Conan the Adaptable, page 109
Of more interest to the Cimmerian was a cell where barley was stored in leather sacks, and he made the tribesmen load some of the horses with food instead of gold. They grumbled but they obeyed him. They would obey him now, if he ordered them to ride with him into Jehannum.
Every nerve in his body shrieked for sleep, submerging hunger, but he gnawed a handful of raw barley and flogged his failing powers with the lash of his driving will. Yasmeena drooped in her saddle wearily, but her eyes shone unclouded in the lamplight, and Conan was dully aware of a deep respect for her that dwarfed even his former admiration.
They rode on through that glittering, dream-palace cavern, the tribesmen munching barley and babbling ecstatically of the joys their gold would buy, and at last they came to a bronze door which was a counterpart of the one at the other end of the tunnel. It was not barred. Yogok maintained that none but the monks had visited Mount Erlik in centuries. The door swung inward at their efforts and they blinked in the glow of a white dawn.
They were looking out on a small ledge from which a narrow trail wound along the edge of a giant escarpment. On one side the land fell away sheer for thousands of feet, so that a stream at the bottom looked like a thread of silver, and on the other a sheer cliff rose for some five hundred feet.
This cliff limited the view to the left, but to the right Conan could see some of the mountains which flanked Mount Erlik Khan, and the valley far below them wandered southward away to a pass in the distance, a notch in the savage rampart of the hills.
“This is life for you, Conan,” said Yogok, pointing to the pass. “Three miles from the spot where we now stand this trail leads down into the valley where there is water and game and rich grass for the horses. You can follow it southward beyond the pass for three days’ journey when you will come into country you know well. It is inhabited by marauding tribes, but they will not attack a party as large as yours. You can be through the pass before the Kirghiz round the mountain, and they will not follow you through it. That is the limit of their country. Now let me go.”
“Not yet; I’ll release you at the pass. You can make your way back here easily and wait for the Kirghiz, and tell them any lie you want to about their goddess.”
Yogok glared angrily at Conan. The Cimmerian’s eyes were bloodshot, the skin stretched taut over the bones of his face. He looked like a man who had been sweated in hell’s fires, and he felt the same way. There was no reason for Yogok’s strident objections, except a desire to get out of the company of those he hated as quickly as possible.
In Conan’s state a man reverts to primitive instincts, and the Cimmerian held his thrumming nerves in an iron grip to keep from braining the priest with his gun butt. Dispute and importunities were like screaming insults to his struggling brain.
While the priest squawked, and Conan hesitated between reasoning with him or knocking him down, the Turanians, inspired by the gold and food, and eager for the trail, began to crowd past him. Half a dozen had emerged on the ledge when Conan noticed them, and ordering Orkhan to bring Yogok along, he rode past those on the ledge, intending to take the lead as usual. But one of the men was already out to the path, and could neither turn back nor hug the wall close enough to let Conan by.
The Cimmerian, perforce, called to him to go ahead, and he would follow, and even as Conan set his horse to the trail a volley of boulders came thundering down from above. They hit the wretched Turanian and swept him and his horse off the trail as a broom sweeps a spider from a wall. One of the stones, bouncing from the ledge, hit Conan’s horse and broke its leg, and the beast screamed and toppled over the side after the other.
Conan threw himself clear as it fell, landed half over the edge, and clawed a desperate way to safety with Yasmeena’s screams and the yells of the Turanians ringing in his ears. There was nothing seen to shoot at, but some of them loosed their bows anyway, and the volley was greeted by a wild peal of mocking laughter from the cliffs above.
In no way unnerved by his narrow escape, Conan drove his men back into the shelter of the cave. They were like wolves in a trap, ready to strike blind right and left, and a dozen tulwars hovered over Yogok’s head.
“Slay him! He has led us into a trap! the gods!”
Yogok’s face was a green, convulsed mask of fear. He squalled like a tortured cat.
“Nay! I led you swift and sure! The Kirghiz could not have reached this side of the mountain by this time!”
“Were there monks hiding in these cells?” asked Conan. “They could have sneaked out when they saw us coming in. Is that a monk up there?”
