Shadows West of Thunder River
A Tale of Conan of Cimmeria
Prequel to Beyond the Black River
David M. Garrett
I. The Dispatch from Tuscelan
From the hand of Valannus, commander of the garrison at Fort Tuscelan, to his excellency Numedides, King of Aquilonia, by way of the lord governor at Velitrium:
Be it known that in the moon now waning, six men of this garrison under the command of Decurion Publio were lost in the wilderness west of Thunder River, to which place they had been dispatched to ascertain the whereabouts of certain settlers reported overdue at the Bossonian fords. No man of that patrol has returned, nor has any sign been had of them beyond a broken arrow of Aquilonian make discovered by a trapper in the forest border west of the river. I have sent a scout of proven skill to ascertain the fate of these men. I remind your excellency that Conajohara is not yet secured and that the Picts, though quiescent these past months, are not to be trusted even in their silence. I do not like a Pictish silence. A Pict speaks when he is beaten; when he is still, he is thinking, and a thinking Pict is a knife not yet drawn.
Given under my hand, the twenty-seventh day of the Hawk Moon—
—
The commander had not finished the letter when the scout entered. He came without knocking, as was his way, and Valannus did not look up at first because he was accustomed to the Cimmerian’s comings and goings and had ceased to be offended by them.
“You leave at dawn?” he said.
“I leave now.”
Valannus set down the quill. The man who stood before him was tall, broad-shouldered, black of hair, blue-eyed in a face burned dark by the sun of a dozen countries. He wore a shirt of fine ring-mail beneath a scout’s jerkin of deerhide, and at his side hung a broadsword of Aquilonian pattern though the hilt had been rewrapped in rawhide after the manner of the frontier. His boots were Pictish—soft-soled, made to move silently over leaves—and he had a hatchet thrust through his belt beside a long knife.
“The moon is nearing new,” Valannus said. “You will have no light.”
“Nor will the Picts. And in three nights there will be no moon, and then I shall want to be already in the deep woods where a man needs to remain undetected.”
Valannus nodded slowly. He was a Poitainian by birth, a dark lean man with the eyes of one who has watched too long at too many frontiers, and he understood the arithmetic of wilderness travel as few men at court could have understood it. He passed a hand across his face.
“Publio was a good man,” he said. “A little proud. He would not have abandoned his patrol.”
“No,” said Conan. “He would not have abandoned them. Something took them.”
“Picts?”
The Cimmerian was a long time answering. When he spoke it was slowly, with the care of a man who has learned that words said in a commander’s office can return as nooses.
“Picts took the trappers at Redgate last autumn. Picts took the surveyors in the Deep Meadow. I know how Picts work and I know what they leave behind. Six Aquilonians do not vanish west of the river and leave no scalps on no lodge-poles. Picts make war for war’s sake, and they make sure you see what they have done, or they do not bother.”
“Then what?”
“I will know when I find it.”
Valannus took a key from around his neck and unlocked a small iron chest that stood beside his chair. From it he drew a purse heavy with silver and set it on the table between them.
“Take it. For the widow, if you do not return.”
“I have no wife.”
“Take it for your own, then.”
Conan put the purse inside his jerkin without counting it. He nodded once to the commander and went out; and when the heavy door of the stockade opened and closed behind him, Valannus looked up and saw by the lamp that the ink of his unfinished letter had dried on the nib and would have to be scraped away before he could write another word.
He did not finish the letter that night.
II. Across the Black River
The Cimmerian crossed Thunder River two hours before dawn, swimming in the black water with his gear bound to a small raft of lashed saplings behind him. The current was strong and he came out a quarter-mile downstream from where he had entered, but that was as he had planned it, for an enemy watching for his crossing would watch the straightest line. He drew the raft up under the roots of a cottonwood and dismantled it, scattering the pieces into the river to be carried away, and stood a long while listening.
The forest west of Thunder River was not the same forest as that which grew on the Aquilonian side. A man who did not know these woods would have said it was, for the oaks were oaks here as there, and the pines were pines, and the frogs sang the same song in the bottoms. But Conan had been a wolf among wolves in his time, and he knew the smell of a country that men have not tamed. There was a stillness here that was not peace. It was the stillness of an animal crouched.
He struck west at a lope, keeping to the shadows of the bigger trees and avoiding the open glades where a man was a mark against the sky. For two hours he ran so, eating as he went from a pouch of parched corn and strips of smoked deer-meat, and at the end of the second hour he had put five miles between himself and the river and had come to the first of the landmarks he wanted.
This was a great dead oak that had been split by lightning in the time of his first scouting, blasted from crown to root, and which stood now like a bleached bone against the paling sky. Publio’s patrol had been ordered to pass this tree. If they had passed it, there would be sign; the ground beneath its branches was soft and black and took an imprint like wax.
There was sign. He knelt and read it as another man might have read a book.
Six men had passed here, walking in file as Aquilonian soldiers walked, and they had passed four days ago. After them, and overlaying their prints at the edges, had come others: moccasined feet, narrow and long, walking not in file but spread out in the hunting-formation of the Picts. Eight of them, or perhaps nine. Conan’s lip drew back from his teeth. So. They had been followed from the river. But the Pictish prints did not continue alongside the Aquilonian ones. They broke off fifty paces beyond the oak and turned north—toward Gwawela village and the Ghost Country beyond.
The Picts had turned back.
He sat on his heels a long time studying this, for it was a thing that did not fit. A Pict war-party does not trail six Aquilonian soldiers this far into the deep woods and then turn aside. A Pict war-party finishes what it begins. Unless something had turned them. Unless they had come to a place where even a Pict would not go.
He rose and went on, following the soldiers’ trail, and as he went the forest closed about him deeper and deeper, and the light that came through the leaves took on the greenish cast of water seen from beneath.
By midmorning he had found the second sign. This was a strip of Aquilonian leather, torn from a baldric, hanging from a thorn bush. It had not been torn by hasty passage. It had been cut, with deliberation, and tied to the branch where a scout would see it.
Publio. Leaving a marker.
Conan took the strip down and turned it in his fingers. There was no blood on it. He tucked the leather into his jerkin and went on, and an hour later he found the third sign, and at the third sign he stopped and for a long moment did not move at all.
