When he could see clearly again, the Transformed had ceased their advance.
Instead they huddled together, glaring in all directions. Some snatched arrows from their hides, others bit their taloned hands and whimpered like starving dogs.
"I have turned the fear back against them," Illyana cried exultantly. "I did not think to do this!"
"Well, start thinking what comes next!" Conan shouted. "Make them run around in
circles until they're all too dizzy to fight, for all I care!"
Raihna sent her last two arrows into the motionless target. One struck a Transformed in the eye. His dying scream made Conan's flesh leap on his bones.
Not all the fear was returning to the Transformed!
The light diminished, until it flowed from a single source, glimmering like a giant bonfire behind the Transformed. It seemed that the Master of the Jewel had indeed come forth.
"Back, and they will follow!" Illyana cried.
Conan turned to see her fleeing with a doe's grace and swiftness, breasting the slope with ease. Was the Jewel giving her strength and speed, and if so at what price?
Meanwhile, the Transformed were rallying and starting across the valley, in no particular order but at a good pace. Even the wounded ones moved as fast as a man could walk.
Their carrion reek marched ahead of them. So did a hideous cacophony of hisses, growls, whimpers, clawed feet on stones, even belches and gulpings.
Conan had seen more than his share of unclean magic in his life, but the Transformed were a whole new order of nightmare. Once more he knew he might not easily find it in him to give Eremius a clean death.
Then he had to think about his own death and how to prevent it. His comrades were all on their way up the slope. Two of the Transformed hurled themselves forward. Perhaps they hoped to overtake Bora or Massouf.
Instead, they faced Conan. He hewed at a hand, slashing deep into the webbing
between the fingers. Whirling, he slashed the second Transformed across the face, taking its sight. A thrust between the ribs with his dagger reached vital organs.
Conan had to leap backward to avoid the grip of the first Transformed. With sword and dagger at the guard, he watched it stop and stand over its fallen comrade. Then it knelt beside the fallen, trying to stanch the blood from the belly wound and the ruined face.
So the Transformed were not lower than the beasts. Conan thought no better of Master Eremius, but he vowed to give the Transformed warriors' deaths whenever possible.
Conan retreated again. He had nearly overtaken his comrades before the Transformed started mounting the slope. Bora was casting back and forth like a dog for a trail. "I smell a cave around here somewhere."
"If you smell it, perhaps the Transformed are already at home," Conan said. "I doubt if they will welcome us to dinner."
"No. For dinner, perhaps," Massouf said. He was limping but held his spear jauntily on one shoulder.
"There it is!" Bora shouted. He pointed uphill to the right. Conan had just time to see a dark mouth, before the Transformed broke into a run.
Light from both Jewels at once seared Conan's eyes. Dimly, he saw Massouf seemingly turned to a statue of jade. Even his eyes glowed green, as though he had become a creature of the Jewel.
Had he in truth become one? Were the Jewels reaching out for others besides
their wearers?
Those uneasy thoughts had barely left Conan's mind when Massouf stripped off his quiver and bow, tossing them to Conan. The Cimmerian caught mem as Massouf charged downhill toward the Transformed.
"Crom!"
The Transformed were giving way before Massouf's charge. They hissed and cringed and cried as if Massouf had been a whole army.
Massouf actually contrived to spit one of the Transformed like a chicken, before they regained their courage. A moment of clawing and trampling, and Massouf was gone.
From first to last, he had not made a sound.
Conan stormed up the slope, to where Illyana stood before the cave mouth. Raihna was already piling stones to narrow it "Conan!" the hill boy cried. "There will be room inside for me to use my sling.
If you will stand to either―"
"Did you kill Massouf?" Conan roared.
Illyana had been drawing off her boots. Now she flinched and stood barefoot, a boot in either hand.
"Did you? Answer me, woman!"
"Conan, I did not command him. I heard no command from the Jewels. I can only say that under the spell cast, the Transformed might be more easily frightened."
"Massouf couldn't have known that!"
