Then the cold covered the arm, and after it came more pain. This time she screamed loud enough to raise echoes, and pulled with all her strength, trying to free herself.
It was useless. No one heard her screams, thinking they were bird cries. She could not pull free, and a moment later the Mist found a blood vessel and darted up through it to the girl's brain. The life went out of her eyes, although she did not fall, but remained sitting while her body slowly shrank in on itself, turning blue, until nothing remained but a trifle of powder to fall to the ground or blow away on the breeze.
The girl was the first. She would not be the last.
Conan and Bethina were once again well ahead of the rest of their band. But there was no water in sight, let alone pools for bathing or beds of lichen for taking their pleasure.
Still, Conan could not help admiring her lithe form, well displayed in snug trousers and short coat, as she clambered up the rocks beside him. Bethina was not for him, and indeed no woman could be, as long as he was a rover—and that might mean he would die unwed, even if he lived long enough that his old playmates in Cimmeria were gray-bearded grandsires.
But there were women with whom he could live in as much peace as man and woman could expect, and Bethina was of that breed.
A sound Conan could not identify made him halt and raise a hand for silence. Bethina was as good a scout as any the Cimmerian had seen in a regular host, ready to obey his signals and growing more skilled each day in hiding herself. It did not hurt that her clothes were a grayish-brown that blended with the rocks so that if she lay still, one could almost tread on her without seeing her.
The sound came again. It was the chink of metal on stone, not a sound natural to these mountains or any other. Conan's band was almost on the border of the land where the Valley of the Mist's Khorajan allies and their bandit mercenaries prowled. A battle now could give warning enough to raise defenses that neither Conan's blade nor Omyela's magic could breach.
Conan crouched, listening intently, trying to put a direction to the sound. It seemed that it might be from behind him, but that was unlikely. Those immediately behind him were his Afghulis, more cat-footed on rocky slopes than even the Cimmerian himself.
He decided to go to ground himself and wait for the noisemaker to reveal himself. If it was an enemy trying to slip up on the Cimmerian through the Afghulis, he had only moments to live. Conan would not have to draw a blade before his followers dealt with the man—and in the deadly silence that helped make the Afghulis such respected foes and their rugged homeland free of foreign enemies in most years.
Silence came to the mountainside. Conan would have sworn that even the birds and the winds were silent. He could hear his own breathing and, just barely, Bethina's. But of he who had made that revealing noise, there was no further sign.
All at once there was more noise, and from high above. Conan shifted his position to look uphill, and saw a pack train ambling across the slope. Conan counted twelve pack mules and six guards on foot, all with bows and short swords of no particular origin— the sort of weapons a mercenary might pick up in the bazaars of fifty different cities.
But their garb was not that of any tribe, and in this part of the mountains that made them enemies.
Their distance and their bows also made them enemies well out of reach. Climbing up against their archery would be slow work and bring quick death to many of those who tried it, besides giving the alarm. Conan braced himself against a rock and slowly rose to his feet, invisible from above but hopefully not so from below.
He was raising his arms in the signal for stillness and silence when a man leapt from the rocks to his right. Conan had one moment to recognize the man whom he'd punished for being slow to swear obedience.
Then the man hurled himself at the Cimmerian, dagger in hand, and Conan was fighting for his life.
The man was slighter and shorter than he, but had surprise on his side and the strength and agility of a leopard, making him no mean foe even for one of the Cimmerian's prowess.
The man's rush drove Conan back against the rock, and his head cracked hard against it. This slowed his drawing his own blade, so that the man slashed at his wrist and made it fall. Conan hammered a fist into the man's face, or at least so aimed it, but the man bobbed aside and the blow only struck his shoulder.
That was still enough to knock him back, but he sprang up again like a child's weighted toy. Now Bethina closed from Conan's left, and he frantically gestured for her to stand clear. It was not in him to shout yet, although he feared that a deaf man in the pack train could already have heard the fight.
The man stamped a foot on Conan's blade, at the same time pivoting on the foot and kicking at the Cimmerian's groin. Conan rode with the kick, taking it on his hip, and picked up his sword, which gave him the edge in reach.
But that also opened the distance between him and his opponent. Before the Cimmerian could strike again, the man leapt at Bethina.
"Doiran is chief!" the man screamed, and the dagger flashed down.
It never reached Bethina, and only partly because she fell and rolled out from under its slash. It still would have torn her open, except that another dagger suddenly blossomed in the back of the man's neck. He stiffened, his own point wavered, blood gushed from his mouth, and he fell almost on top of Bethina.
Farad stepped out of the rocks, a second dagger held by the point in his hand and a grim look on his face. His face grew grimmer still as he saw Bethina, lying still and blood-spattered almost within reach of the would-be assassin.
Then he stopped in midstride, as Bethina leaped to her feet and Conan laughed. A moment later Farad's face was that of a man being strangled and thoroughly enjoying the process, as Bethina wrapped her arms around him and clung to him so tightly that her feet barely touched the ground.
"Did you devise this scheme to dazzle this young lady?" Conan growled, but with a grin.
Farad looked as if he'd been slapped, and Bethina glared at the Cimmerian.
"This is the first I knew of either man's presence, and much good yours did me!" Then she shook her head. "Forgive me, Conan. This—I did not think we might have my brother's spies among us."
"I did," Farad said, regaining his voice. "But I could not be sure. If I simply made the man disappear some night, his tribesfolk would take it ill. So I trusted to my tracking skills, to follow the man until he did some mischief."
"It would not have hurt if you'd followed him a trifle closer," Conan said, holding up his bloody left wrist. "You might have stopped him before he did this, or even made a sound. There was a pack train uphill, and if they're not alert now, I'm a Stygian!"
Farad quickly begged his chief's pardon and went to see what the pack train had done. Not much to Conan's surprise, the Afghuli reported that they had dashed off fast enough for at least two mules to fall.
They were barely in sight to the west, and not slackening their speed.
"As well that they had orders to guard the mules and not fight," Conan said, "or we'd have had arrows about our ears and maybe in other places before this. But the alarm will be up."
"Should I go up and pick over the fallen mules? They may tell us something—"
"And what's to tell you that the guards haven't left an archer behind just to pick off the curious? We can't lose you, Farad. We need you to lead in my place if the next would-be assassin aims his steel better."
Farad and Bethina looked at one another, then Farad cleared his throat. "My chief. Suppose that we pretend this one did aim well? If they have not seen you alive after the fight, how can they know you are not dead?"
"Yes," Bethina added. "We can make a great mourning for you, and pretend to build a cairn."