It was a man’s hand. Only the hand. It lay in the moss at the foot of a hemlock, and it had been severed cleanly at the wrist by a blow of something heavier than a knife, and it had been there perhaps a day, perhaps two. The fingers were curled as if they had been gripping something when they were cut.
Conan turned the hand over with the point of his own knife. On one of the fingers was a ring with a small blue crescent. The mark of the Tenth Aquilonian Foot. Conan recognized the ring as belonging to a soldier named Hadricus. A good Aquilonian farm boy.
So. One of Publio’s men had come this far, at least, and had lost a hand here.
He searched the ground around the hemlock for the rest of the body and did not find it. He searched for the weapon that had done the cutting and did not find that either. What he found, at last, a little way off, was a single print in a patch of soft earth between two roots, and the print was not a man’s. It was broader than a man’s and longer, and where the toes of a man would have been there was nothing but a ragged line, as though whatever had made the print had walked upon feet that were no longer feet but were not yet anything else.
He looked at the print a long time. Then he rose and went on, and now he moved more slowly, and he carried the hatchet in his hand.
III. The Woman in the Thicket
He came upon her at noon of the second day, and had he not been the man he was she would have killed him.
He had been following the soldiers’ trail—what remained of it, for it was broken now, scattered, the tracks of men no longer walking in any formation but running, running west and south, running as though something had come behind them that they could not face. He had found another piece of a man by this time, and a broken sword, and a patch of earth where a man had bled out a great deal of his blood before being dragged away, and he had stopped to drink at a small stream and was rising from the stream when the arrow took him in the side.
Fortunately, in the instant of rising, he had caught the flash of movement in a thicket twenty paces to his left and twisted. The arrow struck the leather of his jerkin at an angle and skittered off the ring-mail beneath and fell into the stream.
He was on her before she could nock a second.
She fought him like a lynx. She was small and quick and she had a knife of chipped flint which she used well, and had she been armed with a knife of steel she might have opened his throat before he pinned her wrist. As it was he broke the flint blade against the hilt of his own knife and bore her down into the leaves, and when he had her pinned with one knee on her bow-arm and one hand on her throat he looked into her face for the first time.
She was a Pict. There was no mistaking it. She had the flat cheekbones of her people and the black straight hair that hung to her shoulders and the dark eyes that slanted above them, and she wore a tunic of doeskin belted at the waist and her arms and throat were marked with the blue tattoos her people put upon their bodies to tell the story of their lives. But she was not painted for war. That was the first thing he noticed. A Pict on a war-trail was painted; a Pict hunting was not. And there was a thing he noticed second, which was that her eyes, when she stopped fighting him and looked up at him, were not the eyes of a woman who had just tried to kill a stranger for the pleasure of killing. They were the eyes of a woman who had expected to die and was puzzled that she had not yet done so.
“Speak,” he said in the Pictish tongue. “What is your name?”
She stared at him.
“You are Pict,” he said. “Yet you do not wear the paint. You are alone. Why?”
She said a word. It was not quite a word he knew, for the Pict-speech differed from tribe to tribe and he had learned his in the southern marches, but it was near enough. She said: *Kiribati.* Or something very like.
“Kiribati,” he repeated. “That is your name?”
She nodded, the slightest movement, and he took his hand from her throat but did not yet rise from her arm.
“I am Conan,” he said. “I am Cimmerian. I am not of the Aquilonians though I serve them for pay. Do you know what a Cimmerian is?”
“The men of the dark land,” she said. Her voice was low and had the husk that the voice of a woman gets when she has gone a long time without speaking. “My grandmother told of them. They kill Picts in the hill country.”
“They do. And Picts kill them. It is an old quarrel and I did not start it. Now, Kiribati: I will let you up, and if you draw another weapon I will break your arm. Do you understand?”
She nodded again. He rose and stepped back, and she sat up slowly in the leaves and rubbed her throat where his grip had marked her. She did not look at him. She looked past him, through the trees, westward.
“You were not hunting me,” he said.
“No.”
“What were you hunting?”
She was a long time answering. When she answered at last, she spoke so low that he had to lean forward to hear her.
“I hunt a thing that was once my father.”
—
He made a small fire in a hollow where the smoke would be lost among the leaves of a spreading beech, and he cooked strips of deer-meat over it, and he shared them with her, for she was gaunt and he judged she had not eaten in a day or more. She ate as one who has trained herself not to hurry at food, taking small bites and chewing each for a long time, but he saw the hunger in her eyes and served her twice. While she ate he did not press her. He had been long enough among wild peoples to know that a question put to a Pict too soon is a question that will not be answered at all.
When she had eaten she wiped her fingers on the grass and looked up at him.
“I will tell you,” she said, “because you did not kill me when you could have, and because you are not Aquilonian. I will not tell an Aquilonian. An Aquilonian I would still be trying to kill.”
“Tell.”
“My father was Ahtok. He was a shaman of my people—not the greatest shaman, for the greatest is Zogar Sag who lives in the painted lodge at Gwawela, but a shaman after his own kind, and he was respected. He knew the old things. He knew the songs of the beasts and he knew the names of the places that are older than my people, older than the Picts who came before my people, older than anything that walks in these woods now.
“There is a hill three days’ walk west of this place. On that hill is a hollow. In the hollow there is a door, and behind the door there is a thing that my people once worshipped, in the time when my people were not yet my people but were something else. My grandmother’s grandmother knew the name of it. I do not know the name. The name is forbidden now. My father knew it.”
She paused. Conan waited.
“In the moon of the broken ice—that which you would call the month of early spring—my father went alone to the hollow. He went to renew a pact that had been made long ago between the thing behind the door and the old people, who had promised it certain things in return for certain other things. My father did not tell me what he went to give or what he went to receive. A shaman does not speak of such things, even to his daughter. But I knew that he was afraid, and that he went because he must, because Zogar Sag had taken many of the old duties from the lesser shamans and my father thought that if he did not keep this one last pact the thing behind the door would come out of itself to seek him.
