Conan and The Mists of Doom

by Roland Green

  Conan supposed that he could take some consolation in the skill of the chief who would be able to boast of ending the Cimmerian's career. He was not sure what else the situation had to commend it.

  Other, that is, than the certainty of dying with sword in hand and comrades round about, if he didn't sit on this rock gawking like a herdboy at a country fair until the enemy found an archer who could see his hand in front of his face.

  "Crom!"

  It was not an appeal to the cold god of Cimmeria, for he did not listen to such appeals. It was more in the nature of a reminder, that here a Cimmerian warrior was about to die, and the manner of his death should be properly noted.

  The god's name echoed around the rocks, drowning out all other cries human and animal, and left a brief, stunned silence in its wake. In the midst of that silence, Conan gathered himself, then leapt down from the rock, sword in hand.

  The procession came up the path toward Captain Muhbaras, eight Maidens before Danar and eight behind. At the very rear walked a figure robed and hooded so thoroughly that she might have been a priestess passing through the marketplace, vowed to shield herself from profane eyes.

  Under that hood, though, gleamed the golden cat's eyes, and the flowing, supple gait would have revealed the figure's identity even without the eyes.

  The Lady of the Mists was coming as she had promised, to deal death for unlawful desire.

  It would be a hard death, too. Danar was bound with thongs holding his hands behind his back and a short length of chain linking his ankles, barely long enough to allow him a shuffling, hobbled gait. His eyes were wide open and alert, although several welts on face and neck showed where he'd learned the unwisdom of looking about him.

  Neither drugged nor wounded, he would see his death coming and feel it for as long as the Lady wished him to—which might be hours if she wished to set an example. Muhbaras hardened his heart all over again and wished that he could briefly stop his ears and blind his eyes.

  The Maidens guarding the captain drew back, to allow their sisters room to file onto the level rock. By the time all were present, they needed to stand practically shoulder to shoulder around the rim of the platform to leave an open space in the middle.

  Into that space Danar marched, as steadily as if he were reporting for roll call. Only the sheen of sweat on his bronzed face betrayed unease of mind.

  Muhbaras forced a smile. It was not much of a final gift to a good man. He wanted to cry to the mountains and the skies as well as these accursed women:

  "See how a soldier of Khoraja dies, and learn from his death the kind of enemies you make by this madness!"

  But the mountains and the skies would not answer; any reply would come from the magic of the Lady of the Mists or the spears and swords of the Maidens.

  Conan hoped to land among the ranks of his enemies, like a boulder plunging from a cliff. That could confuse stouter warriors than the tribesmen, and confused opponents did not last long against the Cimmerian.

  But either the second part of the ambush had miscarried, or else Conan's men were holding their own for the moment. Neither seemed impossible; rough ground with an enemy lurking around a corner every five paces served both sides equally ill. It reminded Conan of fighting house to house, something he had done often enough to know that he would gladly never do it again.

  It was only three paces before he faced opponents, two of them already engaged with a Greencloak. The Greencloak was at a further disadvantage through being pinned by the leg under his dying horse, but he was defending himself with desperate vigor. All his opponents' attention was on him, and they had none to spare for the Cimmerian when he came upon them.

  With surprise and an edge in reach, Conan made easy prey of the first tribesman. He fell with his skull split from crown to the bridge of his nose, brains and blood spurting over the dead horse and the fallen Greencloak. His scimitar fell with a clang, in easy reach of the Greencloak, who snatched it up.

  For a moment more blades were in action than there was space for their wielding. The Greencloak slashed wildly at his opponent with the scimitar in one hand and his own tulwar in the other. The tribesman tried to parry Conan's broadsword with his own scimitar, while at the same time drawing a dagger for use on the Greencloak.

  The clanging as wildly swinging steel collided was worthy of a blacksmith shop. The Greencloak only nicked the tribesman's knee, but the collision of tribal scimitar and Cimmerian broadsword halted both strokes. It also broke the tribesman's grip on his weapon.

