

Beyond the Black River Again

By Roberta E. Howard

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Roberta E. Howard

A Conyn the Barbarian story.

A Gender Switch Adventure.

Chapter 1. Conyn Loses Her Ax

The stillness of the forest trail was so primeval that the tread of a soft-booted foot was a startling disturbance. At least it seemed so to the ears of the wayfarer, though she was moving along the path with the caution that must be practised by any woman who ventures beyond Thunder River. She was a young woman of medium height, with an open countenance and a mop of tousled tawny hair unconfined by cap or helmet. Her garb was common enough for that country--a coarse tunic, belted at the waist, short leather breeches beneath, and soft buckskin boots that came short of the knee. A knife-hilt jutted from one boot-top. The broad leather belt supported a short, heavy sword and a buckskin pouch. There was no perturbation in the wide eyes that scanned the green walls which fringed the trail. Though not tall, she was well built, and the arms that the short wide sleeves of the tunic left bare were thick with corded muscle.

She tramped imperturbably along, although the last settler's cabin lay miles behind her, and each step was carrying her nearer the grim peril that hung like a brooding shadow over the ancient forest.

She was not making as much noise as it seemed to her, though she well knew that the faint tread of her booted feet would be like a tocsin of alarm to the fierce ears that might be lurking in the treacherous green fastness. Her careless attitude was not genuine; her eyes and ears were keenly alert, especially her ears, for no gaze could penetrate the leafy tangle for more than a few feet in either direction.

But it was instinct more than any warning by the external senses which brought her up suddenly, her hand on her hilt. She stood stock-still in the middle of the trail, unconsciously holding her breath, wondering what she had heard, and wondering if indeed she had heard anything. The silence seemed absolute. Not a squirrel chattered or bird chirped. Then her gaze fixed itself on a mass of bushes beside the trail a few yards ahead of her. There was no breeze, yet she had seen a branch quiver. The short hairs on her scalp prickled, and she stood for an instant undecided, certain that a move in either direction would bring death streaking at her from the bushes.

A heavy chopping crunch sounded behind the leaves. The bushes were shaken violently, and simultaneously with the sound, an arrow arched erratically from among them and vanished among the trees along the trail. The wayfarer glimpsed its flight as she sprang frantically to cover.

Crouching behind a thick stem, her sword quivering in her fingers, she saw the bushes part, and a tall figure stepped leisurely into the trail. The traveller stared in surprise. The stranger was clad like herself in regard to boots and breeks, though the latter were of silk instead of leather. But she wore a sleeveless hauberk of dark mesh-mail in place of a tunic, and a helmet perched on her black mane. That helmet held the other's gaze; it was without a crest, but adorned by short bull's horns. No civilized hand ever forged that head-piece. Nor was the face below it that of a civilized woman: dark, scarred, with smoldering blue eyes, it was a face as untamed as the primordial forest which formed its background. The woman held a broad-sword in her right hand, and the edge was smeared with crimson.

"Come on out," she called, in an accent unfamiliar to the wayfarer. "All's safe now. There was only one of the dogs. Come on out."

The other emerged dubiously and stared at the stranger. She felt curiously helpless and futile as she gazed on the proportions of the forest man--the massive iron-clad breast, and the arm that bore the reddened sword, burned dark by the sun and ridged and corded with muscles. She moved with the dangerous ease of a panther; she was too fiercely supple to be a product of civilization, even of that fringe of civilization which composed the outer frontiers.

Turning, she stepped back to the hushes and pulled them apart. Still not certain just what had happened, the wayfarer from the east advanced and stared down into the bushes. A woman lay there, a short, dark, thickly-muscled woman, naked except for a loin-cloth, a necklace of human teeth and a brass armlet. A short sword was thrust into the girdle of the loin-cloth, and one hand still gripped a heavy black bow. The woman had long black hair; that was about all the wayfarer could tell about her head, for her features were a mask of blood and brains. Her skull had been split to the teeth.

"A Pict, by the gods!" exclaimed the wayfarer.

The burning blue eyes turned upon her.

"Are you surprised?"

"Why, they told me at Velitrium, and again at the settlers' cabins along the road, that these devils sometimes sneaked across the border, but I didn't expect to meet one this far in the interior."

"You're only four miles east of Black River," the stranger informed her. "They've been shot within a mile of Velitrium. No settler between Thunder River and Fort Tuscelan is really safe. I picked up this dog's trail three miles south of the fort this morning, and I've been following her ever since. I came up behind her just as she was drawing an arrow on you. Another instant and there'd have been a stranger in Hell. But I spoiled her aim for her."

The wayfarer was staring wide eyed at the larger woman, dumbfounded by the realization that the woman had actually tracked down one of the forest devils and slain her unsuspected. That implied woodsmanship of a quality undreamed, even for Conajohara.

"You are one of the fort's garrison?" she asked.

"I'm no soldier. I draw the pay and rations of an officer of the line, but I do my work in the woods. Valannus knows I'm of more use ranging along the river than cooped up in the fort."

Casually the slayer shoved the body deeper into the thickets with her foot, pulled the bushes together and turned away down the trail. The other followed her.

"My name is Balthusa," she offered. "I was at Velitrium last night. I haven't decided whether I'll take up a hide of land, or enter fort service."

"The best land near Thunder River is already taken," grunted the slayer. "Plenty of good land between Scalp Creek--you crossed it a few miles back--and the fort, but that's getting too devilish close to the river. The Picts steal over to burn and murder--as that one did. They don't always come singly. Some day they'll try to sweep the settlers out of Conajohara. And they may succeed--probably will succeed. This colonization business is mad, anyway. There's plenty of good land east of the Bossonian marches. If the Aquilonians would cut up some of the big estates of their barons, and plant wheat where now only deer are hunted, they wouldn't have to cross the border and take the land of the Picts away from them."

"That's queer talk from a woman in the service of the governor of Conajohara," objected Balthusa.

"It's nothing to me," the other retorted. "I'm a mercenary. I sell my sword to the highest bidder. I never planted wheat and never will, so long as there are other harvests to be reaped with the sword. But you Hyborians have expanded as far as you'll be allowed to expand. You've crossed the marches, burned a few villages, exterminated a few clans and pushed back the frontier to Black River; but I doubt if you'll even be able to hold what you've conquered, and you'll never push the frontier any further westward. Your idiotic queen doesn't understand conditions here. She won't send you enough reinforcements, and there are not enough settlers to withstand the shock of a concerted attack from across the river."

"But the Picts are divided into small clans," persisted Balthusa. "They'll never unite. We can whip any single clan."

"Or any three or four clans," admitted the slayer. "But some day a woman will rise and unite thirty or forty clans, just as was done among the Cimmerians, when the Gunderwomen tried to push the border northward, years ago. They tried to colonize the southern marches of Cimmeria: destroyed a few small clans, built a fort-town, Venarium--you've heard the tale."

"So I have indeed," replied Balthusa, wincing. The memory of that red disaster was a black blot in the chronicles of a proud and warlike people. "My uncle was at Venarium when the Cimmerians swarmed over the walls. She was one of the few who escaped that slaughter. I've heard her tell the tale, many a time. The barbarians swept out of the hills in a ravening horde, without warning, and stormed Venarium with such fury none could stand before them. Women, men, and children were butchered. Venarium was reduced to a mass of charred ruins, as it is to this day. The Aquilonians were driven back across the marches, and have never since tried to colonize the Cimmerian country. But you speak of Venarium familiarly. Perhaps you were there?"

"I was," grunted the other. "I was one of the horde that swarmed over the walls. I hadn't yet seen fifteen snows, but already my name was repeated about the council fires."

Balthusa involuntarily recoiled, staring. It seemed incredible that the woman walking tranquilly at her side should have been one of those screeching, blood-mad devils that poured over the walls of Venarium on that long-gone day to make his streets run crimson.

"Then you, too, are a barbarian!" she exclaimed involuntarily.

The other nodded, without taking offense.

"I am Conyn, a Cimmerian."

"I've heard of you." Fresh interest quickened Balthusa' gaze. No wonder the Pict had fallen victim to her own sort of subtlety! The Cimmerians were barbarians as ferocious as the Picts, and much more intelligent. Evidently Conyn had spent much time among civilized women, though that contact had obviously not softened her, nor weakened any of her primitive instincts. Balthusa' apprehension turned to admiration as she marked the easy catlike stride, the effortless silence with which the Cimmerian moved along the trail. The oiled links of her armor did not clink, and Balthusa knew Conyn could glide through the deepest thicket or most tangled copse as noiselessly as any naked Pict that ever lived.

"You're not a Gunderwoman?" It was more assertion than question.

Balthusa shook her head. "I'm from the Tauran."

"I've seen good woodsmen from the Tauran. But the Bossonians have sheltered you Aquilonians from the outer wilderness for too many centuries. You need hardening."

That was true; the Bossonian marches, with their fortifed villages filled with determined bowmen, had long served Aquilonia as a buffer against the outlying barbarians. Now among the settlers beyond Thunder River here was growing up a breed of forest women capable of meeting the barbarians at their own game, but their numbers were still scanty. Most of the frontiersmen were like Balthusa--more of the settler than the woodsman type.

The sun had not set, but it was no longer in sight, hidden as it was behind the dense forest wall. The shadows were lengthening, deepening back in the woods as the companions strode on down the trail.

"It will be dark before we reach the fort," commented Conyn casually; then: "Listen!"

She stopped short, half crouching, sword ready, transformed into a savage figure of suspicion and menace, poised to spring and rend. Balthusa had heard it too--a wild scream that broke at its highest note. It was the cry of a woman in dire fear or agony.

Conyn was off in an instant, racing down the trail, each stride widening the distance between her and her straining companion. Balthusa puffed a curse. Among the settlements of the Tauran she was accounted a good runner, but Conyn was leaving her behind with maddening ease. Then Balthusa forgot her exasperation as her ears were outraged by the most frightful cry she had ever heard. It was not human, this one; it was a demoniacal caterwauling of hideous triumph that seemed to exult over fallen humanity and find echo in black gulfs beyond human ken.

Balthusa faltered in her stride, and clammy sweat beaded her flesh. But Conyn did not hesitate; she darted around a bend in the trail and disappeared, and Balthusa, panicky at finding herself alone with that awful scream still shuddering through the forest in grisly echoes, put on an extra burst of speed and plunged after her.

The Aquilonian slid to a stumbling halt, almost colliding with the Cimmerian who stood in the trail over a crumpled body. But Conyn was not looking at the corpse which lay there in the crimson-soaked dust. She was glaring into the deep woods on either side of the trail.

Balthusa muttered a horrified oath. It was the body of a woman which lay there in the trail, a short, fat woman, clad in the gilt-worked boots and (despite the heat) the ermine-trimmed tunic of a wealthy merchant. Her fat, pale face was set in a stare of frozen horror; her thick throat had been slashed from ear to ear as if by a razor-sharp blade. The short sword still in its scabbard seemed to indicate that she had been struck down without a chance to fight for her life.

"A Pict?" Balthusa whispered, as she turned to peer into the deepening shadows of the forest.

Conyn shook her head and straightened to scowl down at the dead woman.

"A forest devil. This is the fifth, by Crom!"

"What do you mean?"

"Did you ever hear of a Pictish wizard called Zogara Sag?"

Balthusa shook her head uneasily.

"She dwells in Gwawela, the nearest village across the river. Three months ago she hid beside this road and stole a string of pack-mules from a pack-train bound for the fort--drugged their drivers, somehow. The mules belonged to this man"--Conyn casually indicated the corpse with her foot--"Tiberias, a merchant of Velitrium. They were loaded with ale-kegs, and old Zogara stopped to guzzle before she got across the river. A woodsman named Soractus trailed her, and led Valannus and three soldiers to where she lay dead drunk in a thicket. At the importunities of Tiberias, Valannus threw Zogara Sag into a cell, which is the worst insult you can give a Pict. She managed to kill her guard and escape, and sent back word that she meant to kill Tiberias and the five women who captured her in a way that would make Aquilonians shudder for centuries to come.

"Well, Soractus and the soldiers are dead. Soractus was killed on the river, the soldiers in the very shadow of the fort. And now Tiberias is dead. No Pict killed any of them. Each victim--except Tiberias, as you see--lacked her head--which no doubt is now ornamenting the altar of Zogara Sag's particular god."

