Conan of Cimmeria Part 8

The girl, however, did not sleep. She lay rigid, staring out at the blackness that yawned in the ice cavities beyond the feeble glow of the banked fire. At last, near dawn, came the thing she dreaded.

It was a faint piping sound-a thin, ullulating thread of music that wound around her mind until it was as helpless as a netted bird. Her heart fluttered against her ribs. She could neither move nor speak, even to rouse the snoring youth beside her.

Then two disks of cold green fire appeared in the mouth of the nearest ice tunnel-two great orbs that burned into her young soul and cast a deathly spell over her. There was no soul or mind behind those flaming disks- only remorseless hunger.

Like one walking in a dream, Ilga rose, letting her side of the bearskin cloak slide to her feet. Naked, a slim white form against the dimness, she went forward into the darkness of the tunnel and vanished.

The h.e.l.lish piping faded and ceased; the cold green eyes wavered and disappeared. And Conan slept on.

Chapter Four.

Conan awoke suddenly. Some eery premonition-some warning from the barbarian's hyperacute senses-sent its current quivering along the tendrils of his nerves. Like some wary jungle cat, Conan came instantly from deep, dreamless slumber to full wakefulness. He lay without movement, every sense searching the air around him.

Then, with a deep growl rumbling in his mighty chest, the Cimmerian heaved to his feet and found himself alone in the cavern. The girl was gone. But her furs, which she had discarded during their lovemaking, were still there. His brows knotted in a baffled scowl. Danger was still in the air, scrabbling with tenuous fingers at the edges of his nerves.

He hastily donned his garments and weapons. With his ax in his clenched fist, he thrust himself through the narrow s.p.a.ce between the overhang and the flank of the glacier. Outside on the snow, the wind had died.

Although Conan sensed dawn in the air, no gleam of morning had yet dimmed the diamond blaze of thousands of throbbing stars overhead. A gibbous moon hung low above the western peaks, casting a wan glow of pale gold across the snow fields.

Conan's keen glance raked the snow. He saw no footprints near the overhang, nor any sign of struggle. On the other hand, it was incredible that Ilga should have wandered off into the labyrinth of tunnels and creva.s.ses, where walking was almost impossible even with spiked boots and where a false step could plunge one into one of those cold streams of ice-melt that run along the bottoms of glaciers.

The hairs on Conan's nape p.r.i.c.kled at the weirdness of the girl's disappearance. At heart a superst.i.tious barbarian, he feared nothing mortal but was filled with dread and loathing by the uncanny supernatural beings and forces that lurked in the dark corners of his primeval world.

Then, as he continued to search the snow, he went rigid. Something had lately emerged from a gap in the ice a few strides from the overhang.

It was huge, long, soft, and sinuous, and it moved without feet. Its writhing track was clearly visible in the curving path that its belly had crushed in the soft whiteness, like some monstrous serpent of the snows.

The setting moon shone faintly, but Conan's wilderness-sharpened eyes easily read the path. This path led, curving around hillocks of snow and outjutting ledges of rock, up the hillside away from the glacier-up, toward the windswept peaks. He doubted that it had gone alone.

As he followed the path, a bulky, black, furry shadow, he pa.s.sed the place where his dead horse had lain. Now there was little left of the carca.s.s but a few bones. The track of the thing could be discerned about the remains, but only faintly, for the wind had blown loose snow over them.

A little further on, he came upon the girl-or what was left of her. Her head was gone, and with it most of the flesh of her upper body, so that the white bones gleamed like ivory in the dimming moonlight. The protruding bones had been cleaned, as if the flesh had been sucked from them or rasped off by some many-toothed tongue.

Conan was a warrior, the hard song of a hard people, who had seen death in a thousand forms. But now a mighty rage shook him. A few hours before, this slim, warm girl had lain in the mighty circle of his arms, returning pa.s.sion for pa.s.sion. Now nothing was left of her but a sprawled, headless thing, like a doll broken and thrown away.

Conan mastered himself to examine the corpse. With a grunt of surprise, he found that it was frozen solid and sheathed in hard ice.

Chapter Five.