“He was gone seven days. On the seventh day he came back to our lodge. I was alone; my mother is long dead. My father came through the door of the lodge and I knew at once that he was not my father.
“He wore my father’s body. He spoke with my father’s voice. He knew the things my father knew. He even embraced me, in the manner of my father, who was not always a cold man though he was a shaman. But the thing that looked out of his eyes was not Ahtok. It was something that had come back wearing Ahtok, and it had come back hungry, and it had come back cruel.
“He was cruel in small ways at first. He mocked me. He had never mocked me. He told me things about my mother, who had died when I was small, that no father would have told to a daughter. He struck a dog that had come to him wagging its tail, and the dog crawled away and died in the night of no wound I could find. He sat by the fire and watched me with my father’s eyes, and there was a patience in him that I did not understand until I understood it, and then I fled.”
“You fled.”
“I fled into the woods. I knew that if I stayed he would kill me when it amused him to kill me. I took my bow and my knife and I went. That was eighteen days ago. For twelve days I hid and watched the lodge from far off. On the twelfth day I saw him come out of the lodge, and he had withered. He walked like an old man though my father was not old. His skin had drawn tight on his bones and his color was the color of a long-dead thing. He walked westward, toward the hollow, and I followed him because I had made a promise in my heart that whatever came back to the hollow in my father’s skin, I would put my arrow through its eye before it went down into the dark.”
“Did you?”
“No.” Her voice was very flat. “I followed him to the mouth of the hollow and I could not enter it. There is a fear on that place that cannot be borne. My legs would not carry me down. He went down and he did not come up. That was six days ago. I have been walking the woods since, trying to find courage to go after him, or failing that, to find some other thing that should die.”
“The Aquilonian patrol.”
She nodded. “I did not kill them. I saw them. They went to the hollow, not knowing what it was. Six went down into it. One came out. He came out running, and he was weeping, and I saw him only for a moment before he fled east. I think he had lost a hand.”
“Yes,” said Conan. “Hadricus. I found the sight of a struggle and his severed hand in the brush.” Conan produced the ring from his belt and showed her. “This was his ring.”
They were silent a long while. The fire burned low and he fed it with a broken stick. In the trees above them, a bird sat silently.
“Kiribati,” he said at last, “I am going to the hollow. I have been sent by my commander to learn what became of his men, but I think I have learned what I came to learn, and I am going on now for a different reason. What is in that hollow has crossed the river. It has taken six Aquilonians. One of them got away, and he ran eastward, and he had something on him when he ran—some seed, some sickness, some trace of what touched him. He may have died in the woods, or he may have reached the settlements, and if he reached the settlements then what is in that hollow has already crossed Thunder River in the only way that matters.”
“You are going to the hollow.”
“I am going to the hollow.”
“Then you are a fool, Cimmerian, for I am a shaman’s daughter and I tell you that no sword of yours will bite that thing.”
“I am not going to bite it with a sword. I am going to break its door.”
She looked at him a long time.
“I will come with you,” she said.
IV. The Drums at Night
They traveled together for three days, moving west and a little north, and in those three days Conan took the measure of Kiribati and she of him. She was sixteen or seventeen, he judged, though among her people a woman of that age was reckoned full grown and often had borne a child. She did not speak of children and he did not ask. She was hard as whipcord and she kept his pace without complaint, and she knew the woods in a way that he respected, for she had grown up in them as he had grown up in the hills of Cimmeria, and there is a kind of knowing that only that sort of growing gives.
She taught him things as they walked. She showed him how to tell the tracks of a Pict of Gwawela from the tracks of a Pict of the Little Wolf band that lived north of Gwawela, by the way the first laid his feet flat and the second rolled his heel. She showed him a plant whose root, chewed, would keep a man awake through two nights. She pointed out, one morning, a pattern of three broken twigs set in the crotch of a sapling, and told him it was a message meaning *hunters came this way yesterday, going north,* and that it had been left by a Gwawela scout for other Gwawela scouts, and that it meant they should take care.
He in turn taught her nothing, for she had nothing to learn from a civilized man that she had not already learned better from her own people. But he gave her his spare knife, a good blade of Aquilonian steel, in place of the flint she had broken on him, and she took it without thanks, as a Pict takes a gift, and wore it at her belt thereafter.
On the night of the new moon, the drums began.
They came from the north, low and slow, three beats and a pause, three beats and a pause, carrying through the still air of the forest the way such sounds carry only when the woods are listening. Conan stopped as soon as he heard them and laid his hand on Kiribati’s arm.
“Gwawela,” he said.
“Yes.”
“What do they say?”
She listened a long moment. “They call. They call the bands in. Something has been seen or heard that troubles them. They call the warriors to the painted lodge.”
“Zogar Sag?”
“Zogar Sag. He calls them. He has been calling them more often, these last two moons. He is making something.” She looked at Conan sidelong. “You know this name, Zogar Sag.”
“I know it. He is the shaman at Gwawela. He hates Aquilonia.”
“He hates everything that is not his,” she said. “He hates my father, who was a shaman of an older way. He hates the old pacts, because they bind him to powers older than his own. He would break them if he could. He would rather make his own pact, with something he could master, than uphold an old one with something that masters him.”
“Could he have broken your father’s pact?”
She was silent a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was strained.
“I have thought of it, Cimmerian. I have thought of little else, these past days. My father went to renew a pact. Something was there to meet him, and it was not what should have been there, or it was what should have been there but it had been twisted, turned against the renewal. Something came back in my father’s skin. Zogar Sag did not like my father. Zogar Sag has been calling his warriors. Zogar Sag has been making something.”
“You think he broke the pact from his end.”
“I think he poisoned it. I think he went to the hollow before my father did, and he left something there, some working of his, that fouled the old thing and turned it. And when my father came to renew the pact, he gave himself to a thing that no longer wished to be renewed but wished only to feed.”
“And now it has crossed the river.”
“Now it has crossed the river. And the drums at Gwawela call the warriors in, because Zogar Sag knows what he has loosed, and he must gather his strength before it turns on him.”
Conan sat a long while in the darkness, listening to the drums. Three beats and a pause. Three beats and a pause. In the nearer distance an owl called once and was silent. Somewhere, a great way off, a wolf sang and was not answered.