“Nay; as Erlik is my witness! We work the gold three moons in the years; at other times it is death to go near Mount Erlik. I know not who it is.”
Conan ventured out on the path again and was greeted by another shower of stones, which he barely avoided, and a voice yelled high above him:
“You Yankee dog, how do you like that? I’ve got you now, damn you! Thought I was done for when I fell into that fissure, didn’t you? Well, there was a ledge a few feet down that I landed on. You couldn’t see it because the sun wasn’t high enough to shine down into it. If I’d had a gun I’d have killed you when you looked down. I climbed out after you left.”
“Ormond!” snarled Conan.
“Did you think I hadn’t wormed anything out of that monk?” the Iranistani yelled. “He told me all about the paths and Mount Erlik after I’d caved in some of his teeth with a gun barrel. I saw old Yogok with you and knew he’d lead you to Erlik. I got here first. I’d have barred the door and locked you out to be butchered by the fellows who’re chasing you, but I couldn’t lift the bars. But, anyway, I’ve got you trapped. You can’t leave the cave; if you do I’ll mash you like insects on the path. I can see you on it, and you can’t see me. I’m going to keep you here until the Kirghiz come up. I’ve still got Yasmeena’s symbol. They’ll listen to me.
“I’ll tell them Yogok is helping you to kidnap her; they’ll kill you all except her. They’ll take her back, but I don’t care now. I don’t need that Kashmiri’s money. I’ve got the secret of Mount Erlik Khan!”
Conan fell back into the doorway and repeated what the Iranistani had said. Yogok turned a shade greener in his fear, and all stared silently at Conan. His bloodshot gaze traveled over them as they stood blinking, disheveled, and haggard, with lamps paled by the dawn, like ghouls caught above earth by daybreak. Grimly he marshaled his straying wits. Conan had never reached the ultimate limits of his endurance; always he had plumbed a deeper, hidden reservoir of vitality below what seemed the last.
“Is there another way out of here?” he demanded.
Yogok shook his head, chatting again with terror. “No way that men and horses can go.”
“What do you mean?”
The priest moved back into the darkness and held a lamp close to the flank of the wall where the tunnel narrowed for the entrance. Rusty bits of metal jutted from the rock.
“Here was once a ladder,” he said. “It led far up to a crevice in the wall where long ago one sat to watch the southern pass for invaders. But none has climbed it for many years, and the handholds are rusty and rotten. The crevice opens on the sheer of the outer cliffs, and even if a man reached it, he could scarcely climb down the outside.
“Well, maybe I can pick Ormond off from the crevice,” muttered Conan, his head swimming with the effort of thinking.
Standing still was making infinitely harder his fight to keep awake. The muttering of the Turanians was a meaningless tangle of sound, and Yasmeena’s dark anxious eyes seemed to be looking at him from a vast distance. He thought he felt her arms cling to him briefly, but he could not be sure. The lights were beginning to swim in a thick mist.
Beating himself into wakefulness by striking his own face with his open hand, he began the climb, a bow slung to his back. Orkhan was plucking at him, begging to be allowed to make the attempt in his stead, but Conan shook him off. In his dazed brain was a conviction that the responsibility was his own. He went up like an automaton, slowly, all his muddled faculties concentrating grimly on the task.
Fifty feet up, the light of the lamps ceased to aid him, and he groped upward in the gloom, feeling for the rusty bolts set in the wall. They were so rotten that he dared not put his full weight on any one of them. In some places they were missing and he clung with his fingers in the niches where they had been. Only the slant of the rock enabled him to accomplish the climb at all, and it seemed endless, a hell-born eternity of torture.
The lamps below him were like fireflies in the darkness, and the roof with its clustering stalactites was only a few yards above his head. Then he saw a gleam of light, and an instant later he was crouching in a cleft that opened on the outer air. It was only a couple of yards wide, and not tall enough for a man to stand upright.