  It clattered on the rocks, and the tribesman had only time to fling his dagger before Conan closed the distance. Nothing met the broadsword's second swing, until it opened the tribesman's throat and windpipe, nearly taking his head from his shoulders. More blood flowed over the dead horse as the second tribesman collapsed on top of the first.

  Conan did not notice where the flung dagger had gone until the Greencloak cried out at the Cimmerian's grip on his shoulder. Then Conan saw the dagger thrust three fingers into the man's left shoulder. He plucked it out, wiped it on his breeches, thrust it into his belt, and finished dragging the Greencloak out from under the horse.

  "Best pack that with something," Conan said, pointing at the bleeding shoulder. "Or can you fight left-handed?"

  The man nodded.

  "Better a right-handed fighter than a left-handed corpse," Conan said. "Now stay close by me, while we find our comrades."

  "Ah—eh—if they're dead—?"

  "If they were dead," Conan growled, "we wouldn't be hearing any fighting upslope. If they are dead, they may have killed enough foes to let us escape.

  And if you don't follow me up the hill, the folk from across the valley will surely kill you if I don't do it first."

  He did not quite prod the Greencloak in the small of the back with the point of his broadsword. He did not need to. The soldier lunged up the slope as if he were an unwounded runner on level ground, shouting the motto of the Greencloaks as he went.

  "Our blood is our honor!"

  The Lady of the Mists stepped into the center of the circle. Muhbaras noted that she was carrying a long staff, taller than she was, in the form of a serpent—the giant asp of the jungles east of Vendhya, to be precise. It had one ruby eye and one emerald eye, and down its length flowed, instead of scales, those unnameable runes that the captain had seen far too often since he came to the Valley of the Mists.

  The Lady stopped just behind Danar, and thrust the staff down to the rock three times. Each time the rock boomed under the blow like a giant's drum. Muhbaras was uneasily conscious of how ancient the stonework of this balcony was, and how far it jutted out over a drop clear to the bottom of the valley. He even thought he saw the Maidens betray some unease, by the lift of a shoulder or the flicker of an eye, but for the most part they were doing their usual imitation of statues.

  The Lady struck a fourth time—and this time no drum-thunder rolled out across the Valley. In silence the staff seemed to sink into the rock and stand there as if it had grown there. It did not so much as quiver—although Muhbaras thought that he saw a glow in the ruby eye, and perhaps also in the emerald one.

  The Lady made a commanding gesture with her left hand, and eight Maidens marched forward from their places around the platform, until they made a tight circle around Danar and the staff. One unlocked the chains from his ankles.

  Now an equally commanding gesture of the Lady's right hand set the Maidens to lifting Danar bodily, as if he were a barrel of wine or a sheep's carcass. For a moment Muhbaras thought that Danar's fate was to be impalement, and wondered at the Lady's lack of imagination if she could contrive no worse end for him.

  Then the captain saw that they were lifting Danar so that the staff would rise up between his back and his bound hands. He would be as helpless as if he had actually been bound to it, and there would be no need to unbind his hands at any point.

  Danar rose, then descended until only the top of his head was visible among the g
leaming hair of the Maidens. For a long moment that, too, disappeared— then in the next moment Maidens were flung in all directions like sheep charged by a lion.

  Danar burst out of the circle of Maidens with both hands free. His bonds dangled from his wrists, and in his right hand was a small dagger. He leapt over a Maiden who had gone sprawling and dashed for the edge of the platform, where a gap showed between two other Maidens.

  "Your pardon, ladies," Danar said, as the women raised spears and moved to close the gap. At least that was what it sounded like to Muhbaras.

  What he did know to his dying day was that Danar spoke to the Maidens preparing to kill him as courteously as he might have to a highborn woman with her daughter who found themselves in the path of his war chariot.

  The tone had its effect. Or perhaps it was the dagger in Danar's hand. He feinted with it at the right-hand maiden, lashed out at her sister with the end of the thongs on his left wrist, and made the gap anew.