“Then we have two enemies,” he said at last.
“We have three, Cimmerian. For if the thing in the hollow does not kill us, and if Zogar Sag’s warriors do not kill us, then when we return your Aquilonians will kill me, and when I return my people will kill you. We walk together only so long as the woods between us are empty of our own.”
“That is so.”
“It is enough,” she said. “I have walked with worse.”
—
It took them three days to reach the hill.
It rose out of the surrounding forest like the back of some huge beast sleeping, green with moss and old leaves, and at its western side, where the slope fell away into a fold of the land, there was the hollow of which she had spoken. It was not large. A man standing at its lip could have thrown a stone to its further side. But in the center of the hollow there was a place where the earth had been cleared away in a rough circle, and in the center of the circle was a slab of stone the color of a drowned man’s flesh, and in the slab of stone there was a door.
The door was not a door of wood. It was a slab of the same stone as the surrounding rock, set into the earth at an angle, and it was carved with characters that Conan had seen before, or had seen the likes of, in crypts and temples from Zamora to the steaming swamps of southern Stygia. They were the characters of the serpent-men who had ruled the earth before men, and of other things older even than the serpent-men, whose names were not now spoken in any tongue of living creatures.
But the door was open.
It stood ajar by the width of a hand, and from the opening came a smell. It was not the smell of a tomb, though there was something of the tomb in it. It was not the smell of carrion, though there was something of that also. It was the smell that a man’s nose remembers from the deep places of the world, the caves where the blind white things live, the wet cold smell of earth that has not known the sun since the first sun was young.
Kiribati stopped ten paces from the slab and would not go closer. Her face in the afternoon light had gone the color of old ivory.
“Cimmerian,” she whispered. “Cimmerian, do you feel it?”
“I feel it.”
It was not a sound. It was not a smell, though the smell was part of it. It was a pressure, a heaviness on the mind, a sense that the world immediately around the hollow had been pushed sideways out of its proper place and that one was standing now in a place that did not quite belong to the world at all. The trees at the lip of the hollow grew crooked, leaning away from the slab as if from a long-cold fire. There were no birds. There were no insects. There was only the low soft breathing sound that came from the opening in the stone.
“Give me the torch,” Conan said.
She gave him the torch—a length of pine-pitch bound about a stave, one of two he had prepared that morning for just this purpose. He struck a spark to it with flint and steel and watched it catch, and the flame was a small blue thing, smaller than it should have been, as if the air at the hollow did not wish to burn.
“Stay here,” he said. “If I do not come out by moonrise, go.”
“I will not go.”
“Kiribati—”
“I will not go, Cimmerian. I said I would come with you. I did not say I would stand at the door.”
He looked at her and saw that her eyes were very bright and very afraid, and that behind the fear was a thing harder than fear, which was the memory of her father.
“Come then,” he said. “But walk behind me. And if I fall, do not try to lift me. Turn and run.”
She nodded once.
He went down into the hollow, and she came after him, and at the slab he set his shoulder to the door and pushed it open, and they went down together into the dark.
V. The Thing Beneath the Stone
The passage beneath the slab went down at a steep angle, cut from the living rock, and the steps had been made for feet that were not men’s feet. They were too shallow and too wide, and the spacing between them was wrong, as though the makers had walked with a gait that no man now living would recognize. Conan went down them sideways, one hand on the wall, the torch held before him at arm’s length.
The wall was wet. The wet was not the wet of seeping groundwater. It was cold and it was a little viscous and it clung to the fingers when he took his hand away, and it had a faint phosphor in it, so that when he pulled his hand back the prints of his fingers glowed for a moment in the rock before fading. He wiped his hand on his breeches and did not touch the wall again.
They went down perhaps fifty paces. The passage turned once, sharply, and then opened into a chamber.
It was a great chamber. The torch would not show the far wall of it, nor the roof. What it showed was a floor of worked stone, polished smooth by the passage of a long time, and in the center of the floor a low pit or depression, and around the pit a ring of stone pillars that had once been carved and were now worn nearly smooth by that same long time. The pillars were twelve. In the spaces between them, on the floor, were the things Conan had come to find.
There were five of them. They lay in a rough circle, feet pointing outward toward the pillars, heads toward the pit. They wore the gear of Aquilonian soldiers. One of them was missing his right hand. They were not dead.
That is to say, they were breathing, but not as living men breathe, and their eyes did not move, and when Conan bent over the nearest of them he found no pulse at the throat. But there was a slow movement in them. Their chests rose and fell once, perhaps, in the time a man would have drawn ten breaths. Their skin had the waxy color Kiribati had described of her father’s in his last days. And their mouths were open, all of them, slightly, as though they were receiving something.
“They are being drunk,” Kiribati whispered. “Drop by drop. The thing in the pit drinks them slowly. It is how it feeds.”
“Then the sixth man—the one who fled—”
“Was not fully drunk yet. He pulled himself loose. But it had tasted him. It knows his road back.”
Conan stepped around the bodies—for though they were not dead he could call them nothing else—and approached the pit.
The pit was perhaps six paces across. It was perfectly circular, and its lip was of the same stone as the chamber floor, and it went down into a darkness that the torch would not lift. There was no sound from the pit. There was no smell from the pit beyond the smell that filled the whole chamber. But there was the pressure, and here at the lip of it the pressure was very great, and Conan felt his mind bending under it like a sapling under a slow wind.
He held the torch out over the pit.
At the very edge of the torch’s circle of light, something moved.
It was not an animal. It was not even a shape, exactly. It was a suggestion of folding, as though some quantity of the darkness within the pit had been gathered up like cloth and then let fall again, and in the falling had passed through an arrangement that no living eye was meant to see. In the instant of its passing Conan felt his gorge rise, and he pulled the torch back sharply, and the movement ceased.
But it had seen him.
He felt it see him. He felt the attention of the thing in the pit turn on him as a great slow wheel turns, and fix on him, and consider him, and find him interesting. It had been feeding on the drawn men for some days now and it was sated; it would not take him at once. But it marked him. He felt the mark settle on him like a hand laid on his shoulder, and he knew that from this hour forward, so long as he lived and so long as the thing lived, it would know where he was.