He crawled along it for some thirty feet and then looked out on a rugged slant that pitched down to a crest of cliffs, a hundred feet below. He could not see the ledge where the door opened, nor the path that led from it, but he saw a figure crouching among the boulders along the lip of the cliff, and he unslung his bow.
Ordinarily he could not have missed at that range. But his bloodshot eyes refused to line the sights. Slumber never assails a weary man so fiercely as in the growing light of dawn. The figure among the rocks below merged and blended fantastically with the scenery, and the sights of the bow were mere blurs.
Setting his teeth, Conan let fly, and the arrow smashed on the rock a foot from Ormond’s head. The Iranistani dived out of sight among the boulders without pausing to find where the shot came from.
In desperation Conan slung his bow and threw a leg over the lip of the cleft. He was certain that Ormond had no firearm. Down below the Turanians were clamoring like a wolf pack, but his numbed faculties were fully occupied with the task of climbing down the ribbed pitch. He stumbled and fumbled and nearly fell, and at last he did slip and came sliding and tumbling down until his bow caught on a projection and held him dangling by the strap.
In a red mist he saw Ormond break cover, with a tulwar that he must have found in the cavern, and in a panic lest the Iranistani climb up and kill him as he hung helplessly, Conan braced his feet and elbows against the rock and wrenched savagely, breaking the bow strap. He plunged down like a plummet, hit the slope, clawed at rocks and knobs, and brought up on shelving stone a dozen feet from the cliff edge, while his bow, tumbling before him, slid over and was gone.
The fall jolted his numbed nerves back into life again, knocked some of the cobwebs out of his dizzy brain. Ormond was within a few steps of him when he scrambled up, drawing his scimitar. The Iranistani was as savage and haggard in appearance as was Conan, and his eyes blazed with a frenzy that almost amounted to madness.
“Steel to steel now, Conan!” Ormond gritted. “We’ll see if you’re the swordsman they say you are!”
Ormond came with a rush and Conan met him, fired above his exhaustion by his hate and the stinging frenzy of battle. They fought back and forth along the cliff edge, with a foot to spare between them and eternity sometimes, until the clangor of the swords wakened the eagles to shrill hysteria.
Ormond fought like a wild man, yet with all the craft the sword masters of his native England had taught him. Conan fought as he had learned to fight in grim and merciless battles in the hills and the steppes and the deserts. He fought as an Afghan fights, with the furious intensity of onslaught that gathers force like a rising hurricane as it progresses.
Beating on his blade like a smith on an anvil, Conan drove the Iranistani staggering before him, until the man swayed dizzily with his heels over the edge of the cliff.
“Swine!” gasped Ormond with his last breath, and spat in his enemy’s face and slashed madly at his head.
“This for Ahmed!” roared Conan, and his scimitar whirled past Ormond’s blade and crunched home.
The Iranistani reeled outward, his features suddenly blotted out by blood and brains, and pitched backward into the gulf without a sound.
Conan sat down on a boulder, suddenly aware of the quivering of his leg muscles. He sat there, his gory blade across his knees and his head sunk in his hands, his brain a black blank, until shouts welling up from below roused him to consciousness.
“Ohai, Conan! A man with a cleft head has fallen past us into the valley! Art thou safe? We await orders!”
He lifted his head and glanced at the sun which was just rising over the eastern peaks, turning to crimson flame the snow of Mount Erlik Khan. He would have traded all the gold of the monks of Yolgan to be allowed to lie down and sleep for an hour, and climbing up on his stiffened legs that trembled with his weight was a task of appalling magnitude. But his labor was not yet done; there was no rest for him this side the pass.
Summoning the shreds of his strength, he shouted down to the raiders.
“Get upon the horses and ride, sons of nameless dogs! Follow the trail and I will come along the cliff. I see a place beyond the next bend where I can climb down to the trail. Bring Yogok with you; he has earned his release but the time is not yet.”
“Hurry, Conan,” floated up Yasmeena’s golden call. “It is far to Delhi, and many mountains lie between!”
Conan laughed and sheathed his scimitar, and his laugh sounded like the ghastly mirth of a hyena; the Turanians had taken the road and were already singing a chant improvised in his honor, naming “Son of the Sword” the man who staggered along the cliffs above them, with a face like a grinning skull and feet that left smears of blood on the rock.
