confidence but his very soul.
The archway was partly blocked on either side by skeletons. Human skeletons, standing erect like soldiers of a royal guard on palace duty. Each had armour and weapons piled at its feet, but wore only a crumbling leather belt.
Conan counted close to thirty skeleton guards in the archway alone. Beyond them, in the passage, he saw more, too many to count as they faded away into the shadows.
His retreat lay past an army of skeletons.
The Cimmerian did not hesitate. It was either retreat past the skeletons, or stand a good chance of making his last journey down the water dragon’s maw. Those skeletons had to be nothing except brittle bone; one good lunge by the dragon would reduce them to dust.
But the passage did narrow beyond the archway. He could still fight there at more of an advantage than out here. Step by step, Conan withdrew, moving as much as possible, waving his arms, shouting, even darting in to kick the dragon in the muzzle and darting back out of reach before the jaws crashed shut where his foot had been.
He was careful to avoid the skeletons. Flesh and spirit alike had long fled them, but Conan would no more dishonour the unknown dead than he would have poisoned a well in the desert. The dragon would do enough damage when it finally charged.
Conan was now bleeding in several places. He had scraped a hand and an arm on the dragon’s scales, and the wound in his side was oozing blood again, although without much pain. Still, if this turned into a battle of endurance, the Cimmerian could not be entirely hopeful of victory.
He gave more ground, and in so doing brushed his bleeding hand against the outermost skeleton on the left. The skeleton quivered all over, then seemed to fall apart into its component bones in the space of a single breath.
Conan’s oaths almost out-echoed the dragon’s roarings and hissings. Whether this was a good omen or not, he could not say. But he now knew he had to make his stand before the skeletons, and keep the dragon from ravaging them, or die without honour.
The Cimmerian crouched, ready for a leap on to the dragon’s back. If he could take it from behind, blinding it, he might then start drawing it away from the skeletons. He would be slow in such a deadly dance but so would the dragon, and the Cimmerian would stand between it and the water if it tried to flee.
Then dust rose from the fallen skeleton. Bones scraped on rock, but it was the rock that yielded. Before the Cimmerian’s widening eyes, leg bones joined above and below knee caps, and legs set themselves into hip sockets while feet settled in at the other end. Ribs, spine, arms, skull—all skittered across the floor or rose into the air, and somehow all found their proper place.
In the time a hungry man takes to gnaw the meat from a chicken leg, a pile of bones was a complete skeleton—but no longer standing stiffly on guard. It moved as freely as any living man of flesh and blood. Conan thought he had seen everything... then the skeleton bent, rummaged through the pile at its feet, and came up with a short spear.
The skull-face turned toward Conan and the jaws— still furnished with a full set of strong white teeth-— clacked twice. Then bones rattled, and incredibly the skull wore something very like a smile.
By sheer force of will, the Cimmerian cudgelled his wits into order and pointed at the dragon. The skeleton nodded.
The dragon hissed. Conan raised echoes with a Cimmerian war cry. The skeleton clattered the spear against its ribs, as a living warrior might have struck his spear against his shield.
Then living Cimmerian and skeletal warrior advanced against the dragon.
Conan might have hoped that the dragon’s exertions had wearied it or that his sword had cost it blood as well as temper. Except that “hope” was not a word he allowed himself to use when facing mortal combat.
Also, the evidence of his senses was somewhat against the dragon being weakened at all. He thought it showed admirable courage on the part of the skeleton to match its frail bone against the armoured flesh of the dragon. He also suspected that he would be fighting alone again within moments.
Nonetheless, the skeleton seemed to know that when two men faced a single opponent, they should separate so as to force it to choose which one it would attack. The skele
ton ran out to the left while Conan moved to the right.
Perhaps Conan was now more familiar to the dragon. Perhaps his living flesh gave him a scent it could detect. Perhaps he made more noise—although since the skeleton sounded rather like several carpenters all hammering at once, Conan doubted this last.
For whatever reason, the dragon grated around on its belly—which was scoring new marks in the rock— and charged the Cimmerian. With ample room, Conan now gave ground nimbly, seeking to place himself between the dragon and the water. His swift movements drew the dragon’s entire attention, and the Cimmerian himself was too busy keeping a safe distance between him and the beast, so that neither paid much attention to the skeleton.
