Black Hounds of Death Read online

  “And now you think you’ll drag me back to Zarallo’s camp?” she sneered.

  “Don’t talk like a fool,” he grunted. “Come, girl, don’t be such a spitfire. I’m not like that Stygian you knifed, and you know it.”

  “A penniless vagabond,” she taunted.

  He laughed at her.

  “What do you call yourself? You haven’t enough money to buy a new seat for your breeches. Your disdain doesn’t deceive me. You know I’ve commanded bigger ships and more men than you ever did in your life. As for being penniless—what rover isn’t, most of the time? I’ve squandered enough gold in the seaports of the world to fill a galleon. You know that, too.”

  “Where are the fine ships and the bold lads you commanded, now?” she sneered.

  “At the bottom of the sea, mostly,” he replied cheerfully. “The Zingarans sank my last ship off the Shemite shore—that’s why I joined Zarallo’s Free Companions. But I saw I’d been stung when we marched to the Darfar border. The pay was poor and the wine was sour, and I don’t like black women. And that’s the only kind that came to our camp at Sukhmet—rings in their noses and their teeth filed—bah! Why did you join Zarallo? Sukhmet’s a long way from salt water.”

  “Red Ortho wanted to make me his mistress,” she answered sullenly. “I jumped overboard one night and swam ashore when we were anchored off the Kushite coast. Off Zabhela, it was. There was a Shemite trader told me that Zarallo had brought his Free Companies south to guard the Darfar border. No better employment offered. I joined an east-bound caravan and eventually came to Sukhmet.”

  “It was madness to plunge southward as you did,” commented Conan, “but it was wise, too, for Zarallo’s patrols never thought to look for you in this direction. Only the brother of the man you killed happened to strike your trail.”

  “And now what do you intend doing?” she demanded.

  “Turn west,” he answered. “I’ve been this far south, but not this far east. Many days’ traveling to the west will bring us to the open savannas, where the black tribes graze their cattle. I have friends among them. We’ll get to the coast and find a ship. I’m sick of the jungle.”

  “Then be on your way,” she advised. “I have other plans.”

  “Don’t be a fool!” He showed irritation for the first time. “You can’t keep on wandering through this forest.”

  “I can if I choose.”

  “But what do you intend doing?”

  “That’s none of your affair,” she snapped.

  “Yes, it is,” he answered calmly. “Do you think I’ve followed you this far, to turn around and ride off empty-handed? Be sensible, wench. I’m not going to harm you.”

  He stepped toward her, and she sprang back, whipping out her sword.

  “Keep back, you barbarian dog! I’ll spit you like a roast pig!”

  He halted, reluctantly, and demanded: “Do you want me to take that toy away from you and spank you with it?”

  “Words! Nothing but words!” she mocked, lights like the gleam of the sun on blue water dancing in her reckless eyes.

  He knew it was the truth. No living man could disarm Valeria of the Brotherhood with his bare hands. He scowled, his sensations a tangle of conflicting emotions. He was angry, yet he was amused and filled with admiration for her spirit. He burned with eagerness to seize that splendid figure and crush it in his iron arms, yet he greatly desired not to hurt the girl. He was torn between a desire to shake her soundly, and a desire to caress her. He knew if he came any nearer her sword would be sheathed in his heart. He had seen Valeria kill too many men in border forays and tavern brawls to have any illusions about her. He knew she was as quick and ferocious as a tigress. He could draw his broadsword and disarm her, beat the blade out of her hand, but the thought of drawing a sword on a woman, even without intent of injury, was extremely repugnant to him.

  “Blast your soul, you hussy!” he exclaimed in exasperation. “I’m going to take off your—”

  He started toward her, his angry passion making him reckless, and she poised herself for a deadly thrust. Then came a startling interruption to a scene at once ludicrous and perilous.

  “What’s that?”

  It was Valeria who exclaimed, but they both started violently, and Conan wheeled like a cat, his great sword flashing into his hand. Back in the forest had burst forth an appalling medley of screams—the screams of horses in terror and agony. Mingled with their screams there came the snap of splintering bones.

