With a wail of terror, the trampled man staggered to his feet and fled limping. In an instant, the other six had joined him in panic-stricken flight across the glacier. Conan drew rein to watch their shaggy figures dwindle ... and then had to leap clear of the saddle as his horse shuddered and fell. A flint-headed spear had been driven deep into the animal's body, just behind Conan's left leg. A glance showed Conan that the beast was dead.
“Crom damn me for a meddling fool!” he growled to himself. Horses were scarce and costly in the northlands. He had ridden this steed all tie way from far Zamora. He had stabled and fed and pampered it through the long winter. He had left it behind when he joined the Aesir in their raid, knowing that deep snow and treacherous icewould rob it of most of its usefulness. He had counted upon the faithful beast to get him back to the warm lands, and now it lay dead, all because he had impulsively intervened in a quarrel among the mountain folk that was none of his affair.
As his panting breath slowed and the red mist of battle fury faded out of his eyes, he turned toward the girl for whom he had fought. She stood a few feet away, staring at him wide-eyed.
“Are you all right, lass ?” he grunted. “Did the brutes hurt you? Have no fear; I'm not a foe. I am Conan, a Cimmerian.”
Her reply came in a dialect he had never heard before. It seemed to be a form of Hyperborean, mixed with words from other tongues ... some from Nemedian and others from sources he did not recognize. He found it hard to gather more than half her meaning.
“You fight ... like a god,” she panted. “I thought “ you Ymir come to save Ilga.”
As she cabled, he drew the story from her in spurts of words. She was Ilga of the Vimnian people, a branch of the Hyperboreans who had strayed into the Border Kingdom. Her folk lived in perpetual war with the hairy cannibals who dwelt in caves among the Eiglophian peaks. The struggle for survival in this barren realm was desperate; she would have been eaten by her captors had not Conan rescued her.
Two days before, she explained, she had set out with a small party of Vinmians to cross the pass above Snow Devil Glacier. Thence they planned to journey several days' ride northeast to Sigtona, the nearest of the Hyperborean strongholds. There they had kinsmen, among whom the Vimnians hoped to trade at the spring fair. There Ilga's uncle, who accompanied her, also meant to seek a good husband for her. But they had been ambushed by the hairy ones, and only Ilga had survived the terrible battle on the slippery slopes. Her uncle's last command to her, before he fell with his skull cleft by a flint ax, had been to ride like the wind for home.
Before she was out of sight of the mountain men, her horse had fallen on a patch of ice and broken a leg. She had thrown herself clear and, though bruised, had fled afoot. The hairy ones, however, had seen the fall, and a party of them came scampering down over the glacier to seize her. For hours, it seemed, she had run from them, But at last they had caught up with her and ringed her round, as Conan had seen.
Conan granted his sympathy; his profound dislike of Hyperboreans, based upon his sojourn in a Hyperborean slave pen, did not extend to their women. It was a hard tale, but life in the bleak northlands was grim. He had often heard the like.
Now, however, another problem faced them. Night had fallen, and neither had a horse. The wind was rising, and they would have little chance of surviving through the night on the surface of the glacier. They must find shelter and make a fire, or Snow Devil Glacier would add two more victims to its toll.
Late that night, Conan fell asleep. They had found a hollow beneath an overhang of rock on the side of the glacier, where the ice had melted away enough to let them squeeze in. With their backs to the granite surface of the cliff, deeply scored and striated by the rubbing of the glacier, they had room to stretch out. In front of the hollow rose the flank of the glacier ... clear, translucent ice, fissured by cavernous crevasses and tunnels.
Although the chill of the ice struck through to their bones, they were still warmer than they would have been on the surface above, where a howling wind was now driving dense clouds of snow before it.
Ilga had been reluctant to accompany Conan, although he made it plain that he meant the lass no harm. She had tugged away from his hand, crying out an unfamiliar word, which sounded something like yakhmar. At length, losing patience, he had given her a mfld cuff on the side of the head and carried her unconscious to the dank haven of the cave.
Then he had gone out to recover his bearskin cloak and the gear and supplies tied to his saddle. From the rocky slope that rose from the edge of the glacier, he had gathered a double armful of twigs, leaves, and wood, which he had carried to the cave. There, with flint and steel, he had coaxed a small fire into life. It gave more the illusion of warmth than true warmth, for he dared not let it grow too large lest it melt the nearby walls of the glacier and flood them out of their refuge.
The orange gleams of the fire shone deeply into the fissures and tunnels that ran back into the body of the glacier until their windings and branchings were lost in the dim distance. A faint gurgle of running water came to Conan's ears, now and then punctuated by the creak and crack of slowly moving ice.
Conan went out again into the biting wind, to hack from the stiffening body of his horse some thick slabs of meat. These he brought back to the cave to roast on the ends of pointed sticks. The horse steaks, together with slabs of black bread from his saddle bag, washed down with bitter Asgardian beer from a goatskin bottle, made a tough but sustaining repast.
Ilga seemed withdrawn as she ate. At first Conan thought she was still angry with him for the blow. But it was gradually borne upon him that her mind was not on this incident at ah1. She was, instead, in the grip of stark terror. It was not the normal fear she had felt for the band of shaggy brutes that had pursued her, but a deep, superstitious dread somehow connected with the glacier. When he tried to question her, she could do nothing but whisper the strange word, “Yakhmar! Yakhmar!” while her lovely face took on a pale, drawn look of terror. When he tried to get the meaning of the word out of hers she could only make vague gestures, which conveyed nothing to him.
After the meal, warm and weary, they curled up together in his bearskin cloak. Her nearness brought to Conan's mind the thought that a bout of hot love might calm her mind for sleep. His first tentative caresses found her not at all unwilling. Nor was she unresponsive to his youthful ardor; as he soon discovered, she was not new to this game. Before the hour of lovemaking was over, she was gasping and crying out in her passion. Afterwards, thinking her now relaxed, the Cimmerian rolled over and slept like a dead man.
The girl, however, did not sleep. She lay rigid, staring out at the blacloiess that yawned in the ice cavities beyond the feeble glow of the banked fire. At last, near dawn, came the thing she dreaded.
It was a faint piping sound - a thin, ullulating thread of music that wound around her mind until it was as helpless as a netted bird. Her heart fluttered against her ribs. She could neither move nor speak, even to rouse the snoring youth beside her.
Then two disks of cold green fire appeared in the mouth of the nearest ice tunnel - two great orbs that burned into her young soul and cast a deathly spell over her. There was no soul or mind behind those flaming disks ... only remorseless hunger.