by Roland Green
Conan. Her comrade of bed and battle, Conan the Cimmerian. He stood between the two skeletons, staring at her as if contemplating a ghost. She saw that he seemed on easy terms with the two skeletons, as if they were three soldiers who had met the night before at a tavern and were now new friends back on duty.
“Crom!” the Cimmerian exclaimed and rushed forward to embrace her. His arms nearly lifted her off her feet, while she could have sworn that the fleshless faces were smiling.
Then he introduced the two skeletons with him as Iom and Ruks.
“They lead these warriors, who are sworn to the destruction of the Death Lord of Thanza. They can tell you more about what they and I have been doing. Then you can explain what brought you to the mountain, and we can all go hunting.”
The Cimmerian looked around. “Oh, good day, Klarnides. How fare you?”
Lysinka wanted to giggle, but feared she could not stop. Klarnides was looking at Conan as if doubting his own eyes. At last he stepped forward and gripped the Cimmerian’s forearm.
“No stone there, or even between my ears, as you once thought,” Conan said, with a gusty laugh. “I’m as much flesh and blood as I ever was.”
“If you’ve lived to meet us here, you’re something more,” the young captain said. “Will it suffice if I believe in you enough to follow you?”
“Fair enough,” Conan replied. “Now, Iom and Ruks can tell their tale while we move. We’ve a bit of shelter yonder; a cave that didn’t fall when the mountain rose. But we can’t stay long. It looks to us as if the Death Lord’s bound for somewhere and meaning no good when he reaches it.”
Lysinka forced herself to look downhill. Beyond where the mountainside ended abruptly, she saw tree-tops—so far below that they looked like a green carpet. She shuddered at the thought of being so high in the air, sustained by nothing save evil magic.
Then she shuddered again at the thought of this mountain descending on some peaceful town and holding it for ransom by the threat of crushing it to rubble. She could no longer think of stepping out of the Death Lord’s path and letting him do as he pleased if he did not harm her and her band.
Somehow she knew that she would not leave the mountain alive without destroying the Death Lord.
It made it still easier to know that Conan—yes, and those skeleton warriors—would be fighting beside her. They might even have some notion of how to fight a Death Lord.
The warrior Conan had introduced as Ruks stepped up to her and bowed with a good deal of scraping and grating. He must have been at least Conan’s size in life, and retained a courtly grace even in his skeletal form.
“Lady Lysinka, comrade of our leader Conan, let us march while I tell you the tale of the Death Lords of Thanza.”
Conan listened almost as intently as Lysinka when Ruks told his tale. He did his best to listen with more outward calm.
Truth to tell, he was hardly more pleased than Lysinka to be challenging such magic as the Death Lord could command. Nor was he overly hopeful that this would not be his last battle.
But no one else seemed able to fight it at all. Nor was it in Conan to leave folk like the Death Lord to wreak havoc with their magic. A man who did that was no warrior but instead the sort of murderous wastrel who butchered women and roasted babies on spits over the burning timbers of ruined villages. Conan had never been one of those who even cared to consort with such, and it would be a pleasure so to end the career of the Death Lord of Thanza.
The Death Lord’s extended senses had encompassed the greater part of the mountainside before he realized that he was not alone in the sky.
Life was there, moving in a way that suggested a human presence. There was too much strength for it to be anything but the largest flock of birds, and he thought he sensed minds far beyond the level that birds possessed.
Not that human beings were worth so much more than birds when one looked at them from the position of a Death Lord. But they could give service that birds could not, and their life was stronger than that of birds and strengthened him more.
If they were on the mountain, it was likely that they had come with hostile intent. Therefore he had no reason to doubt that they would come within easy reach long before he needed to deal with the town.
Attacking him, they could be destroyed at close range, as he drew their lives into himself with little exertion.
He might even be able to fly past the town, panicking the people but not otherwise harming them. Could he fly on to a larger, richer source of lives? It was worth contemplating.
At the extreme limit of his senses, the Death Lord felt something else. It was movement but not living movement. It was also curiously familiar, and he spent a frustrated moment realizing that he ought to know what it was.
Perhaps he should ask the Soul of Thanza?
Yes. He had done that before, after it took its place in his chest. But it demanded all his strength to get its attention, and sometimes a long while passed before he gained an answer.
Best start now, he thought. The people outside could scarcely draw close enough to harm him in the time he would need to speak to the Soul.
The Death Lord closed his eyes, placed his hands over the place where the living human Grolin’s heart had been, and formed in his mind the questions he needed to ask the Soul of Thanza.
XVII
Conan had felt what he now felt too many times for his peace of mind. It was the sense of marching about under the gaze of a foe who has the patience of a cat waiting for a mouse—and the same willingness to toy with its prey.
He had lost many comrades and more than a little of his own blood in such ambushes. His own blood was between him and the gods, if perchance they cared at all, and most comrades put themselves in harm’s way of their own will. But one could still grow weary of burying them.
The Cimmerian also remembered the times that this feeling had led him astray. He had walked in silence, wishing he had eyes in the back of his head, for entire days—and in the end nothing happened.
