Voices broke into Conan's study of the ground, coming up behind him.
"”old crone's fancies," came in Farad's voice.
"Old crone? Is that what you see when you look at me?" That could only be Omyela.
"With my eyes, yes. We Afghulis are not much for magic."
"Hmmp. We call that 'stone-brained' among my folk. I see a stone-brained young warrior who loves his chief's woman."
Only Farad's trying to choke back an angry retort broke the ensuing silence. That, and Conan's swift feet as he hurried back to the others.
"What Bethina is to me, and I to her, and what Farad may be toward both of us, is not for spreading on the desert wind like camel-stink," Conan said sharply. He did not look at either Omyela or Farad, but saw out of the corner of his eye that both took the chiding to heart.
"Now, Omyela, you had some”what Farad called by a rude name”to speak of to me? True?"
The old woman inclined her head with almost regal grace. "That is so, Cimmerian. My 'fancies' tell me where lies the Valley of the Mists."
That silenced even Farad, and the two men listened with great attention as Omyela explained. Conan had no more love for sorcery than ever, but in his years of adventuring, magic-wielders had sometimes been more help than hindrance. Omyela was looking to be one such.
He hoped she was. The Kezankian Mountains were full of valleys, some known only to the mountain folk who lived in or about them, others hardly visited at all by mortal men. It would take longer than they could afford, climbing among the peaks and peering into each valley”and perhaps learning that they had found the Valley of the Mists when its witch-Lady hurled her magic at them.
"You say you have sensed what is both alive and dead, and can guide us to it?" Conan said, by way of prodding Omyela into brevity.
"Yes, with some help," Omyela said. "One of those who goes to the valley must be a woman. What I will be using is woman's magic."
Farad and Conan looked at each other, then at Omyela. Neither could imagine her climbing up mountains and down into valleys where both armed warriors and potent spells awaited. Neither could doubt that the woman she meant to send against those perils was Bethina.
Fortunately for the peace of the quest, neither of them said a word against it. They knew Bethina”and a moment later she appeared from behind a rock, as if Omyela had conjured her out of the air.
Farad and Conan could only exchange looks again, and then listen as Omyela finished her explanation of how to fight the menace of the Valley of the Mists.
"I will wear one amulet, Bethina the other. All that either of us knows, the other will know too. My power can pass into Bethina, so if she is with you, it will be as if I were."
"You say that you have sensed the Mist, and from that sensing, you know where the Valley lies," Conan said. "What of the Mist sensing you, and where you are?"
"The Mist does not yet have that power by itself," Omyela said”rather complacently, Conan thought. He hoped Omyela would not be numbered among those adepts of sorcery who had trusted old knowledge too much when they faced new foes. That was a bad habit among the breed, he'd discovered, and one reason why they were often no match for a well-taught warrior.
"The Lady of the Mists has that power, if she chooses to wield it,"
Omyela continued. "But I have not sensed her using it. One wonders if her power weakens, or if she has grown lazy in guarding herself and her valley."
"The more she has, the better for us," Farad said. "A witch is a foe I'll gladly take when her back is turned."
"Ah, that may be your hope," Omyela said. "But it should not be. The less the Lady of the Mists binds her creation, the more it will seek power for itself. The more power it finds, the wider it can spread, feeding as it comes. If it grows enough, the Mist will be the doom of all who face it."
Silence followed, broken only by the piping of the wind among distant peaks, and by a bird cry that to Conan's ears did not sound quite natural.
Conan divided his band before they plunged into the Kezankians on the trail of the Valley of the Mists. This was not much to his liking”dividing your strength just before you closed with the enemy was no way to gain victory. But if one could neither take old Omyela into the high mountains nor safely leave her alone, what else was a man to do?
Nor was it much to the liking of the men left behind. Tales of the valley's warrior women had grown with the retelling, like mushrooms in the dark, and every man dreamed of grappling a Maiden of the Mists.
Conan came down on those dreams with a heavy boot. "If they're coming at you with swords, use yours and not some other weapon, or you'll be vulture-fodder. I won't sing a death-song for you, either. I've no breath to waste on fools.
"If they don't fight, they're lawful prisoners and they'll have lawful treatment from any man who wants to keep his head on his shoulders."
The Cimmerian's demeanor was so ferocious that the men immediately swore potent oaths to do as he wished. He doubted all of them swore without some inward doubts, but that was why his Afghulis were going with him. They sometimes wondered at Cimmerian ways, but they always obeyed the chief to whom they were blood-sworn. They would cheerfully skewer any of Bethina's tribesfolk who went against their chief's command.
Surprisingly, Omyela herself was none too pleased at a division of the band intended to protect her. "I can deal with any foe likely to come upon me quite well without you keeping a dozen good warriors idling,"
she snapped.
"How?" he asked. "By making yourself invisible?"
"It is within my powers to do that," Omyela said, complacently. "Also, guards cannot protect me if the Lady of the Mists strikes at me with her magic. They can only be fresh prey for her."
"Yes, but if you are hiding from loosefeet, can you also fight the Lady? How many spells can you cast at once, Omyela?"