"How do you know they weren't killed by the Picts?" demanded Balthusa.

Conyn pointed to the corpse of the merchant.

"You think that was done with a knife or a sword? Look closer and you'll see that only a talon could have made a gash like that. The flesh is ripped, not cut."

"Perhaps a panther--" began Balthusa, without conviction.

Conyn shook her head impatiently.

"A woman from the Tauran couldn't mistake the mark of a panther's claws. No. It's a forest devil summoned by Zogara Sag to carry out her revenge. Tiberias was a fool to start for Velitrium alone, and so close to dusk. But each one of the victims seemed to be smitten with madness just before doom overtook her. Look here; the signs are plain enough. Tiberias came riding along the trail on her mule, maybe with a bundle of choice otter pelts behind her saddle to sell in Velitrium, and the thing sprang on her from behind that bush. See where the branches are crushed down.

"Tiberias gave one scream, and then her throat was torn open and she was selling her otter skins in Hell. The mule ran away into the woods. Listen! Even now you can hear her thrashing about under the trees. The demon didn't have time to take Tiberias' head; it took fright as we came up."

"As you came up," amended Balthusa. "It must not be a very terrible creature if it flees from one armed woman. But how do you know it was not a Pict with some kind of a hook that rips instead of slicing? Did you see it?"

"Tiberias was an armed woman," grunted Conyn. "If Zogara Sag can bring demons to aid her, she can tell them which women to kill and which to let alone. No, I didn't see it. I only saw the bushes shake as it left the trail. But if you want further proof, look here!"

The slayer had stepped into the pool of blood in which the dead woman sprawled. Under the bushes at the edge of the path there was a footprint, made in blood on the hard loam.

"Did a woman make that?" demanded Conyn.

Balthusa felt her scalp prickle. Neither woman nor any beast that she had ever seen could have left that strange, monstrous, three-toed print, that was curiously combined of the bird and the reptile, yet a true type of neither. She spread her fingers above the print, careful not to touch it, and grunted explosively. She could not span the mark.

"What is it?" she whispered. "I never saw a beast that left a spoor like that."

"Nor any other sane woman," answered Conyn grimly. "It's a swamp demon--they're thick as bats in the swamps beyond Black River. You can hear them howling like damned souls when the wind blows strong from the south on hot nights."

"What shall we do?" asked the Aquilonian, peering uneasily into the deep blue shadows. The frozen fear on the dead countenance haunted her. She wondered what hideous head the wretch had seen thrust grinning from among the leaves to chill her blood with terror.

"No use to try to follow a demon," grunted Conyn, drawing a short woodman's ax from her girdle. "I tried tracking her after she killed Soractus. I lost her trail within a dozen steps. She might have grown herself wings and flown away, or sunk down through the earth to Hell. I don't know. I'm not going after the mule, either. It'll either wander back to the fort, or to some settler's cabin."

As she spoke Conyn was busy at the edge of the trail with her ax. With a few strokes she cut a pair of saplings nine or ten feet long, and denuded them of their branches. Then she cut a length from a serpent-like vine that crawled among the bushes near by, and making one end fast to one of the poles, a couple of feet from the end, whipped the vine over the other sapling and interlaced it back and forth. In a few moments she had a crude but strong litter.

"The demon isn't going to get Tiberias' head if I can help it," she growled. "We'll carry the body into the fort. It isn't more than three miles. I never liked the fat fool, but we can't have Pictish devils making so cursed free with white women's heads."

The Picts were a white race, though swarthy, but the border women never spoke of them as such.

Balthusa took the rear end of the litter, onto which Conyn unceremoniously dumped the unfortunate merchant, and they moved on down the trail as swiftly as possible. Conyn made no more noise laden with their grim burden than she had made when unencumbered. She had made a loop with the merchant's belt at the end of the poles, and was carrying her share of the load with one hand, while the other gripped her naked broadsword, and her restless gaze roved the sinister walls about them. The shadows were thickening. A darkening blue mist blurred the outlines of the foliage. The forest deepened in the twilight, became a blue haunt of mystery sheltering unguessed things.

They had covered more than a mile, and the muscles in Balthusa' sturdy arms were beginning to ache a little, when a cry rang shuddering from the woods whose blue shadows were deepening into purple.

Conyn started convulsively, and Balthusa almost let go the poles.

"A man!" cried the younger woman. "Great Mitra, a man cried out then!"

"A settler's wife straying in the woods," snarled Conyn, setting down her end of the lifter. "Looking for a cow, probably, and--stay here!"

She dived like a hunting wolf into the leafy wall. Balthusa' hair bristled.

"Stay here alone with this corpse and a devil hiding in the woods?" she yelped. "I'm coming with you!"

And suiting action to words, she plunged after the Cimmerian. Conyn glanced back at her, but made no objection, though she did not moderate her pace to accommodate the shorter legs of her companion. Balthusa wasted her wind in swearing as the Cimmerian drew away from her again, like a phantom between the trees, and then Conyn burst into a dim glade and halted crouching, lips snarling, sword lifted.

"What are we stopping for?" panted Balthusa, dashing the sweat out of her eyes and gripping her short sword.

"That scream came from this glade, or near by," answered Conyn. "I don't mistake the location of sounds, even in the woods. But where--"

Abruptly the sound rang out again--behind them; in the direction of the trail they had just quitted. It rose piercingly and pitifully, the cry of a man in frantic terror--and then, shockingly, it changed to a yell of mocking laughter that might have burst from the lips of a fiend of lower Hell.

"What in Mitra's name--" Balthusa' face was a pale blur in the gloom.

With a scorching oath Conyn wheeled and dashed back the way she had come, and the Aquilonian stumbled bewilderedly after her. She blundered into the Cimmerian as the latter stopped dead, and rebounded from her brawny shoulders as though from an iron statue. Gasping from the impact, she heard Conyn's breath hiss through her teeth. The Cimmerian seemed frozen in her tracks.

Looking over her shoulder, Balthusa felt her hair stand up stiffly. Something was moving through the deep bushes that fringed the trail--something that neither walked nor flew, but seemed to glide like a serpent. But it was not a serpent. Its outlines were indistinct, but it was taller than a woman, and not very bulky. It gave off a glimmer of weird light, like a faint blue flame. Indeed, the eery fire was the only tangible thing about it. It might have been an embodied flame moving with reason and purpose through the blackening woods.

Conyn snarled a savage curse and hurled her ax with ferocious will. But the thing glided on without altering its course. Indeed it was only a few instants' fleeting glimpse they had of it--a tall, shadowy thing of misty flame floating through the thickets. Then it was gone, and the forest crouched in breathless stillness.

With a snarl Conyn plunged through the intervening foliage and into the trail. Her profanity, as Balthusa floundered after her, was lurid and impassioned. The Cimmerian was standing over the litter on which lay the body of Tiberias. And that body no longer possessed a head.

"Tricked us with its damnable caterwauling!" raved Conyn, swinging her great sword about her head in her wrath. "I might have known! I might have guessed a trick! Now there'll be five heads to decorate Zogara's altar."

"But what thing is it that can cry like a man and laugh like a devil, and shines like witch-fire as it glides through the trees?" gasped Balthusa, mopping the sweat from her pale face.

"A swamp devil," responded Conyn morosely. "Grab those poles. We'll take in the body, anyway. At least our load's a bit lighter."

With which grim philosophy she gripped the leathery loop and stalked down the trail.

Chapter 2. The Wizard of Gwawela

Fort Tuscelan stood on the eastern bank of Black River, the tides of which washed the foot of the stockade. The latter was of logs, as were all the buildings within, including the donjon (to dignify it by that appellation), in which were the governor's quarters, overlooking the stockade and the sullen river. Beyond that river lay a huge forest, which approached jungle-like density along the spongy shores. Women paced the runways along the log parapet day and night, watching that dense green wall. Seldom a menacing figure appeared, but the sentries knew that they too were watched, fiercely, hungrily, with the mercilessness of ancient hate. The forest beyond the river might seem desolate and vacant of life to the ignorant eye, but life teemed there, not alone of bird and beast and reptile, but also of women, the fiercest of all the hunting beasts.

There, at the fort, civilization ended. Fort Tuscelan was the last outpost of a civilized world; it represented the westernmost thrust of the dominant Hyborian races. Beyond the river the primitive still reigned in shadowy forests, brush-thatched huts where hung the grinning skulls of women, and mud-walled enclosures where fires flickered and drums rumbled, and spears were whetted in the hands of dark, silent women with tangled black hair and the eyes of serpents. Those eyes often glared through bushes at the fort across the river. Once dark-skinned women had built their huts where that fort stood, yes, and their huts had risen where now stood the fields and log cabins of fair-haired settlers, back beyond Velitrium, that raw, turbulent frontier town on the banks of Thunder River, to the shores of that other river that bounds the Bossonian marches. Traders had come, and priests of Mitra who walked with bare feet and empty hands, and died horribly, most of them; but soldiers had followed, women with axes in their hands and men and children in ox-drawn wains. Back to Thunder River, and still back, beyond Black River, the aborigines had been pushed, with slaughter and massacre. But the dark-skinned people did not forget that once Conajohara had been theirs.

The guard inside the eastern gate bawled a challenge. Through a barred aperture torchlight flickered, glinting on a steel headpiece and suspicious eyes beneath it.

"Open the gate," snorted Conyn. "You see it's I, don't you?"

Military discipline put her teeth on edge.

The gate swung inward and Conyn and her companion passed through. Balthusa noted that the gate was flanked by a tower on each side, the summits of which rose above the stockade. She saw loopholes for arrows.

The guardswomen grunted as they saw the burden borne between the women. Their pikes jangled against each other as they thrust shut the gate, chin on shoulder, and Conyn asked testily: "Have you never seen a headless body before?"

The faces of the soldiers were pallid in the torchlight.

"That's Tiberias," blurted one. "I recognize that fur-trimmed tunic. Valerius here owes me five lunas. I told her Tiberias had heard the loon call when she rode through the gate on her mule, with her glassy stare. I wagered she'd come back without her head."

Conyn grunted enigmatically, motioned Balthusa to ease the litter to the ground, and then strode off toward the governor's quarters, with the Aquilonian at her heels. The tousle-headed youth stared about her eagerly and curiously, noting the rows of barracks along the walls, the stables, the tiny merchants' stalls, the towering blockhouse, and the other buildings, with the open square in the middle where the soldiers drilled, and where, now, fires danced and women off duty lounged. These were now hurrying to join the morbid crowd gathered about the litter at the gate. The rangy figures of Aquilonian pikemen and forest runners mingled with the shorter, stockier forms of Bossonian archers.

She was not greatly surprised that the governor received them herself. Autocratic society with its rigid caste laws lay east of the marches. Valannus was still a young woman, well knit, with a finely chiseled countenance already carved into sober cast by toil and responsibility.

"You left the fort before daybreak, I was told," she said to Conyn. "I had begun to fear that the Picts had caught you at last."

"When they smoke my head the whole river will know," grunted Conyn. "They'll hear Pictish men wailing their dead as far as Velitrium--I was on a lone scout. I couldn't sleep. I kept hearing drums talking across the river."

"They talk each night," reminded the governor, her fine eyes shadowed, as she stared closely at Conyn. She had learned the unwisdom of discounting wild women's instincts.

"There was a difference last night," growled Conyn. "There has been ever since Zogara Sag got back across the river."

"We should either have given her presents and sent her home, or else hanged her," sighed the governor. "You advised that, but--"

"But it's hard for you Hyborians to learn the ways of the outlands," said Conyn. "Well, it can't be helped now, but there'll be no peace on the border so long as Zogara lives and remembers the cell she sweated in. I was following a warrior who slipped over to put a few white notches on her bow. After I split her head I fell in with this lass whose name is Balthusa and who's come from the Tauran to help hold the frontier."

Valannus approvingly eyed the young woman's frank countenance and strongly-knit frame.

"I am glad to welcome you, young sir. I wish more of your people would come. We need women used to forest life. Many of our soldiers and some of our settlers are from the eastern provinces and know nothing of woodcraft, or even of agricultural life."

"Not many of that breed this side of Velitrium," grunted Conyn. "That town's full of them, though. But listen, Valannus, we found Tiberias dead on the trail." And in a few words she related the grisly affair.

Valannus paled. "I did not know she had left the fort. She must have been mad!"