A hoarse voice croaked, “Cimmerian.”
He spun. The voice had come from his right, from among the pillars.
A man was standing there. He had not been standing there a moment before. He was Pictish by his build and his dress, and he was old, or had the look of old age though his body was not bent, and his skin had drawn tight on his bones and his color was the color of a long-dead thing, and his eyes—
His eyes were the eyes of the pit.
“Daughter.” The withered thing turned its head toward Kiribati, who had come to a stop at the mouth of the passage and was standing with her back to the stone. “You followed. I knew you would follow. Come closer, daughter. Come let your father look at you.”
“You are not my father,” Kiribati said.
“I wear him still. There is a little of him left. Shall I give him to you, daughter? Shall I let him speak? He is in here. He is weeping. He would like to see his daughter once more before the last of him is gone.”
“You are not my father.”
“No,” said the thing in Ahtok’s skin. “I am not. But I could be, in time. I could learn to be. You would find the difference small.” It took a step toward her. Its feet made no sound on the stone. “There is a pact, daughter. There has always been a pact. Your father came to renew it and I renewed it in a new shape. The old shape was narrow; the new shape is wide. Under the new shape your people and I will prosper together. Zogar Sag thought to poison me against your father. He succeeded only in freeing me. Now I will feed where I will feed, and your people will be strong beyond any strength they have known, and you, daughter—you I will set beside me. You are a shaman’s child. You have the blood. Come to me, Kiribati. Come.”
She was shaking. Conan saw it. The mark of the pit was upon her also, and she had been a shaman’s daughter, and she had a thing in her blood that was answering the call whether she willed it or not. Her knife was in her hand but her hand was shaking.
He did the only thing he could do, which was to throw the torch.
He threw it not at the withered thing but past it, into the pit.
The torch fell spinning and as it fell it lit for an instant what lay below, and Conan saw it, saw it fully and clearly for the space of one heartbeat, and he knew that for the rest of his life he would not speak of what he had seen, not in drink, not in fever, not in the hour of his own death. The torch struck something that was neither water nor stone nor flesh, and the flame went out, and in the moment of its going out the chamber filled with a sound.
It was not a cry. It was not a roar. It was a long slow drawing-in of breath as though some great lung had begun to fill after a very long time of not filling, and the sound of it came from everywhere at once, from the walls and the pillars and the pit and from the open mouths of the six soldiers on the floor, and Conan felt the pressure that had been bending his mind snap suddenly into a pulling, as though the thing in the pit had ceased to consider him and had begun to reach.
“Run!” he shouted.
Kiribati was already moving. She had struck the withered thing across the face with her knife as it reached for her, and it had not bled but it had recoiled, and she was past it before it recovered and at the mouth of the passage. Conan turned and drew his broadsword in the same motion and swung at the withered thing as he passed, and the blade bit into the shoulder of Ahtok’s body. He tore it free and ran. Behind him the thing that had been Ahtok fell to one knee and then rose again, and it came after them.
They went up the passage in great bounds. Kiribati was ahead. Conan felt the pulling behind him, the reaching of the thing in the pit, and he felt too the slower pursuit of the withered thing that had been her father, and above all he felt a terrible urgency to be out of the dark and into the sun, for though the sun would not save him he wished to see it once more before the end if the end was coming.
They came up out of the slab into the hollow and into daylight, and he slammed his shoulder against the door of stone, and Kiribati came and set her shoulder beside his, and the door ground slowly on its ancient hinges and began to close. The withered thing was on the stair below them, climbing. Conan saw its face in the narrowing gap, and the face was smiling, and the smile was Ahtok’s smile that Kiribati must have known in better days.
“Daughter,” it said.
Kiribati screamed and threw her weight against the door, and the door closed, and something on the other side of it struck the stone once, twice, three times, and was silent.
VI. The Breaking of the Door
They lay on the earth at the lip of the hollow for a long time, breathing. The sun had moved two hand-spans across the sky before either of them spoke.
“It is not finished,” Kiribati said at last. She was staring at the sky, not at Conan. Her face was wet. “The door will not hold it. It held the thing before because the old pacts held it. The pacts are broken now. The door is only a door.”
She had not finished speaking when the first of them came out of the now cracked door.
It came on two legs, but it did not come as a man came. It came in a gait that was half a stoop and half a lurch, and its arms were too long, and its hands at the ends of those arms had grown into things that were neither hands nor claws but had begun to be both. Its skin was the gray of wet ash and it wore the rags of a doeskin tunic such as a Pict might have worn, but the body inside the rags was not now a Pictish body, nor any body that had a name.
It was not alone. Behind it, slipping out from between the narrow crack, came others. Conan counted them as a man counts arrows in a quiver: eight, nine, ten. Some came on two legs and some on all fours, and some had the look of having once been Picts and some had the look of having once been animals, and one of them—Conan saw with a coldness that came up from his belly—had the broken stub of an Aquilonian sword still hanging from a thong at its waist.
“They have been here long,” Kiribati whispered. “These are what the thing made before it found my father. These are the old failures. The old hungers. They live under the hill and feed on what falls down to them, and when the door opens, they come up.”
She had her bow strung before Conan could rise. Conan came to his feet and his broadsword came out of its sheath in the same motion, and the first of the things—the gray-skinned one in the rags—was already springing.
It was fast. It was faster than a man, faster than a wolf, and it came at him low and silent with its long arms reaching, and Conan met it with the broadsword swung two-handed in a flat arc that took it across the ribs and turned it half-around in the air. It landed on its side and rolled and was up again, and there was no blood where the blade had bitten, only a slow black weeping like pitch coming out of a wound in a tree. The thing came on. He took its head off at the second swing.
The head fell into the leaves and the body stood for a long moment before it understood what had happened to it. Then it sat down, very slowly, like a tired man, and was still.
Behind him, an arrow sang. He did not turn to see what it had hit. He heard a sound like the cough of a sick dog and knew that one of the things had taken the shaft, and he heard Kiribati’s bow sing again, and a third time, and each time there was a sound, and each time he knew that one of the things had been hurt or killed, and he had no time to count which.
