Fires dazzled Balthus again as he slowly recovered his senses. He
blinked, shook his head. Their glare hurt his eyes. A confused medley of
sound rose about him, growing more distinct as his senses cleared. He
lifted his head and stared stupidly about him. Black figures hemmed him
in, etched against crimson tongues of flame.
Memory and understanding came in a rush. He was bound upright to a post
in an open space, ringed by fierce and terrible figures. Beyond that
ring fires burned, tended by naked, dark-skinned women. Beyond the fires
he saw huts of mud and wattle, thatched with brush. Beyond the huts
there was a stockade with a broad gate. But he saw these things only
incidentally. Even the cryptic dark women with their curious coiffures
were noted by him only absently. His full attention was fixed in awful
fascination on the men who stood glaring at him.
Short men, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, lean-hipped, they were naked
except for scanty loin-clouts. The firelight brought out the play of
their swelling muscles in bold relief. Their dark faces were immobile,
but their narrow eyes glittered with the fire that burns in the eyes of
a stalking tiger. Their tangled manes were bound back with bands of
copper. Swords and axes were in their hands. Crude bandages banded the
limbs of some, and smears of blood were dried on their dark skins. There
had been fighting, recent and deadly.
His eyes wavered away from the steady glare of his captors, and he
repressed a cry of horror. A few feet away there rose a low, hideous
pyramid: it was built of gory human heads. Dead eyes glared glassily up
at the black sky. Numbly he recognized the countenances which were
turned toward him. They were the heads of the men who had followed Conan
into the forest. He could not tell if the Cimmerian's head were among
them. Only a few faces were visible to him. It looked to him as if there
must be ten or eleven heads at least. A deadly sickness assailed him. He
fought a desire to retch. Beyond the heads lay the bodies of half a
dozen Picts, and he was aware of a fierce exultation at the sight. The
forest runners had taken toll, at least.
Twisting his head away from the ghastly spectacle, he became aware that
another post stood near him--a stake painted black as was the one to
which he was bound. A man sagged in his bonds there, naked except for
his leathern breeks, whom Balthus recognized as one of Conan's woodsmen.
Blood trickled from his mouth, oozed sluggishly from a gash in his side.
Lifting his head as he licked his livid lips, he muttered, making
himself heard with difficulty above the fiendish clamor of the Picts:
'So they got you, too!'
'Sneaked up in the water and cut the other fellow's throat,' groaned
Balthus. 'We never heard them till they were on us. Mitra, how can
anything move so silently?'
'They're devils,' mumbled the frontiersman. 'They must have been
watching us from the time we left midstream. We walked into a trap.
Arrows from all sides were ripping into us before we knew it. Most of us
dropped at the first fire. Three or four broke through the bushes and
came to hand-grips. But there were too many. Conan might have gotten
away. I haven't seen his head. Been better for you and me if they'd
killed us outright. I can't blame Conan. Ordinarily we'd have gotten to
the village without being discovered. They don't keep spies on the river
bank as far down as we landed. We must have stumbled into a big party
coming up the river from the south. Some devilment is up. Too many Picts
here. These aren't all Gwaweli; men from the western tribes here and
from up and down the river.'
Balthus stared at the ferocious shapes. Little as he knew of Pictish
ways, he was aware that the number of men clustered about them was out
of proportion to the size of the village. There were not enough huts to
have accommodated them all. Then he noticed that there was a difference
in the barbaric tribal designs painted on their faces and breasts.
'Some kind of devilment,' muttered the forest runner. 'They might have
gathered here to watch Zogar's magic-making. He'll make some rare magic
with our carcasses. Well, a border-man doesn't expect to die in bed. But
I wish we'd gone out along with the rest.'
The wolfish howling of the Picts rose in volume and exultation, and from
a movement in their ranks, an eager surging and crowding, Balthus
deduced that someone of importance was coming. Twisting his head about,
he saw that the stakes were set before a long building, larger than the
other huts, decorated by human skulls dangling from the eaves. Through
the door of that structure now danced a fantastic figure.