"She was," answered Conyn. "Like the other four; each one, when her time came, went mad and rushed into the woods to meet her death like a hare running down the throat of a python. Something called to them from the deeps of the forest, something the women call a loon, for lack of a better name, but only the doomed ones could hear it. Zogara Sag has made a magic that Aquilonian civilization can't overcome."

To this thrust Valannus made no reply; she wiped her brow with a shaky hand.

"Do the soldiers know of this?"

"We left the body by the eastern gate."

"You should have concealed the fact, hidden the corpse somewhere in the woods. The soldiers are nervous enough already."

"They'd have found it out some way. If I'd hidden the body, it would have been returned to the fort as the corpse of Soractus was--tied up outside the gate for the women to find in the morning."

Valannus shuddered. Turning, she walked to a casement and stared silently out over the river, black and shiny under the glint of the stars. Beyond the river the jungle rose like an ebony wall. The distant screech of a panther broke the stillness. The night pressed in, blurring the sounds of the soldiers outside the blockhouse, dimming the fires. A wind whispered through the black branches, rippling the dusky water. On its wings came a low, rhythmic pulsing, sinister as the pad of a leopard's foot.

"After all," said Valannus, as if speaking her thoughts aloud, "what do we know--what does anyone know--of the things that jungle may hide? We have dim rumors of great swamps and rivers, and a forest that stretches on and on over everlasting plains and hills to end at last on the shores of the western ocean. But what things lie between this river and that ocean we dare not even guess. No white woman has ever plunged deep into that fastness and returned alive to tell us what be found. We are wise in our civilized knowledge, but our knowledge extends just so far--to the western bank of that ancient river! Who knows what shapes earthly and unearthly may lurk beyond the dim circle of light our knowledge has cast?

"Who knows what gods are worshipped under the shadows of that heathen forest, or what devils crawl out of the black ooze of the swamps? Who can be sure that all the inhabitants of that black country are natural? Zogara Sag--a sage of the eastern cities would sneer at her primitive magic-making as the mummery of a fakir; yet she has driven mad and killed five women in a manner no woman can explain. I wonder if she herself is wholly human."

"If I can get within ax-throwing distance of her I'll settle that question," growled Conyn, helping herself to the governor's wine and pushing a glass toward Balthusa, who took it hesitatingly, and with an uncertain glance toward Valannus.

The governor turned toward Conyn and stared at her thoughtfully.

"The soldiers, who do not believe in ghosts or devils," she said, "are almost in a panic of fear. You, who believe in ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and all manner of uncanny things, do not seem to fear any of the things in which you believe."

"There's nothing in the universe cold steel won't cut," answered Conyn. "I threw my ax at the demon, and she took no hurt, but I might have missed in the dusk, or a branch deflected its flight. I'm not going out of my way looking for devils; but I wouldn't step out of my path to let one go by."

Valannus lifted her head and met Conyn's gaze squarely.

"Conyn, more depends on you than you realize. You know the weakness of this province--a slender wedge thrust into the untamed wilderness. You know that the lives of all the people west of the marches depend on this fort. Were it to fall, red axes would be splintering the gates of Velitrium before a horsewoman could cross the marches. Her Majesty, or her Majesty's advisers, have ignored my plea that more troops be sent to hold the frontier. They know nothing of border conditions, and are averse to expending any more money in this direction. The fate of the frontier depends upon the women who now hold it.

"You know that most of the army which conquered Conajohara has been withdrawn. You know the force left is inadequate, especially since that devil Zogara Sag managed to poison our water supply, and forty women died in one day. Many of the others are sick, or have been bitten by serpents or mauled by wild beasts which seem to swarm in increasing numbers in the vicinity of the fort. The soldiers believe Zogara's boast that she could summon the forest beasts to slay her enemies.

"I have three hundred pikemen, four hundred Bossonian archers, and perhaps fifty women who, like yourself, are skilled in woodcraft. They are worth ten times their number of soldiers, but there are so few of them. Frankly, Conyn, my situation is becoming precarious. The soldiers whisper of desertion; they are low-spirited, believing Zogara Sag has loosed devils on us. They fear the black plague with which she threatened us--the terrible black death of the swamplands. When I see a sick soldier, I sweat with fear of seeing her turn black and shrivel and die before my eyes.

"Conyn, if the plague is loosed upon us, the soldiers will desert in a body! The border will be left unguarded and nothing will check the sweep of the dark-skinned hordes to the very gates of Velitrium--maybe beyond! If we cannot hold the fort, how can they hold the town?

"Conyn, Zogara Sag must die, if we are to hold Conajohara. You have penetrated the unknown deeper than any other woman in the fort; you know where Gwawela stands, and something of the forest trails across the river. Will you take a band of women tonight and endeavor to kill or capture her? Oh, I know it's mad. There isn't more than one chance in a thousand that any of you will come back alive. But if we don't get her, it's death for us all. You can take as many women as you wish."

"A dozen women are better for a job like that than a regiment," answered Conyn. "Five hundred women couldn't fight their way to Gwawela and back, but a dozen might slip in and out again. Let me pick my women. I don't want any soldiers."

"Let me go!" eagerly exclaimed Balthusa. "I've hunted deer all my life on the Tauran."

"All right. Valannus, we'll eat at the stall where the foresters gather, and I'll pick my women. We'll start within an hour, drop down the river in a boat to a point below the village and then steal upon it through the woods. If we live, we should be back by daybreak."

Chapter 3. The Crawlers in the Dark

The river was a vague trace between walls of ebony. The paddles that propelled the long boat creeping along in the dense shadow of the eastern bank dipped softly into the water, making no more noise than the beak of a heron. The broad shoulders of the woman in front of Balthusa were a blue in the dense gloom. She knew that not even the keen eyes of the woman who knelt in the prow would discern anything more than a few feet ahead of them. Conyn was feeling her way by instinct and an intensive familiarity with the river.

No one spoke. Balthusa had had a good look at her companions in the fort before they slipped out of the stockade and down the bank into the waiting canoe. They were of a new breed growing up in the world on the raw edge of the frontier--men whom grim necessity had taught woodcraft. Aquilonians of the western provinces to a woman, they had many points in common. They dressed alike--in buckskin boots, leathern breeks and deerskin shirts, with broad girdles that held axes and short swords; and they were all gaunt and scarred and hard-eyed; sinewy and taciturn.

They were wild women, of a sort, yet there was still a wide gulf between them and the Cimmerian. They were sons of civilization, reverted to a semi-barbarism. She was a barbarian of a thousand generations of barbarians. They had acquired stealth and craft, but she had been born to these things. She excelled them even in lithe economy of motion. They were wolves, but she was a tiger.

Balthusa admired them and their leader and felt a pulse of pride that she was admitted into their company. She was proud that her paddle made no more noise than did theirs. In that respect at least she was their equal, though woodcraft learned in hunts on the Tauran could never equal that ground into the souls of women on the savage border.

Below the fort the river made a wide bend. The lights of the outpost were quickly lost, but the canoe held on its way for nearly a mile, avoiding snags and floating logs with almost uncanny precision.

Then a low grunt from their leader, and they swung its head about and glided toward the opposite shore. Emerging from the black shadows of the brush that fringed the bank and coming into the open of the midstream created a peculiar illusion of rash exposure. But the stars gave little light, and Balthusa knew that unless one were watching for it, it would be all but impossible for the keenest eye to make out the shadowy shape of the canoe crossing the river.

They swung in under the overhanging bushes of the western shore and Balthusa groped for and found a projecting root which she grasped. No word was spoken. All instructions had been given before the scouting-party left the fort. As silently as a great panther, Conyn slid over the side and vanished in the bushes. Equally noiseless, nine women followed her. To Balthusa, grasping the root with her paddle across her knee, it seemed incredible that ten women should thus fade into the tangled forest without a sound.

She settled herself to wait. No word passed between her and the other woman who had been left with her. Somewhere, a mile or so to the northwest, Zogara Sag's village stood girdled with thick woods. Balthusa understood her orders; she and her companion were to wait for the return of the raiding-party. If Conyn and her women had not returned by the first tinge of dawn, they were to race back up the river to the fort and report that the forest had again taken its immemorial toll of the invading race. The silence was oppressive. No sound came from the black woods, invisible beyond the ebony masses that were the overhanging bushes. Balthusa no longer heard the drums. They had been silent for hours. She kept blinking, unconsciously trying to see through the deep gloom. The dank night-smells of the river and the damp forest oppressed her. Somewhere, near by, there was a sound as if a big fish had flopped and splashed the water. Balthusa thought it must have leaped so close to the canoe that it had struck the side, for a slight quiver vibrated the craft. The boat's stern began to swing, slightly away from the shore. The woman behind her must have let go of the projection she was gripping. Balthusa twisted her head to hiss a warning, and could just make out the figure of her companion, a slightly blacker bulk in the blackness.

The woman did not reply. Wondering if she had fallen asleep, Balthusa reached out and grasped her shoulder. To her amazement, the woman crumpled under her touch and slumped down in the canoe. Twisting her body half about, Balthusa groped for her, her heart shooting into her throat. Her fumbling fingers slid over the woman's throat--only the youth's convulsive clenching of her jaws choked back the cry that rose to her lips. Her finger encountered a gaping, oozing wound--his companion's throat had been cut from ear to ear.

In that instant of horror and panic Balthusa started up--and then a muscular arm out of the darkness locked fiercely about her throat, strangling her yell. The canoe rocked wildly. Balthusa' knife was in her hand, though she did not remember jerking it out of her boot, and she stabbed fiercely and blindly. She felt the blade sink deep, and a fiendish yell rang in her ear, a yell that was horribly answered. The darkness seemed to come to life about her. A bestial clamor rose on all sides, and other arms grappled her. Borne under a mass of hurtling bodies the canoe rolled sidewise, but before she went under with it, something cracked against Balthusa' head and the night was briefly illuminated by a blinding burst of fire before it gave way to a blackness where not even stars shone.

Chapter 4. The Beasts of Zogara Sag

Fires dazzled Balthusa again as she slowly recovered her senses. She blinked, shook her head. Their glare hurt her eyes. A confused medley of sound rose about her, growing more distinct as her senses cleared. She lifted her head and stared stupidly about her. Black figures hemmed her in, etched against crimson tongues of flame.

Memory and understanding came in a rush. She 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 men. Beyond the fires she saw huts of mud and wattle, thatched with brush. Beyond the huts there was a stockade with a broad gate. But she saw these things only incidentally. Even the cryptic dark men with their curious coiffures were noted by her only absently. Her full attention was fixed in awful fascination on the women who stood glaring at her.

Short women, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed, 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.

Her eyes wavered away from the steady glare of her captors, and she 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 the black sky. Numbly she recognized the countenances which were turned toward her. They were the heads of the women who had followed Conyn into the forest. She could not tell if the Cimmerian's head were among them. Only a few faces were visible to her. It looked to her as if there must be ten or eleven heads at least. A deadly sickness assailed her. She fought a desire to retch. Beyond the heads lay the bodies of half a dozen Picts, and she was aware of a fierce exultation at the sight. The forest runners had taken toll, at least.

Twisting her head away from the ghastly spectacle, she became aware that another post stood near her--a stake painted black as was the one to which she was bound. A woman sagged in her bonds there, naked except for her leathern breeks, whom Balthusa recognized as one of Conyn's woodsmen. Blood trickled from her mouth, oozed sluggishly from a gash in her side. Lifting her head as she licked her livid lips, she muttered, making herself 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 Balthusa. "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. Conyn might have gotten away. I haven't seen her head. Been better for you and me if they'd killed us outright. I can't blame Conyn. 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; women from the western tribes here and from up and down the river."

Balthusa stared at the ferocious shapes. Little as she knew of Pictish ways, she was aware that the number of women clustered about them was out of proportion to the size of the village. There were not enough huts to have accommodated them all. Then she noticed that there was a difference in the barbaric tribal designs painted on their faces and pectorals.

"Some kind of devilment," muttered the forest runner. "They might have gathered here to watch Zogara's magic-making. She'll make some rare magic with our carcasses. Well, a border-womenwoman 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, Balthusa deduced that someone of importance was coming. Twisting her head about, she 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.