The Haunter of the Ring
Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson
As Conan entered Count Trocero's study he was too much engrossed in his own thoughts to notice, at first, the haggard appearance of his visitor, a big, handsome young fellow well known to him.
"Hello, Trocero," Conan greeted. "Hello, Enri. I haven't seen you for quite a while. How is Evlena?" And before he could answer, still on the crest of the enthusiasm which had brought him there, Conan exclaimed: "Look, I've got something that will make you stare! I got it from that robber Ahmed Mektub, and I paid high for it, but it's worth it. Look!" From under his breech-clout Conan drew the jewel-hilted Afghul dagger which had fascinated him as a collector of rare weapons.
Trocero, familiar with his passion, showed only polite interest, but the effect on Enri was shocking.
With a strangled cry he sprang up and backward, knocking the chair clattering to the floor. Fists clenched and countenance livid he faced him, crying: "Keep back! Get away from him, or—"
Conan was frozen in his tracks.
"What in Crom's name—" Conan began bewilderedly, when Enri, with another amazing change of attitude, dropped into a chair and sank his head in his hands. Conan saw his heavy shoulders quiver. Conan stared helplessly from him to Trocero, who seemed equally dumbfounded.
"Is he drunk?" Conan asked.
Trocero shook his head, and filling a brandy glass, offered it to the man. Enri looked up with haggard eyes, seized the drink and gulped it down like a man half famished. Then he straightened up and looked at them shamefacedly.
"I'm sorry I went off his handle, my king," he said. "It was the unexpected shock of you drawing that knife."
"Well," Conan retorted, with some disgust, "I suppose you thought I was going to stab you with it!'
"Yes, I did!" Then, at the utterly blank expression on his face, he added: "Oh, I didn't actually think that; at least, I didn't reach that conclusion by any process of reasoning. It was just the blind primitive instinct of a hunted man, against whom anyone's hand may be turned."
His strange words and the despairing way he said them sent a queer shiver of nameless apprehension down his spine.
"What are you talking about?" Conan demanded uneasily. "Hunted? For what? You never committed a crime in your life."
"Not in this life, perhaps," he muttered.
"What do you mean?"
"What if retribution for a black crime committed in a previous life were hounding him?" he muttered.
"That's nonsense," Conan snorted.
"Oh, is it?" he exclaimed, stung. "Did you ever hear of my great-grandsire, Argello?"
"Sure; but what's that got to do with—"
"You've seen his portrait: doesn't it resemble him?"
"Well, yes," Conan admitted, "except that your expression is frank and wholesome whereas his is crafty and cruel."
"He murdered his wife," answered Enri. "Suppose the theory of reincarnation were true? Why shouldn't a man suffer in one life for a crime committed in another?"
"You mean you think you are the reincarnation of your great-grandsire? Of all the fantastic—well, since he killed his wife, I suppose you'll be expecting Evlena to murder you!" This last was delivered in searing sarcasm, as Conan thought of the sweet, gentle girl Enri had married. His answer stunned him.
"My wife," he said slowly, "has tried to kill me three times in the past week."
There was no reply to that. Conan glanced helplessly at Count Trocero. He sat in his customary position, chin resting on his strong, slim hands; his white face was immobile, but his dark eyes gleamed with interest. In the silence Conan heard a gust of wind blowing outside.
"Tell them the full story, Enri," suggested Trocero, and his calm, even voice was like a knife that cut a strangling, relieving the unreal tension.
"You know we've been married less than a year," Enri began, plunging into the tale as though he were bursting for utterance; his words stumbled and tripped over one another. "All couples have spats, of course, but we've never had any real quarrels. Evlena is the best-natured girl in the world."
"The first thing out of the ordinary occurred about a week ago. We had gone up in the mountains, left the carriage, and were wandering around picking wild flowers. At last we came to a steep slope, some thirty feet in height, and Evlena called my attention to the flowers which grew thickly at the foot. I was looking over the edge and wondering if I could climb down without tearing his clothes to ribbons, when I felt a violent shove from behind that toppled me over.