'Zogar!' muttered the woodsman, his bloody countenance set in wolfish
lines as he unconsciously strained at his cords. Balthus saw a lean
figure of middle height, almost hidden in ostrich plumes set on a
harness of leather and copper. From amidst the plumes peered a hideous
and malevolent face. The plumes puzzled Balthus. He knew their source
lay half the width of a world to the south. They fluttered and rustled
evilly as the shaman leaped and cavorted.
With fantastic bounds and prancings he entered the ring and whirled
before his bound and silent captives. With another man it would have
seemed ridiculous--a foolish savage prancing meaninglessly in a whirl of
feathers. But that ferocious face glaring out from the billowing mass
gave the scene a grim significance. No man with a face like that could
seem ridiculous or like anything except the devil he was.
Suddenly he froze to statuesque stillness; the plumes rippled once and
sank about him. The howling warriors fell silent. Zogar Sag stood erect
and motionless, and he seemed to increase in height--to grow and expand.
Balthus experienced the illusion that the Pict was towering above him,
staring contemptuously down from a great height, though he knew the
shaman was not as tall as himself. He shook off the illusion with
difficulty.
The shaman was talking now, a harsh, guttural intonation that yet
carried the hiss of a cobra. He thrust his head on his long neck toward
the wounded man on the stake; his eyes shone red as blood in the
firelight. The frontiersman spat full in his face.
With a fiendish howl Zogar bounded convulsively into the air, and the
warriors gave tongue to a yell that shuddered up to the stars. They
rushed toward the man on the stake, but the shaman beat them back. A
snarled command sent men running to the gate. They hurled it open,
turned and raced back to the circle. The ring of men split, divided with
desperate haste to right and left. Balthus saw the women and naked
children scurrying to the huts. They peeked out of doors and windows. A
broad lane was left to the open gate, beyond which loomed the black
forest, crowding sullenly in upon the clearing, unlighted by the fires.
A tense silence reigned as Zogar Sag turned toward the forest, raised on
his tiptoes and sent a weird inhuman call shuddering out into the night.
Somewhere, far out in the black forest, a deeper cry answered him.
Balthus shuddered. From the timbre of that cry he knew it never came
from a human throat. He remembered what Valannus had said--that Zogar
boasted that he could summon wild beasts to do his bidding. The woodsman
was livid beneath his mask of blood. He licked his lips spasmodically.
The village held its breath. Zogar Sag stood still as a statue, his
plumes trembling faintly about him. But suddenly the gate was no longer
empty.
A shuddering gasp swept over the village and men crowded hastily back,
jamming one another between the huts. Balthus felt the short hair stir
on his scalp. The creature that stood in the gate was like the
embodiment of nightmare legend. Its color was of a curious pale quality
which made it seem ghostly and unreal in the dim light. But there was
nothing unreal about the low-hung savage head, and the great curved
fangs that glistened in the firelight. On noiseless padded feet it
approached like a phantom out of the past. It was a survival of an
older, grimmer age, the ogre of many an ancient legend--a saber-tooth
tiger. No Hyborian hunter had looked upon one of those primordial brutes
for centuries. Immemorial myths lent the creatures a supernatural
quality, induced by their ghostly color and their fiendish ferocity.
The beast that glided toward the men on the stakes was longer and
heavier than a common, striped tiger, almost as bulky as a bear. Its
shoulders and forelegs were so massive and mightily muscled as to give
it a curiously top-heavy look, though its hind-quarters were more
powerful than that of a lion. Its jaws were massive, but its head was
brutishly shaped. Its brain capacity was small. It had room for no
instincts except those of destruction. It was a freak of carnivorous
development, evolution run amuck in a horror of fangs and talons.
This was the monstrosity Zogar Sag had summoned out of the forest.
