Something screamed.
It was an unearthly sound, like nothing the Cimmerian had ever heard; a
grating, screeching roar that made the skin of his neck chill and bump. It came
from above, that horrible shriek. He risked a glance upward and noticed that
the bats and the Harskeel did the same.
A flying monster swooped down toward him. It had a long, thin head and a
mouth filled with teeth the size of a man’s fingers, and its wings seemed to
stretch halfway across the breadth of the cave.
Conan jerked his sword back to strike at the thing—Crom, it was huge!—but
one of the bats, trying to get away from the descending horror, flitted behind
him just as the Cimmerian cocked the blade and started to shift his grip on the
handle. The edge of the blued iron bit into the bat’s skull, effectively stopping
further voluntary activity by the bat; unfortunately, the blade stuck in the
wet bone, and the weight of the bat was enough to pull the sword from a
startled Conan’s too-loose grip
Time to leave, Conan thought. He turned to sprint toward his friends, but it
was too late. The talons of the flying monster closed upon him, one claw
gripping his arm like an iron band, the other snagging in the leather of his
belt. Conan felt himself lifted into the air as easily as a newborn child
picked up by its mother. The flapping of the great wings fanned the air,
stirring up a stinging spray of rocky grit and mold from the cavern floor.
“Run!” Conan yelled to his friends.
In answer, Lalo took aim and hurled his rock. Unfortunately, his aim was
less than perfect and the rock struck Conan on the thigh.
“Go!” Conan yelled.
Conan was already too high for his friends to reach. They needed no further
urging. The three of them ran for the small exit tunnel as Conan was lifted yet
higher into the air by the demonic flying beast.
Beneath him, the Harskeel screamed in a voice that started deep but quickly
rose to a woman’s shrillness.
“Noooooo!”
The monster bearing Conan banked to the left and flapped away. Conan did not
struggle. To be dropped from this altitude upon the rocky floor could hardly
help his cause. Better to see where this thing would end its flight than to be
dashed to jelly upon the surface below.
The Harskeel’s rage evaporated in an instant as it realized that which had
dropped upon it from the monster above was none other than Conan’s blood. Only
a few drops, to be sure, but certainly that would be enough? And the sword lay
embedded in one of the dead bats on the ground, not three paces away!
The Harskeel had started for the fallen sword when Red alighted upon the
floor in its path.
“Stand aside,” the Harskeel ordered.
“We are done trucking with you,” Red said, fluttering his wings in
apparent anger. “Give us our spell, now!”
“Certainly, certainly, in a moment.
I only
need fetch that—”
“Now!”
It was too much. To be thwarted by a fool of a bat when its goal lay within
reach was too much. The Harskeel whipped its blade around in a flat arc, all
the strength of its shoulder and upper arm in the blow. Red’s head spewed blood
as it looped through the air and fell, to bounce twice upon the cavern floor.
There were perhaps five or six bats still uninjured. They glanced at one
another, then at the Harskeel.
“Anyone else in a hurry?”
No one, it seemed, was in a hurry.
The Harskeel walked to Conan’s fallen blade and wrenched it free of the dead
bat. The words of the spell came to it, firmly set in its memory after all the
years of searching. The few drops of Conan’s blood were carefully scraped onto
the tip of the blue iron, and the point of the sword was just as carefully drawn
down the Harskeel’s body by its trembling hands, making a thin furrow from the
top of its head to its crotch.
The last words of the spell came from the Harskeel’s throat.
The air around it began to shimmer, and the Harskeel felt a surge of joy. It
was going to work! Already it could feel itself—no,
themselves
—begin
to separate into two beings. The male half focused on the right, the female
half on the left, as the furrow—drawn by the blade and the blood of a truly
brave man—combined with the magic of the spell to widen, forming two people
where before there had been one.