"Zogara!" muttered the woodsman, her bloody countenance set in wolfish lines as she unconsciously strained at her cords. Balthusa 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 Balthusa. She 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 she entered the ring and whirled before her bound and silent captives. With another woman 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 woman with a face like that could seem ridiculous or like anything except the devil she was.

Suddenly she froze to statuesque stillness; the plumes rippled once and sank about her. The howling warriors fell silent. Zogara Sag stood erect and motionless, and she seemed to increase in height--to grow and expand. Balthusa experienced the illusion that the Pict was towering above her, staring contemptuously down from a great height, though she knew the shaman was not as tall as herself. She shook off the illusion with difficulty.

The shaman was talking now, a harsh, guttural intonation that yet carried the hiss of a cobra. She thrust her head on her long neck toward the wounded woman on the stake; her eyes shone red as blood in the firelight. The frontiersman spat full in her face.

With a fiendish howl Zogara bounded convulsively into the air, and the warriors gave tongue to a yell that shuddered up to the stars. They rushed toward the woman on the stake, but the shaman beat them back. A snarled command sent women running to the gate. They hurled it open, turned and raced back to the circle. The ring of women split, divided with desperate haste to right and left. Balthusa saw the men 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 Zogara Sag turned toward the forest, raised on her tiptoes and sent a weird inhuman call shuddering out into the night. Somewhere, far out in the black forest, a deeper cry answered her. Balthusa shuddered. From the timbre of that cry she knew it never came from a human throat. She remembered what Valannus had said--that Zogara boasted that she could summon wild beasts to do her bidding. The woodsman was livid beneath her mask of blood. She licked her lips spasmodically.

The village held its breath. Zogara Sag stood still as a statue, her plumes trembling faintly about her. But suddenly the gate was no longer empty.

A shuddering gasp swept over the village and women crowded hastily back, jamming one another between the huts. Balthusa felt the short hair stir on her scalp. The creature that stood in the gate was like the embodiment of nightstallion 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 women 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 hindquarters 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 Zogara Sag had summoned out of the forest. Balthusa 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 her consciousness rose the vague memory of the name of an ancient god of darkness and primordial fear, to whom once both women and beasts bowed and whose children--men whispered--still lurked in dark corners of the world. New horror tinged the glare she fixed on Zogara Sag.

The monster moved past the heap of bodies and the pile of gory heads without appearing to notice them. She was no scavenger. She 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. Her gaping jaws slavered. The shaman stepped back, her hand waved toward the woodsman.

The great cat sank into a crouch, and Balthusa 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.

Balthusa 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 woman. Balthusa glared almost paralyzed, her brain refusing to credit what her 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 woman, and the giant fangs had torn away the whole top of her 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. Balthusa retched suddenly. She had hunted bears and panthers, but she 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 Balthusa' skin. What new horror would come through that gate to make carrion-meat of her body? Sick panic assailed her and she strained futilely at her thongs. The night pressed in very black and horrible outside the firelight. The fires themselves glowed lurid as the fires of Hell. She felt the eyes of the Picts upon her--hundreds of hungry, cruel eyes that reflected the lust of souls utterly without humanity as she knew it. They no longer seemed women; they were devils of this black jungle, as inhuman as the creatures to which the fiend in the nodding plumes screamed through the darkness.

Zogara sent another call shuddering through the night, and it was utterly unlike the first cry. There was a hideous sibilance in it--Balthusa 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 Balthusa' heart strangled her; and then there sounded a swishing outside the gate, a dry rustling that sent chills down Balthusa' spine. Again the firelit gate held a hideous occupant.

Again Balthusa recognized the monster from ancient legends. She 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 woman'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.

Balthusa became incapable of emotion. The horror of her fate paralyzed her. 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 woman 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 strike. Balthusa gazed with a glazed, hypnotized stare into that loathsome gullet down which she would soon be engulfed, and she 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 Balthusa 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 women who stove back from her. The spear had not severed its spine, but merely transfixed its great neck muscles. Its furiously lashing tail mowed down a dozen women 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.

Women 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 nightstallion scene where the giant reptile whipped and rolled, and women clawed and shrieked in frantic flight.

Balthusa felt something jerk at her wrists, and then, miraculously, she was free, and a strong hand dragged her behind the post. Dazedly she saw Conyn, felt the forest woman's iron grip on her arm.

There was blood on the Cimmerian's mail, dried blood on the sword in her right hand; she loomed dim and gigantic in the shadowy light.

"Come on! Before they get over their panic!"

Balthusa felt the haft of an ax shoved into her hand. Zogara Sag had disappeared. Conyn dragged Balthusa after her until the youth's numb brain awoke, and her legs began to move of their own accord. Then Conyn released her and ran into the building where the skulls hung. Balthusa followed her. She 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 Balthusa as the shape heaved up suddenly with a rattle of chains, lifting long, misshapen arms in the gloom.

Conyn's sword flailed down, crunching through flesh and bone, and then the Cimmerian was dragging Balthusa 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 Conyn halted, gripped Balthusa, and heaved her at arm's length into the air as she might have lifted a child. Balthusa grasped the points of the upright logs set in the sun-dried mud and scrambled up on them, ignoring the havoc done her skin. She lowered a hand to the Cimmerian, when around a corner of the altar-hut sprang a fleeing Pict. She halted short, glimpsing the woman on the wall in the faint glow of the fires. Conyn hurled her 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 she 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.

Conyn leaped high, caught, not Balthusa' hand but her arm near the shoulder, and swung herself up. Balthusa set her teeth against the strain, and then the Cimmerian was on the wall beside her, and the fugitives dropped down on the other side.

Chapter 5. The Children of Jhebbal Sag

"Which way is the river?" Balthusa was confused.

"We don't dare try for the river now," grunted Conyn. "The woods between the village and the river are swarming with warriors. Come on! We'll head in the last direction they'll expect us to go--west!"

Looking back as they entered the thick growth, Balthusa beheld the wall dotted with black heads as the savages peered over. The Picts were bewildered. They had not gained the wall in time to see the fugitives take cover. They had rushed to the wall expecting to repel an attack in force. They had seen the body of the dead warrior. But no enemy was in sight.

Balthusa realized that they did not yet know their prisoner had escaped. From other sounds she believed that the warriors, directed by the shrill voice of Zogara Sag, were destroying the wounded serpent with arrows. The monster was out of the shaman's control. A moment later the quality of the yells was altered. Screeches of rage rose in the night.

Conyn laughed grimly. She was leading Balthusa along a narrow trail that ran west under the black branches, stepping as swiftly and surely as if she trod a well-lighted thoroughfare. Balthusa stumbled after her, guiding herself by feeling the dense wall on either hand.

"They'll be after us now. Zogara's discovered you're gone, and she knows my head wasn't in the pile before the altar-hut. The dog! If I'd had another spear I'd have thrown it through her before I struck the snake. Keep to the trail. They can't track us by torchlight, and there are a score of paths leading from the village. They'll follow those leading to the river first--throw a cordon of warriors for miles along the bank, expecting us to try to break through. We won't take to the woods until we have to. We can make better time on this trail. Now buckle down to it and run was you never ran before."

"They got over their panic cursed quick!" panted Balthusa, complying with a fresh burst of speed.

"They're not afraid of anything, very long," grunted Conyn.

For a space nothing was said between them. The fugitives devoted all their attention to covering distance. They were plunging deeper and deeper into the wilderness and getting farther away from civilization at every step, but Balthusa did not question Conyn's wisdom. The Cimmerian presently took time to grunt: "When we're far enough away from the village we'll swing back to the river in a big circle. No other village within miles of Gwawela. All the Picts are gathered in that vicinity. We'll circle wide around them. They can't track us until daylight. They'll pick up our path then, but before dawn we'll leave the trail and take to the woods."

They plunged on. The yells died out behind them. Balthusa' breath was whistling through her teeth. She felt a pain in her side, and running became torture. She blundered against the bushes on each side of the trail. Conyn pulled up suddenly, turned and stared back down the dim path.

Somewhere the moon was rising, a dim white glow amidst a tangle of branches.

"Shall we take to the woods?" panted Balthusa.

"Give me your ax," murmured Conyn softly. "Something is close behind us."

"Then we'd better leave the trail!" exclaimed Balthusa. Conyn shook her head and drew her companion into a dense thicket. The moon rose higher, making a dim light in the path.

"We can't fight the whole tribe!" whispered Balthusa.

"No human being could have found our trail so quickly, or followed us so swiftly," muttered Conyn. "Keep silent."

There followed a tense silence in which Balthusa felt that her heart could be heard pounding for miles away. Then abruptly, without a sound to announce its coming, a savage head appeared in the dim path. Balthusa' heart jumped into her throat; at first glance she feared to look upon the awful head of the saber-tooth. But this head was smaller, more narrow; it was a leopard which stood there, snarling silently and glaring down the trail. What wind there was was blowing toward the hiding women, concealing their scent. The beast lowered her head and snuffed the trail, then moved forward uncertainly. A chill played down Balthusa' spine. The brute was undoubtedly trailing them.

And it was suspicious. It lifted its head, its eyes glowing like balls of fire, and growled low in its throat. And at that instant Conyn hurled the ax.

All the weight of arm and shoulder was behind the throw, and the ax was a streak of silver in the dim moon. Almost before she realized what had happened, Balthusa saw the leopard rolling on the ground in its death-throes, the handle of the ax standing up from its head. The head of the weapon had split its narrow skull.

Conyn bounded from the bushes, wrenched her ax free and dragged the limp body in among the trees, concealing it from the casual glance.

"Now let's go, and go fast!" she grunted, leading the way southward, away from the trail. "There'll be warriors coming after that cat. As soon as she got her wits back, Zogara sent her after us. The Picts would follow her, but she'd leave them far behind. She'd circle the village until she hit our trail and then come after us like a streak. They couldn't keep up with her, but they'll have an idea as to our general direction. They'd follow, listening for her cry. Well, they won't hear that, but they'll find the blood on the trail, and look around and find the body in the brush. They'll pick up our spoor there, if they can. Walk with care."

She avoided clinging briars and low-hanging branches effortlessly, gliding between trees without touching the stems and always planting her feet in the places calculated to show least evidence of her passing; but with Balthusa it was slower, more laborious work.

No sound came from behind them. They had covered more than a mile when Balthusa said: "Does Zogara Sag catch leopard-cubs and train them for bloodhounds?"

Conyn shook her head. "That was a leopard she called out of the woods."

"But," Balthusa persisted, "if she can order the beasts to do her bidding, why doesn't she rouse them all and have them after us? The forest is full of leopards; why send only one after us?"

Conyn did not reply for a space, and when she did it was with a curious reticence.

"She can't command all the animals. Only such as remember Jhebbal Sag."

"Jhebbal Sag?" Balthusa repeated the ancient name hesitantly. She had never heard it spoken more than three or four times in her whole life.

"Once all living things worshipped her. That was long ago, when beasts and women spoke one language. Women have forgotten her; even the beasts forget. Only a few remember. The women who remember Jhebbal Sag and the beasts who remember are sisters and speak the same tongue."

Balthusa did not reply; she had strained at a Pictish stake and seen the nighted jungle give up its fanged horrors at a shaman's call.

"Civilized women laugh," said Conyn. "But not one can tell me how Zogara Sag can call pythons and tigers and leopards out of the wilderness and make them do her bidding. They would say it is a lie, if they dared. That's the way with civilized women. When they can't explain something by their half-baked science, they refuse to believe it."

The people on the Tauran were closer to the primitive than most Aquilonians; superstitions persisted, whose sources were lost in antiquity. And Balthusa had seen that which still prickled her flesh. She could not refute the monstrous thing which Conyn's words implied.

"I've heard that there's an ancient grove sacred to Jhebbal Sag somewhere in this forest," said Conyn. "I don't know. I've never seen it. But more beasts remember in this country than any I've ever seen."

"Then others will be on our trail?"

"They are now," was Conyn's disquieting answer. "Zogara would never leave our tracking to one beast alone."

"What are we to do, then?" asked Balthusa uneasily, grasping her ax as she stared at the gloomy arches above her. Her flesh crawled with the momentary expectation of ripping talons and fangs leaping from the shadows.

"Wait!"

Conyn turned, squatted and with her knife began scratching a curious symbol in the mold. Stooping to look at it over her shoulder, Balthusa felt a crawling of the flesh along her spine, she knew not why. She felt no wind against her face, but there was a rustling of leaves above them and a weird moaning swept ghostily through the branches. Conyn glanced up inscrutably, then rose and stood staring somberly down at the symbol she had drawn.