They were on him then, three of them at once.
He had fought in many places and he had fought against many things, but he had never fought against a thing that did not bleed when it was cut and did not slow when it was hurt. He fought now with the broadsword in both hands and with the hatchet in his belt forgotten, and he kept his back to the rising slope of the hollow so that the things had to come at him uphill, and he killed them as they came. It was hot work. The first he took through the belly and ripped up to the breastbone and it kept coming until he sheared its spine; the second he caught on the backswing and broke its skull; the third closed inside his guard and he dropped the sword and seized it by the throat with one hand and drove the hatchet into the side of its head with the other, again and again, until the thing that was not a head any longer ceased to bite at him.
He came up out of that with his ring-mail torn at the shoulder and a long cut down his thigh that was bleeding freely. Kiribati had loosed five arrows now. Three of the things lay still in the leaves around her; a fourth was crawling, dragging its hindquarters, the shaft of one of her arrows standing up out of its eye.
But while they had been fighting, the sky had been changing.
He had not noticed it at first. There had been no time to notice. But now, in the brief space while the things gathered themselves for another rush, he looked up and saw that the sun was gone. It had not set; it was the wrong hour for setting. It had been put out. A great slow wheel of cloud had come over the sky from the west, dark green at the edges and black at the heart, and it turned slowly above the hollow as though something below were stirring it with a stick. There was no wind. The leaves on the trees did not move. But the cloud turned, and at the center of it, directly above the slab, there was a place where the blackness was not blackness but was a kind of looking-down, as though an eye had opened in the sky and was watching what passed below it.
And atop the slab, where there had been nothing a moment before, there stood a man.
It was the thing in Ahtok’s skin.
It had come up. Conan did not know how it had come up. The slab was still mostly closed; the door stood open by perhaps the width of two hands now, no more, and from the gap came the slow grinding sound of stone on stone as the great elder thing in the pit below pushed at it from beneath. But the doppelganger had come up somehow—through some seam, some side-passage, some way that was not a way for living men—and it stood now upon the slab with its arms raised, and from its mouth came a chant in a language that was not Pictish and was not any language Conan had ever heard.
The chant was not loud. It was the quietest thing in the hollow. But it had a shape, and the shape of it pressed on the air, and Conan felt the slab beneath the doppelganger’s feet shudder and grind and open another finger’s-width.
“He calls it up,” Kiribati said. Her voice had gone flat with horror. “He sings the door open. He gives himself as the key. While he chants, the door will open, and when the door is open the thing in the pit will come out into the world. Cimmerian, kill him.“
He started for the slab.
The remaining things—four of them now, the bow having done its work—rushed him from the flank. He killed the first on the run, the broadsword swinging level with his shoulder and taking it in the throat. The second hit him low and bore him down, and he rolled with it and came up with the hatchet and split it from crown to jaw. The third he took on the point of the broadsword as it sprang, the weight of the thing driving the blade through it to the hilt; he could not pull free in time, and the fourth was on him before he could draw the hatchet again. He took it on his forearm. The thing’s teeth closed on the ring-mail and could not pierce it but the jaws ground at him with a strength that he felt in the bone. He drove his thumb into its eye. It let go. He picked up the hatchet from where it had fallen and finished the work.
When he looked up, panting, blood running from a dozen small wounds, the doppelganger was still chanting and the slab had opened wider. Wide enough now, perhaps, that something the size of a bear might have come through. Wide enough, certainly, for what was below to begin to push its way up.
A hand was coming out of the gap.
It was not a hand. It was a thing the size of a hand, that had begun to take a hand’s shape because it had observed what hands were and was learning to mimic them, and it was the color of a drowned man’s flesh, and it groped at the lip of the slab and found purchase, and another hand-shape was rising behind it.
Conan ran for the slab.
The doppelganger saw him coming. It did not stop chanting. But its eyes—Ahtok’s eyes, wearing the gleam of the pit—fixed on him as he came, and Conan felt the mark that had been laid on him in the chamber pull suddenly tight, and he stumbled. His legs would not carry him at the speed he wanted. The chant pressed on him. He went forward in a stagger, the broadsword dragging from his hand, and he knew with a certainty that came from no part of his rational mind that if the chant did not break before he reached the slab, he would not reach the slab at all.
“Kiribati!” he roared. “The torches—bind them! Throw them in the door!“
She understood at once. She had two torches at her belt, and Conan had two more, and she gathered them up and lashed them together with a strip of doeskin from her own tunic, and she struck flint to steel and lit the bundle, and the four pitch-soaked stakes caught all together and flared up in a great fist of flame.
She ran with them to the slab. The hand-things at the lip of the gap reached for her. She kicked the nearest aside with a cry of revulsion and rammed the burning bundle down into the opening, deep, as deep as her arm would push, and let it go.
The fire fell into the dark below the slab.
For a moment there was no sound. Then there came a sound that Conan had heard once before, in the chamber, and would have given much never to hear again: the long slow drawing-in of breath that was not breath, but now the drawing-in had a different quality, it had a quality of injury, and it rose into a howl that made the stones of the hollow ring and shook leaves down out of the trees a hundred paces away.
The doppelganger stopped chanting.
It stopped because it could not chant and scream at the same time, and it was screaming. Whatever it had been doing to hold itself together as a vessel for the thing below, the fire in the pit had broken the doing of it, and the screaming was the screaming of a creature that had been one thing and was now many things, all of them in pain.
And in the screaming, for a single moment, the eyes that looked out of Ahtok’s face were Ahtok’s eyes.
He saw his daughter.
She had stopped, the empty hand that had thrown the torches still extended, and she was looking up at him from the lip of the slab, and the face that looked down at her—just for that one moment, just for that single broken heartbeat—was the face of her father as she had known him, before the moon of the broken ice, before the seven days of his absence, before the door had opened in their lodge and let in the wrong man. He was old in that moment. He was tired. He looked at her with an exhaustion that was the exhaustion of a man who has been screaming silently for a great many days and has only now been heard.