He took little comfort from those memories, however. Magic could strike with less warning and far more swiftness than any natural foe. Something that Ruks had said led him to believe that some of the skeleton warriors—the Slayers of Death, they now called themselves—had the power to sense magic of the kind used by the Death Lord.
Something else that Iom had said, moreover, made it likely that the new Death Lord had new powers. The senses of the Slayers might not warn against these. Nor was it certain that all their senses had survived so many inanimate years.
Indeed, there was no certainty but one: Conan, Slayers, Lysinka, Klarnides, and everyone else abroad on the mountain was staying there until they closed with the Death Lord of Thanza and slew him or perished at his hands.
The Death Lord’s quest for answers within the memory of the Soul of Thanza was long, seemingly measured in days. It was wearying, for his senses recorded every moment of those days, however much time actually passed in the outside world from which he had fled to embrace the Soul.
He had ample resources within himself, let alone the Soul, to contend with mere flesh-and-blood opponents. If he faced something unnatural or magical, he at least wanted to put a name to it before it reached close quarters.
He asked the Soul whether it could enhance his senses so that he could actually see, as if he had been a living man, what lay out there on the mountainside.
The answer came: it could, but it would weaken him. He was already wielding great power, keeping the mountain aloft. Did he wish to involve himself in another potent spell?
The Death Lord pondered the question, and in due time delivered his answer:
He did so wish. The spell might weaken his power for defence. Being surprised would weaken it still more. He and the Soul both had to look to their own survival.
Therefore it should help him.
Lysinka was the first to actually see someone watching the climbers. She was looking toward the summit when she saw wha
t seemed to be a single vast eye open, look briefly at her from under heavy lids, and then close again—but not as if in sleep.
The eye was green, slit-pupiled like a serpent’s, and seemed to have silvery smoke curling out from one comer.
“What did you see?” Conan said. She thought he had read her mind or seen something himself; then she realized that she had clutched his arm hard enough for her nails to dent even his tough hide.
She described it. Conan and Klarnides listened intently. So did Iom and Ruks, in so far as she could judge anything about the Slayers’ leaders.
Iom broke the silence that followed Lysinka’s tale.
“The Death Lord may now know what he faces. But he has also used much strength in learning about us. So what Lady Lysinka has seen is both good and bad.”
“Spare us riddles,” Klarnides grumbled. “Do we run upward faster, creep downward on our bellies, or do something else entirely?”
Iom and Ruks would have glared had they been capable of facial expressions. That was plain to Lysinka.
Conan, on the other hand, laughed.
“Don’t flaunt new knowledge in the face of men who were bones when your forefathers were yet unconceived,” Conan said. “But Captain Klarnides has the right of it. What do you suggest, my friends?”
“Haste,” Iom and Ruks said together. “Also, that we the Slayers of Death surround you fighters of flesh and blood. Each will need the other before this day is over, but for the moment you need our protection.”
The only “fighter of flesh and blood” who looked content with this arrangement was Conan. But his opinion carried weight with Lysinka. He knew the Slayers. She and Klarnides did not.
“As you wish,” she said. The Slayers clashed their weapons together or banged them on their ribs. The wind of the mountain’s passage through the sky blew away any echoes. Then they ran to form a circle around the human fighters.
One Slayer lost his footing from moving a little too swiftly. He went down, began to roll, and could not stop himself. He kept on rolling, leaving a trail of dust that blew away in the wind, until he was no longer there.
For the first time, Lysinka heard the Slayers’ dirge for one of their own slain. It was the most fearsome sound she had ever heard—even the death cries of one of her fellow concubines had not been so terrible.
Yet oddly, it made her feel more at peace with the Slayers and safer in their company. They too felt enough comradeship to mourn their dead. None who did that could be so far beyond human ken that she needed to fear them.
This time her grip on Conan’s arm was almost a caress.
“We will sing for their dead when we come down, will we not?” she asked.
The Cimmerian grinned. It was a more wolfish grin than usual, and his teeth blazed white in a face as dark as a Stygian’s with soot and dust.
“We shall. But we will also make the Death Lord do a trifle of singing before that!”
* * *
The Death Lord’s study of his enemies had told him who they were—or rather, allowed the Soul of Thanza to tell him. The humans were food, no more and no less—if he could feed upon their lives. But the others were the Slayers of Death, sent into the world by who could tell what cunning trick. At least that was what his eyes and Grolin’s memories told him, and he preferred not to doubt either.
The Slayers of Death being on his trail again was not welcome news. Nor was it welcome that he had depleted much of his strength. Keeping the mountain aloft was becoming a burden. Add fighting the Slayers and their allies to that, and his strength might fail.
It was time to devour more lives, the nearest first. Once he had strengthened himself, he should be equal to the task of fending off the Slayers until he had crushed the town and fed on its lives.
If necessary, he could keep the mountain on the ground until he dealt with the Slayers. With renewed strength and no remaining enemies, he could then resume his journey, knowing himself invincible.
To the north, Conan saw a broad lake with marshy borders. If the mountain landed there, his people would have a wet journey wading ashore, but they would be more likely to survive the landing.