  “Lions are slaying the horses!” cried Valeria.

  “Lions, nothing!” snorted Conan, his eyes blazing. “Did you hear a lion roar? Neither did I! Listen to those bones snap—not even a lion could make that much noise killing a horse.”

  He hurried down the natural ramp and she followed, their personal feud forgotten in the adventurers’ instinct to unite against common peril. The screams had ceased when they worked their way downward through the green veil of leaves that brushed the rock.

  “I found your horse tied by the pool back there,” he muttered, treading so noiselessly that she no longer wondered how he had surprized her on the crag. “I tied mine beside it and followed the tracks of your boots. Watch, now!”

  They had emerged from the belt of leaves, and stared down into the lower reaches of the forest. Above them the green roof spread its dusky canopy. Below them the sunlight filtered in just enough to make a jade-tinted twilight. The giant trunks of trees less than a hundred yards away looked dim and ghostly.

  “The horses should be beyond that thicket, over there,” whispered Conan, and his voice might have been a breeze moving through the branches. “Listen!”

  Valeria had already heard, and a chill crept through her veins; so she unconsciously laid her white hand on her companion’s muscular brown arm. From beyond the thicket came the noisy crunching of bones and the loud rending of flesh, together with the grinding, slobbering sounds of a horrible feast.

  “Lions wouldn’t make that noise,” whispered Conan. “Something’s eating our horses, but it’s not a lion—Crom!”

  The noise stopped suddenly, and Conan swore softly. A suddenly risen breeze was blowing from them directly toward the spot where the unseen slayer was hidden.

  “Here it comes!” muttered Conan, half-lifting his sword.

  The thicket was violently agitated, and Valeria clutched Conan’s arm hard. Ignorant of jungle-lore, she yet knew that no animal she had ever seen could have shaken the tall brush like that.

  “It must be as big as an elephant,” muttered Conan, echoing her thought. “What the devil—” His voice trailed away in stunned silence.

  Through the thicket was thrust a head of nightmare and lunacy. Grinning jaws bared rows of dripping yellow tusks; above the yawning mouth wrinkled a saurian-like snout. Huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times magnified, stared unwinkingly at the petrified humans clinging to the rock above it. Blood smeared the scaly, flabby lips and dripped from the huge mouth.

  The head, bigger than that of a crocodile, was further extended on a long scaled neck on which stood up rows of serrated spikes, and after it, crushing down the briars and saplings, waddled the body of a titan, a gigantic, barrel-bellied torso on absurdly short legs. The whitish belly almost raked the ground, while the serrated backbone rose higher than Conan could have reached on tiptoe. A long spiked tail, like that of a gargantuan scorpion, trailed out behind.

  “Back up the crag, quick!” snapped Conan, thrusting the girl behind him. “I don’t think he can climb, but he can stand on his hind legs and reach us—”

  With a snapping and rending of bushes and saplings the monster came hurtling through the thickets, and they fled up the rock before him like leaves blown before a wind. As Valeria plunged into the leafy screen a backward glance showed her the titan rearing up fearsomely on his massive hinder legs, even as Conan had predicted. The sight sent panic racing through her. As he reared, the beast seemed more gigantic than ever; his snouted head towered am
ong the trees. Then Conan’s iron hand closed on her wrist and she was jerked headlong into the blinding welter of the leaves, and out again into the hot sunshine above, just as the monster fell forward with his front feet on the crag with an impact that made the rock vibrate.

  Behind the fugitives the huge head crashed through the twigs, and they looked down for a horrifying instant at the nightmare visage framed among the green leaves, eyes flaming, jaws gaping. Then the giant tusks clashed together futilely, and after that the head was withdrawn, vanishing from their sight as if it had sunk in a pool.

  Peering down through broken branches that scraped the rock, they saw it squatting on its haunches at the foot of the crag, staring unblinkingly up at them.

  Valeria shuddered.

  “How long do you suppose he’ll crouch there?”

  Conan kicked the skull on the leaf-strewn shelf.