"What is it?" whispered Balthusa. It looked archaic and meaningless to her. She supposed that it was her ignorance of artistry which prevented her identifying it as one of the conventional designs of some prevailing culture. But had she been the most erudite artist in the world, she would have been no nearer the solution.

"I saw it carved in the rock of a cave no human had visited for a million years," muttered Conyn, "in the uninhabited mountains beyond the Sea of Vilayet, half a world away from this spot. Later I saw a black witch-finder of Kush scratch it in the sand of a nameless river. She told me part of its meaning--it's sacred to Jhebbal Sag and the creatures which worship her. Watch!"

They drew back among the dense foliage some yards away and waited in tense silence. To the east drums muttered and somewhere to north and west other drums answered. Balthusa shivered, though she knew long miles of black forest separated her from the grim beaters of those drums, whose dull pulsing was a sinister overture that set the dark stage for bloody drama.

Balthusa found herself holding her breath. Then with a slight shaking of the leaves, the bushes parted and a magnificent panther came into view. The moonlight dappling through the leaves shone on its glossy coat rippling with the play of the great muscles beneath it.

With its head low it glided toward them. It was smelling out their trail. Then it halted as if frozen, its muzzle almost touching the symbol cut in the mold. For a long space it crouched motionless; it flattened its long body and laid its head on the ground before the mark. And Balthusa felt the short hairs stir on her scalp. For the attitude of the great carnivore was one of awe and adoration.

Then the panther rose and backed away carefully, belly almost to the ground. With her hind-quarters among the bushes she wheeled as if in sudden panic and was gone like a flash of dappled light.

Balthusa mopped her brow with a trembling hand and glanced at Conyn.

The barbarian's eyes were smoldering with fires that never lit the eyes of women bred to the ideas of civilization. In that instant she was all wild, and had forgotten the woman at her side. In her burning gaze Balthusa glimpsed and vaguely recognized pristine images and half-embodied memories, shadows from Life's dawn, forgotten and repudiated by sophisticated races--ancient, primeval fantasms unnamed and nameless.

Then the deeper fires were masked and Conyn was silently leading the way deeper into the forest.

"We've no more to fear from the beasts," she said after a while, "but we've left a sign for women to read. They won't follow our trail very easily, and until they find that symbol they won't know for sure we've turned south. Even then it won't be easy to smell us out without the beasts to aid them. But the woods south of the trail will be full of warriors looking for us. If we keep moving after daylight, we'll be sure to run into some of them. As soon as we find a good place we'll hide and wait until another night to swing back and make the river. We've got to warn Valannus, but it won't help her any if we get ourselves killed."

"Warn Valannus?"

"Hell, the woods along the river are swarming with Picts! That's why they got us. Zogara's brewing war-magic; no mere raid this time. She's done something no Pict has done in my memory--united as many as fifteen or sixteen clans. Her magic did it; they'll follow a wizard farther than they will a war-chief. You saw the mob in the village; and there were hundreds hiding along the river bank that you didn't see. More coming, from the farther villages. She'll have at least three thousand fighting-womenwomen. I lay in the bushes and heard their talk as they went past. They mean to attack the fort; when, I don't know, but Zogara doesn't dare delay long. She's gathered them and whipped them into a frenzy. If she doesn't lead them into battle quickly, they'll fall to quarreling with one another. They're like blood-mad tigers.

"I don't know whether they can take the fort or not. Anyway, we've got to get back across the river and give the warning. The settlers on the Velitrium road must either get into the fort or back to Velitrium. While the Picts are besieging the fort, war parties will range the road far to the east--might even cross Thunder River and raid the thickly settled country behind Velitrium."

As she talked she was leading the way deeper and deeper into the ancient wilderness. Presently she grunted with satisfaction. They had reached a spot where the underbrush was more scattered, and an outcropping of stone was visible, wandering off southward. Balthusa felt more secure as they followed it. Not even a Pict could trail them over naked rock.

"How did you get away?" she asked presently.

Conyn tapped her mail-shirt and helmet.

"If more borderers would wear harness there'd be fewer skulls hanging on the altar-huts. But most women make noise if they wear armor. They were waiting on each side of the path, without moving. And when a Pict stands motionless, the very beasts of the forest pass her without seeing her. They'd seen us crossing the river and got in their places. If they'd gone into ambush after we left the bank, I'd have had some hint of it. But they were waiting, and not even a leaf trembled. The devil herself couldn't have suspected anything. The first suspicion I had was when I heard a shaft rasp against a bow as it was pulled back. I dropped and yelled for the women behind me to drop, but they were too slow, taken by surprise like that.

"Most of them fell at the first volley that raked us from both sides. Some of the arrows crossed the trail and struck Picts on the other side. I heard them howl." She grinned with vicious satisfaction. "Such of us as were left plunged into the woods and closed with them. When I saw the others were all down or taken, I broke through and outfooted the painted devils through the darkness. They were all around me. I ran and crawled and sneaked, and sometimes I lay on my belly under the bushes while they passed me on all sides.

"I tried for the shore and found it lined with them, waiting for just such a move. But I'd have cut my way through and taken a chance on swimming, only I heard the drums pounding in the village and knew they'd taken somebody alive.

"They were all so engrossed in Zogara's magic that I was able to climb the wall behind the altar-hut. There was a warrior supposed to be watching at that point, but she was squatting behind the hut and peering around the corner at the ceremony. I came up behind her and broke her neck with my hands before she knew what was happening. It was her spear I threw into the snake, and that's her ax you're carrying."

"But what was that--that thing you killed in the altar-hut?" asked Balthusa, with a shiver at the memory of the dim-seen horror.

"One of Zogara's gods. One of Jhebbal's children that didn't remember and had to be kept chained to the altar. A bull ape. The Picts think they're sacred to the Hairy One who lives on the moon--the gorilla-god of Gullah.

"It's getting light. Here's a good place to hide until we see how close they're on our trail. Probably have to wait until night to break back to the river."

A low hill pitched upward, girdled and covered with thick trees and bushes. Near the crest Conyn slid into a tangle of jutting rocks, crowned by dense bushes. Lying among them they could see the jungle below without being seen. It was a good place to hide or defend. Balthusa did not believe that even a Pict could have trailed them over the rocky ground for the past four or five miles, but she was afraid of the beasts that obeyed Zogara Sag. Her faith in the curious symbol wavered a little now. But Conyn had dismissed the possibility of beasts tracking them.

A ghostly whiteness spread through the dense branches; the patches of sky visible altered in hue, grew from pink to blue. Balthusa felt the gnawing of hunger, though she had slaked her thirst at a stream they had skirted. There was complete silence, except for an occasional chirp of a bird. The drums were no longer to be heard. Balthusa' thoughts reverted to the grim scene before the altar-hut.

"Those were ostrich plumes Zogara Sag wore," she said. "I've seen them on the helmets of knights who rode from the East to visit the barons of the marches. There are no ostriches in this forest, are there?"

"They came from Kush," answered Conyn. "West of here, many marches, lies the seashore. Ships from Zingara occasionally come and trade weapons and ornaments and wine to the coastal tribes for skins and copper ore and gold dust. Sometimes they trade ostrich plumes they got from the Stygians, who in turn got them from the black tribes of Kush, which lies south of Stygia. The Pictish shamans place great store by them. But there's much risk in such trade. The Picts are too likely to try to seize the ship. And the coast is dangerous to ships. I've sailed along it when I was with the pirates of the Barachan Isles, which lie southwest of Zingara."

Balthusa looked at her companion with admiration.

"I knew you hadn't spent your life on this frontier. You've mentioned several far places. You've traveled widely?"

"I've roamed far; farther than any other woman of my race ever wandered. I've seen all the great cities of the Hyborians, the Shemites, the Stygians, and the Hyrkanians. I've roamed in the unknown countries south of the black kingdoms of Kush, and east of the Sea of Vilayet. I've been a mercenary captain, a corsair, a kozak, a penniless vagabond, a general--hell, I've been everything except a queen of a civilized country, and I may be that, before I die." The fancy pleased her, and she grinned hardly. Then she shrugged her shoulders and stretched her mighty figure on the rocks. "This is as good a life as any. I don't know how long I'll stay on the frontier; a week, a month, a year. I have a roving foot. But it's as well on the border as anywhere."

Balthusa set herself to watch the forest below them. Momentarily she expected to see fierce painted faces thrust through the leaves. But as the hours passed no stealthy footfall disturbed the brooding quiet. Balthusa believed the Picts had missed their trail and given up the chase. Conyn grew restless.

"We should have sighted parties scouring the woods for us. If they've quit the chase, it's because they're after bigger game. They may be gathering to cross the river and storm the fort."

"Would they come this far south if they lost the trail?"

"They've lost the trail, all right; otherwise they'd have been on our necks before now. Under ordinary circumstances they'd scour the woods for miles in every direction. Some of them should have passed without sight of this hill. They must be preparing to cross the river. We've got to take a chance and make for the river."

Creeping down the rocks Balthusa felt her flesh crawl between her shoulders as she momentarily expected a withering blast of arrows from the green masses above them. She feared that the Picts had discovered them and were lying about in ambush. But Conyn was convinced no enemies were near, and the Cimmerian was right.

"We're miles to the south of the village," grunted Conyn. "We'll hit straight through for the river. I don't know how far down the river they've spread, We'll hope to hit it below them."

With haste that seemed reckless to Balthusa they hurried eastward. The woods seemed empty of life. Conyn believed that all the Picts were gathered in the vicinity of Gwawela, if, indeed, they had not already crossed the river. She did not believe they would cross in the daytime, however.

"Some woodsman would be sure to see them and give the alarm. They'll cross above and below the fort, out of sight of the sentries. Then others will get in canoes and make straight across for the river wall. As soon as they attack, those hidden in the woods on the east shore will assail the fort from the other sides. They've tried that before, and got the guts shot and hacked out of them. But this time they've got enough women to make a real onslaught of it."

They pushed on without pausing, though Balthusa gazed longingly at the squirrels flitting among the branches, which she could have brought down with a cast of her ax. With a sigh she drew up her broad belt. The everlasting silence and gloom of the primitive forest was beginning to depress her. She found herself thinking of the open groves and sun-dappled meadows of the Tauran, of the bluff cheer of her father's steep-thatched, diamond-paned house, of the fat cows browsing through the deep lush grass, and the hearty fellowship of the brawny, bare-armed plowmen and herdsmen.

She felt lonely, in spite of her companion. Conyn was as much a part of this wilderness as Balthusa was alien to it. The Cimmerian might have spent years among the great cities of the world; she might have walked with the rulers of civilization; she might even achieve her wild whim some day and rule as queen of a civilized nation; stranger things had happened. But she was no less a barbarian. She was concerned only with the naked fundamentals of life. The warm intimacies of small, kindly things, the sentiments and delicious trivialities that make up so much of civilized women's lives were meaningless to her. A wolf was no less a wolf because a whim of chance caused her to run with the watch-dogs. Bloodshed and violence and savagery were the natural elements of the life Conyn knew; she could not, and would never, understand the little things that are so dear to civilized women and men.

The shadows were lengthening when they reached the river and peered through the masking bushes. They could see up and down the river for about a mile each way. The sullen stream lay bare and empty. Conyn scowled across at the other shore.

"We've got to take another chance here. We've got to swim the river. We don't know whether they've crossed or not. The woods over there may be alive with them. We've got to risk it. We're about six miles south of Gwawela."

She wheeled and ducked as a bowstring twanged. Something like a white flash of light streaked through the bushes. Balthusa knew it was an arrow. Then with a tigerish bound Conyn was through the bushes. Balthusa caught the gleam of steel as she whirled her sword, and heard a death scream. The next instant she had broken through the bushes after the Cimmerian.

A Pict with a shattered skull lay face-down on the ground, her fingers spasmodically clawing at the grass. Half a dozen others were swarming about Conyn, swords and axes lifted. They had cast away their bows, useless at such deadly close quarters. Their lower jaws were painted white, contrasting vividly with their dark faces, and the designs on their muscular pectorals differed from any Balthusa had ever seen.