Conan's eyes narrowed thoughtfully. She could not have left his side more than an hour ago, for the cloak had still held some of the warmth from her body when he awoke. In so brief a time, a warm body does not freeze solid, let alone become encased in glittering ice. It was not according to nature.

Then he grunted a coa.r.s.e expletive. He knew now, with inward loathing and fury, what had borne the sleeping girl from his side. He remembered the half-forgotten legends told around the fire in his Cimmerian boyhood. One of these concerned the dread monster of the snows, the grim Remora-the vampiric ice worm whose name was an almost forgotten whisper of horror in Cimmerian myth.

The higher animals, he knew, radiated heat. Below them in the scale of being came the scaled and plated reptiles and fishes, whose temperature was that of their surroundings. But the Remora, the worm of the ice lands, seemed unique in that it radiated cold; at least, that was how Conan would have expressed it. It gave out a sort of bitter cold that could encase a corpse in an armor of ice within minutes. Since none of Conan's fellow-tribesmen claimed to have seen a Remora, Conan had a.s.sumed that the creature was long extinct.

This, then, must be the monster that Ilga had dreaded, and of which she had vainly tried to warn him by the name yakhmar.

Conan grimly resolved to track the thing to its lair and slay it. His reasons for this decision were vague, even to himself. But, for all his youthful impulsiveness and his wild, lawless nature, he had his own rude code of honor. He liked to keep his word and to fulfill an obligation that he had freely undertaken. While he did not think of himself as a stainless, chivalrous hero, he treated women with a rough kindness that contrasted with the harshness and truculence with which he met those of his own s.e.x. He refrained from forcing his l.u.s.ts upon women if they were unwilling, and he tried to protect them when he found them dependent upon him.

Now he had failed in his own eyes. In accepting his rough act of love, the girl Ilga had placed herself under his protection. Then, when she needed his strength, he had slumbered unaware like some besotted beast.

Not knowing about the hypnotic piping sound by which the Remora paralyzed its victims and by which it had kept him-usually a light sleeper-sound asleep, he cursed himself for a stupid, ignorant fool not to have paid more heed to her warnings. He ground his powerful teeth and bit his lips in rage, determined to wipe out this stain on his code of honor if it cost him his life.

As the sky lightened in the east, Conan returned to the cave. He bundled together his belongings and laid his plans. A few years before, he might have rushed out on the ice worm's trail, trusting to his immense strength and the keen edges of his weapons to see him through.

But experience, if it had not yet tamed all his rash impulses, had taught him the beginnings of caution.

It would be impossible to grapple with the ice worm with naked hands.

The very touch of the creature meant frozen death. Even his sword and his ax were of doubtful effectiveness. The extreme cold might make their metal brittle, or the cold might run up their hafts and freeze the hand that wielded them.

But-and here a grim smile played over Conan's lips- perhaps he could turn the ice worm's power against itself.

Silently and swiftly he made his preparations. Gorged, the gelid worm would doubtless slumber through the daylight hours. But Conan did not know how long it would take him to reach the creature's lair, and he feared that another gale might wipe out its serpentine track.

Chapter Six.

As it turned out, it took Conan little more than an hour to find the ice worm's lair. The dawning sun had ascended only a little way above the eastern peaks of the Eiglophians, making the snow fields sparkle like pavements of crushed diamonds, when he stood at last before the mouth of the ice cave into which the writhing snow track led him. This cave opened in the flank of a smaller glacier, a tributary of the Snow Devil. From his elevation, Conan could look back down the slope to where this minor glacier curved to join the main one, like the affluent of a river.

Conan entered the opening. The light of the rising sun glanced and flashed from the translucent ice walls on either side, breaking up into rainbow patterns and polychrome gleams. Conan had the sensation of walking by some magical means through the solid substance of a colossal gem.

Then, as he penetrated deeper into the glacier, the darkness congealed around him. Still, he doggedly set one foot before the other, plodding onward. He raised the collar of his bearskin cloak to protect his face from the numbing cold that poured past him, making his eyeb.a.l.l.s ache and forcing him to take short, shallow breaths to keep his lungs from being frosted. Crystals of ice formed like a delicate mask upon his face, to shatter with each movement and as quickly to reform. But he went on, carefully holding that which he carried so gingerly inside his cloak.