That was-the dragon’s final mistake. So swiftly that
Conan saw the skeleton only in mid-leap, the ancient warrior sprang on to the dragon’s back. It braced itself on both bony feet, and with terrible strength in its bony arms thrust the spear down.
The shaft of the spear was wood, but seemed as limber as the day it was carved. The point looked to Conan like iron or perhaps some alloy of iron and unknown metals, although there were precious few such alloys he could not recognize. Certainly it was as rustless as bronze or newly forged iron, and also as sharp.
The spearhead drove between the scales, then through a gap in the skull plates of the dragon. Sharp metal reached the dragon’s brain; it bellowed and spasmed. The warrior flew off like a slingstone, and Conan commended his spirit to a safe journey. Then the Cimmerian rushed in on the dragon’s blind side, reached in, and thrust his dagger hard into the remaining eye.
The dragon’s last spasm was more of a twitch, but still violent enough to send Conan sprawling. It also brought the dragon’s tail down with an echoing crash on top of the skeleton. Conan listened for the sound of bones crumbling, but heard only the dragon’s last gasping breaths.
The dragon’s body hid the fallen remains of the skeleton warrior from the Cimmerian. Conan gave the beast a wide berth as he walked around, knowing from hard experience the tenacity of reptilian life. Indeed, the creature was still bleeding, which meant that somewhere in that scaly mass the heart still beat.
Then Conan stopped, and only an iron will kept him from gaping like a boy at his first woman. The skeleton he had expected to be reduced to dust was sitting up, and flexing all of its limbs. The gestures were exactly those of a living man who had been thrown down, braised, and grazed, seeing if anything had been broken.
Conan stared, bemused. He wondered if he was still in the real world, or if not, where. Then he decided that perhaps he did not want to know.
The skeleton finished its self-examination by leaping up and down several times. That solved part of the mystery for the Cimmerian. As the skeleton’s feet came down, he heard, not the clatter of bone on rock, but the sharper impact of stone on stone.
Whatever magic had given the skeleton its power to reanimate, had also turned it from ancient, desiccated bone into something very like the rock of the cave where it had stood sentinel for so long.
The skeleton promptly scrambled on top of the dragon, gripped its spear with both hands, and pulled. The spear came free so suddenly the skeleton nearly fell, but this time turned the tumble into a leap. It looked at the blood on the spearhead and the blood oozing from the wound, then turned and practically ran toward the line of skeletons.
Again, it wore something very like a smile—if one could use human terms to describe the expressions of a face without flesh. It wore that smile as it struck the bloody spearhead against the ribs of one skeleton, the thighbone of another, the skull of a third.
All three skeletons fell into pieces, then began re-knitting themselves. Conan was not even surprised when all at once three skeletons stood again at attention.
Now each bore a weapon—a broadsword, a short sword, and a long-shafted spear—and each had its free hand over where its heart would have been, in an archaic form of the salute of honour.
As Conan watched, he also saw that the bloodstain on the first skeleton had vanished, and that the blood stains on the other three were also fading. It was as if the skeletons drew the blood into themselves, like desert sand swallowing water.
Conan told himself firmly that these beings were magical but not hostile. The first one owed his animation to the Cimmerian’s blood, and had fought beside him.
The Cimmerian therefore believed that he had nothing to fear. Still, he was careful retrieving his sword and bag from the dragon’s maw. Clothed again, albeit in sodden garments, and with a sword (slightly bent) in his hand, he felt more fit to deal with the skeletons.
How he was to fight beings of stone with no flesh or vital organs for steel to sunder was another matter. Meanwhile, he stood close to the wall, his hands near to weapons’ hilts, and watched the army of skeletons take shape.
The dragon went on bleeding long enough to animate half the skeletons. The first four carved several more wounds in the carcase, to speed the process.
After that it seemed that animating the rest needed more than a smear of blood from the point of a weapon. The thirty-odd skeletons now formed into pairs, and each delicately lifted a comrade, and carried him intact to the dragon. There they dipped a foot, a hand, or sometimes a skull into the congealing blood, set the skeleton down, and stepped back to await results.