The remaining bats watched in awe. The Harskeel laughed, the sound now
coming from two throats and two mouths. Success! It had killed hundreds, slain
indiscriminately, robbed, cheated, stolen, and finally, finally after all the
years, it had achieved its—no, not its—
their
goal! The lovers would
now become two, as they had been before.
Stretching apart as might a strand of elastic clay, what had been split
finally into
two.
A moment later, a man stood facing a
woman. Their smiles were radiant.
“What is this?”
came
a voice from behind
them.
The man and the woman turned. The man held Conan’s blade, the woman the thin
sword that had been the Harskeel’s.
They found themselves facing none other than Katamay Rey.
“Who are you?” the wizard demanded to know.
“None of your affair,” the woman said.
“Hold your tongue,” the man standing next to her said.
“After all these years?
I will not!”
“It was your hasty speech that got us into this mess originally,”
the man said.
“I beg your pardon! It was
you
who—”
“Silence!” the wizard yelled. “I have not the time for this
bickering.”
“If we are fast enough, we can take him,” the woman said, dropping
her voice to a whisper,
“Do not be a fool,” the man whispered back.
“Now!” she yelled. The woman leaped toward the wizard, the sword
held ready to cut him down. Half a step behind her, the man who had recently
been joined with her managed to shake his head as he jumped to follow her. One
more killing would hardly cause them problems.
A pair of
cyclopes
stood behind Rey, but at some
distance. They would not be able to intervene in time.
The wizard raised his hands and waggled his fingers, and he spoke four
hard-edged and harsh words.
Even as he gathered himself for the final leap to chop down the wizard, the
man who had been half of the Harskeel felt himself slow, as if his feet had
become liquid. He chanced a quick glance down, and in an almost detached manner
noted that this was indeed so—his feet
had
become fluid. Even as he
looked, his lower legs sank into the puddle that had been his feet. There was
no pain, but a foul odor came from the ooze.
The man twisted his body to look at the woman with whom he had been
perversely intimate for so long. Her lower half now consisted of
an identical
ooze, and she sank rapidly into this bubbling
pool of high stench, looking quite puzzled.
“Now look what you have done!” she
said,
her voice a wail.
“I?
I
have done?”
It was the man’s last speech, and in a moment the words were followed by his
final thought: curse all the gods!
An instant later the two who had been the Harskeel of Loplain were nothing
but bubbling puddles of stinking slime upon the floor of the cave.
Deek’s appearance accompanied by a cyclops caused no small stir amongst his kind.
“—D-d-deek!
Wh-wh-what i-is
th-
this—?”
“—h-h-how c-came y-you b-by on-one-eye—?”
“—a-are y-you c-crazy—?”
But a short demonstration that first ensnared some of their folk and then
turned the floor to oiled ice beneath others of them stirred them even more.
“—b-by all the g-g-gods—!”
“—r-r-emove th-th-this st-stuff—!”
“Think they are ready to listen?” Wikkell asked.
“S-so it w-w-would s-s-seem.”
So the worms listened as Deek and Wikkell out lined their scheme. While
there was no generalized rush to mount a revolution against the witch, voices
that had been still before now were heard. That there was dissatisfaction with
Chuntha’s rule no one doubted; that there might be a chance to void that rule
had never been thought likely. But if all of the giant worms joined with all of
the
cyclopes
, perhaps such a thing
was
possible. Deek and Wikkell’s possession of the two talismans they had purloined
indicated that the witch and the wizard did indeed have vulnerable spots.
The discussion heated up and the talks were not short; in the end, though,
the worms reached a consensus: if Deek and Wikkell could guarantee
participation by the one-eyes, well, then, certainly the worms would be willing
to fight alongside of them.
Deek and Wikkell looked at each other, and each knew the jubilation the
other must feel. Success!
Well, to be sure, it was only half successful; still, with the worms’
promise in
hand,
they had a potent weapon to sway the
cyclopes to their argument.
Leaving the worms’ chambers, Deek and Wikkell went to visit the
cyclopes
.