Every nerve in his body shrieked for sleep, submerging hunger, but he gnawed a handful of raw barley and flogged his failing powers with the lash of his driving will. Yasmeena drooped in her saddle wearily, but her eyes shone unclouded in the lamplight, and Conan was dully aware of a deep respect for her that dwarfed even his former admiration.
They rode on through that glittering, dream-palace cavern, the tribesmen munching barley and babbling ecstatically of the joys their gold would buy, and at last they came to a bronze door which was a counterpart of the one at the other end of the tunnel. It was not barred. Yogok maintained that none but the monks had visited Mount Erlik in centuries. The door swung inward at their efforts and they blinked in the glow of a white dawn.
They were looking out on a small ledge from which a narrow trail wound along the edge of a giant escarpment. On one side the land fell away sheer for thousands of feet, so that a stream at the bottom looked like a thread of silver, and on the other a sheer cliff rose for some five hundred feet.
This cliff limited the view to the left, but to the right Conan could see some of the mountains which flanked Mount Erlik Khan, and the valley far below them wandered southward away to a pass in the distance, a notch in the savage rampart of the hills.
“This is life for you, Conan,” said Yogok, pointing to the pass. “Three miles from the spot where we now stand this trail leads down into the valley where there is water and game and rich grass for the horses. You can follow it southward beyond the pass for three days’ journey when you will come into country you know well. It is inhabited by marauding tribes, but they will not attack a party as large as yours. You can be through the pass before the Kirghiz round the mountain, and they will not follow you through it. That is the limit of their country. Now let me go.”
“Not yet; I’ll release you at the pass. You can make your way back here easily and wait for the Kirghiz, and tell them any lie you want to about their goddess.”
Yogok glared angrily at Conan. The Cimmerian’s eyes were bloodshot, the skin stretched taut over the bones of his face. He looked like a man who had been sweated in hell’s fires, and he felt the same way. There was no reason for Yogok’s strident objections, except a desire to get out of the company of those he hated as quickly as possible.
In Conan’s state a man reverts to primitive instincts, and the Cimmerian held his thrumming nerves in an iron grip to keep from braining the priest with his gun butt. Dispute and importunities were like screaming insults to his struggling brain.
While the priest squawked, and Conan hesitated between reasoning with him or knocking him down, the Turanians, inspired by the gold and food, and eager for the trail, began to crowd past him. Half a dozen had emerged on the ledge when Conan noticed them, and ordering Orkhan to bring Yogok along, he rode past those on the ledge, intending to take the lead as usual. But one of the men was already out to the path, and could neither turn back nor hug the wall close enough to let Conan by.
The Cimmerian, perforce, called to him to go ahead, and he would follow, and even as Conan set his horse to the trail a volley of boulders came thundering down from above. They hit the wretched Turanian and swept him and his horse off the trail as a broom sweeps a spider from a wall. One of the stones, bouncing from the ledge, hit Conan’s horse and broke its leg, and the beast screamed and toppled over the side after the other.
Conan threw himself clear as it fell, landed half over the edge, and clawed a desperate way to safety with Yasmeena’s screams and the yells of the Turanians ringing in his ears. There was nothing seen to shoot at, but some of them loosed their bows anyway, and the volley was greeted by a wild peal of mocking laughter from the cliffs above.
In no way unnerved by his narrow escape, Conan drove his men back into the shelter of the cave. They were like wolves in a trap, ready to strike blind right and left, and a dozen tulwars hovered over Yogok’s head.
“Slay him! He has led us into a trap! the gods!”
Yogok’s face was a green, convulsed mask of fear. He squalled like a tortured cat.
“Nay! I led you swift and sure! The Kirghiz could not have reached this side of the mountain by this time!”
“Were there monks hiding in these cells?” asked Conan. “They could have sneaked out when they saw us coming in. Is that a monk up there?”
“Nay; as Erlik is my witness! We work the gold three moons in the years; at other times it is death to go near Mount Erlik. I know not who it is.”