  It was more than wide enough to let him reach the edge of the platform and, without breaking stride, leap into space.

  Conan followed the Greencloak up the slope at a less frantic pace. Once again he was trying to look in every direction at once, for all that in some directions his eyes met solid rock just beyond the end of his nose.

  He still saw too many men coming across the valley, and fewer but still uncomfortably many atop the ridge on this side. He and his comrades were boxed in as thoroughly as if they had been in a dungeon, and stone walls would have been only a trifle harder to break through than such a horde of tribesmen.

  Then he noticed that the battle din from up the slope was dying away, faster than it should. Either his men had been overrun, or they had beaten off at least one attack, which ought to be impossible—

  His eagerness to solve the mystery nearly ended Conan's life. He came around a rock into full view of archers higher up, and they promptly put a dozen arrows through the space where he had been standing. Nothing but a hillman's speed held his wounds to scratches. That same preternatural speed let him scoop up a handful of usable arrows before he leapt again.

  This time he landed on something alive and foul-smelling, which swore Afghuli oaths fit to crack rocks or cause landslides.

  "Farad, I heard you shouting. How fare we?"

  Farad coughed so long and loud that Conan suspected sarcasm. "The men fare well, save for one dead and another fallen under his horse—or is that the one who dashed past me as if his breeches were aflame?"

  "The same. I had some trouble bringing him up. Now that you've your breath back and your ribs intact, I repeat my question."

  "We've beaten off one attack, on our right." Farad waved an arm in that general direction. "Nobody came down against our left, for which the gods be praised as that would have been the end of us."

  "Are their men not yet in position on our left?" If so, then Conan's men had received only a stay of execution, not a full pardon.

  "Oh, they hold the heights all across our front, Conan. But they've no manhood, the ones on our left. They hardly put a head up; when they do, they seldom shoot; and when they shoot, it's not to hit. If those weaklings had all the arrows in the world—"

  Conan held up a hand. Battle-honed instincts made him see possibilities in this situation that had escaped Farad. It would be best not to get anyone's hopes up, however.

  "My thanks. While there's a lull, I'm going up to scout on the left."

  Had Danar's leap been a spell to turn all who saw it into stone, there could not have been more silence or less movement on the balcony. Muhbaras alone contained himself out of fear. The rest seemed unable to believe that what their eyes had seen was really what had happened.

  To suspect one's eyes of so misleading one would unsettle anyone, Muhbaras suspected. At least he had no doubts—and indeed, he was already composing the tribute to Danar he would send to the soldier's kin, if he had any and if Muhbaras himself lived to set pen to parchment again—

  The Maidens ceased to be statues. So did the Lady of the Mists. With hands raised, she advanced on the eight Maidens standing about the staff. A crimson nimbus sprang into existence around her right hand; a fainter golden light seemed to drip like water from her left hand.

  The two colors cascaded down to the stone, splashed upward like water, and merged. They formed a sphere the size of a large melon, mostly crimson, shot with gold, and throwing off sparks. The sphere began to rotate—as it seemed to Muhbaras, in three different directions as once.

  He would have called that impossible—except that since he came to the Valley of the Mists, Muhbaras had purged that word from his lips. It could only make one apt to be surprised—and the Lady and her Maidens held enough surprises for a soldier who kept his wits.

  The sphere now floated upward, still spinning, with sparks of both colors cascading down so thickly that one could not see anyone through it. It rose higher and seemed to be moving toward the ring of Maidens.

  It darted forward, until it was over the place where Danar had leapt.

  Then Muhbaras clapped his hands over his ears, and before he squeezed his eyes shut, saw others doing the same. All seemed to be hearing the scream of one being flayed alive, a scream that told all who heard that it would go on until the end of time and perhaps beyond it until the gods themselves brought an end to it—

  He kept his feet, and so did most of the Maidens. Some of them staggered, however, and a handful went to their knees.