One of them hurled her ax at Balthusa and rushed after it with lifted knife. Balthusa ducked and then caught the wrist that drove the knife licking at her throat. They went to the ground together, rolling over and over. The Pict was like a wild beast, her muscles hard as steel strings.

Balthusa was striving to maintain her hold on the wild woman's wrist and bring her own ax into play, but so fast and furious was the struggle that each attempt to strike was blocked. The Pict was wrenching furiously to free her knife hand, was clutching at Balthusa' ax, and driving her knees at the youth's groin. Suddenly she attempted to shift her knife to her free hand, and in that instant Balthusa, struggling up on one knee, split the painted head with a desperate blow of her ax.

She sprang up and glared wildly about for her companion, expecting to see her overwhelmed by numbers. Then she realized the full strength and ferocity of the Cimmerian. Conyn bestrode two of her attackers, shorn half asunder by that terrible broadsword. As Balthusa looked she saw the Cimmerian beat down a thrusting shortsword, avoid the stroke of an ax with a cat-like side-wise spring which brought her within arm's length of a squat savage stooping for a bow. Before the Pict could straighten, the red sword flailed down and clove her from shoulder to midbreastbone, where the blade stuck. The remaining warriors rushed in, one from either side. Balthusa hurled her ax with an accuracy that reduced the attackers to one, and Conyn, abandoning her efforts to free her sword, wheeled and met the remaining Pict with her bare hands. The stocky warrior, a head shorter than her tall enemy, leaped in, striking with her ax, at the same time stabbing murderously with her knife. The knife broke on the Cimmerian's mail, and the ax checked in midair as Conyn's fingers locked like iron on the descending arm. A bone snapped loudly, and Balthusa saw the Pict wince and falter. The next instant she was swept off her feet, lifted high above the Cimmerian's head--he writhed in midair for an instant, kicking and thrashing, and then was dashed headlong to the earth with such force that she rebounded, and then lay still, her limp posture telling of splintered limbs and a broken spine.

"Come on!" Conyn wrenched her sword free and snatched up an ax. "Grab a bow and a handful of arrows, and hurry! We've got to trust to our heels again. That yell was heard. They'll be here in no time. If we tried to swim now, they'd feather us with arrows before we reached midstream!"

Chapter 6. Red Axes of the Border

Conyn did not plunge deeply into the forest. A few hundred yards from the river, she altered her slanting course and ran parallel with it. Balthusa recognized a grim determination not to be hunted away from the river which they must cross if they were to warn the women in the fort. Behind them rose more loudly the yells of the forest women. Balthusa believed the Picts had reached the glade where the bodies of the slain women lay. Then further yells seemed to indicate that the savages were streaming into the woods in pursuit. They had left a trail any Pict could follow.

Conyn increased her speed, and Balthusa grimly set her teeth and kept on her heels, though she felt she might collapse any time. It seemed centuries since she had eaten last. She kept going more by an effort of will than anything else. Her blood was pounding so furiously in her ear-drums that she was not aware when the yells died out behind them.

Conyn halted suddenly.. Balthusa leaned against a tree and panted.

"They've quit!" grunted the Cimmerian, scowling.

"Sneaking--up--on--us!" gasped Balthusa.

Conyn shook her head.

"A short chase like this they'd yell every step of the way. No. They've gone back. I thought I heard somebody yelling behind them a few seconds before the noise began to get dimmer. They've been recalled. And that's good for us, but damned bad for the women in the fort. It means the warriors are being summoned out of the woods for the attack. Those women we ran into were warriors from a tribe down the river. They were undoubtedly headed for Gwawela to join in the assault on the fort. Damn it, we're farther away than ever, now. We've got to get across the river."

Turning east she hurried through the thickets with no attempt at concealment. Balthusa followed her, for the first time feeling the sting of lacerations on her breast and shoulder where the Pict's savage teeth had scored her. She was pushing through the thick bushes that hinged the bank when Conyn pulled her back. Then she heard a rhythmic splashing, and peering through the leaves, saw a dugout canoe coming up the river, its single occupant paddling hard against the current. She was a strongly built Pict with a white heron feather thrust in a copper band that confined her square-cut mane.

"That's a Gwawela woman," muttered Conyn. "Emissary from Zogara. White plume shows that. She's carried a peace talk to the tribes down the river and now she's trying to get back and take a hand in the slaughter."

The lone ambassador was now almost even with their hiding-place, and suddenly Balthusa almost jumped out of her skin. At her very ear had sounded the harsh gutturals of a Pict. Then she realized that Conyn had called to the paddler in her own tongue. The woman started, scanned the bushes and called back something, then cast a startled glance across the river, bent low and sent the canoe shooting in toward the western bank. Not understanding, Balthusa saw Conyn take from her hand the bow she had picked up in the glade, and notch an arrow.

The Pict had run her canoe in close to the shore, and staring up into the bushes, called out something. Her answer came in the twang of the bow-string, the streaking flight of the arrow that sank to the feathers in her broad breast. With a choking gasp she slumped sidewise and rolled into the shallow water. In an instant Conyn was down the bank and wading into the water to grasp the drifting canoe. Balthusa stumbled after her and somewhat dazedly crawled into the canoe. Conyn scrambled in, seized the paddle and sent the craft shooting toward the eastern shore. Balthusa noted with envious admiration the play of the great muscles beneath the sun-burnt skin. The Cimmerian seemed an iron woman, who never knew fatigue.

"What did you say to the Pict?" asked Balthusa.

"Told her to pull into shore; said there was a white forest runner on the bank who was trying to get a shot at her."

"That doesn't seem fair," Balthusa objected. "She thought a friend was speaking to her. You mimicked a Pict perfectly--"

"We needed her boat," grunted Conyn, not pausing in her exertions. "Only way to lure her to the bank. Which is worse--to betray a Pict who'd enjoy skinning us both alive, or betray the women across the river whose lives depend on our getting over?"

Balthusa mulled over this delicate ethical question for a moment, then shrugged her shoulders and asked: "How far are we from the fort?"

Conyn pointed to a creek which flowed into Black River from the east, a few hundred yards below them.

"That's South Creek; it's ten miles from its mouth to the fort. It's the southern boundary of Conajohara. Marshes miles wide south of it. No danger of a raid from across them. Nine miles above the fort North Creek forms the other boundary. Marshes beyond that, too. That's why an attack must come from the west, across Black River. Conajohara's just like a spear, with a point nineteen miles wide, thrust into the Pictish wilderness."

"Why don't we keep to the canoe and make the trip by water?"

"Because, considering the current we've got to brace, and the bends in the river, we can go faster afoot. Besides, remember Gwawela is south of the fort; if the Picts are crossing the river we'd run right into them."

Dusk was gathering as they stepped upon the eastern bank. Without pause Conyn pushed on northward, at a pace that made Balthusa' sturdy legs ache.

"Valannus wanted a fort built at the mouths of North and South Creeks," grunted the Cimmerian. "Then the river could be patrolled constantly. But the government wouldn't do it.

"Soft-bellied fools sitting on velvet cushions with naked girls offering them iced wine on their knees.--I know the breed. They can't see any farther than their palace wall. Diplomacy--hell! They'd fight Picts with theories of territorial expansion. Valannus and women like her have to obey the orders of a set of damned fools. They'll never grab any more Pictish land, any more than they'll ever rebuild Venarium. The time may come when they'll see the barbarians swarming over the walls of the eastern cities!"

A week before, Balthusa would have laughed at any such preposterous suggestion. Now she made no reply. She had seen the unconquerable ferocity of the women who dwelt beyond the frontiers.

She shivered, casting glances at the sullen river, just visible through the bushes, at the arches of the trees which crowded close to its banks. She kept remembering that the Picts might have crossed the river and be lying in ambush between them and the fort. It was fast growing dark.

A slight sound ahead of them jumped her heart into her throat, and Conyn's sword gleamed in the air. She lowered it when a dog, a great, gaunt, scarred beast, slunk out of the bushes and stood staring at them.

"That dog belonged to a settler who tried to build her cabin on the bank of the river a few miles south of the fort," grunted Conyn. "The Picts slipped over and killed her, of course, and burned her cabin. We found her dead among the embers, and the dog lying senseless among three Picts she'd killed. She was almost cut to pieces. We took her to the fort and dressed her wounds, but after she recovered she took to the woods and turned wild.--What now, Slasher, are you hunting the women who killed your master?"

The massive head swung from side to side and the eyes glowed greenly. She did not growl or bark. Silently as a phantom she slid in behind them.

"Let her come," muttered Conyn. "She can smell the devils before we can see them."

Balthusa smiled and laid her hand caressingly on the dog's head. The lips involuntarily writhed back to display the gleaming fangs; then the great beast bent her head sheepishly, and her tail moved with jerky uncertainty, as if the owner had almost forgotten the emotions of friendliness. Balthusa mentally compared the great gaunt hard body with the fat sleek hounds tumbling vociferously over one another in her father's kennel yard. She sighed. The frontier was no less hard for beasts than for women. This dog had almost forgotten the meaning of kindness and friendliness.

Slasher glided ahead, and Conyn let her take the lead. The last tinge of dusk faded into stark darkness. The miles fell away under their steady feet. Slasher seemed voiceless. Suddenly she halted, tense, ears lifted. An instant later the women heard it--a demoniac yelling up the river ahead of them, faint as a whisper.

Conyn swore like a madman.

"They've attacked the fort! We're too late! Come on!"

She increased her pace, trusting to the dog to smell out ambushes ahead. In a flood of tense excitement, Balthusa forgot her hunger and weariness. The yells grew louder as they advanced, and above the devilish screaming they could hear the deep shouts of the soldiers. Just as Balthusa began to fear they would run into the savages who seemed to be howling just ahead of them, Conyn swung away from the river in a wide semicircle that carried them to a low rise from which they could look over the forest. They saw the fort, lighted with torches thrust over the parapets on long poles. These cast a flickering, uncertain light over the clearing, and in that light they saw throngs of naked, painted figures along the fringe of the clearing. The river swarmed with canoes. The Picts had the fort completely surrounded.

An incessant hail of arrows rained against the stockade from the woods and the river. The deep twanging of the bowstrings rose above the howling. Yelling like wolves, several hundred naked warriors with axes in their hands ran from under the trees and raced toward the eastern gate. They were within a hundred and fifty yards of their objective when a withering blast of arrows from the wall littered the ground with corpses and sent the survivors fleeing back to the trees. The women in the canoes rushed their boats toward the river-wall, and were met by another shower of clothyard shafts and a volley from the small ballistae mounted on towers on that side of the stockade. Stones and logs whirled through the air and splintered and sank half a dozen canoes, killing their occupants, and the other boats drew back out of range. A deep roar of triumph rose from the walls of the fort, answered by bestial howling from all quarters.

"Shall we try to break through?" asked Balthusa, trembling with eagerness.

Conyn shook her head. She stood with her arms folded, her head slightly bent, a somber and brooding figure.

"The fort's doomed. The Picts are blood-mad, and won't stop until they're all killed. And there are too many of them for the women in the fort to kill. We couldn't break through, and if we did, we could do nothing but die with Valannus."

"There's nothing we can do but save our own hides, then?"

"Yes. We've got to warn the settlers. Do you know why the Picts are not trying to burn the fort with fire-arrows? Because they don't want a flame that might warn the people to the east. They plan to stamp out the fort, and then sweep east before anyone knows of its fall. They may cross Thunder River and take Velitrium before the people know what's happened. At least they'll destroy every living thing between the fort and Thunder River.

"We've failed to warn the fort, and I see now it would have done no good if we had succeeded. The fort's too poorly manned. A few more charges and the Picts will be over the walls and breaking down the gates. But we can start the settlers toward Velitrium. Come on! We're outside the circle the Picts have thrown around the fort. We'll keep clear of it."

They swung out in a wide arc, hearing the rising and falling of the volume of the yells, marking each charge and repulse. The women in the fort were holding their own; but the shrieks of the Picts did not diminish in savagery. They vibrated with a timbre that held assurance of ultimate victory.

Before Balthusa realized they were close to it, they broke into the road leading east.

"Now run!" grunted Conyn. Balthusa set her teeth. It was nineteen miles to Velitrium, a good five to Scalp Creek beyond which began the settlements. It seemed to the Aquilonian that they had been fighting and running for centuries. But the nervous excitement that rioted through her blood stimulated her to herculean efforts.