"I may have told him without remembering it. Or―"
"Or the Jewels might have told him," Conan finished for her.
Illyana shook her head, as if beset by stinging insects. Suddenly she flung herself into Conan's arms.
"I beg you, Conan. Believe me, that I meant Massouf no harm. He came here seeking death and found it."
That at least was the truth, and for the moment Conan was ready to be content with it. Not that he had any choice, either. The Transformed were halfway up the hill, some still gnawing fragments of Massouf.
Illyana contemplated them, all her unease of a moment before gone. "Good. We have them closing swiftly. If we can hold until they have closed just a trifle more―"
"And how long will that be?" Conan asked.
Illyana stripped off her tunic and waved it like a flag. "Look, Eremius. Look and dream, but know that you will die before you touch!"
"Haw long?"
"I do not know," Illyana said. Then she ran toward the cave, with Conan at her heels.
Twenty-one CONAN LOWERED A rock the size of a newborn calf onto the pile in the cave mouth.
Then he stepped back, dusting off his hands and looking into the cave for any
more loose stones.
He had all the light he could wish, pouring from Illyana's Jewel. Unclothed save for the Jewel, the sorceress stood forty paces inside the cave, chanting in an unknown tongue. The world beyond her duel with Eremius might have ceased to exist.
Conan saw no more stones worth adding to their barricade. He was about to tell Raihna when a stone went wheeet between them. Conan whirled, glaring at Bora.
The boy was reloading his sling and grinning. "As I said, there is room to send a stone between you."
"Warn us the next time, you young―"
"Captain, I might not be able to warn you. What if you and Raihna are close-grappled with the Transformed? Best you trust me to hit them and not you."
Conan couldn't help laughing. The boy was right, of course. And anyone who could grin like that, in what might indeed be his last minutes of life―"Bora, perhaps you shouldn't join the army after all. In five years, you would be giving me orders!"
"They would never make a hillman―" Bora began soberly. Raihna's shout interrupted him.
"Here they come!"
Conan sprang to his post by the barricade. Eremius had taken longer than they expected to form up his creations for battle. What Illyana had done with that time, Conan did not know. He and Raihna had narrowed the cave mouth so that only two or three of the Transformed could attack at once. He had also placed a few
throwing stones ready to hand.
The Transformed stormed up the hill in two ragged lines. At Raihna's signal Bora sent a stone hurtling low through the cave mouth. It struck a Transformed in the chest, without so much as knocking him down. Conan flung a fist-sized stone. He aimed for eyes and struck a forehead. Again the Transformed did not even fall.
It howled in rage and pain and seemed to climb faster.
"I think we have the pick of the Transformed coming up," Conan said.
"The pick of Bossonia and Cimmeria stand here," Raihna replied. She tossed her head. The Jewel-light shimmered on her hair as it flowed about her shoulders.
Then she tossed her sword and caught it by the hilt.
A Transformed flung a stone. It drove chips and dust from the barricade into Conan's fac
e. As he blinked, Bora replied. The slingstone struck a Transformed in the knee, hard enough to leave it limping.
Then the spearhead of the attack reached the defenders. Conan and Raihna had practiced together since the return to Fort Zheman. Now Conan's training in the rude school of surviving and Raihna's training from Master Barathres merged as easily as their bodies did in love.
Conan feinted high to draw the attention of a Transformed upward. His sword crashed into a scaly arm. That upraised arm left an armpit exposed. Raihna's dagger leaped upward into the armpit, finding the expected weak spot where the scales were thin to allow free movement.
The Transformed reeled back, holding a crippled arm. A human would have been dead, and this one at least was out of the fight.
Another Transformed gripped the top of the barricade. Conan hewed at the nearest hand, three, four, five cuts, as if chopping firewood with his sword. At the fifth stroke, the hand flopped limply. At the sixth it fell off entirely, landing on Conan's side of the barricade. Reeking blood sprayed into Conan's face, neither looking nor smelling anything like human gore. The Transformed's howls echoed around the cave.
