by Roland Green
When the dust settled and the remaining torches showed Conan in single-handed battle against six of Akimos’s men, Harphos expected a general rush down the ravine. Instead only Talouf leaped forward. No one followed him, and even the archers held their shots.
Conan had taught Harphos enough for him to know what had to be done. His own honour told him the same.
“Follow me!” Harphos shouted, and drew his short sword as he ran down the ravine. Men who might abandon a Cimmerian would not readily abandon the heir of House Lokhri, or so he hoped.
Harphos did not look behind him once as he plunged down the ravine. If the men would not follow, his eyes on them would not help. It would help even less for him to stumble and fall, to dash out the brains he sometimes doubted he had on the tumbled rocks. Harphos was only near-sighted, not night blind, but he had never tried to run downhill over boulders in a cloud of dust with enemies waiting at the bottom.
Somehow, simple will-power and the fear of making a fool of himself kept his feet under him. He still sighed with relief when he reached level ground. He sighed again, when he heard the scutter and rattle of the men coming down behind him. His swordsmanship might not be put to the test tonight—
Relief made him careless. As he watched the last of Conan’s opponents flee, Harphos’s foot sank into a crack in the rock. Pain shot up his leg as the rock scraped his skin and pressed his ankle bone.
Then Harphos’s mouth gaped, as one of Akimos’s dead men proved not so dead after all. Harphos drew his sword, but never had he expected to face an opponent when he had a foot almost literally rooted to the ground.
Sparks flew and sweat streamed from Harphos as he parried the man’s dagger. By the gods’ favour., the man was hurt and bloody, slowed by wounds and fatigue, and his blade was no longer than Harphos’s.
As the heir of Lokhri fought, he felt the sweat on his skin reach his ankle. He heaved, and as if it had been greased his foot slid free. Akimos’s man lunged in a final desperate effort, then died as Harphos’s sword slid up between his ribs and Conan’s broadsword clove his skull.
Harphos tried to laugh, contrived to smile, and did not faint. “Conan, had that stroke been only a trifle stronger, you would have split my—look out behind you!”
Harphos’s shout had an echo, and the two warnings together made the Cimmerian whirl with inhuman speed. Instead of cutting down the man striking at his exposed back, he kicked him smartly between the legs, then kicked his legs out from under him. The man went down, gasping and writhing.
Harphos recognized one of Conan’s men, whose name he recalled as Douras. A Damaos man, Mekhas, had dropped his sword and was looking in all directions save at Conan.
“What in Mitra’s name—?” Harphos began.
“Listen to him, when he talks,” Conan growled, jabbing a thumb in under Douras’s jaw. The man writhed harder but said nothing.
“Captain Conan,” Mekhas said, barely loud enough to be heard. “I—I thought you were going to slay Harphos next. We were warned against that. Then I saw I had been mistaken. I tried to stop Douras. Then all I could do was shout.”
“Well, I’m grateful enough for that,” Conan said. “I’ll be more grateful if you tell me who warned you. Maybe even grateful enough not to serve you the way I’ll serve Douras.”
Mekhas looked at the ground. Harphos glared at him. “If Conan leaves anything of you, I’ll warn Lady Livia to finish it off. Now—who warned you that Conan might be thinking to kill me?”
“Reza.”
Harphos and the Cimmerian cursed together. “I’m going to geld that son of a sow with a red-hot knife,” Conan growled, when he had done cursing. “That’s one too many times he’s put his nose in where it’s not welcome. Unless—”
He broke off, and Harphos blinked at a sight he had doubted would ever be seen by mortal eyes. The Cimmerian seemed ill at ease. Then Conan laughed. “Perhaps he only thought to save his lady from her own folly, rather than my ambition. If so, then she can geld him.”
Harphos frowned. The Cimmerian no longer seemed ill at ease, but he was talking in riddles, which was hardly better.
“What folly of Livia’s?”
Conan hooked both thumbs into his belt. “Her—call it choice—to lie with me.”
