A glance behind them sent Conan and his comrades scurrying. “That gully! Over there!” growled Conan, pointing. “Mayhap it won’t see us.”
They dashed to the gully that he had indicated and crouched, scarcely daring to breathe. The monster shambled out on their track just as the Stygian host, with much drumming and trumpeting, began to move. The first units passed the left paw of the statue—to find themselves riding parallel to the monster and only a few yards from it.
One Stygian uttered an exclamation; then others; then shouts of terror and amazement filled the night. Bowstrings twanged and a shower of arrows and javelins fell about the monster. These missiles were mere pin pricks to so vast a creature, but they stuck in its hide and roused it to fury.
It wheeled ponderously toward the host and for an instant towered over them, like the living cub of the stone monster it resembled.
Then it was among them! Its great paws swept right and left, dashing men and mounts head over heels in a welter of gore. The Black Beast waded through the slaughter, dipping its huge head with every stride to snatch up a Stygian and crunch him to jelly with one bite. The air was hideous with the shrieking of mangled horses, the agony and terror of broken men.
The Stygians did not lack courage. Horrified though he was, their general ordered one desperate charge. The beast swept his men to earth with its slashing paws and snapping jaws as fast as they came within reach. At last the Stygians went mad with terror, clawing and trampling one another in their haste to flee. Most of them were dismounted by the frantic leaps and buckings of their terrified horses and camels and had to slog through the sand afoot. And after them came the Black Beast, trampling and crunching. Ever it slew… and slew… and slew.
As the sun’s golden disc lifted above the desert beyond the Bakhr, the monster returned from its slaughter. It moved with haste, shivering as the sun’s inimical rays struck it, and squeezed through the great portal in the sphinx’s breast. Then it was gone, and the vast stone door boomed shut behind it.
From a distance, Conan and his companions watched the disappearing monster. Then they trudged back to the camp. There the Aquilonians, drawn up in ranks of archers and spearmen determined to sell their lives dearly, could hardly believe their deliverance.
Some of the baggage had been lost in tent fires. A few men had died from Stygian arrows but many more were wounded, for those light, long-range shafts were designed to cripple rather than to kill. Everywhere, surgeons were cleaning and binding minor wounds.
Soon Conan and Pallantides organized the recovery. A few of the masterless horses and camels which wandered disconsolately around the camp were captured and then used to round up more of the Stygians’ mounts. In the course of this work, the Aquilonians discovered the Stygians’ abandoned baggage train, by which they soon made good their own losses of material.
His powers augmented by the Heart of Ahriman, the White Druid searched the spirit plane with his astral senses. He awoke from his trance to say that Thoth-Amon had fled the destruction of the Black Ring and was on his way southeast, toward the mysterious black kingdom of Zembabwei.
The host was drawn up, awaiting orders. There had been changes. Most of the horses were now wiry Stygian ponies. Their riders had put away their plate armor as too heavy for such small steeds to bear; they wore light tunics of chain mail instead. There was a newly formed camel corps, whose members looked uneasily upon their angular, irascible mounts.
Conan sat easily on his camel, his legs locked together in front of the hump. He grinned at a remark by Trocero.
“Of course I know how to ride a camel!” he chuckled. Wasn’t I once a chief of the Zuagir nomads of the eastern deserts? If you treat a camel well and know its limitations, ’tis no harder to manage than any other beast.”
He stared at the distant, dun-colored horizon, his blue eyes fierce under scowling brows. Beside him, Diviatix smiled up from his mule cart. He had been drinking again, but his voice was steady enough.
“The Lords of Light are still with you, O King!” he said. He turned to where Prince Conn sat a Stygian pony. “Lend me your brand, O Prince!”
Conn handed over the sword. With his forefinger, Diviatix sketched a series of runes on the blade. The characters showed black on the bright steel.
“What’s that?” asked Conn, taking back the sword and looking curiously at it.
Diviatix smiled crookedly. “Ask no question, lad. Suffice it to say that in a vision last night, one of the powers told me to write those words. It was said that they would prove of use to you. And now, farewell!”
Pallantides cantered up, reining in a restive Stygian gray. “We are ready to march, sire.”
“Give the order, then,” growled Conan.
“Whither away?” asked Trocero.
Conan grinned, white teeth flashing in his bronzed, impassive face. “Southeast, to Zembabwei and the jungle lands—and to the end of the earth, if need be!”
And the trumpets sang.
RED MOON OF ZEMBABWEI
ONE: Green Hell
Count Trocero of Poitain snatched at his saddlebow as his weary, lathered horse—a small but sturdy Stygian gray—slipped in the mud, nearly causing him to lose his stirrups. He tugged at the reins, pulling the gray’s head around, and slapped at the cloud of stinging gnats that hovered before his face. He muttered a weary curse. Behind him, Pallantides, commander of the Aquilonian host, ripped out a sulfurous oath as his steed slipped in the same patch of mud.
Trocero squinted at the cloudy sky which lay close above them. It seemed hardly to clear the tops of the tall, canelike grasses which rose to the height of a horseman’s head all about them. Below, the hooves of their horses splashed through the shallow sheet of water which lay fetlock-deep over the land. For the rainy season had come to the plains of Zembabwei, turning the country into a reeking morass.
In another fortnight the rains would cease and the water which drained sluggishly in this flatland would vanish. The soil would change to dry, hard-baked clay. The towering grasses would turn from green to yellow, dry out, and be swept by brush fires. But that lay in the future.
“Looks like rain,” Trocero grunted to Pallantides.
The general cast a grim eye aloft. “By Set’s slimy scales,” he growled, “tell me something new, Count! It’s rained every day for the last ten, and I’ve given up trying to keep the rust off my gear. How much longer will the king keep us at this back-breaking pace?”
Trocero shrugged with a saturnine grin. “You know Conan! Until it’s so black an owl couldn’t see its way. ’Ware serpent!” he snapped as his gray shied.
Pallantides jerked his reins as a mottled gray swamp viper, thick as a man’s thigh, slithered among the stems of the grasses and vanished.
I’ve had a bellyful of this accursed swamp,” the general snorted. “Gut me on the altars of Derketo, but I wish that spindle-shanked old tosspot of a druid were still with us! Belike he could magic us through the air to Old Zembabwei. Anything were better than slogging afoot through this mire! Half our horses and camels are dead or ailing, and half our men are spilling their guts with swamp fever… How in the forty-nine hells he expects to reach the Forbidden City in shape to fight is beyond me.”
Trocero shrugged. For more than a month King Conan had driven the Aquilonian host on and on, following the course of the Styx towards its unknown source. They had trudged along the borders of eastern Stygia, where the slender ribbon of greenery along the river was flanked on either side by the golden sands of the eastern deserts. Then the river bent southward. They had traversed a parched no man’s land, where few signs of human life were to be seen save the wandering clans of the eastern Shemites, the Zuagirs, with their camels and sheep.