Conan's fight against the climbing Transformed left Raihna to hold the opening single-handed. Two Transformed who came at her jammed in the opening, letting her slash and thrust until they reeled away bloody and daunted. The next enemy was swifter.
Conan turned to find Raihna in the clutches of a Transformed, being drawn toward it. She had blinded it and thrust deep into its chest, without reaching its unnatural life. The talons were already gashing her flesh. The fangs would reach her throat before the creature died.
They had not done so, when Conan's sword came down across the bridge of the creature's nose. Under the scale armor, the bones there were still thin enough to be vulnerable. Shattering under the Cimmerian's sword, they drove splinters into the Transformed's brain. It convulsed, arching backward. Raihria leaped free, kicking out. The Transformed crashed into an approaching comrade. Both went down.
Raihna stripped off her tunic, used it to roughly wipe her oozing wounds, then tossed it aside. Bare to the waist, she raised her weapons again.
"You won't distract them that way," Conan said, laughing. "You might distract
Bora, though."
Bora certainly seemed not to mind fighting in the presence of two splendid and nearly unclothed women. His eye for targets was still keener than his eye for the women. As the Transformed knocked down by the latest kill struggled to its feet, a stone caught it in the eye. The stone was sharp and reached the brain.
The Transformed fell, kicked wildly, but did not rise. Other Transformed held back until the kicking ceased.
"That's five down or out against your scratches and tunic," Conan said. "How many left?"
"Oh, not more than forty or so."
"Then we should be finished by breakfast."
"Yes, but whose breakfast?"
With howls and scrabbling feet, the Transformed came on again.
Eremius suspected that his face was streaming sweat, as if he had been in a steam bath. He knew that pain racked his joints so that it needed real effort to stand.
Nearly all his magic was pouring into the duel with Illyana. The little he could spare for the Transformed was barely enough to keep them attacking without turning on one another. Those who took wounds or lost their courage had to do without his help.
This should not be. It could not be, unless Illyana had become greater than he.
That was impossible. She did not have it in her to become so.
Eremius turned against Illyana even the little magic he was sparing to ease the pain in his joints. He almost cried out, like a man on the rack. He eased his pain with the thought that this addition of strength might be enough to let him try piercing the veil around Illyana's Jewel.
He tried and failed.
Only after he abandoned the effort, when he could barely stand, did he realize that the failure had told him what he wanted to know. Illyana's Jewel was utterly in harmony with her, defending both her and itself against him. How had she achieved this harmony?
Eremius thought he knew the answer. When he allowed himself to contemplate it, he knew fear as well, for the first time in many years.
Both Conan and Raihna were bleeding from a dozen minor wounds. Their muscles twitched and ached, their breaths rasped, and neither of them had enough intact clothing to garb a tavern dancer.
They fought on, because the Transformed did so. Illyana chanted and the Jewel-light danced and flickered. Bora's sling flung stone after stone, always swiftly, often with effect.
It was still mostly Conan's fight and Raihna's. Neither any longer kept count of the Transformed maimed or slain. Neither kept count of the times they had saved the other's life.
These matters were of small importance, compared with the oncoming Transformed.
There had to be an end of them, to be sure, but would that end come before Conan
and Raihna reached the end of their strength?
Already Raihna's dagger was blunted from thrusting through scales, and her sword was kinked. Conan's sword showed as many nicks as if he had been chopping wood with it. They might soon lose the power to harm the Transformed even if they still possessed the strength.
It seemed to Conan that the Transformed were somewhat thinner on the ground. It also seemed that the intervals between attacks were growing longer. It was not impossible that the tide of battle was flowing their way.
Would it flow fast enough? They could still lose everything, if the Transformed broke through in sufficient strength to slay Illyana.
Another Transformed―no, two of them―charged the opening. Conan dashed the sweat from his eyes. Matters were not well, when he could hardly count the number of his opponents!
