Conan and the Shaman's Curse (6 page)

“And the blood,” Jhatil added, nodding. “That ‘ape’ has strewn a fresh trail of meat that the most sluggish of sea beasts would find impossible to resist.”

Chadim chewed his lower lip. “Did you see the full moon tonight? It marks the beginning of the Month of the Fish, midway through the Year of the Serpent. Yama’s star is in the House of Abwharim—”

Khertet interrupted, rolling his eyes upward. “Pah! Only fools or madmen let the night skies decide their fate. I know not how, but the Cimmerian has once again slain my crew and stolen my vessel. By the fangs of Set, I would wish that your Nehebku were real, if she would come and slay the barbarian. Doubtless he stands above us, laughing from the tiller, steering the Mistress to some pirate cove.” The three men lapsed into glum silence, staring dejectedly at the walls of their self-made prison. Then Khertet’s brow furrowed, and Chadim tilted his head sideways, as if straining to hear a distant sound.

Jhatil, balancing atop a barrel, pressed his ear to the top of the hatch.

WHUMP!

The Mistress lurched violently, as if slapped by a giant hand. Jhatil’s arms whirled in the air, then he lost his balance and fell to the deck, narrowly rolling away from a toppling barrel.

Khertet, whose sea legs were not so easily upset, stood gaping incredulously as the Mistress shuddered, listing and reeling as if rammed full bore by a Turanian war galley. The Stygian’s dusky face paled.

“Nehebku,” Chadim whispered, his eyes wide, mouth agape. He flung himself to the deck, covering his head with his arms and sobbing in sheer terror.

A thunderous crash jolted Conan from his deep repose. Rising slowly to his feet, he shook an unusual fog of slumber from his brain. He was instantly aware that something was wrong, for he seldom slept so heavily. Even the faint light of the coming dawn had failed to awaken him.

He braced himself against the mast. As his vision cleared, the carnage surrounding him came into focus. He stared at the blood-soaked deck and the shredded heaps of entrails and bones, almost gagging at the putrid, nose-shrivelling reek that wafted up his nostrils. And although the haze of sleep lingered in his mind, his body tingled with energy, more vitality than he had felt in days.

But how had he escaped from the cargo hold?

He lifted his hands to the sides of his head, and an icy finger brushed his spine. Where there had been ghastly cuts, his fingers traced nearly healed skin. It was as if the slashes had been made days ago. Conan’s flesh crawled in suspicion of this miracle; he wondered if he were dreaming. He accepted the boon with hesitant cheer, for he had an instinctive dread of events that were stained even faintly with the ink of sorcery. The calf-wound he had taken from Chadim’s knife had also vanished, leaving not even the pink line of a scar. The only marks on his body were faint abrasions criss-crossing his arms, legs, and chest.

“Crom,” he muttered. “What sorcery is this?” Racking his hazy memory, he struggled to recall the events that had brought him here. He remembered drifting into sleep last night...

Then the images flashed into his mind, like scenes from a half-remembered nightmare. His transformation—and the butchery that had followed. Reeling from the repugnant memories of his macabre feast, he forced down his rising gorge.

But Conan pushed aside these disturbing, shadowy recollections. He had little time to dwell upon the atrocities that he had committed while transformed, for the Mistress had begun to list. The wind was still pushing her through the water on a meandering course. He had thought the crash that awakened him had been the Mistress striking a reef, but near her stem, he saw a churning, boiling eddy. It was nothing natural, that whirlpool, a thing unlike any he had ever seen in all his years at sea. His flesh crawled in spite of the heat, and a feeling of dread rippled through his bones.

Staring at the whirlpool, he watched it bubble and foam until steam rose from the water in thick, translucent vapours. The Mistress, caught in the swirling current, slowly circled around the eddy’s widening perimeter.

Without so much as a warning splash, a scaly, red leviathan reared its head from the centre of the boiling region. Barnacles and sea scum sprouted from its bumpy, dull skin. Its immense skull reminded Conan of a serpent’s save for the rows of pulsating gills on its neck and the pair of eyes each as large as Conan’s head. Those dreadful orbs bulged from its misshapen skull like noxious, pinkish-yellow boils. Its tail was nowhere in sight; doubtless it lay deep below the maelstrom.

Opening its fanged mouth wide enough to swallow three men, the behemoth’s head lunged straight for the Mistress.

Conan froze, transfixed by the unspeakable, ageless malice that glistened in those veined eyes. It was as if the bowels of the deepest Hell had opened, spewing out the most fearsome serpent-devil ever spawned.

As its dripping snout thrust toward him, Conan could see splintered pieces of the keel, impaled on the sea beast’s fangs. The Cimmerian immediately deduced the reason for the Mistress’s labouring: the monster’s jaw had ripped through wood as thick as a man’s waist, tearing out a chunk of timber large enough to gut the Mistress.