As his captor flew through the caves on its huge, leathery wings, Conan
wondered which of the two magical rulers was responsible for his plight. That
either the witch or the wizard had sent this beast was apparent. And it also
seemed that he was wanted alive, else he would surely be dead by now. The
flying monster merely had to loosen its grip and allow the fall to do the deed.
The answer to the Cimmerian’s question was not long in coming. That tickle
of words inside Conan’s head came again:
We shall be home soon, my
beautiful barbar
.
Definitely female, that voice, and since it seemed to come from the toothed
reptile carrying him, Conan figured that the witch was somehow within the form
of the creature.
Indeed. As the cave’s walls seemed to close in and the floor grew closer,
the thing holding him turned and swooped down familiar tunnels, reaching at
last the entrance to Chuntha’s chambers. Two large worms stood guard over the
portal. Conan could not be certain that those two were the same he had seen
before, since all of the worms looked alike to him, but he suspected it was so.
The creature settled to the floor, loosing its grip on the Cimmerian but
remaining within the reach of the worms. A hasty move might be repaid with a
slap of one of those massive tails, and Conan did not desire to discover how
powerful such a stroke might be.
Any thoughts of quick escape fled when the scaled reptile suddenly altered
its shape. After a shimmer in the air, Conan beheld the form of the witch for the
first time. He had expected a crone, wrinkled and crusty, bent with ages of
evil, speaking in a cracked and raspy cackle, but that was not what he beheld,
not at all.
Crom, she was beautiful! And naked! Her face, her breasts, her long and
well-formed legs, her dark, silky hair… everything about her was altogether
lovely.
The witch’s smile was sensual and full of invitation.
“I have been searching for you for too long a time,” she said.
“We have much
to
… discuss.”
Conan stared at the naked woman. Surely a woman who looked like this could
not be as bad as he had been led to believe?
“Come,” she said.
“Into my chambers.
You must be tired from your fight with the bats. You can lie down on my bed
and… relax.”
Relaxing was not high upon Conan’s list of desired activities at the moment.
Hardly.
A man could not stand next to such a woman and
think of rest, save in the most abstract of futures.
Rest?
Later.
Much later.
Added to
his thoughts came the feathery touch of that mindspeech he had begun to hear
recently:
We shall lie together on my bed, strong
one,
and I shall show you pleasure beyond any you have ever known
.
Chuntha turned, and the view from behind was as lovely as that from the
front. Conan watched her walk away. Actually, it was more of sway than a walk,
and the muscles moved under her smooth and silky skin in a most interesting
manner.
Without prompting, Conan followed. He seemed to recall Tull’s warnings about
the witch, but the memory was dim and distant compared to the reality of the
woman he beheld.
The escape tunnel that Tull, Elashi, and Lalo had chosen was instead a dead
end. It stopped abruptly at a flat wall, and there was no
option
save
to turn around and retrace their steps.
The three had not gone a dozen paces, however, when they halted again. A
pair of
cyclopes
stood there, blocking the exit. After
a moment the
cyclopes
moved apart, revealing just
behind them the form of Katamay Rey.
“Ah, my friends,” the wizard said. “You left so abruptly
earlier that we did not have time to finish our discussion. And look, another
has joined you.” Rey nodded at Lalo. “Have I not seen you somewhere
before?”
“I have only just dropped in,” Lalo said, ever smiling.
“Mm.
Of course, I recall. Sent by Chuntha,
were you?”
“Not at all, you pea-brained fool.”
Startled, the wizard raised one hand,
then
stopped.
“There’s something about you… ah, I have it! You are enspelled. My brother
Mambaya Rey used to have such a curse at his disposal. Perhaps you know
him?”
For once Lalo was struck with silence.
“Well, no matter, no matter. I see that your large companion has left
you. Where is he?”
None of the three spoke.
The wizard grinned. “Ah, well, we can discuss this more at our leisure
back at my chambers. You will come and visit, will you not?” He waved at
the
cyclopes
flanking him, and they moved toward the
three.