For a moment Harphos felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach, not to mention slapped in the face and pounded on the back. His breath came in gasps. Then he remembered certain things, not least among them the way he had spent the first night at Castle Tebroth snugly wrapped in Shilka’s arms.
Which, he realized, Livia had no doubt arranged, to keep him pleasantly occupied while she kicked Conan’s feet from under him and leaped upon him! Harphos was certain that it had happened thus, and the picture in his mind made him smile, then laugh.
Conan frowned. ‘What in the name of Erlik’s pride is so funny?”
“The idea of my intended wife all but abducting you, Captain. I knew she had great strength of purpose, but not that much. Well, I shall have to say a word or two about it to her.”
The Cimmerian now looked almost bemused. “So you’re not angry?”
Harphos sighed. “Had you sought to hide the whole matter, I might well have suspected you as Reza did. Since you spoke the truth, I have no further quarrel with you.
“My mother will be another matter. She will throw a royal tantrum. But I am past letting her tantrums strike me down, like a chamberpot flung from a high window.
Reza will be still another matter. I do not think he can remain in the service of—”
“If Reza lives out the night, we can settle with him then,” Conan put in. “For now, we spend time talking that we may need to save your—”
A scream that seemed to come from the bottom of a pit of demons interrupted them. Harphos spun to look uphill past the litter of corpses to the mouth of the Caves of Zimgas. Silhouetted against the flickering light stood a woman. Even seeing nothing but the silhouette, Harphos recognized his mother.
“It seems that my mother has saved herself,” he said. He sheathed his sword and plunged uphill, toward where Lady Doris had now fallen on her knees, head bowed and shoulders shaking with sobs or exhaustion.
As Harphos ran, he saw the light in the caves dim, as if something had passed between the light and the mouth.
Between drugs, exhaustion, spells, and pain, Lady Doris remembered little of what passed, the night of her rescue. She certainly never remembered that she owed her life to Lord Skiron.
But that was the truth. Skiron was the first man in the cave to sense the Great Watcher’s approach. By the time he could hear the hiss and slither of its approach, he was moving. His slave already had the bags of magical apparatus on his back, and the sorcerer followed with staff and a phial for renewing the spell on Lady Doris.
As the hissing grew louder, they both began to run. They ran up to Lady Doris’s pallet, and the slave tore the curtains aside while Skiron dragged the lady to her feet. She stared at him, eyes blank and wandering, making no effort to cover herself.
Then she pulled away. “I must stay here. Akimos will be coming to me. He will be here soon.” She actually smiled.
“Akimos is outside, waiting for you there. You will be returning in state with him to Messantia. But you must come swiftly. My lady, please come, now! Come to Akimos!”
As he argued, Skiron heard the Watcher give tongue for the first time, a low rumbling cry. He flung the vial of potion at Lady Doris. It could pass into the body through the skin, if not as swiftly as by the mouth.
Doris ran a finger through the potion trickling down between her breasts, then licked at it. She smiled again.
“I come.” Then she leaped to her feet and ran down toward the mouth of the cave, quickly outstripping even Skiron.
Conan saw half a dozen men appear at the mouth of the Caves of Zimgas just as Harphos reached his mother. He shouted a warning, but the men seemed more intent on flight than on attack. They ran past Harphos like rabbits fleei
ng a wolf, saw Conan and his men below, and turned sharply to either side.
“After those men!” Conan roared. “If they escape, I’ll roast the ones who let them for breakfast!” He was almost certain, but did not care to say aloud, that one of the fleeing men was Skiron. If the sorcerer still had any spells at his command—
Then thoughts of merely human opponents vanished from Conan’s mind, as the Great Watcher reached the mouth of the caves.
Some men who saw it fainted. Others knelt, to pray or spew. Some merely stood as if their senses and limbs were all alike numb. Few could describe what they saw, other than that it was a translucent grey, shot with flowing lighter patches of crimson and a sickly dark gold.