To the west he saw a fair-sized town, with roads gleaming yellow-white amidst the green fields and the villages surrounding it. He even thought he could see people scurrying about in the streets and on the roads. Doubtless they had seen the flying mountain by now. Equally likely, they were half-mad with fear.
No help to be had from those poor wretches, even if the mountain by chance landed close to the town without crashing untold numbers of innocents under its mass. The Slayers and their companions on the mountain would have to do the work themselves—and quickly.
It was then that the Death Lord of Thanza struck hard for the first time. Crimson and emerald bolts of raw magical power poured down from the summit, curved around the marching fighters, and formed a whirlwind of colours. that completely engulfed them.
Or rather, it would have, except for the circle of Slayers around the humans. The Slayers seemed to repel the whirlwind as two lodestones repel each other. They neither chanted, cried out, danced, nor made any other gestures that he thought of in connection with working magic.
They merely stood, and the crimson and emerald tide roared in frustration, dancing more wildly and churning up the air until the humans felt as if they were in the middle of a whirlwind. Gravel, dust, and dead grass flew, stung and scoured faces, and forced most to close their eyes.
Through eyes closed to slits, Conan saw one of the Thanza Rangers knocked off his feet. He rolled downhill, through a gap in the Slayers’ circle, and out into the wind.
He had just regained his feet when his eyes bulged out and his mouth opened in a soundless scream. At the same time, two of the Slayers reached into a mass of crimson light that seemed almost liquid incandescence, and pulled on the man’s arms.
His eyes were open and staring but without sight when they pulled him back. He was bleeding from the nose and mouth—and Conan saw the two Slayers each dip a finger of their free hands into the man’s blood.
A howl of outrage rose from the Rangers, joined by the bandits, the two together almost outshouting the whirlwind of light. Weapons flew free, and one man had a spear ready to cast at Ruks when Klarnides gripped the spear and thrust the point of his sword almost into the man’s stomach.
“Stop it, you fool!” he roared, shouting down both the whirlwind and the angry fighters. “Tolos is dead. But his life can go to strengthen the Death Lord or to feed our friends the Slayers. Which do you want?” “Vampires are no friends of mine!” someone shouted. Conan heard a ragged chorus of assent and took a deep breath when he heard Klarnides speak.
“Iom! Ruks! Can we give rites to the man whose blood you took?”
“Of course!” Ruks shouted. “Do you think we Slayers are barbarians? Look at Conan. He gave us blood and stands here hale and strong.”
Conan drew his sword and added, “I’m also ready to kill the next fool! Do you think the Death Lord will allow rites for Tolos or anyone else, if he captures them? Gods above, don’t make your comrades die without rites or purpose to strengthen our enemies!” That seemed to renew the men’s courage or at least to reduce them to silence as the whirlwind continued. Under cover of its whine and roar, Conan put his mouth close to Ruks’s ear hole and muttered:
“What we’ve said had better prove true, or you’ll be fighting the Death Lord by yourselves. I thought that once you folk were animate again, you had no more need for strong blood.”
“We do not need it,” Ruks replied. “Indeed, more than a little of it will kill us. But even as it begins to kill, it also makes us stronger for a brief while.”
Conan studied the eyeless, fleshless face, that seemed the face of death itself yet was prepared to fight off something worse. “Then I suppose you want the blood of our dead?”
“If we are to win, that may be needed.”
“I fear you will have to fight enemies on both sid
es,” Conan said. “But you may have my blood if I fall.”
“If I could still pray, I would pray that would not be needed,” Ruks said. He looked outward, and Conan saw that the colours. of the whirlwind had faded to pink and a pale green like sun-bleached seaweed. Also, the debris cast into the air by the wind was pattering down again.
One attack was foiled. How many more?
Conan looked up at the summit. It showed no sign of the powers just unleashed, but he had not expected much. The answer to his question, however, surely lay up there.
“Up!” he shouted. The men must be bone weary of that command by now, the Cimmerian thought, but they would cease to hear it only when they or the Death Lord were gone.
The Soul of Thanza beat within the Death Lord’s chest like a heart gone mad. Both the beat and the madness flowed from it to every part of the Death Lord’s body.
He had the fearful sense that though he might be invulnerable from without, he might perish through the work of his own long-sought ally.
Had the Soul grown stronger or he become weaker through the battle just ended? Perhaps both. Certainly he had needed all his power to batter desperately at the Slayers—desperately and ultimately without purpose. He had regained much of it, but not all.
When death struck at the living, it took lives into itself. When death struck at the dead, it was they who took it into themselves. Took it in—and did not give it back.
The Death Lord would have cried out in rage had he not known that the Soul would use the strength he spent in that cry. He willed the mountain to fly faster toward the town. Perhaps if he was above the town and could threaten to crush it if the Slayers came at him, their human companions would oppose them.
Then Slayers and humans would be at odds. Without the protection of the Slayers, the humans would die. Their deaths would add to his strength, so that he could fend off his enemies until all the lives in the town were his.
He could still become invincible.
He willed the mountain to increase its speed toward the town. The Soul of Thanza hammered within him; for a moment long enough to give him hope, it seemed to be yielding to his will.