  “That fellow must have climbed up here to escape him, or one like him. He must have died of starvation. There are no bones broken. That thing must be a dragon, such as the black people speak of in their legends. If so, it won’t leave here until we’re both dead.”

  Valeria looked at him blankly, her resentment forgotten. She fought down a surging of panic. She had proved her reckless courage a thousand times in wild battles on sea and land, on the blood-slippery decks of burning warships, in the storming of walled cities, and on the trampled sandy beaches where the desperate men of the Red Brotherhood bathed their knives in one another’s blood in their fights for leadership. But the prospect now confronting her congealed her blood. A cutlass stroke in the heat of battle was nothing; but to sit idle and helpless on a bare rock until she perished of starvation, besieged by a monstrous survival of an elder age—the thought sent panic throbbing through her brain.

  “He must leave to eat and drink,” she said helplessly.

  “He won’t have to go far to do either,” Conan pointed out. “He’s just gorged on horse-meat and, like a real snake, he can go for a long time without eating or drinking again. But he doesn’t sleep after eating, like a real snake, it seems. Anyway, he can’t climb this crag.”

  Conan spoke imperturbably. He was a barbarian, and the terrible patience of the wilderness and its children was as much a part of him as his lusts and rages. He could endure a situation like this with a coolness impossible to a civilized person.

  “Can’t we get into the trees and get away, traveling like apes through the branches?” she asked desperately.

  He shook his head. “I thought of that. The branches that touch the crag down there are too light. They’d break with our weight. Besides, I have an idea that devil could tear up any tree around here by its roots.”

  “Well, are we going to sit here on our rumps until we starve, like that?” she cried furiously, kicking the skull clattering across the ledge. “I won’t do it! I’ll go down there and cut his damned head off—”

  Conan had seated himself on a rocky projection at the foot of the spire. He looked up with a glint of admiration at her blazing eyes and tense, quivering figure, but, realizing that she was in just the mood for any madness, he let none of his admiration sound in his voice.

  “Sit down,” he grunted, catching her by her wrist and pulling her down on his knee. She was too surprized to resist as he took her sword from her hand and shoved it back in its sheath. “Sit still and calm down. You’d only break your steel on his scales. He’d gobble you up at one gulp, or smash you like an egg with that spiked tail of his. We’ll get out of this jam some way, but we shan’t do it by getting chewed up and swallowed.”

  She made no reply, nor did she seek to repulse his arm from about her waist. She was frightened, and the sensation was new to Valeria of the Red Brotherhood. So she sat on her companion’s—or captor’s—knee with a docility that would have amazed Zarallo, who had anathematized her as a she-devil out of Hell’s seraglio.

  Conan played idly with her curly yellow locks, seemingly intent only upon his conquest. Neither the skeleton at his feet nor the monster crouching below disturbed his mind or dulled the edge of his interest.

  The girl’s restless eyes, roving the leaves below them, discovered splashes of color among the green. It was fruit, large, darkly crimson globes suspended from the boughs of a tree whose broad leaves were a peculiarly rich and vivid green. She became aware of both thirst and hunger, though thirst had not assailed her until she knew she could not descend from the crag to find food and water.

  “We need not starve,” she said. “There is fruit we can reach.”

  Conan glanced where she pointed.

  “If we ate that we wouldn’t need the bite of a dragon,” he grunted. “That’s what the black people of Kush call the Apples of Derketa. Derketa is the Queen of the Dead. Drink a little of that juice, or spill it on your flesh, and you’d be dead before you could tumble to the foot of this crag.”

  “Oh!”

  She lapsed into dismayed silence. There seemed no way out of their predicament, she reflected gloomily. She saw no way of escape, and Conan seemed to be concerned only with her supple waist and curly tresses. If he was trying to formulate a plan of escape he did not show it.

  “If you’ll take your hands off me long enough to climb up on that peak,” she said presently, “you’ll see something that will surprize you.”

  He cast her a questioning glance, then obeyed with a shrug of his massive shoulders. Clinging to the spire-like pinnacle, he stared out over the forest roof.

  He stood a long moment in silence, posed like a bronze statue on the rock.