"Enough."
"I think not, lady."
"Who are you to tell me the extent of my powers?"
"Someone who has come alive out of battles with a good many sorcerers because they thought they could do everything. The one thing they could not do allowed me to escape, sometimes to kill them into the bargain.
"You've spoken of this Mist being the doom of us all. If you can't fight it, another dozen or score or ten score men in the mountains won't help. If you can
Omyela held up a hand. "Indeed, I see that Bethina sings the praises of your wisdom with good reason. Also other aspects of you. Have you thought of wedding her?"
A dagger thrust at his ribs could hardly have surprised the Cimmerian more. "I have not."
"Well that you should do so, Cimmerian. If she had a consort of your prowess in battle, those who follow her brother would swiftly leave his banners. Her father would have a son worthy of him, and in time the Ekinari a chief worthy of them."
"I will think on it, Omyela. But first, let all of us come back down the mountains alive."
"There is that, to be sure."
Conan left Omyela hoping that she would not remember this conversation, but fearing otherwise. She had weighty reasons behind her, but the Cimmerian had his own as well.
Plainly, the first was Farad's regard for Bethina and hers for him.
Wedding her would be taking another man's woman, and a surer way to make enemies, neither gods nor men had yet devised.
The second was the Turanian price on Conan's head. Yezdigerd would never tolerate seeing a desert tribe so close to his borders under the chieftainship of an enemy of Turan.
The last was Doiran's followers. Not all of them would turn their coats, nor would all of the rest flee. Too many would remain within stabbing distance of the new chief for Conan ever to take easy sleep”or for Bethina and her kin to do so, either.
It would have been less perilous to stay in Afghulistan, and there was an end to the matter!
The first person the Mist fed on of its own will was a half-witted girl”born so, not turned into one of the Lady's creatures by magic. She had the
wits to wield a small knife, and to avoid falling from high places, so she was often sent up the sides of the valley to cut brush for the cookfires.
She had done her work so well in days gone by that she had cleared the brush from all the lower slopes in the area given to her. So she climbed higher than ever, holding her knife between her teeth”her single garment had no belt or pockets.
She finally ended her climb on a ledge where several bushes were growing. She cut all the branches that were thin enough for her knife, then looked around for more before she bundled them up to carry back down the hill.
In a crack in the rock she saw what looked like another bush growing, with yellow berries and thin branches that would cut easily. She had to reach very far in to even touch the branches, and she soon realized that she would not in truth be able to cut them easily.
She was trying to decide what to do next, and meanwhile reaching in over and over again, when her fingers touched something cold. It felt as cold as ice or springwater, but it was not solid or liquid. It felt like a wind blowing on her fingers.
Then her fingers began to hurt. The pain grew so fierce that she cried out. She tried to pull her hand out, to see if her fingers were all right. But the crack in the rock seemed to be holding not just her hand now, but her whole arm.
Then the cold covered the arm, and after it came more pain. This time she screamed loud enough to raise echoes, and pulled with all her strength, trying to free herself.
It was useless. No one heard her screams, thinking they were bird cries. She could not pull free, and a moment later the Mist found a blood vessel and darted up through it to the girl's brain. The life went out of her eyes, although she did not fall, but remained sitting while her body slowly shrank in on itself, turning blue, until nothing remained but a trifle of powder to fall to the ground or blow away on the breeze.
The girl was the first. She would not be the last.
Conan and Bethina were once again well ahead of the rest of their band.
But there was no water in sight, let alone pools for bathing or beds of lichen for taking their pleasure.
Still, Conan could not help admiring her lithe form, well displayed in snug trousers and short coat, as she clambered up the rocks beside him.
Bethina was not for him, and indeed no woman could be, as long as he was a rover”and that might mean he would die unwed, even if he lived long enough that his old playmates in Cimmeria were graybearded grandsires.
But there were women with whom he could live in as much peace as man and woman could expect, and Bethina was of that breed.
A sound Conan could not identify made him halt and raise a hand for silence. Bethina was as good a scout as any the Cimmerian had seen in a regular host, ready to obey his signals and growing more skilled each day in hiding herself. It did not hurt that her clothes were a grayish-brown that blended with the rocks so that if she lay still, one could almost tread on her without seeing her.
The sound came again. It was the chink of metal on stone, not a sound natural to these mountains or any other. Conan's band was almost on the border of the land where the Valley of the Mist's Khorajan allies and their bandit mercenaries prowled. A battle now could give warning enough to raise defenses that neither Conan's blade nor Omyela's magic could breach.
Conan crouched, listening intently, trying to put a direction to the sound. It seemed that it might be from behind him, but that was unlikely. Those immediately behind him were his Afghulis, more cat-footed on rocky slopes than even the Cimmerian himself.
He decided to go to ground himself and wait for the noisemaker to reveal himself. If it was an enemy trying to slip up on the Cimmerian through the Afghulis, he had only moments to live. Conan would not have to draw a blade before his followers dealt with the man”and in the deadly silence that helped make the Afghulis such respected foes and their rugged homeland free of foreign enemies in most years.