Conan ventured out on the path again and was greeted by another shower of stones, which he barely avoided, and a voice yelled high above him:
“You Yankee dog, how do you like that? I’ve got you now, damn you! Thought I was done for when I fell into that fissure, didn’t you? Well, there was a ledge a few feet down that I landed on. You couldn’t see it because the sun wasn’t high enough to shine down into it. If I’d had a gun I’d have killed you when you looked down. I climbed out after you left.”
“Ormond!” snarled Conan.
“Did you think I hadn’t wormed anything out of that monk?” the Iranistani yelled. “He told me all about the paths and Mount Erlik after I’d caved in some of his teeth with a gun barrel. I saw old Yogok with you and knew he’d lead you to Erlik. I got here first. I’d have barred the door and locked you out to be butchered by the fellows who’re chasing you, but I couldn’t lift the bars. But, anyway, I’ve got you trapped. You can’t leave the cave; if you do I’ll mash you like insects on the path. I can see you on it, and you can’t see me. I’m going to keep you here until the Kirghiz come up. I’ve still got Yasmeena’s symbol. They’ll listen to me.
“I’ll tell them Yogok is helping you to kidnap her; they’ll kill you all except her. They’ll take her back, but I don’t care now. I don’t need that Kashmiri’s money. I’ve got the secret of Mount Erlik Khan!”
Conan fell back into the doorway and repeated what the Iranistani had said. Yogok turned a shade greener in his fear, and all stared silently at Conan. His bloodshot gaze traveled over them as they stood blinking, disheveled, and haggard, with lamps paled by the dawn, like ghouls caught above earth by daybreak. Grimly he marshaled his straying wits. Conan had never reached the ultimate limits of his endurance; always he had plumbed a deeper, hidden reservoir of vitality below what seemed the last.
“Is there another way out of here?” he demanded.
Yogok shook his head, chatting again with terror. “No way that men and horses can go.”
“What do you mean?”
The priest moved back into the darkness and held a lamp close to the flank of the wall where the tunnel narrowed for the entrance. Rusty bits of metal jutted from the rock.
“Here was once a ladder,” he said. “It led far up to a crevice in the wall where long ago one sat to watch the southern pass for invaders. But none has climbed it for many years, and the handholds are rusty and rotten. The crevice opens on the sheer of the outer cliffs, and even if a man reached it, he could scarcely climb down the outside.
“Well, maybe I can pick Ormond off from the crevice,” muttered Conan, his head swimming with the effort of thinking.
Standing still was making infinitely harder his fight to keep awake. The muttering of the Turanians was a meaningless tangle of sound, and Yasmeena’s dark anxious eyes seemed to be looking at him from a vast distance. He thought he felt her arms cling to him briefly, but he could not be sure. The lights were beginning to swim in a thick mist.
Beating himself into wakefulness by striking his own face with his open hand, he began the climb, a bow slung to his back. Orkhan was plucking at him, begging to be allowed to make the attempt in his stead, but Conan shook him off. In his dazed brain was a conviction that the responsibility was his own. He went up like an automaton, slowly, all his muddled faculties concentrating grimly on the task.
Fifty feet up, the light of the lamps ceased to aid him, and he groped upward in the gloom, feeling for the rusty bolts set in the wall. They were so rotten that he dared not put his full weight on any one of them. In some places they were missing and he clung with his fingers in the niches where they had been. Only the slant of the rock enabled him to accomplish the climb at all, and it seemed endless, a hell-born eternity of torture.
The lamps below him were like fireflies in the darkness, and the roof with its clustering stalactites was only a few yards above his head. Then he saw a gleam of light, and an instant later he was crouching in a cleft that opened on the outer air. It was only a couple of yards wide, and not tall enough for a man to stand upright.
He crawled along it for some thirty feet and then looked out on a rugged slant that pitched down to a crest of cliffs, a hundred feet below. He could not see the ledge where the door opened, nor the path that led from it, but he saw a figure crouching among the boulders along the lip of the cliff, and he unslung his bow.
