A pause ensued while Thulandra added more powders to his sinister brew and pronounced another incantation. At length he beckoned to the next man in line, who dragged his satyr forward to be slain. The other soldiers shifted uneasy feet One muttered:
"This takes longer than a coronation! Would he’d get on with it and let us back to bed.”
The eastern sky was paling when the last satyr died. The fire beneath the brazen pot had burned to a bed of embers. Hsiao, at his master’s command, unhooked the steaming pot and poured its boiling contents into the blood-filled cauldron. The nearest soldiers saw—or thought they saw—ghostly forms rise from the latter vessel; but others perceived only great clouds of vapor. In the deceptive predawn half-light, none could be sure of what he saw.
Faintly in the distance those on the cliff-top heard the sound of men in motion. Among the marching men no word was spoken, but the jingle of harness and the tramp of many feet cried defiance to the silent morning air.
Thulandra Thuu raised a voice shrill with tension: “My lord! Prince Numitorl Order your men away!”
Startled out of his sleepy lethargy, the prince barked the command: “Stand to arms! Back to camp!”
The sounds of an approaching army grew. The sorcerer raised his arms and droned an invocation.
Hsiao handed him a dipper, with which he scooped up liquid from the cauldron and poured the fluid into a deep crack in the rocks. He stepped back, raised imploring arms against the lightening sky, and cried out again in unknown tongues. Then he ladled out another dipperful, and another.
Along the road from Culario, before that sandy ribbon disappeared beneath a canopy of leaves, the mage could see a pair of mounted men. They trotted toward the Giant’s Notch, and as they went, they studied the rock wall and the woods below it. Then a whole troop of cavalry came into view; and following them, files of infantry, swinging along with weapons balanced on their shoulders.
Thulandra Thuu hastily ladled out more liquid from the cauldron and once more raised his skirmy arms to heaven.
Leading the first rank of rebel horse, Conan rose in his stirrups to peer about. His scouts had seen no royalists in the greenery along the forest road, or at the Giant’s Notch, or atop the towering cliffs. The Cimmerian’s eagle glance raked the summit, now tipped a rosy pink by the slanting rays of the morning sun. Conan’s apprehension of hidden traps stirred in his savage soul. Prince Numitor was no genius, this he knew; but even such a one as he would make ready to defend the Notch.
Yet he saw no sign of a royalist mustering. Would Numitor, indeed, allow the rebels to reach the Imirian Plateau to lessen the odds against them? Conan knew the nobles of this land professed obedience to the rules of chivalry; but in all his years of war, no general had ever risked a certain chance of victory for such an abstract principle. Nay, the enemy had the upper hand; a trap was obvious! Experience with the hypocrisies of civilized men made the Cimmerian cynical about the ideals they so eloquently proclaimed.
The barbarians among whom he had grown to manhood were quite as treacherous; but they did not seek to gild their bloody actions with noble sentiments.
One scout reported a strange discovery. At the base of the escarpment, leftward of the Giant’s Notch, he had come upon a heap of satyr corpses, each with its throat ripped open. The bodies, smashed and scattered, had fallen from the heights above.
“Scorcery afootl" muttered Trocero. “The king’s he-witch has joined with Numitor, I'll wager.”
As the two lead horsemen neared the Notch, they spurred their steeds and vanished up the road that paralleled the turgid River Bitaxa. Soon they reappeared upon a rocky ledge and signaled all was quiet. Conan scanned the summit once again. He thought he caught a hint of movement—a mere black speck that might have been a trick of light or of tired eyes. Turning, he motioned the leader of the troop. Captain Morenus, to enter the tunnel of the Notch.
Conan sat his mount beside the road, watching intently. As the horsemen trotted past, his heart swelled at the soldierly appearance they made, thanks to the driving force of his incessant drilling. His own horse, a bay gelding, seemed restless, stamping its hooves and dancing sideways. Conan stroked the creature’s neck to gentle it, but the bay continued to fidget. He first thought the animal was impatient to move forward with the others of the troop; but as the horse became more agitated, a premonition took shape in Conan’s mind.
After another glance at the escarpment Conan, a scowl on his scarred face, swung off his beast and dropped with a clash of armor to the ground. Gripping his reins, he shut his eyes. His barbarian senses, keener than those of city-bred men, had not deceived him. Through the soles of his boots he felt a faint quivering in the earth. Not the vibration that a group of galloping horsemen sends through the ground, this was something slower, more deliberate, with more actual motion, as if the earth had waked to yawn and stretch.
Conan hesitated no longer. Cupping his hands around his mouth and filling his great lungs, he bellowed: “Morenus, come back! Get out of the Notch! Spur your horses, all come back!”
There was a moment of confusion in the Notch, as the command was passed along and the soldiers sought to turn their steeds on the narrow way. Above them on the cliff, the sorcerer shrieked a final invocation and struck the rocks outside his pentacle with his curiously carven staff.
A rumble—a deep-toned roll that scarcely could be heard—issued from the earth. Above the retreating cavalrymen, the cliffs swayed. Pieces of black basalt detached themselves and toppled, with deceptive slowness, then faster and faster, striking ledges, shattering, and bounding off to crash into the gorge. From the river Bitaxa, towering jets of spray fountained aloft to dwarf the downward fall of the cascade.
Conan found his stirrup with some difficulty, as his terror-stricken beast danced around him in a circle. His foot secured, he swung cursing into the saddle and wheeled to face the column of infantry, still marching briskly toward the Notch.
“Get back! Get back!” he roared, but his words were lost in the grumbling, grinding thunder of the earthquake. He moved his horse into the column’s path, making frantic gestures. The lead men understood and checked their gait; but those behind continued to press forward, so that the column bunched up into a milling mass.
Within the Notch the cliffs swayed, reeled, and crumbled. With the roar of an angry god, millions of tons of rock cascaded into the gap. The earth beneath the soldiers’ feet so swayed and bounced that men clutched one another to stay erect; a few fell, their weapons clattering to the rocky ground.
Down from the deadly flume raced Conan’s troop of cavalry, lashed by their panic. The leaders crashed into the infantry column, downing some horses, spilling riders from their saddles, and injuring many foot soldiers caught in the pincer's jaws. Men’s shouts and horses' screams soared above the thunder of the quake.
The Bitaxa River foamed out of its bed, as waves sent downstream by the fall of rock spread out on the flatlands below and lapped across the road. Soldiers splashed ankle-deep in water and prayed to their assorted gods.
Controlling his frantic mount by a savage grip on the reins, Conan sought to restore order. “Morenus!” he shouted. “Did all your men get out?”
“All but a dozen or so in the van. General.”