Balthus no longer doubted the actuality of the shaman's magic. Only the
black arts could establish a domination over that tiny-brained,
mighty-thewed monster. Like a whisper at the back of his consciousness
rose the vague memory of the name of an ancient god of darkness and
primordial fear, to whom once both men and beasts bowed and whose
children--men whispered--still lurked in dark corners of the world. New
horror tinged the glare he fixed on Zogar Sag.
The monster moved past the heap of bodies and the pile of gory heads
without appearing to notice them. He was no scavenger. He hunted only
the living, in a life dedicated solely to slaughter. An awful hunger
burned greenly in the wide, unwinking eyes; the hunger not alone of
belly-emptiness, but the lust of death-dealing. His gaping jaws
slavered. The shaman stepped back; his hand waved toward the woodsman.
The great cat sank into a crouch, and Balthus numbly remembered tales of
its appalling ferocity: of how it would spring upon an elephant and
drive its sword-like fangs so deeply into the titan's skull that they
could never be withdrawn, but would keep it nailed to its victim, to die
by starvation. The shaman cried out shrilly, and with an ear-shattering
roar the monster sprang.
Balthus had never dreamed of such a spring, such a hurtling of
incarnated destruction embodied in that giant bulk of iron thews and
ripping talons. Full on the woodsman's breast it struck, and the stake
splintered and snapped at the base, crashing to the earth under the
impact. Then the saber-tooth was gliding toward the gate, half dragging,
half carrying a hideous crimson hulk that only faintly resembled a man.
Balthus glared almost paralysed, his brain refusing to credit what his
eyes had seen.
In that leap the great beast had not only broken off the stake, it had
ripped the mangled body of its victim from the post to which it was
bound. The huge talons in that instant of contact had disemboweled and
partially dismembered the man, and the giant fangs had torn away the
whole top of his head, shearing through the skull as easily as through
flesh. Stout rawhide thongs had given way like paper; where the thongs
had held, flesh and bones had not. Balthus retched suddenly. He had
hunted bears and panthers, but he had never dreamed the beast lived
which could make such a red ruin of a human frame in the flicker of an
instant.
The saber-tooth vanished through the gate, and a few moments later a
deep roar sounded through the forest, receding in the distance. But the
Picts still shrank back against the huts, and the shaman still stood
facing the gate that was like a black opening to let in the night.
Cold sweat burst suddenly out on Balthus' skin. What new horror would
come through that gate to make carrion-meat of his body? Sick panic
assailed him and he strained futilely at his thongs. The night pressed
in very black and horrible outside the firelight. The fires themselves
glowed lurid as the fires of hell. He felt the eyes of the Picts upon
him--hundreds of hungry, cruel eyes that reflected the lust of souls
utterly without humanity as he knew it. They no longer seemed men; they
were devils of this black jungle, as inhuman as the creatures to which
the fiend in the nodding plumes screamed through the darkness.
Zogar sent another call shuddering through the night, and it was utterly
unlike the first cry. There was a hideous sibilance in it--Balthus
turned cold at the implication. If a serpent could hiss that loud, it
would make just such a sound.
This time there was no answer--only a period of breathless silence in
which the pound of Balthus' heart strangled him; and then there sounded
a swishing outside the gate, a dry rustling that sent chills down
Balthus' spine. Again the firelit gate held a hideous occupant.
Again Balthus recognized the monster from ancient legends. He saw and
knew the ancient and evil serpent which swayed there, its wedge-shaped
head, huge as that of a horse, as high as a tall man's head, and its
palely gleaming barrel rippling out behind it. A forked tongue darted in
and out, and the firelight glittered on bared fangs.
Balthus became incapable of emotion. The horror of his fate paralysed
him. That was the reptile that the ancients called Ghost Snake, the
pale, abominable terror that of old glided into huts by night to devour
whole families. Like the python it crushed its victim, but unlike other
constrictors its fangs bore venom that carried madness and death. It too
had long been considered extinct. But Valannus had spoken truly. No
white man knew what shapes haunted the great forests beyond Black River.