Ordinarily he could not have missed at that range. But his bloodshot eyes refused to line the sights. Slumber never assails a weary man so fiercely as in the growing light of dawn. The figure among the rocks below merged and blended fantastically with the scenery, and the sights of the bow were mere blurs.
Setting his teeth, Conan let fly, and the arrow smashed on the rock a foot from Ormond’s head. The Iranistani dived out of sight among the boulders without pausing to find where the shot came from.
In desperation Conan slung his bow and threw a leg over the lip of the cleft. He was certain that Ormond had no firearm. Down below the Turanians were clamoring like a wolf pack, but his numbed faculties were fully occupied with the task of climbing down the ribbed pitch. He stumbled and fumbled and nearly fell, and at last he did slip and came sliding and tumbling down until his bow caught on a projection and held him dangling by the strap.
In a red mist he saw Ormond break cover, with a tulwar that he must have found in the cavern, and in a panic lest the Iranistani climb up and kill him as he hung helplessly, Conan braced his feet and elbows against the rock and wrenched savagely, breaking the bow strap. He plunged down like a plummet, hit the slope, clawed at rocks and knobs, and brought up on shelving stone a dozen feet from the cliff edge, while his bow, tumbling before him, slid over and was gone.
The fall jolted his numbed nerves back into life again, knocked some of the cobwebs out of his dizzy brain. Ormond was within a few steps of him when he scrambled up, drawing his scimitar. The Iranistani was as savage and haggard in appearance as was Conan, and his eyes blazed with a frenzy that almost amounted to madness.
“Steel to steel now, Conan!” Ormond gritted. “We’ll see if you’re the swordsman they say you are!”
Ormond came with a rush and Conan met him, fired above his exhaustion by his hate and the stinging frenzy of battle. They fought back and forth along the cliff edge, with a foot to spare between them and eternity sometimes, until the clangor of the swords wakened the eagles to shrill hysteria.
Ormond fought like a wild man, yet with all the craft the sword masters of his native England had taught him. Conan fought as he had learned to fight in grim and merciless battles in the hills and the steppes and the deserts. He fought as an Afghan fights, with the furious intensity of onslaught that gathers force like a rising hurricane as it progresses.
Beating on his blade like a smith on an anvil, Conan drove the Iranistani staggering before him, until the man swayed dizzily with his heels over the edge of the cliff.
“Swine!” gasped Ormond with his last breath, and spat in his enemy’s face and slashed madly at his head.
“This for Ahmed!” roared Conan, and his scimitar whirled past Ormond’s blade and crunched home.
The Iranistani reeled outward, his features suddenly blotted out by blood and brains, and pitched backward into the gulf without a sound.
Conan sat down on a boulder, suddenly aware of the quivering of his leg muscles. He sat there, his gory blade across his knees and his head sunk in his hands, his brain a black blank, until shouts welling up from below roused him to consciousness.
“Ohai, Conan! A man with a cleft head has fallen past us into the valley! Art thou safe? We await orders!”
He lifted his head and glanced at the sun which was just rising over the eastern peaks, turning to crimson flame the snow of Mount Erlik Khan. He would have traded all the gold of the monks of Yolgan to be allowed to lie down and sleep for an hour, and climbing up on his stiffened legs that trembled with his weight was a task of appalling magnitude. But his labor was not yet done; there was no rest for him this side the pass.
Summoning the shreds of his strength, he shouted down to the raiders.
“Get upon the horses and ride, sons of nameless dogs! Follow the trail and I will come along the cliff. I see a place beyond the next bend where I can climb down to the trail. Bring Yogok with you; he has earned his release but the time is not yet.”
“Hurry, Conan,” floated up Yasmeena’s golden call. “It is far to Delhi, and many mountains lie between!”
Conan laughed and sheathed his scimitar, and his laugh sounded like the ghastly mirth of a hyena; the Turanians had taken the road and were already singing a chant improvised in his honor, naming “Son of the Sword” the man who staggered along the cliffs above them, with a face like a grinning skull and feet that left smears of blood on the rock.