Slasher ran ahead of them, her head to the ground, snarling low, the first sound they had heard from her.

"Picts ahead of us!" snarled Conyn, dropping to one knee and scanning the ground in the starlight. She shook her head, baffled. "I can't tell how many. Probably only a small party. Some that couldn't wait to take the fort. They've gone ahead to butcher the settlers in their beds! Come on!"

Ahead of them presently they saw a small blaze through the trees, and, heard a wild and ferocious chanting. The trail bent there, and leaving it, they cut across the bend, through the thickets. A few moments later they were looking on a hideous sight. An ox-wain stood in the road piled with meager household furnishings; it was burning; the oxen lay near with their throats cut. A woman and a man lay in the road, stripped and mutilated. Five Picts were dancing about them with fantastic leaps and bounds, waving bloody axes; one of them brandished the man's red-smeared gown.

At the sight a red haze swam before Balthusa. Lifting her bow she lined the prancing figure, black against the fire, and loosed. The slayer leaped convulsively and fell dead with the arrow through her heart. Then the two white women and the dog were upon the startled survivors. Conyn was animated merely by her fighting spirit and an old, old racial hate, but Balthusa was afire with wrath.

She met the first Pict to oppose her with a ferocious swipe that split the painted skull, and sprang over her failing body to grapple with the others. But Conyn had already killed one of the two she had chosen, and the leap of the Aquilonian was a second late. The warrior was down with the long sword through her even as Balthusa' ax was lifted. Turning toward the remaining Pict, Balthusa saw Slasher rise from her victim, her great jaws dripping blood.

Balthusa said nothing as she looked down at the pitiful forms in the road beside the burning wain. Both were young, the man little more than a boy. By some whim of chance the Picts had left his face unmarred, and even in the agonies of an awful death it was beautiful. But his soft young body had been hideously slashed with many knives--a mist clouded Balthusa' eyes and she swallowed chokingly. The tragedy momentarily overcame her. She felt like falling upon the ground and weeping and biting the earth.

"Some young couple just hitting out on their own," Conyn was saying as she wiped her sword unemotionally. "On their way to the fort when the Picts met them. Maybe the girl was going to enter the service; maybe take up land on the river. Well, that's what will happen to every woman, man, and child this side of Thunder River if we don't get them into Velitrium in a hurry."

Balthusa' knees trembled as she followed Conyn. But there was no hint of weakness in the long easy stride of the Cimmerian. There was a kinship between her and the great gaunt brute that glided beside her. Slasher no longer growled with her head to the trail. The way was clear before them. The yelling on the river came faintly to them, but Balthusa believed the fort was still holding. Conyn halted suddenly, with an oath.

She showed Balthusa a trail that led north from the road. It was an old trail, partly grown with new young growth, and this growth had recently been broken down. Balthusa realized this fact more by feel than sight, though Conyn seemed to see like a cat in the dark. The Cimmerian showed her where broad wagon tracks turned off the main trail, deeply indented in the forest mold.

"Settlers going to the licks after salt," she grunted. "They're at the edges of the marsh, about nine miles from here. Blast it! They'll be cut off and butchered to a woman! Listen! One woman can warn the people on the road. Go ahead and wake them up and herd them into Velitrium. I'll go and get the women gathering the salt. They'll be camped by the licks. We won't come back to the road. We'll head straight through the woods."

With no further comment Conyn turned off the trail and hurried down the dim path, and Balthusa, after staring after her for a few moments, set out along the road. The dog had remained with her, and glided softly at her heels. When Balthusa had gone a few rods she heard the animal growl. Whirling, she glared back the way she had come, and was startled to see a vague ghostly glow vanishing into the forest in the direction Conyn had taken. Slasher rumbled deep in her throat, her hackles stiff and her eyes balls of green fire. Balthusa remembered the grim apparition that had taken the head of the merchant Tiberias not far from that spot, and she hesitated. The thing must be following Conyn. But the giant Cimmerian had repeatedly demonstrated her ability to take care of herself, and Balthusa felt her duty lay toward the helpless settlers who slumbered in the path of the red hurricane. The horror of the fiery phantom was overshadowed by the horror of those limp, violated bodies beside the burning ox-wain.

She hurried down the road, crossed Scalp Creek and came in sight of the first settler's cabin--a, long, low structure of ax-hewn logs. In an instant she was pounding on the door. A sleepy voice inquired her pleasure.

"Get up! The Picts are over the river!"

That brought instant response. A low cry echoed her words and then the door was thrown open by a man in a scanty shift. His hair hung over him bare shoulders in disorder; he held a candle in one hand and an ax in the other. His face was colorless, his eyes wide with terror.

"Come in!" he begged. "We'll hold the cabin."

"No. We must make for Velitrium. The fort can't hold them back. It may have fallen already. Don't stop to dress. Get your children and come on."

"But my woman's gone with the others after salt!" he wailed, wringing his hands. Behind his peered three tousled youngsters, blinking and bewildered.

"Conyn's gone after them. She'll fetch them through safe. We must hurry up the road to warn the other cabins."

Relief flooded his countenance.

"Mitra be thanked!" he cried. "If the Cimmerian's gone after them, they're safe if mortal woman can save them!"

In a whirlwind of activity he snatched up the smallest child and herded the others through the door ahead of him. Balthusa took the candle and ground it out under her heel. She listened an instant. No sound came up the dark road.

"Have you got a horse?"

"In the stable," he groaned. "Oh, hurry!"

She pushed his aside as he fumbled with shaking hands at the bars. She led the horse out and lifted the children on its back, telling them to hold to its mane and to one another. They stared at her seriously, making no outcry. The man took the horse's halter and set out up the road. He still gripped his ax and Balthusa knew that if cornered he would fight with the desperate courage of a he-panther.

She held behind, listening. She was oppressed by the belief that the fort had been stormed and taken, that the dark-skinned hordes were already streaming up the road toward Velitrium, drunken on slaughter and mad for blood. They would come with the speed of starving wolves.

Presently they saw another cabin looming ahead. The man started to shriek a warning, but Balthusa stopped him. She hurried to the door and knocked. A man's voice answered her. She repeated her warning, and soon the cabin disgorged its occupants--an old man, two young men, and four children. Like the other man's husband, their women had gone to the salt licks the day before, unsuspecting of any danger. One of the young men seemed dazed, the other prone to hysteria. But the old man, a stern old veteran of the frontier, quieted them harshly; he helped Balthusa get out the two horses that were stabled in a pen behind the cabin and put the children on them. Balthusa urged that he himself mount with them, but he shook his head and made one of the younger men ride.

"He's with child," grunted the old man. "I can walk--and fight, too, if it comes to that."

As they set out, one of the young men said: "A young couple passed along the road about dusk; we advised them to spend the night at our cabin, but they were anxious to make the fort tonight. Did--did--"

"They met the Picts," answered Balthusa briefly, and the man sobbed in horror.

They were scarcely out of sight of the cabin when some distance behind them quavered a long high-pitched yell.

"A wolf!" exclaimed one of the men.

"A painted wolf with an ax in her hand," muttered Balthusa. "Go! Rouse the other settlers along the road and take them with you. I'll scout along behind."

Without a word the old man herded his charges ahead of him. As they faded into the darkness, Balthusa could see the pale ovals that were the faces of the children twisted back over their shoulders to stare toward her. She remembered her own people on the Tauran and a moment's giddy sickness swam over her. With momentary weakness she groaned and sank down in the road, her muscular arm fell over Slasher's massive neck and she felt the dog's warm moist tongue touch her face.

She lifted her head and grinned with a painful effort.

"Come on, girl," she mumbled, rising. "We've got work to do."

A red glow suddenly became evident through the trees. The Picts had fired the last hut. She grinned. How Zogara Sag would froth if she knew her warriors had let their destructive natures get the better of them. The fire would warn the people farther up the road. They would be awake and alert when the fugitives reached them. But her face grew grim. The men were traveling slowly, on foot and on the overloaded horses. The swift-footed Picts would run them down within a mile, unless--he took her position behind a tangle of fallen logs beside the trail. The road west of hers was lighted by the burning cabin, and when the Picts came she saw them first--black furtive figures etched against the distant glare.

Drawing a shaft to the head, she loosed and one of the figures crumpled. The rest melted into the woods on either side of the road. Slasher whimpered with the killing lust beside her. Suddenly a figure appeared on the fringe of the trail, under the trees, and began gliding toward the fallen timbers. Balthusa' bow-string twanged and the Pict yelped, staggered and fell into the shadows with the arrow through her thigh. Slasher cleared the timbers with a bound and leaped into the bushes. They were violently shaken and then the dog slunk back to Balthusa' side, her jaws crimson.

No more appeared in the trail; Balthusa began to fear they were stealing past her position through the woods, and when she heard a faint sound to her left she loosed blindly. She cursed as she heard the shaft splinter against a tree, but Slasher glided away as silently as a phantom, and presently Balthusa heard a thrashing and a gurgling; then Slasher came like a ghost through the bushes, snuggling her great, crimson-stained head against Balthusa' arm. Blood oozed from a gash in her shoulder, but the sounds in the wood had ceased for ever.

The women lurking on the edges of the road evidently sensed the fate of their companion, and decided that an open charge was preferable to being dragged down in the dark by a devil-beast they could neither see nor hear. Perhaps they realized that only one woman lay behind the logs. They came with a sudden rush, breaking cover from both sides of the trail. Three dropped with arrows through them--and the remaining pair hesitated. One turned and ran back down the road, but the other lunged over the breastwork, her eyes and teeth gleaming in the dim light, her ax lifted. Balthusa' foot slipped as she sprang up, but the slip saved her life. The descending ax shaved a lock of hair from her head, and the Pict rolled down the logs from the force of hers wasted blow. Before she could regain her feet Slasher tore her throat out.

Then followed a tense period of waiting, in which time Balthusa wondered if the woman who had fled had been the only survivor of the party. Obviously it had been a small band that had either left the fighting at the fort, or was scouting ahead of the main body. Each moment that passed increased the chances for safety of the men and children hurrying toward Velithum.

Then without warning a shower of arrows whistled over her retreat. A wild howling rose from the woods along the trail. Either the survivor had gone after aid, or another party had joined the first. The burning cabin still smoldered, lending a little light. Then they were after her, gliding through the trees beside the trail. She shot three arrows and threw the bow away. As if sensing her plight, they came on, not yelling now, but in deadly silence except for a swift pad of many feet.

She fiercely hugged the head of the great dog growling at her side, muttered: "All right, girl, give 'em hell!" and sprang to her feet, drawing her ax. Then the dark figures flooded over the breastworks and closed in a storm of flailing axes, stabbing knives and ripping fangs.

Chapter 7. The Devil in the Fire

When Conyn turned from the Velitrium road, she expected a run of some nine miles and set herself to the task. But she had not gone four when she heard the sounds of a party of women ahead of her. From the noise they were making in their progress she knew they were not Picts. She hailed them.

"Who's there?" challenged a harsh voice. "Stand where you are until we know you, or you'll get an arrow through you."

"You couldn't hit an elephant in this darkness," answered Conyn impatiently. "Come on, fool; it's I--Conyn. The Picts are over the river."

"We suspected as much," answered the leader of the women, as they strode forward--tall, rangy women, stern-faced, with bows in their hands. "One of our party wounded an antelope and tracked it nearly to Black River. She heard them yelling down the river and ran back to our camp. We left the salt and the wagons, turned the oxen loose, and came as swiftly as we could. If the Picts are besieging the fort, war-parties will be ranging up the road toward our cabins."

"Your families are safe," grunted Conyn. "My companion went ahead to take them to Velitrium. If we go back to the main road, we may run into the whole horde. We'll strike southeast, through the timber. Go ahead. I'll scout behind."

A few moments later the whole band was hurrying southeastward. Conyn followed more slowly, keeping just within ear-shot. She cursed the noise they were making; that many Picts or Cimmerians would have moved through the woods with no more noise than the wind makes as it blows through the black branches. She had just crossed a small glade when she wheeled, answering the conviction of her primitive instincts that she was being followed. Standing motionless among the bushes she heard the sounds of the retreating settlers fade away. Then a voice called faintly back along the way she had come: "Conyn! Conyn! Wait for me, Conyn!"

"Balthusa!" she swore bewilderedly. Cautiously she called: "Here I am!"