At last it seemed that the blood was no longer fresh enough to reanimate skeletons. The last few merely fell apart, one as it was being carried. The bones quivered and twitched, and a few of them knit, but remained more a pile than a completed skeleton.
By this time there were more than fifty-odd rockboned skeletons roaming about the shelf. Conan judged that all had been good-sized men, probably in the prime of life as befitted picked soldiers.
He had no time for further study. A few of the skeletons had put their skulls together in a circle, close to the water’s edge. Now they broke out of that circle and advanced toward the wall—and Conan.
Others joined them as they moved—no, marched, for Conan saw that they kept in step as they approached. At last more than half the skeletons were gathered in a half-circle around the Cimmerian. They could not get at his back, against the solid wall—nor could he break out of that circle without a clash he did not wish.
He would have liked to be able to say that the skeletons had the same peaceful wish. But the way the fleshless bones held themselves and their weapons gave him cause to doubt.
XII
Lysinka could not sleep. Nor was it because Conan was not there to warm her and their sleeping cocoon. She had not allowed any man to mean that much to her in years and if the gods were kind would never do so again. The price of doing otherwise had proved too high.
So she was making the rounds of the sentry posts, to seem to be doing something useful while she waited for the night to pass, or for sleep to come. She feared that sleep would come only with daylight, when it would be time to lead scouts to the mountain where Conan had disappeared, and mount guard on it until he reappeared or something else became more urgent than finding him.
Lysinka passed the third sentry post with a cursory glance and a brief exchange of polite remarks on the weather. She noted that this post held Rasha, one of her women, and a Thanza Ranger with a head too large for his body and too much hair and beard even for his head.
She was halfway to the next post, approaching a deep-shadowed flight of crumbling stairs, when she heard footsteps behind her. She did not turn, nor even quicken her pace. Her sword and other blades were always well-placed for a quick draw, and she was wearing a light mail shirt under her tunic— “Countess,” came a soft whisper.
She smiled, and replied as quietly, “I did not know you were so light-footed, Fergis.”
“Oh, my skills are without number. My hearing is also keen. Tonight has taught me things I would rather not have learned.”
Telling Fergis not to talk in riddles would be futile. When the mood was upon him, he would ask a riddle of an opponent in
mortal combat—some said he had won several fights this way, by thoroughly distracting his foes.
“Our people are uneasy about Conan’s disappearance,” Lysinka said.
“Indeed,” Fergis said, sounding rather cast down at being understood so easily. “They say they will not go to the Mountain of the Skull tomorrow.”
“We do not know that it is the Mountain of the Skull or any other part of the legend of the Soul of Thanza. And who are ‘they’?”
Before Fergis could even begin a reply, a shrill scream echoed around the rocks. It was a woman’s scream, seeming to come from the sentry post Lysinka had just left.
She thought briefly that it might be a trap, to lure her and Fergis into an ambush. But her feet were already moving of their own will as that thought passed through her mind. By the time it was gone, she was back in sight of the sentry post, with Fergis close behind her. Both had drawn their swords, and this was well, for the Thanza Ranger was standing over Rasha. Blood smeared the rocks about her head, and he was bending to collect her weapons.
Lysinka ran at the man with sword drawn. He promptly put his own blade’s point at Rasha’s throat. Lysinka halted abruptly, but did not sheathe her sword.
“We’ll none of us stay up here as prey for the snakes just to save your bedmate,” the Ranger muttered. “Not your folk, not the Rangers.”
Lysinka was about to reply, knowing that she needed most of all to give Fergis time for some stratagem. For all his piety, his wits worked more swiftly than most people’s, nor did fear of the gods ever make him accept folly or villainy—and this was both.
The words never came out. A large rock flew seemingly from nowhere, striking the man in the forehead. He went limp all over, the sword falling from insensible hands, as he toppled.
Unfortunately, he toppled sideways, landing where the rock dropped sharply away. A single roll, the rattle of dislodged pebbles, and the senseless Ranger plummeted into the night. Lysinka stood as if transfixed, until a distant thump told of the Ranger’s reaching the bottom of the cliff.