The Transformed facing Conan bore several wounds and an arrow, relics of previous exchanges. It stumbled against the barricade, flinging all its more-than-human weight against the stones. One of them shifted, then another.
With a rattle and a crash, the barricade subsided in a cloud of dust. The second Transformed leaped through the dust. Raihna met him with a desperate lunge. Her sword bent almost double. Conan hewed at the Transformed's neck, but it had the speed to elude him. It leaped between the two defenders, shrugged off a stone from Bora's sling, and lunged at Illyana.
The talons were only an arm's length from the sorceress when she leaped up and back. Conan would have sworn that she floated into the air. He did not doubt
what he saw leaping from the Jewel―emerald fire, a spearthrust of eye-searing light.
It struck the Transformed. One claw raked Illyana's shoulder, without drawing blood. Then the flesh was boiling off the Transformed's bones, like stew in an untended pot. A wave of indescribable stench swept over Conan, making him blink and reel. When he saw clearly again, only smoking bones on the cave floor remained of the Transformed.
Illyana stood, fingering a shoulder that Conan knew should have been gaping nearly to the bone. The smooth flesh was unmarred. Unbidden and unwelcome, the thought of how he had held that flesh close to him entered his mind.
As if she shared the thought, Illyana smiled.
"I should not have been able to do that. The Jewels―" Whatever she might have wanted to say about the Jewels went unuttered. Instead her face turned grim. "I do not know how often I can do that. I can certainly do it often enough to let you and Raihna attack."
"With what?" the swordswoman exclaimed, holding out her crippled weapons.
Illyana seemed uncaring. "Eremius has drawn closer and the Transformed are weaker. If you attack now, with Bora and me guarding your backs, you may slay Eremius. The second Jewel will come to us. Victory will be ours."
Conan wanted to shake the sorceress. "We'll win no victory with blades too dull to cut butter!"
For the first time, Illyana seemed to notice the weapons in her friends' hands.
Her eyes clouded for a moment. Then she rested a hand on Conan's
sword,
stretching out the other with fingers spread so it touched both Raihna's sword and dagger.
Conan fought the urge to snatch his blade out of Illyana's hands. Sorcery had been too close for too long already. To fight with an ensorceled blade―Illyana chanted, and Raihna's sword straightened. The nicks vanished from the edge of Conan's sword. A point returned to her dagger. Bright sharp edges gleamed on all of them.
"Crom!"
The Cimmerian god was not one to answer prayers or hear them with patience. For once in his life Conan almost regretted this.
Conan raised his sword, testing the balance and sighting along the magically-restored edge. It seemed as good as new, Ensorceled or not, it was also the only weapon at hand.
He still felt nearly as much fear of Illyana as of the Transformed when he led Raihna out of the cave.
Eremius struggled to understand what had come to pass in the cave. Illyana lived and the Transformed had died in a way that even the power of her Jewel should not have allowed.
He abandoned the struggle when the Cimmerian burst from the cave. Understanding he did not need, when life itself was in peril. Withdrawing his power from the duel against Illyana, he sought to shield, then rally the Transformed.
For a moment he thought he had succeeded. Emerald fire blazed along the thin
line of the Transformed. Two were not swift enough to leap clear; the flesh flew from their bones amid howls.
The other Transformed recoiled at those howls. They did not recoil far. They saw that the fire held their enemies away from them, and began to regain their courage. Eremius cast his thoughts at them furiously, forming them into a solid mass, then urging them forward.
They were approaching the line of fire when Illyana appeared at the mouth of the cave. Eremius's thoughts leaped from battle to her awesome beauty, every bit of it revealed to him.
A moment later, he saw his doom revealed as well. Illyana raised a hand, and the line of fire vanished. She gripped Bora's arm with the other hand, then let him wind up with his sling.
Only one stone flew, but the Transformed howled as if each saw a stone flying straight at it. Their solid line broke up. The Cimmerian and the swordswoman plunged into the fleeing remnants.
The Conan Compendium Page 308