Men glanced at one another darkly, a new element of suspicion added to the already seething cauldron. Conan climbed the tree, secured the head, and carried it into the bushes, where he tossed it into a stream and watched it sink.
“The Picts whose tracks are about this tree weren’t Horn-bills,” he growled, returning through the thicket. “I’ve sailed these coasts enough to know something about the sea-land tribes. If I read the prints of their moccasins aright, they were Cormorants. I hope they’re having a war with the Horn-bills. If they’re at peace, they’ll head straight for the Horn-bill village, and there’ll be trouble. I don’t know how far away that village is …but, as soon as they learn of this murder, they’ll come through the forest like starving wolves. That’s the worst insult possible to a Pict …to kill a man not in war-paint and stick his head up in a tree for the vultures to eat. Damned peculiar things going on along this coast. But that’s always the way when civilized men come into the wilderness; they’re all crazy as Hell. Come on.”
Men loosened blades in their scabbards and shafts in their quivers as they strode deeper into the forest. Men of the sea, accustomed to rolling expanses of gray water, they were ill at ease with mysterious, green walls of trees and vines hemming them in. The path wound and twisted until most of them quickly lost their sense of direction and did not even know in which direction the beach lay.
Conan was uneasy for another reason. He kept scanning the trail and finally grunted: “Somebody’s passed along here recently …not more than an hour ahead or us. Somebody in boots, with no woodcraft. Was he the fool who found that Pict’s head and stuck it back up in that tree? No, it couldn’t have been he. I didn’t find his tracks under the tree. But who was it? I found no tracks there, except those of the Picts I’d already seen. And who’s this fellow hurrying ahead of us? Did either of you bastards send a man ahead of us for any reason?”
Both Strombanni and Zarono loudly disclaimed any such act, glaring at each other with mutual disbelief. Neither man could see the signs Conan pointed out; the faint prints that he saw on the grassless, hard-beaten trail were invisible to their untrained eyes.
Conan quickened his pace, and they hurried after him, fresh coals of suspicion added to the smoldering fire of distrust. Presently the path veered northward, and Conan left it and began threading his way through the trees in a southeasterly direction.
The afternoon wore on as the swearing men plowed through bushes and climbed over logs. Strombanni, momentarily falling behind with Zarono, murmured:
“Think you he’s leading us into an ambush?”
“He might,” retorted the buccaneer. “In any case, we shall never find our way back to the sea without him to guide us.” Zarono gave Strombanni a meaningful look.
“I see your point,” said the latter. “This may force a change in our plans.”
Suspicion grew as they advanced and had almost reached panic proportions when they emerged from the thick woods and saw, just ahead of them, a gaunt crag that jutted up from the forest floor. A dim path, leading out of the woods from the east, ran along a cluster of boulders and wound up the crag on a ladder of stony shelves to a flat ledge near the summit.
Conan halted, a bizarre figure in his piratical finery. “That trail is the one I followed, when I was running from the Eagle Picts,” he said. “It leads up to a cave behind that ledge. In that cave are the bodies of Tranicos and his captains, and the treasure he plundered from Tothmekri. But a word before we go up after it: If you kill me here, you’ll never find your way back to the trail we followed from the beach. I know you seafaring men; you’re helpless in the deep woods. Of course, the beach lies due west; but, if you have to make your way through the tangled woods, burdened with the plunder, it’ll take you, not hours, but days. And I don’t think these woods will be very safe for white men, when the Horn-bills learn about their hunter.”
He laughed at the ghastly, mirthless smiles with which they greeted his recognition of their intentions toward him. And he also comprehended the thought that sprang in the mind of each: Let the barbarian secure the loot for them and lead them back to the beach trail before they killed him.
“All of you stay here except Strombanni and Zarono,” said Conan. “We three are enough to pack the treasure down from the cave.”
Strombanni grinned mirthlessly. “Go up there alone with you and Zarono? Do you take me for a fool? One man at least comes with me!”
And he designated his boatswain, a brawny, hard-faced giant, naked to his broad leather belt, with gold hoops in his ears and a crimson scarf around his head.
“And my executioner comes with me!” growled Zarono. He beckoned to a lean sea-thief with a face like a parchment-covered skull, who carried a two-handed scimitar naked over his bony shoulder.
Conan shrugged his shoulders. “Very well. Follow me.”
They were close on his heels as he strode up the winding path and mounted the ledge. They crowded him close as he passed through the cleft in the wall behind it, and their breath sucked greedily between their teeth as he called their attention to the iron-bound chests on either side of the short, tunnel-like cavern.
“A rich cargo here,” he said carelessly. “Silks, laces, garments, ornaments, weapons …the loot of the southern seas. But the real treasure lies beyond that door.”
The massive door stood partly open. Conan frowned. He remembered closing that door before he left the cavern. But he said nothing of the matter to his eager companions as he drew aside to let them through.
They looked into a wide cavern, lit by a strange, blue glow that glimmered through a smoky, mistlike haze. A great ebony table stood in the midst of the cavern, and, in a carved chair with a high back and broad arms, which might once have stood in the castle of some Zingaran baron, sat a giant figure, fabulous and fantastic. There sat Bloody Tranicos, his great head sunk on his bosom, one hand still gripping a jeweled goblet …Tranicos, in his lacquered hat, his gilt-embroidered coat with jeweled buttons that winked in the blue flame, his flaring boots and gold-worked baldric, which upheld a jewel-hilted sword in a golden sheath.
And ranging the board, each with his chin resting on his lace-bedecked breast, sat the eleven captains. The blue fire played weirdly on them and on their giant admiral, as it flowed from the enormous jewel on the tiny ivory pedestal, striking glints of frozen fire from the heaps of fantastically-cut gems that shone before the place of Tranicos …the plunder of Khemi, the jewels of Toth-mekri! The stones whose value was greater than that of all the rest of the known jewels in the world put together!
The faces of Zarono and Strombanni showed pallid in the blue glow. Over their shoulder, their men gaped stupidly.
“Go in and take them,” invited Conan, drawing aside.
Zarono and Strombanni crowded avidly past him, jostling each other in their haste. Their followers were treading on their heels. Zarono kicked the door wide open …and halted, with one foot on the threshold, at the sight of a figure on the floor, previously hidden from view by the partly-closed door. It was a man, prone and contorted, with his head drawn back between his shoulders and his white face twisted in a grin of mortal agony.
“Galbro!” exclaimed Zarono. “Dead! What …” With sudden suspicion, he thrust his head over the threshold. Then he jerked back and screamed: “There’s death in the cavern!”
Even as he screamed, the blue mist swirled and condensed. At the same time, Conan hurled his weight against the four men bunched in the doorway, sending them staggering …but not headlong into the misty cavern as he had planned.
Suspecting a trap, they were recoiling from the sight of the dead man and the materializing demon. Hence his violent push, while it threw them off their feet, yet failed of the result he desired. Strombanni and Zarono sprawled half over the threshold on their knees, the boatswain tumbled over their legs, and the executioner caromed against the wall.