Silence came to the mountainside. Conan would have sworn that even the birds and the winds were silent. He could hear his own breathing and, just barely, Bethina's. But of he who had made that revealing noise, there was no further sign.
All at once there was more noise, and from high above. Conan shifted his position to look uphill, and saw a pack train ambling across the slope. Conan counted twelve pack mules and six guards on foot, all with bows and short swords of no particular origin” the sort of weapons a mercenary might pick up in the bazaars of fifty different cities.
But their garb was not that of any tribe, and in this part of the mountains that made them enemies.
Their distance and their bows also made them enemies well out of reach.
Climbing up against their archery would be slow work and bring quick death to many of those who tried it, besides giving the alarm. Conan braced himself against a rock and slowly rose to his feet, invisible from above but hopefully not so from below.
He was raising his arms in the signal for stillness and silence when a man leapt from the rocks to his right. Conan had one moment to recognize the man whom he'd punished for being slow to swear obedience.
Then the man hurled himself at the Cimmerian, dagger in hand, and Conan was fighting for his life.
The man was slighter and shorter than he, but had surprise on his side and the strength and agility of a leopard, making him no mean foe even for one of the Cimmerian's prowess.
The man's rush drove Conan back against the rock, and his head cracked hard against it. This slowed his drawing his own blade, so that the man slashed at his wrist and made it fall. Conan hammered a fist into the man's face, or at least so aimed it, but the man bobbed aside and the blow only struck his shoulder.
That was still enough to knock him back, but he sprang up again like a child's weighted toy. Now Bethina closed from Conan's left, and he frantically gestured for her to stand clear. It was not in him to shout yet, although he feared that a deaf man in the pack train could already have heard the fight.
The man stamped a foot on Conan's blade, at the same time pivoting on the foot and kicking at the Cimmerian's groin. Conan rode with the kick, taking it on his hip, and picked up his sword, which gave him the edge in reach.
But that also opened the distance between him and his opponent. Before the Cimmerian could strike again, the man leapt at Bethina.
"Doiran is chief!" the man screamed, and the dagger flashed down.
It never reached Bethina, and only partly because she fell and rolled out from under its slash. It still would have torn her open, except that another dagger suddenly blossomed in the back of the man's neck.
He stiffened, his own point wavered, blood gushed from his mouth, and he fell almost on top of Bethina.
Farad stepped out of the rocks, a second dagger held by the point in his hand and a grim look on his face. His face grew grimmer still as he saw Bethina, lying still and blood-spattered almost within reach of the would-be assassin.
Then he stopped in midstride, as Bethina leaped to her feet and Conan laughed. A moment later Farad's face was that of a man being strangled and thoroughly enjoying the process, as Bethina wrapped her arms around him and clung to him so tightly that her feet barely touched the ground.
"Did you devise this scheme to dazzle this young lady?" Conan growled, but with a grin.
Farad looked as if he'd been slapped, and Bethina glared at the Cimmerian.
"This is the first I knew of either man's presence, and much good yours did me!" Then she shook her head. "Forgive me, Conan. This”I did not think we might have my brother's spies among us."
"I did," Farad said, regaining his voice. "But I could not be sure. If I simply made the man disappear some night, his tribesfolk would take it ill. So I trusted to my tracking skills, to follow the man until he did some mischief."
"It would not have hurt if you'd followed him a trifle closer," Conan said, holding up his bloody left wrist. "You might have stopped him before he did this, or even made a sound. There was a pack train uphill, and if they're not
alert now, I'm a Stygian!"
Farad quickly begged his chief's pardon and went to see what the pack train had done. Not much to Conan's surprise, the Afghuli reported that they had dashed off fast enough for at least two mules to fall.
They were barely in sight to the west, and not slackening their speed.
"As well that they had orders to guard the mules and not fight," Conan said, "or we'd have had arrows about our ears and maybe in other places before this. But the alarm will be up."
"Should I go up and pick over the fallen mules? They may tell us something
"And what's to tell you that the guards haven't left an archer behind just to pick off the curious? We can't lose you, Farad. We need you to lead in my place if the next would-be assassin aims his steel better."
Farad and Bethina looked at one another, then Farad cleared his throat.
"My chief. Suppose that we pretend this one did aim well? If they have not seen you alive after the fight, how can they know you are not dead?"
"Yes," Bethina added. "We can make a great mourning for you, and pretend to build a cairn."
"I don't mind that," Conan said, "as long as you don't actually put me under it alive. But”do I smell a ruse?"
Farad nodded. "You said yourself that the alarm is now given. But if they think we are defeated, despairing, about to withdraw, they will be less alert. They may even come down to attack us, on our own ground."
"Farad," Conan said. "When we are done with misty Ladies and their valleys, we shall return to Afghulistan. There I will support you for chief of the whole people!"
"If you do, you go alone," Bethina snapped. "I will not perch on a mountain like a rock-ape
"You say this of Afghulistan, when your people roam the desert from well to well, not staying under a roof three nights out of the year?"
"Better than have the roofs fall in on us when
The Conan Compendium Page 561