He spoke a word. It was not a word in Pictish. It was older than Pictish. It was a word that had been part of the chant, but said now in reverse, and at the saying of it the slab beneath his feet gave a great shudder, and the chant that was still echoing in the air around the hollow seemed to fold in upon itself and collapse, and the thing in the pit gave another howl, and then the hill began to come down.
It came down slowly at first. A trickle of small stones from the rim of the hollow. Then a sliding of larger stones. Then the slab itself cracked across, with a sound like a great tree splitting in a storm, and the two halves of it tilted and dropped inward, and the hand-things at the lip were drawn down with them and were gone. The doppelganger stood upon the cracking slab. He did not move. He did not try to leap clear. He looked at his daughter.
“Kiribati,” he said. It was a Pictish word. It was her name as her father had said it.
The slab gave way beneath him and he was gone.
The whole of the hollow caved in then. The walls slumped together; the trees at the rim leaned and fell; there was a great roar of stone on stone and earth on earth, and Conan seized Kiribati by the wrist and dragged her stumbling up the slope, and they went over the lip of the hollow and threw themselves down into the leaves on the far side as the last of the hill below them came down upon what it had so long contained.
The howl from below the stone went on for a little while longer. Then it grew thin. Then it was a wail. Then it was nothing.
The wheel of cloud above the hollow ceased to turn. It began, very slowly, to break apart, the dark green of its edges paling toward gray, and through a gap in it the sun appeared again, late-afternoon and ordinary, slanting down through the broken canopy onto a place where there was no longer a hollow at all but only a great heaped wound of raw earth and tumbled stone, with here and there a piece of something that had once been carved still showing among the rubble.
It was over.
Kiribati wept. She wept silently, with her face in the leaves, and Conan did not touch her. He lay on his back and looked up at the sky and breathed, and for a long time that was all he did.
When she had finished weeping she sat up and wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“It is done,” she said.
“It is done.”
“My father is in that hill.”
“Your father has been gone a long time, Kiribati. What is in that hill is what took him. You buried your father eighteen days ago, when he came through the door of your lodge and was not himself. You have done what a daughter could do. You have closed the door on the thing that wore him. That is more than most do, for their dead.”
She nodded slowly. She did not speak for a while. Then she said: “I am going north.”
“North?”
“Not to Gwawela. I cannot go to Gwawela. Zogar Sag will know what was done here, and he will know I was part of it, and he will have me burned in the painted lodge. I am going to the Little Wolf band, who were my mother’s people. I will tell them what Zogar Sag has done. Some of them will believe me. Those who believe me will not follow Zogar Sag to his war.”
“He is making a war, then.”
“He is making a great war. I have seen the drums calling. I have seen the runners going out to the further bands. Within two moons, Cimmerian—three at most—he will bring every fighting man of the Pictish wilderness across Thunder River. He will burn your forts. He will burn Velitrium. He will not stop until the river runs red and Conajohara is empty of Aquilonians.”
“I will tell Valannus.”
“Tell him. He will not believe you, or he will believe you and it will not matter, for there are not enough soldiers at Tuscelan to hold what is coming. But tell him. Let him prepare what he can prepare.”
She rose. She took up her bow and she slung it on her shoulder, and she tucked the Aquilonian knife he had given her more firmly into her belt, and she looked at him for what he understood would be the last time.
“Cimmerian.”
“Kiribati.”
“If we meet again in these woods, we will meet as enemies. You know this.”
“I know this.”
“I would rather not meet you again.”
“Nor I you.”
She stood a moment longer. Then she turned and went, and the forest took her, and Conan watched the place where she had gone until the leaves had ceased to stir and there was no longer any sign that a woman had passed there at all.
He turned his face east, toward Thunder River, and began the long walk home.
VII. The Drums Beyond Thunder River
He came east through the woods alone, and at the place where the soldiers’ trail had broken he turned aside from his own back-track and began to cast in widening circles for the trail of the man who had fled.
He did not know if he would find Hadricus alive. He thought perhaps he hoped not. He had seen what the thing in the pit could do to a man it had only tasted, and he had seen it more clearly in what it had done to a man it had taken whole, and he could not put out of his mind the picture of an Aquilonian farm boy walking into Velitrium with the gray of the pit beginning to creep along the edges of his skin and the wrong thing looking out of his eyes. That was a thing he would have to settle if he found it. He would settle it cleanly, for he had liked the boy, and a clean settling was the most a man could offer a friend who had been used so.
But he hoped, even so, that he would not have to.
The trail was a hard one. Hadricus had run with no thought for cover, breaking branches and trampling moss as a wounded deer breaks its trail, and the rains of three nights past had washed much of it away. Conan tracked him by what remained: a bent fern that had not sprung back; a smear of old blood, dark as rust, on the bark of a hickory; the print of a knee where he had fallen and risen again. The boy had been moving fast, even with one hand gone. Even bleeding. There was a strength in him that the pit had not yet taken.
On the morning of the second day Conan heard the sound he had been half expecting and half dreading, and he broke into a run.
It was the sound of fighting. It was the harsh quick yipping cry that the Picts of Gwawela gave when they closed for the kill, and under it the deeper sound of a man cursing in Aquilonian, and the dry knock of wood on wood that meant a sword was being parried by a war-club.
He came up over a low rise and saw it below him in a clearing.
There were four Picts. Hadricus was set with his back against a great oak, and they had him three-sided, and they were trying to pull him down. He had no shield. He had no helmet; his head was bare and the side of it was crusted with dried blood. His left arm ended at the wrist in a wrapping of filthy doeskin that had once been white and was now black with what had soaked through it. In his right hand he held an Aquilonian short-sword.
He was using it.
Conan stopped at the rise’s crest for the space of two breaths and watched, because he could not help watching. The boy had the look of a man who had been dying for some days but had refused to lie down for it. His face was hollowed, and the gray of the pit was indeed creeping along the edges of him—at the temples, around the mouth, in the hollow of the throat where the open shirt showed it—but his eyes were his own. They were red-rimmed and they were sunken and they were the eyes of a soldier of Aquilonia who had been bred to die well, and they were on fire with the kind of cold rage that is the last gift a man’s body gives him before it lets him go.