If Harphos had been one of those men whose wits fled, he and his mother would have died on the spot. As it was, he saw the Watcher thrusting forward a tentacle ending in fanged jaws. He slashed at the jaws, chopped out a piece, saw it fly through the air—then land and begin crawling back toward the main body.
Yet the Watcher seemed to be capable of feeling pain, or at least sensing danger in its path. It drew back the tentacle, thrust out four more shorter ones covered with suckers, but did not itself advance. This gave Harphos time to half lead, half drag, and at the end mostly carry his mother out of danger.
At least for the moment. The Watcher took long enough to gather its strength for Conan to rally his men. They were mostly on their feet, alert, and with weapons in hand by the time the Watcher surged out into the open.
As it did, it flung part of itself well ahead and downhill. The mass of grey slime landed on top of two men, and their screams died swiftly as it absorbed them. As it did, horrified watchers saw it turn crimson with their blood and flesh—then sprout legs, a tail, and a head with more teeth than a school of sharks.
Before this monstrosity could move, though, Conan was up with it. His sword flashed in the light of the campfire, slashing down with a stroke that might have cloven a mountain to its roots. Half the head sheered off and flew through the air. It began crawling back toward the legged isolate, then sensed the Watcher itself uphill. It turned, careless of its path—and crawled over a hot ember from the scattered campfire of Akimos’s men.
Instantly a high-pitched scream tore at everyone’s ears. Conan saw the isolate jerking and twisting as smoke streamed out from under it. Seizing a burning brand in his free hand, he dashed forward and slashed at the isolate’s back with his sword. It was like slashing at a sea turtle’s shell, but the Cimmerian’s strength was adequate to the purpose. The hard skin of the isolate’s back gaped, and Conan thrust the brand into it.
Smoke poured up, and the scream came again, rising until even Conan wanted to clap his hands over his ears to shut out the sound of a world going mad. The isolate swelled up, until the skin began to crack, then burst like a gigantic pustule. Foul-smelling ichor and smoking fragments of skin rained down over the camp, but Conan’s men ignored them.
They had seen that the Watcher was not invincible, and even how it might be bested. They ran to snatch up brands. Those who reached the camp fires too late plucked handfuls of dry grass and used their flint and steel, or searched the tents for anything else that might bum.
Harphos cupped his hands and shouted, “Well done, Captain Conan! It stands to reason that there had to be some way of destroying those creatures without sorcery!”
Conan nodded. He had to admit that the ancient sorcerers who created the Watchers showed a trifle more foresight than most of their breed. Certainly more than Skiron, who had waked this monster with all the caution of a man building fires in a tinder-dry forest!
The Great Watcher sensed the isolate’s destruction, but it had memories of isolates being destroyed before, without danger to itself. This was a situation that demanded more knowledge before a decision could be taken either to fight or to withdraw. The way to that knowledge seemed to lie forward.
So the Great Watcher surged entirely out of the cave, and onto the open hillside. Confronted with its full horror, some men once again lost command of themselves. Some even turned to flee, but Harphos stood in their path, his mother on one arm and his short sword in the other hand.
“If you aren’t afraid of dishonour, you’d best be afraid of me!” he snarled, and for that moment he looked as fierce and formidable as Conan himself. The would-be fugitives remembered themselves, and turned back to join their comrades.
From up the hill, arrows now whistled down into the Watcher. The archers had marched to the sound of the fight and were now shooting as best they could in the poor light, trying for anything that looked like an eye or a mouth.
“Fire arrows!” Conan roared, as loud as the Watcher itself. “Use fire arrows if you have them! If you touch fire to the thing, it bums like a haystack!”
Whether the archers heard him or not, Conan had no time to consider. His shouts drew the Watcher’s attention, and it surged toward him, sprouting twenty stubby legs ending in five-clawed feet to speed its movements. With the slope to aid it, the Watcher came down on Conan so fast that three fanged heads were looping toward him on long necks before he realized it.
His speed saved him, though, his speed and a House Damaos man who ran in and thrust a spear deep into the nearest neck. The head stopped, and the man twisted the spear in the wound before withdrawing it.