Then in the gloom before him opened two cold green eyes, which stared into the roots of his soul. These luminous...o...b.. cast a gelid, submarine light of their own. By their faint, fungoid phosph.o.r.escence, he could see that there the cavern ended in a round well, which was the ice worm's nest. Coil on undulating coil, its immense length was curled in the hollow of its nest. Its boneless form was covered with the silken nap of thick white fur. Its mouth was merely a jawless, circular opening, now puckered and closed. Above the mouth, the two luminous...o...b.. gleamed out of a smooth, rounded, featureless, eel-like head.

Replete, the ice worm took a few heartbeats to react to Conan's presence. During the countless eons that the thing of the snows had dwelt in the cold silences of Snow Devil Glacier, no puny man-thing had ever challenged it in the frozen depths of its nest. Now its weird, trilling, mind-binding song rose about Conan, pouring over him in lulling, overpowering, narcotic waves.

But it was too late. Conan threw back his cloak to expose his burden.

This was his heavy steel horned Asgardian helm, into which he had packed the glowing coals of his fire, and in which the head of his ax also lay buried, held in place by a loop of the chin strap around the handle. A rein from his horse's harness was looped around the ax helve and the chin strap.

Holding the end of the rein in one hand, Conan whirled the whole ma.s.s over his head, round and round, as if he were whirling a sling. The rush of air fanned the faintly glowing coals to red, then to yellow, then to white. A stench of burning helmet padding arose.

The ice worm raised its blunt head. Its circular mouth slowly opened, revealing a ring of small, inward-pointing teeth. As the piping sound grew to an intolerable pitch and the black circle of mouth moved toward him, Conan stopped the whirl of the helmet on the end of its thong. He s.n.a.t.c.hed out the ax, whose helve was charred, smoking and flaming where it entered the fiercely glowing ax head. A quick cast sent the incandescent weapon looping into the cavernous maw. Holding the helmet by one of its horns, Conan hurled the glowing coals after the ax. Then he turned and ran.

Chapter Seven.

Conan never quite knew how he reached the exit. The writhing agony from the thing of the snows shook the glacier. Ice cracked thunderously all around him. The draft of interstellar cold no longer wafted out of the tunnel; instead, a blinding, swirling fog of steam choked the air.

Stumbling, slipping, and falling on the slick, uneven surface of the ice, banging into one side wall of the tunnel and then the other, Conan at last reached the outer air. The glacier trembled beneath his feet with the t.i.tanic convulsions of the dying monster within. Plumes of steam wafted from a score of creva.s.ses and caverns on either side of Conan, who, slipping and skidding, ran down the snowy slope. He angled off to one side to get free of the ice. But, before he reached the solid ground of the mountainside, with its jagged boulders and stunted trees, the glacier exploded. When the white-hot steel of the ax head met the frigid interior of the monster, something had to give way.

With a crashing roar, the ice quivered, broke up, hurled gla.s.sy fragments into the air, and collapsed into a chaotic ma.s.s of ice and pouring water, soon hidden by a vast cloud of vapor. Conan lost his footing, fell, tumbled, rolled, slid, and fetched up with bruising force against a boulder on the edge of the ice flow. Snow stuffed his mouth and blinded his eyes. A big piece of ice up-ended toppled, and struck his boulder, nearly burying him in fragments of ice.

Half stunned, Conan dragged himself out from under the ma.s.s of broken ice. Although cautious moving of his limbs showed no bones to be broken, he bore enough bruises to have been in a battle. Above him, a tremendous cloud of vapor and glittering ice crystals whirled upward from the site of the ice worm's cavern, now a black crater. Fragments of ice and slush poured into this crater from all sides. The whole level of the glacier in the area had sunk.

Little by little the scene returned to normal. The biting mountain breeze blew away the clouds of vapor. The water from the melting of the ice froze again. The glacier returned to its usual near-immobility.

Battered and weary, Conan limped down into the pa.s.s.

Lamed as he was, he must now walk all the way to far Nemedia or Ophir, unless he could buy, beg, borrow, or steal another horse. But he went with a high heart, turning his bruised face southward-to the golden South, where shining cities lifted tall towers to a balmy sun, and where a strong man with courage and luck could win gold, wine, and soft, full-breasted women.