"Wait for me, Conyn!" the voice came more distinctly.

Conyn moved out of the shadows, scowling. "What the devil are you doing here?--Crom!"

She half crouched, the flesh prickling along her spine. It was not Balthusa who was emerging from the other side of the glade. A weird glow burned through the trees. It moved toward her, shimmering weirdly--a green witch-fire that moved with purpose and intent.

It halted some feet away and Conyn glared at it, trying to distinguish its fire-misted outlines. The quivering flame had a solid core; the flame was but a green garment that masked some animate and evil entity; but the Cimmerian was unable to make out its shape or likeness. Then, shockingly, a voice spoke to her from amidst the fiery column.

"Why do you stand like a sheep waiting for the butcher, Conyn?"

The voice was human but carried strange vibrations that were not human.

"Sheep?" Conyn's wrath got the best of her momentary awe. "Do you think I'm afraid of a damned Pictish swamp devil? A friend called me."

"I called in her voice," answered the other. "The women you follow belong to my brother; I would not rob her knife of their blood. But you are mine. O fool, you have come from the far gray hills of Cimmeria to meet your doom in the forests of Conajohara."

"You've had your chance at me before now," snorted Conyn. "Why didn't you kill me then, if you could?"

"My sister had not painted a skull black for you and hurled it into the fire that burns for ever on Gullah's black altar. She had not whispered your name to the black ghosts that haunt the uplands of the Dark Land. But a bat has flown over the Mountains of the Dead and drawn your image in blood on the white tiger's hide that hangs before the long hut where sleep the Four Sisters of the Night. The great serpents coil about their feet and the stars burn like fireflies in their hair."

"Why have the gods of darkness doomed me to death?" growled Conyn.

Something--a hand, foot or talon, she could not tell which, thrust out from the fire and marked swiftly on the mold. A symbol blazed there, marked with fire, and faded, but not before she recognized it.

"You dared make the sign which only a priestess of Jhebbal Sag dare make. Thunder rumbled through the black Mountain of the Dead and the altar-hut of Gullah was thrown down by a wind from the Gulf of Ghosts. The loon which is messenger to the Four Sisters of the Night flew swiftly and whispered your name in my ear. Your race is run. You are a dead woman already. Your head will hang in the altar-hut of my sister. Your body will be eaten by the black-winged, sharp-beaked Children of Jhil."

"Who the devil is your brother?" demanded Conyn. Her sword was naked in her hand, and she was subtly loosening the ax in her belt.

"Zogara Sag; a child of Jhebbal Sag who still visits her sacred groves at times. A man of Gwawela slept in a grove holy to Jhebbal Sag. His babe was Zogara Sag. I too am a son of Jhebbal Sag, out of a fire-being from a far realm. Zogara Sag summoned me out of the Misty Lands. With incantations and sorcery and her own blood she materialized me in the flesh of her own planet. We are one, tied together by invisible threads. Her thoughts are my thoughts; if she is struck, I am bruised. If I am cut, she bleeds. But I have talked enough. Soon your ghost will talk with the ghosts of the Dark Land, and they will tell you of the old gods which are not dead, but sleep in the outer abysses, and from time to time awake."

"I'd like to see what you look like," muttered Conyn, working her ax free, "you who leave a track like a bird, who burn like a flame and yet speak with a human voice."

"You shall see," answered the voice from the flame, "see, and carry the knowledge with you into the Dark Land."

The flames leaped and sank, dwindling and dimming. A face began to take shadowy form. At first Conyn thought it was Zogara Sag herself who stood wrapped in green fire. But the face was higher than her own, and there was a demoniac aspect about it--Conyn had noted various abnormalities about Zogara Sag's features--an obliqueness of the eyes, a sharpness of the ears, a wolfish thinness of the lips: these peculiarities were exaggerated in the apparition which swayed before her. The eyes were red as coals of living fire.

More details came into view: a slender torso, covered with snaky scales, which was yet man-like in shape, with woman like arms, from the waist upward, below, long crane-like legs ended in splay, three-toed feet like those of huge bird. Along the monstrous limbs the blue fire fluttered and ran. She saw it as through a glistening mist.

Then suddenly it was towering over her, though she had not seen it move toward her. A long arm, which for the first time she noticed was armed with curving, sickle-like talons, swung high and swept down at her neck. With a fierce cry she broke the spell and bounded aside, hurling her ax. The demon avoided the cast with an unbelievably quick movement of its narrow head and was on her again with a hissing rush of leaping flames.

But fear had fought for it when it slew its other victims and Conyn was not afraid. She knew that any being clothed in material flesh can be slain by material weapons, however grisly its form may be.

One flailing talon-armed limb knocked her helmet from her head. A little lower and it would have decapitated her. But fierce joy surged through her as her savagely driven sword sank deep in the monster's groin. She bounded backward from a flailing stroke, tearing her sword free as she leaped. The talons raked her breast, ripping through mail-links as if they had been cloth. But her return spring was like that of a starving wolf. She was inside the lashing arms and driving her sword deep in the monster's belly--felt the arms lock about her and the talons ripping the mail from her back as they sought her vitals--he was lapped and dazzled by blue flame that was chill as ice--then she had torn fiercely away from the weakening arms and her sword cut the air in a tremendous swipe.

The demon staggered and fell sprawling sidewise, its head hanging only by a shred of flesh. The fires that veiled it leaped fiercely upward, now red as gushing blood, hiding the figure from view. A scent of burning flesh filled Conyn's nostrils. Shaking the blood and sweat from her eyes, she wheeled and ran staggering through the woods. Blood trickled down her limbs. Somewhere, miles to the south, she saw the faint glow of flames that might mark a burning cabin. Behind her, toward the road, rose a distant howling that spurred her to greater efforts.

Chapter 8. Conajohara No More

There had been fighting on Thunder River; fierce fighting before the walls of Velitrium; ax and torch had been plied up and down the bank, and many a settler's cabin lay in ashes before the painted horde was rolled back.

A strange quiet followed the storm, in which people gathered and talked in hushed voices, and women with red-stained bandages drank their ale silently in the taverns along the river bank.

There, to Conyn the Cimmerian, moodily quaffing from a great wine-glass, came a gaunt forester with a bandage about her head and her arm in a sling. She was the one survivor of Fort Tuscelan.

"You went with the soldiers to the ruins of the fort?"

Conyn nodded.

"I wasn't able," murmured the other. "There was no fighting?"

"The Picts had fallen back across Black River. Something must have broken their nerve, though only the devil who made them knows what."

The woodsman glanced at her bandaged arm and sighed.

"They say there were no bodies worth disposing of."

Conyn shook her head. "Ashes. The Picts had piled them in the fort and set fire to the fort before they crossed the river. Their own dead and the women of Valannus."

"Valannus was killed among the last--in the hand-to-hand fighting when they broke the barriers. They tried to take her alive, but she made them kill her. They took ten of the rest of us prisoners when we were so weak from fighting we could fight no more. They butchered nine of us then and there. It was when Zogara Sag died that I got my chance to break free and run for it."

"Zogara Sag's dead?" ejaculated Conyn.

"Aye. I saw her die That's why the Picts didn't press the fight against Velitrium as fiercely as they did against the fort. It was strange. She took no wounds in battle. She was dancing among the slain, waving an ax with which she'd just brained the last of my comrades. She came at me, howling like a wolf--and then she staggered and dropped the ax, and began to reel in a circle screaming as I never heard a woman or beast scream before. She fell between me and the fire they'd built to roast me, gagging and frothing at the mouth, and all at once she went rigid and the Picts shouted that she was dead. It was during the confusion that I slipped my cords and ran for the woods.

"I saw her lying in the firelight. No weapon had touched her. Yet there were red marks like the wounds of a sword in the groin, belly, and neck--the last as if her head had been almost severed from her body. What do you make of that?"

Conyn made no reply, and the forester, aware of the reticence of barbarians on certain matters, continued: "She lived by magic, and somehow, she died by magic. It was the mystery of her death that took the heart out of the Picts. Not a woman who saw it was in the fighting before Velitrium. They hurried back across Black River. Those that struck Thunder River were warriors who had come on before Zogara Sag died. They were not enough to take the city by themselves.

"I came along the road, behind their main force, and I know none followed me from the fort. I sneaked through their lines and got into the town. You brought the settlers through all right, but their men and children got into Velitrium just ahead of those painted devils. If the youth Balthusa and old Slasher hadn't held them up awhile, they'd have butchered every man and child in Conajohara. I passed the place where Balthusa and the dog made their last stand. They were lying amid a heap of dead Picts--I counted seven, brained by her ax, or disemboweled by the dog's fangs, and there were others in the road with arrows sticking in them. Gods, what a fight that must have been!"

"She was a woman," said Conyn. "I drink to her shade, and to the shade of the dog, who knew no fear." She quaffed part of the wine, then emptied the rest upon the floor, with a curious heathen gesture, and smashed the goblet. "The heads of ten Picts shall pay for hers, and seven heads for the dog, who was a better warrior than many a woman."

And the forester, staring into the moody, smoldering blue eyes, knew the barbaric oath would be kept.

"They'll not rebuild the fort?"

"No; Conajohara is lost to Aquilonia. The frontier has been pushed back. Thunder River will be the new border."

The woodsman sighed and stared at her calloused hand, worn from contact with ax-haft and sword-hilt. Conyn reached her long arm for the wine-jug. The forester stared at her, comparing her with the women about them, the women who had died along the lost river, comparing her with those other wild women over that river. Conyn did not seem aware of her gaze.

"Barbarism is the natural state of mankind," the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. "Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph."

THE END

Artwork by Roberto Rizzato

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Also by Jekkara press

The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn currently include:

01 Blood Demons of Titan - Tara Loughead

The warriors Bulays and Ghaavn hunt demons and their master through the dim and dusty streets of Barnes, on Titan. Can they stop him before he completes a devastating ritual?

02 Death Queen of Neptune - Tara Loughead

Bulays and Ghaavn are called in to investigate why a frontier base on Neptune has gone silent. Ice monsters and an ancient, beautiful evil await.

03 She Devils of Europa - Tara Loughead

One of the richest women in the Solar System asks Bulays and Ghaavn for help in stopping a series of thefts. There is a mystery to solve at the most

expensive resort in existence, The Europa. Larceny, magic and dancing await, in an all expenses paid evening.

04 Shadow Emperor of Phobos: The Martian Moon War Part 1 - Tara Loughead

Bulays and Ghaavn try and stop a underworld shooting war. First they must get past a Martian Shadowcat, employ surprising combat techniques, and try and reason with Ghaavn's criminal mentor.

05 Desert Empress of Deimos: The Martian Moon War Part 2 - Tara Loughead

Bulays and Ghaavn are caught in the middle of a crime family war. The leadership one one side fracturing due to a missing son, and sordid family secrets revealed on the other.

The Gender Switch Adventures

The Devil In Iron, Respawned [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. A resurrected demon menaces Conyn on an island fortress, along with other monsters.

The Pool of the Black One, Reswum [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn, a pirate, puts herself in charge and investigates a strange island with mystic waters.

Jewels of Gwahlur, Reboxed [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn encounters deity impersonation, tries for treasure, boys and ape monster fighting.

Queen of the Black Coast, Recrowned [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard

Conyn survives the slaughter of her pirate colleagues and finds a man to fire her blood. Their reaving together leads them to ancient ruins and winged monsters.

Red Nails, Polished [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard

Conyn finally catches Valerian of the Red Brotherhood, and the pair end up fighting for their lives against a sorcerous death cult in an ancient city.

Beyond the Black River, Recrossed [Conyn the Barbarian] by Roberta E. Howard

Conyn signs up as a scout in Pictish territory, and gets involved with his partner in a border war against the wizard Zogara Sag and her cult of followers.

Stand Alone

Undead Dining - Tara Loughead

A very short horror story about a very different restaurant.

Coming Soon

The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn

06 Heart Breakers of Hyperion – Tara Loughead

The Gender Switch Adventures

Queen of the Martian Catacombs, Recrowned (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett

Black Male Amazon of Mars (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett

Song In A Minor Key, Retuned (Norawest Smith) - Cathan L. Moore

The Tree of Life, Revisited (Norawest Smith) - Cathan L. Moore

The Valor of Cappea Verra, Recapped (Cappea Verra) - Poula Anderson