The Haunter of the Ring
Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson
As Conan entered Count Trocero's study he was too much engrossed in his own thoughts to notice, at first, the haggard appearance of his visitor, a big, handsome young fellow well known to him.
"Hello, Trocero," Conan greeted. "Hello, Enri. I haven't seen you for quite a while. How is Evlena?" And before he could answer, still on the crest of the enthusiasm which had brought him there, Conan exclaimed: "Look, I've got something that will make you stare! I got it from that robber Ahmed Mektub, and I paid high for it, but it's worth it. Look!" From under his breech-clout Conan drew the jewel-hilted Afghul dagger which had fascinated him as a collector of rare weapons.
Trocero, familiar with his passion, showed only polite interest, but the effect on Enri was shocking.
With a strangled cry he sprang up and backward, knocking the chair clattering to the floor. Fists clenched and countenance livid he faced him, crying: "Keep back! Get away from him, or—"
Conan was frozen in his tracks.
"What in Crom's name—" Conan began bewilderedly, when Enri, with another amazing change of attitude, dropped into a chair and sank his head in his hands. Conan saw his heavy shoulders quiver. Conan stared helplessly from him to Trocero, who seemed equally dumbfounded.
"Is he drunk?" Conan asked.
Trocero shook his head, and filling a brandy glass, offered it to the man. Enri looked up with haggard eyes, seized the drink and gulped it down like a man half famished. Then he straightened up and looked at them shamefacedly.
"I'm sorry I went off his handle, my king," he said. "It was the unexpected shock of you drawing that knife."
"Well," Conan retorted, with some disgust, "I suppose you thought I was going to stab you with it!'
"Yes, I did!" Then, at the utterly blank expression on his face, he added: "Oh, I didn't actually think that; at least, I didn't reach that conclusion by any process of reasoning. It was just the blind primitive instinct of a hunted man, against whom anyone's hand may be turned."
His strange words and the despairing way he said them sent a queer shiver of nameless apprehension down his spine.
"What are you talking about?" Conan demanded uneasily. "Hunted? For what? You never committed a crime in your life."
"Not in this life, perhaps," he muttered.
"What do you mean?"
"What if retribution for a black crime committed in a previous life were hounding him?" he muttered.
"That's nonsense," Conan snorted.
"Oh, is it?" he exclaimed, stung. "Did you ever hear of my great-grandsire, Argello?"
"Sure; but what's that got to do with—"
"You've seen his portrait: doesn't it resemble him?"
"Well, yes," Conan admitted, "except that your expression is frank and wholesome whereas his is crafty and cruel."
"He murdered his wife," answered Enri. "Suppose the theory of reincarnation were true? Why shouldn't a man suffer in one life for a crime committed in another?"
"You mean you think you are the reincarnation of your great-grandsire? Of all the fantastic—well, since he killed his wife, I suppose you'll be expecting Evlena to murder you!" This last was delivered in searing sarcasm, as Conan thought of the sweet, gentle girl Enri had married. His answer stunned him.
"My wife," he said slowly, "has tried to kill me three times in the past week."
There was no reply to that. Conan glanced helplessly at Count Trocero. He sat in his customary position, chin resting on his strong, slim hands; his white face was immobile, but his dark eyes gleamed with interest. In the silence Conan heard a gust of wind blowing outside.
"Tell them the full story, Enri," suggested Trocero, and his calm, even voice was like a knife that cut a strangling, relieving the unreal tension.
"You know we've been married less than a year," Enri began, plunging into the tale as though he were bursting for utterance; his words stumbled and tripped over one another. "All couples have spats, of course, but we've never had any real quarrels. Evlena is the best-natured girl in the world."
"The first thing out of the ordinary occurred about a week ago. We had gone up in the mountains, left the carriage, and were wandering around picking wild flowers. At last we came to a steep slope, some thirty feet in height, and Evlena called my attention to the flowers which grew thickly at the foot. I was looking over the edge and wondering if I could climb down without tearing his clothes to ribbons, when I felt a violent shove from behind that toppled me over.
