One of those spells covered the escape of Conan's new company—all the Afghulis and twenty-five Ekinari besides Bethina and Omyela, with a few spare mounts "acquired" from the Greencloaks. It was the simplest of spells, sending into the middle of the Greencloak camp an image of Bethina dancing. While everyone, including the sentries, had their eyes fixed on the play of supple limbs and veils that revealed more than they hid, the Afghulis slipped out of the camp.
Carrying their gear, they swiftly reached their meeting with the Ekinari, who had mounts for all. Then, mounted and with night enfolding the desert to hide their tracks, Conan's new band rode north.
They had a good notion of where to start looking for the Valley of the Mists, and it was a good three days' ride to the north. Conan set a punishing pace that made even the Afghulis sweat, and feared only that the two women might not be able to endure.
Neither gave trouble. Bethina was young and fit, and decades of desert sun had baked Omyela to the color and toughness of old leather.
"I remember when a woman who could not ride from dawn to dark three days running was not considered fit to bear children," Omyela said, scoffing at Bethina's concern. "Take care of yourself, girl. Wear away your strength, and when that Cimmerian wants you, there'll be nothing of you there!" She gave a bawdy chuckle, and Bethina's bronzed skin turned even darker.
Conan walked silently away, and nearly ran into Farad.
"Maidens should not ride on such death-quests," the Afghuli said softly.
Conan laughed. "Maidens you admire, you mean. I had not heard that the Afghuli lasses huddled around the cookfires."
"I admire that wild desert girl?" Farad said indignantly.
"Yes," Conan said. "Or was it someone else who stood there gaping while she danced, so that Omyela could send the image to the camp? A fly could have crawled into your mouth and made a nest in your back teeth, for all you noticed."
Farad twined the fingers of both hands in his beard and glared at Conan. "My chief, the day I cannot tell when a beautiful woman dances, it will be the day I am dead or at least blind. Last night I was neither."
Conan laughed, and chaffed Farad with a few light words to cool his indignation. He wondered if he should mention Farad's admiration to Bethina, lest the girl hurt him by chance.
Then he decided on silence. He faced enough tasks for three men on this last part of the journey, and he would not add playing matchmaker to them!
Captain Khezal was neither surprised nor alarmed at waking to find Conan gone, and the Afghulis and Ekinari along with him. He had, indeed, rather hoped that the Cimmerian would take swift action, and be long gone before any reinforcements to the Green-cloaks arrived from the South or West.
Such reinforcements were likely to include some captain more senior than Khezal. Not all such captains would be inclined to send Conan's head in a bag of salt back to Aghrapur, but too many were. Even those who wished to be honest might become otherwise, for fear of what spies might say. Fear of Yezdigerd's spies had run through Turan like a plague for years now, and showed no signs of abating.
Khezal might be putting his own head in danger, of course. But he would rather not keep it on his shoulders if he could not do so honorably. Conan was thrusting his head into a land of the most sinister sort of magic, courting damnation even more than death. For the sake of a friend facing such dangers, one's own death was nothing much to fear.
So Khezal sent messengers south and west, and also waited for the messengers returning from the party he had trailing Conan.
They rode close to the mountains, for concealment from the desert and for water from the mountain springs. It was as well that the Greencloaks did not ride with them, for no tribe in these lands was friendly to Turan. Instead, the wind seemed to bear word of their coming to tribesmen in search of adventure, and these riders came in until Conan led a band of more than fifty.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, they camped at the mouth of a ravine known for its endlessly flowing springs. Farad led the first watch up the ravine, and Conan did the same with the second when Farad's men returned. Bethina went with Conan, striding with sturdy litheness over the rugged ground. She was clad from crown to toe, but the breeze pressed certain of her garments against the ripe curves Conan remembered so well from the night she danced.
They led the way up the ravine, and Conan's hill-eating stride soon left everyone but Bethina behind. They found themselves climbing onto a shelf of rock, from which the far end of the ravine rose straight into the sky, a vertical crack taller than a tall tree.
From the crack in the rock, water flowed, to form an iridescent blue pool just beyond the shelf. Below the shelf, water flowed out and down, to form the stream that the men were using to fill their water bags.
Conan saw that the rocks on either side of the pool sparkled with gemlike bright bits, and a soft cushion of blue lichen overgrew one of them. He wanted to sit down, pull off his boots, and bathe his feet in water that looked so much like the pools where he'd swum as a boy in Cimmeria.
Bethina had already given in to the same impulse. She dandled her feet in the water, wincing at its chill, then kicked and splashed like a baby.
Suddenly she stood up and began unlacing her cloak. "I think that pool's deep enough to swim in."
Conan frowned. "Mortally cold, though."
"Is hill blood so weak, then? Or are you so clean that you need no bath?" She wrinkled her nose. "No, it cannot be that. So it must be a weakness in Cimmerians. The world must know of this. I shall— yaaahh!"
She broke off with a happy shout as Conan closed the distance to her, lifted her, and tossed her into the pool. It was deep enough to submerge her completely; when she bobbed to the surface she was spluttering and gasping from the cold.
Then she laughed, dove again, and came up at Conan's feet. Water sluiced over him, and as Bethina thrashed and splashed, more doused him all the way up to his waist.
"Well, Conan?"
Conan glared in mock-fury, sat down, and started pulling off his boots. Then he stopped, for Bethina's tunic was now floating in the pool, and as he watched, her trousers bobbed up to join it. Then her head reappeared, hair sleeked down over bare shoulders, and she stepped out of the water. Silver drops ran down between her breasts and over every other curve, and Conan's arms were rising to meet her even as she came into them.
They used the bed of lichen well, and for how long, Conan never knew. Even the thought of danger could not enter his mind for a while.
Somewhere in Bethina's embrace, he chuckled.
"Do I amuse you, Conan?"
"That, and much else. But I was thinking. You are a whole woman now, true?"
"Well—"
"You're lacking nothing any woman has, and you've more than most. Or isn't that what your folk call 'whole'?"
"For me—it might be best—if I bore a child. Prove that the line of my father is safe with me. To a man of good blood, of course, and a friend to the tribe."
Conan slapped Bethina smartly on her bare rump. "Woman, you won't find me unwilling, and I hope your folk call me friend. But having a babe in your belly is no way to go questing!"
"I will remember that. But surely, Conan, we will not be here in the mountains that long?"
"Maybe, maybe not. But if you hope too much, ten Turanian crowns to a brass bit you'll find yourself trying to have the babe somewhere in a blizzard-buried cave in the mountains next winter!"
She shuddered at the thought, and the Cimmerian held her close. He hoped she could not read in his touch his innermost thought, which was that anyone here by next winter would not be among the living. Perhaps not among the lawfully dead, if the Lady of the Mists had half the powers credited to her by rumor, but surely not among the living.