Then a second man ran in as the neck writhed, darted aside from the snapping jaws, and thrust a burning brand into the wound.
The Watcher screamed from two mouths as the third head flew off in an eruption of smoke and stomach-turning fragments. The truncated neck writhed more frenziedly than ever, but the other two heads still had life, will, and sharp teeth. Conan saw one head seize a man, lift him high, then shake the life out of him and start absorbing him.
One of Conan’s men ran in against a second head, wielding a tulwar with a strength almost equal to the Cimmerian’s. The head flew into the air and landed on a man standing by the campfire, lighting an improvised torch. Both fell into the fire. The man screamed at the pain of burns and teeth sinking into his flesh, then the head vanished in a vast cloud of foul green smoke. A moment later the man lurched to his feet, scorched and bloody but cursing too furiously to be mortally hurt.
The Great Watcher now seemed bemused, even wary, at the vigour of its enemies. But Conan doubted that it had been seriously hurt. He wanted to alter that before it found some new method of attack less vulnerable than those fanged heads.
By now the men who had foraged in Akimos’s camp were coming back, and Conan saw two of them carrying straw pallets. He quickly snatched up a fresh brand, summoned the pallet-bearers, and rallied a couple of spearmen. Then he led the whole party forward.
Conan’s broadsword whistled, and the horny covering over the stump of one neck gaped open. The two spearmen lifted the pallets on the points of their spears, and Conan thrust the burning brand deep into the straw.
Then all three together heaved, ramming the pallet into the Great Watcher’s wound like a cork into a bottle.
Conan said afterward that the end of all creation might well be quieter than the end of the Great Watcher. No man could stand close by and hear anything but the death-cry that began as a hiss and ended as a screaming roar.
Nor could anyone endure the smoke and stench that poured out as the Great Watcher exploded. Few cared to risk being struck down by razor-sharp fragments of skin the size of platters, or spattered with smoking ichor.
As one man, Conan and his party ran downhill and remained there until the last life had departed from the Great Watcher. Conan was prodding smoking fragments with the tip of his sword when he saw Harphos making his way up to join him. The young man was naked save for boots, loinguard, and slime-dripping shorts word.
“How fares Lady Doris?” the Cimmerian asked.
“Not well,” Harphos said. “I have garbed her in my tunic and salved the worst of her hurts. But she will need a litter, and perhaps more. She cries out for Akimos, as a man dying of thirst cries
out for water.” The two men had no need to use the word “sorcery.”
“Well, then, let us go find Lord Akimos,” Conan said, sheathing his sword. “Oris spoke of more than one Watcher. If there’s another about, perhaps we can feed Lord Akimos to it.”
“Gods, Conan, have you no mercy? To poison even such a creature as a Watcher—”
“Will save my men and yours, as well as the villagers hereabouts.” Conan was in no humour for jests.
“Then I will see about the men who are fit to walk, if you can contrive a litter.”
It had been some time since Conan gave Harphos the formal Argossean bow, but now he did and not only because it was his “place.” Tonight was finishing the work of turning Lady Doris’s boy Harphos into a man and lord of House Lokhri—not to mention a fit match for Lady Livia.
XIX
Akimos started as Partab loomed out of the darkness. “Only I, lord.”
So the Vendhyan swine knew that the lord of House Peram was uneasy! How long before all the men before Castle Tebroth knew it?
“Any news from the sentries?”
“They have heard sounds that might be the villagers moving about, wild cattle, deer, or many other things.” “Curse the city-bred fools!”
But if he had gone out to hire men wise in the ways of the country, his plans would quickly have been no secret. Then he would likely enough not have even come far enough to be facing defeat now in the mountains.
“The gods may do so in their own good time. For ourselves, I suggest that we strengthen the sentries.” Akimos frowned. He had lost close upon a third of his strength in the desperate battle in the gateway. That would have been a small price to pay for victory and possession of Livia. But instead the wench had fought bare from crown to toes and turned the tide of the battle, and now she was there sitting on that lovely arse and mocking him—!