A Pict came in low at his sword-hand. Hadricus did not retreat. He let the man come, and at the last instant he pivoted on his good leg and brought the short-sword down across the back of the Pict’s neck, and the Pict went into the leaves and did not rise. The other three closed at once. Hadricus took a war-club across the ribs that should have broken him and did not; he gave back a thrust that opened the second Pict’s belly to the spine. The third Pict swung at his head. He ducked it, barely, and his left arm—the arm that ended at the wrist—came up by reflex to ward, and the war-club caught the stump full on, and Conan saw the boy’s face whiten and saw his knees begin to go.
He started down the slope at a run. He was twenty paces away. He was fifteen. He was ten.
Hadricus saw him.
The boy’s eyes met his own across the clearing, and there was a moment—Conan would remember this moment a long time afterward, and would not speak of it—when something passed between them that was neither hope nor relief but only recognition. The recognition of one frontier man for another. The recognition of a soldier for a comrade who has come, even if he has come too late.
Then Hadricus smiled. It was a small smile, mostly in the eyes. He set his back more firmly against the oak, and he raised the short-sword for a last cut, and he took the second-to-last Pict full in the chest as the man came in to finish him. The Pict died on the blade. Hadricus’s knees went under him at last. He slid down the trunk of the oak with the dead Pict still spitted on his sword and the stump of his left arm trailing black across the bark.
The fourth Pict turned at the sound of Conan’s running.
He was a tall man, painted for war, and he had a moment to set himself before Conan reached him. It was not enough. Conan came in with the broadsword swinging and took the war-club out of the Pict’s hand at the wrist; the Pict had a knife in his other hand and used it, and the blade scored Conan’s thigh across the old cut, but Conan was already inside the knife’s reach and his own hatchet was coming up from below. He drove it under the Pict’s chin and the Pict was dead before he hit the ground.
Conan stood a moment in the cleared space breathing hard. Then he went to the oak.
Hadricus was alive. Barely. The dead Pict had been kicked off the short-sword and lay sprawled to one side, and the boy was sitting against the trunk with his good hand pressed to his chest where a war-club had caved something in beneath the ribs. His breathing was a wet whistling. But his eyes were still his own.
“Cimmerian,” he said.
“Aye, lad.”
“Decurion’s dead.”
“I know.”
“All of them. We went down a hole in the ground. I came back up. I don’t—I don’t remember coming up.”
“You got out. You got further than any of them got.”
“Did I?”
“You did.”
The boy nodded, very slightly. His good hand groped at his belt; there was a small leather pouch there, and he could not unfasten it. Conan unfastened it for him. Inside there was a folded square of parchment and a curl of dark hair tied with a thread.
“Rosamund,” Hadricus said. “In Velitrium. She was—she was going to be—”
“I will see she gets it.”
“She’s the cooper’s daughter. The cooper on the south street.”
“I will find her.”
“Tell her I—”
He did not finish. His good hand fell open in his lap and the breath went out of him in a long slow sigh, and he was gone. The eyes that had been his own to the end stayed open, looking at nothing, and Conan reached down and closed them with the side of his thumb.
He sat a long while beside the boy. He did not bury him; the ground was full of roots and he had no spade, and a man buried in shallow earth in this country was a man dug up by wolves before the next moon. He gathered stones instead, and he heaped them over the body, and over the heap of stones he set the short-sword upright with its point in the earth and its hilt to the sky, in the old soldiers’ way, so that any Aquilonian who came this way after would know that a man of the Tenth Foot had fallen here and would say the right words for him.
The Picts he left where they had fallen. The crows would have them by evening.
He went through Hadricus’s belt and took the pouch with the parchment and the curl of hair. The ring he had carried since the second day. He looked at the ring a long moment in the broken sunlight that came down through the oak’s leaves, and he thought of what he had feared and what he had found, and he thought that there were worse things in the world than dying as Hadricus had died, with his eyes his own and a sword in his good hand and four Picts dead before him at the foot of an oak in a country far from home.
He turned east again.
Two days later, at dusk—
He was under the palisade of Fort Tuscelan and giving the sentry’s challenge-word in a voice so hoarse the sentry did not know him at first. When at last they let him in through the postern he went straight to Valannus’s quarters, and Valannus rose from his chair at the sight of him and called for wine and for meat and for a man to see to his hurts.
“They are dead,” Conan said. “All six. It was not Picts.”
“What was it?”
“A thing. A thing older than Picts. I put the hill down on it and it is buried now. It will not come again in our time, I think. But Valannus—”
“Yes?”
“Zogar Sag is making a war. A great war. A war of all the bands together, which has not been seen in a hundred years. It will come across the river before the leaves fall. You must send to Velitrium. You must send to Tarantia. You must bring the Gundermen down from the north and you must raise the Bossonian militia and you must build your wall higher, or you will lose Conajohara and you will lose Velitrium after it, and the border of Aquilonia will be where it was in your grandfather’s time.”
Valannus sat down slowly. He did not speak for a long time. At last he said: “How do you know?”
“I know.”
“From whom?”
“From a friend who is no longer a friend. Do not ask me more than that. I will swear on Crom and on any god you name that what I tell you is true, and you may do with the knowing what you will. But she came to me as a friend and she left me as a stranger, and I will not give you her name.”
Valannus looked at him a long time across the table. Then he nodded once.
“I will send the dispatches tonight,” he said. “Whether they will be believed is another matter. It is always another matter, with dispatches from the frontier. But I will send them.”
“Do that.”
Conan rose and made as if to leave. At the door he paused.
“Valannus.”
“Yes?”
Conan tossed him Hadricus’s ring. Valannus caught it and looked at the insignia. “Give it to a soldier worthy of the Tenth.”
—
Some weeks later, in the season of red leaves, a Pictish raid crossed Thunder River in the night and struck at an outlying settlement called Mullen’s Ford, and in the days that followed there were other raids, each larger than the last, and the scout Conan was sent out many times into the country west of the river, and each time he returned he brought word more grim than the last, and at Fort Tuscelan the palisades were made higher and the store of arrows was doubled and the commander Valannus walked the walls at night and looked westward into the dark and thought of what was coming.
But that is another tale, and has been told elsewhere.
— the end —
Visions of the Dark 