  “It’s a walled city, right enough,” he muttered presently. “Was that where you were going, when you tried to send me off alone to the coast?”

  “I saw it before you came. I knew nothing of it when I left Sukhmet.”

  “Who’d have thought to find a city here? I don’t believe the Stygians ever penetrated this far. Could black people build a city like that? I see no herds on the plain, no signs of cultivation, or people moving about.”

  “How can you hope to see all that, at this distance?” she demanded.

  He shrugged his shoulders and dropped down on the shelf.

  “Well, the folk of the city can’t help us just now. And they might not, if they could. The people of the Black Countries are generally hostile to strangers. Probably stick us full of spears—”

  He stopped short and stood silent, as if he had forgotten what he was saying, frowning down at the crimson spheres gleaming among the leaves.

  “Spears!” he muttered. “What a blasted fool I am not to have thought of that before! That shows what a pretty woman does to a man’s mind.”

  “What are you talking about?” she inquired.

  Without answering her question, he descended to the belt of leaves and looked down through them. The great brute squatted below, watching the crag with the frightful patience of the reptile folk. So might one of his breed have glared up at their troglodyte ancestors, treed on a high-flung rock, in the dim dawn ages. Conan cursed him without heat, and began cutting branches, reaching out and severing them as far from the end as he could reach. The agitation of the leaves made the monster restless. He rose from his haunches and lashed his hideous tail, snapping off saplings as if they had been toothpicks. Conan watched him warily from the corner of his eye, and just as Valeria believed the dragon was about to hurl himself up the crag again, the Cimmerian drew back and climbed up to the ledge with the branches he had cut. There were three of these, slender shafts about seven feet long, but not larger than his thumb. He had also cut several strands of tough, thin vine.

  “Branches too light for spear-hafts, and creepers no thicker than cords,” he remarked, indicating the foliage about the crag. “It won’t hold our weight—but there’s strength in union. That’s what the Aquilonian renegades used to tell us Cimmerians when they came into the hills to raise an army to invade their own country. But we always fight by clans and tribes.”

  “What the devil has that got to do w
ith those sticks?” she demanded.

  “You wait and see.”

  Gathering the sticks in a compact bundle, he wedged his poniard hilt between them at one end. Then with the vines he bound them together, and when he had completed his task, he had a spear of no small strength, with a sturdy shaft seven feet in length.

  “What good will that do?” she demanded. “You told me that a blade couldn’t pierce his scales—”

  “He hasn’t got scales all over him,” answered Conan. “There’s more than one way of skinning a panther.”

  Moving down to the edge of the leaves, he reached the spear up and carefully thrust the blade through one of the Apples of Derketa, drawing aside to avoid the darkly purple drops that dripped from the pierced fruit. Presently he withdrew the blade and showed her the blue steel stained a dull purplish crimson.

  “I don’t know whether it will do the job or not,” quoth he. “There’s enough poison there to kill an elephant, but—well, we’ll see.”

  Valeria was close behind him as he let himself down among the leaves. Cautiously holding the poisoned pike away from him, he thrust his head through the branches and addressed the monster.

  “What are you waiting down there for, you misbegotten offspring of questionable parents?” was one of his more printable queries. “Stick your ugly head up here again, you long-necked brute—or do you want me to come down there and kick you loose from your illegitimate spine?”

  There was more of it—some of it couched in eloquence that made Valeria stare, in spite of her profane education among the seafarers. And it had its effect on the monster. Just as the incessant yapping of a dog worries and enrages more constitutionally silent animals, so the clamorous voice of a man rouses fear in some bestial bosoms and insane rage in others. Suddenly and with appalling quickness, the mastodonic brute reared up on its mighty hind legs and elongated its neck and body in a furious effort to reach this vociferous pigmy whose clamor was disturbing the primeval silence of its ancient realm.

  But Conan had judged his distance with precision. Some five feet below him the mighty head crashed terribly but futilely through the leaves. And as the monstrous mouth gaped like that of a great snake, Conan drove his spear into the red angle of the jawbone hinge. He struck downward with all the strength of both arms, driving the long poniard blade to the hilt in flesh, sinew and bone.