  Only the Lady of the Mists stood unaffected, her hands still raised, her breasts rising and falling a trifle more than usual under the robe as if she was breathing hard. Her eyes contrived to both glow and be utterly blank at the same time, while her lips were even paler than usual.

  Then she gripped the staff with both hands, and it came free of the rock as easily as a weed from sodden ground. She tossed it with one hand and caught it with the other, whirled it, and seemed almost ready to break into a dance.

  Dancing was the last thing Muhbaras felt like doing. His highest hope was that his legs and stomach would not betray him until he was safely beyond the Gate of the valley.

  He had not believed that the Lady could conjure more horrors. The next moment proved him wrong. Danar, or at least a human figure more like him than not, floated up from the valley. It was as though an invisible hand had caught him before he found the merciful death he sought, and raised him to be prey to the Lady's torments.

  For very surely the screams came from the human figure held there in the air before Muhbaras's horror-struck eyes.

  Nine

  Conan reined in his urge to rush upslope as he would have reined in a pair of fractious chariot horses. Haste on broken ground leads more often to falls than to safe arrival, even for a surefooted hillman.

  It also draws an enemy's attention, which Conan wished to avoid as long as possible. His comrades below lacked the numbers to force the enemy's archers to keep their heads down or even to spoil their shooting, if they chose to rejoin the fray.

  So Conan moved with the stealth of a leopard, finding cover in cracks and hiding in pools of shadow that a watcher would have thought too small for a man his size. He also moved with the silence of a cobra, testing each handhold and footrest before putting weight on it. Little dust rose to mark his passage, and only the smallest pebbles rolled silently downhill.

  As he climbed, the rocks grew smaller but the ground grew otherwise more rugged. At times the only route that offered concealment also required him to call on his mountaineering skills. Fortunately these were fresh in his memory, as much of Afghulistan reared itself up into slopes that challenged even its own goat-footed tribesfolk or even Cimmerians.

  Conan finished climbing a short rock chimney with his feet against one side and his back against another. The ground at the upper end offered just enough hiding places to let him stop, catch his breath, spit dust from his mouth (although he still did not care to have his teeth touch one another), and listen to the progress of the battle. />
  Or rather, listen for the progress of the battle, without hearing it. Both above and below, the enemy seemed to have sat down to wait, not even hurling the occasional arrow or slingstone at a venture into the rocks where Conan's band lay hidden. Conan listened for war cries and curses, but heard only coughs and sneezes, and beyond that the crack of rocks breaking in the heat, the sigh of the wind, and distant birdcalls from high above.

  Of course, such a silence had in Conan's experience also meant the enemy slipping into his comrades' position and cutting their throats. But he did not believe that the Turanian had yet been born who could do that to one Afghuli tribesman, let alone half a dozen—unless he was of Afghuli blood himself…

  A sound from above cut short the Cimmerian's brief speculations. It was the sound of a man crawling, trying to be silent but having rather less than complete success at it.

  Then other sounds joined the first one. Somebody was calling out, trying to be heard close by but not at any great distance. The call abruptly cut off, and Conan heard what sounded remarkably like a struggle. Meanwhile, the crawling man was drawing closer. Conan judged that the man would be close enough to spit on if he continued downhill for as long as it might take to empty a mug of good ale.

  Then from above someone cried out in rage, someone else in agony. Neither seemed concerned about being overheard at a distance; indeed both shouted loud enough to be heard in Aghrapur. A frantic scrabbling told of the crawling man increasing his pace.

  Then a bearded, wild-eyed head peered over a rock just beyond Conan's reach. Instantly shouts rose from all around the rim, and the Cimmerian heard the whistle of arrows. Whether this man was friend or foe, Conan judged that he must know something that it would be well to learn. Turned into a pincushion by archers, he would die without speaking.

  Conan lunged out of cover and grabbed a handful of greasy black hair with one hand, the neck of a patched and weather-faded robe with the other. Then he heaved backward. The man flew over the Cimmerian's head, screaming in panic as he saw himself about to plunge headfirst down the chimney.