It came on silently rippling over the ground, its hideous head on the
same level, its neck curving back slightly for the stroke. Balthus gazed
with glazed, hypnotized stare into that loathesome gullet down which he
would soon be engulfed, and he was aware of no sensation except a vague
nausea.
And then something that glinted in the firelight streaked from the
shadows of the huts, and the great reptile whipped about and went into
instant convulsions. As in a dream Balthus saw a short throwing-spear
transfixing the mighty neck, just below the gaping jaws; the shaft
protruded from one side, the steel head from the other.
Knotting and looping hideously, the maddened reptile rolled into the
circle of men who strove back from him. The spear had not severed its
spine, but merely transfixed its great neck muscles. Its furiously
lashing tail mowed down a dozen men and its jaws snapped convulsively,
splashing others with venom that burned like liquid fire. Howling,
cursing, screaming, frantic, they scattered before it, knocking each
other down in their flight, trampling the fallen, bursting through the
huts. The giant snake rolled into a fire, scattering sparks and brands,
and the pain lashed it to more frenzied efforts. A hut wall buckled
under the ram-like impact of its flailing tail, disgorging howling
people.
Men stampeded through the fires, knocking the logs right and left. The
flames sprang up, then sank. A reddish dim glow was all that lighted
that nightmare scene where the giant reptile whipped and rolled, and men
clawed and shrieked in frantic flight.
Balthus felt something jerk at his wrists, and then, miraculously, he
was free, and a strong hand dragged him behind the post. Dazedly he saw
Conan, felt the forest man's iron grip on his arm.
There was blood on the Cimmerian's mail, dried blood on the sword in his
right hand; he loomed dim and gigantic in the shadowy light.
'Come on! Before they get over their panic!'
Balthus felt the haft of an ax shoved into his hand. Zogar Sag had
disappeared. Conan dragged Balthus after him until the youth's numb
brain awoke, and his legs began to move of their own accord. Then Conan
released him and ran into the building where the skulls hung. Balthus
followed him. He got a glimpse of a grim stone altar, faintly lighted by
the glow outside; five human heads grinned on that altar, and there was
a grisly familiarity about the features of the freshest; it was the head
of the merchant Tiberias. Behind the altar was an idol, dim, indistinct,
bestial, yet vaguely man-like in outline. Then fresh horror choked
Balthus as the shape heaved up suddenly with a rattle of chains, lifting
long misshapen arms in the gloom.
Conan's sword flailed down, crunching through flesh and bone, and then
the Cimmerian was dragging Balthus around the altar, past a huddled
shaggy bulk on the floor, to a door at the back of the long hut. Through
this they burst, out into the enclosure again. But a few yards beyond
them loomed the stockade.
It was dark behind the altar-hut. The mad stampede of the Picts had not
carried them in that direction. At the wall Conan halted, gripped
Balthus and heaved him at arm's length into the air as he might have
lifted a child. Balthus grasped the points of the upright logs set in
the sun-dried mud and scrambled up on them, ignoring the havoc done his
skin. He lowered a hand to the Cimmerian, when around a corner of the
altar-hut sprang a fleeing Pict. He halted short, glimpsing the man on
the wall in the faint glow of the fires. Conan hurled his ax with deadly
aim, but the warrior's mouth was already open for a yell of warning, and
it rang loud above the din, cut short as he dropped with a shattered
skull.
Blinding terror had not submerged all ingrained instincts. As that wild
yell rose above the clamor, there was an instant's lull, and then a
hundred throats bayed ferocious answer and warriors came leaping to
repel the attack presaged by the warning.
Conan leaped high, caught, not Balthus' hand but his arm near the
shoulder, and swung himself up. Balthus set his teeth against the
strain, and then the Cimmerian was on the wall beside him, and the
fugitives dropped down on the other side.