A blast of steam hissed through the serpent’s yawning orifice, reddening Conan’s skin and searing his eyes. He shielded his face with his arm and broke the paralysing effect of the thing’s insidious eyes.

The Cimmerian sprang sideways, his heels brushing against the beast’s sweltering skin. Its rapier-like fangs missed him by a handspan, closing instead upon the base of the mast. The thick wooden shaft broke like a twig, thumping against the rail. Conan rolled out of its way, ducking under the sweep of the crimson-skinned head.

Undaunted, the barbarian grabbed the largest cutlass within reach, prying away a disembodied hand that still gripped the hilt. Grimly, he braced himself against the slanting deck, preparing for the serpent’s next lunge. He had fought against the children of Set before and knew that a well-placed sword thrust through the tender, vulnerable roof of a snake’s mouth might pierce the vile creature’s brain. He would need to bury the blade deep, to be certain, and his first attack must succeed, before the whirlpool swallowed the doomed ship and sucked him into its steamy abyss.

The air around him grew unbearably hot, thickening and filling his nose with a rotten, sulphurous stench. The labouring vessel creaked as the water roared and bubbled around it.

Swinging back and around, the beast again thrust its maw toward Conan, who stood defiantly in its path, his feet planted upon the blood-besmeared deck. Again the serpent’s gleaming fangs flashed in the light like ivory daggers in curving racks.

But the Cimmerian was ready. Vaulting forward to meet its diving head, he plunged his blade into the exposed pink flesh of the mouth. A stinging cloud of steam washed over him before he could release his grip on the sword, but he avoided the deadly fangs by diving and rolling onto the deck. The powerful jaws snapped onto naught but air— and a few strands of Conan’s flowing black mane.

Reaching for another cutlass, the Cimmerian scrambled to his feet and waited to see if his attack had skewered the thing’s brain. Would one thrust be enough? Never had he clashed with so gigantic a serpent!

As the beast pulled its head back toward the centre of the eddy, Conan could see the hilt jutting from its mouth, its three-foot blade a meagre thorn in that elephantine maw. The Mistress continued to spiral and sink; the sea rose to the halfway mark on her broached hull. The desperate Cimmerian knew that time was running out. In another moment he would have to plunge overboard and swim like a man possessed lest the whirlpool suck him into its churning, frothing throat.

He tossed aside the useless cutlass as another plan sprang into his head. Positioning himself amidships and bracing his feet against the starboard thwarts, he waited for the sea giant’s next assault. Its head, rocking back on a neck thick enough for a horse to ride on, jumped forward again, intent on devouring its tiny but elusive Cimmerian prey.

Flexing his knees and wrapping his iron-hard arms around the fallen mast, Conan strained to lift it, using legs and arms to wrestle the thick, unwieldy spar into the path of the spike-toothed muzzle. Its weight was easily thrice his own, and he felt his back creak from the burden. The thicker end of the mast had been splintered into a tapering, jagged point, and Conan struggled to lift this end over his head, shifting his grip and unbending his knees. He dragged the pole slightly forward, bracing the far end against the deck as if setting a titan’s spear against a charge.

The serpent, with eerie cunning, seemed to be aware of Conan’s defiant effort. It twisted its snout away, trying to check its swift forward motion. But the Mistress was moving, too, as Conan had foreseen.

“Eat this, by Crom!” he bellowed, swinging the wide, hardwood beam straight for the brutish skull. Corded muscles rippled from his forearms and knotted in this shoulders, bulging from the strain. The beast’s dodging head slammed into the broken mast, but the jagged base missed its mouth by a sword-length. It plunged into the glowering pink eye with a sickening wet smack, lancing the bulging orb in a gout of yellow spew.

Driven by the force of the serpent’s lunge, the mast gouged out the eye and ploughed into the thing’s thick brain-pan. Gobs of pungent pink slime gushed from the gaping socket, spraying the mast with an ooze so rancid that its smell made Conan’s eyes water. The gelatinous eye slipped from the end of the mast and flopped to the deck with a greasy splat.

Hissing out a foul gasp of scalding breath, the impaled creature slid down the mast and crashed onto the deck, convulsing. Thrashing weakly, the serpent tugged to free its head, but the mast’s yardarm had caught on the rowers’ bench, trapping the beast. Spouting puffs of steam mixed with its own vital fluids. The jaws flexed one final time, heaving up a viscous mound of sludge before slumping at the feet of its slayer.

Panting, Conan stepped back, light-headed from his exertions. He looked out over the bow, along the serpent’s body, toward the whirlpool. The eddy was slowing, receding. But the Mistress continued spinning toward the gurgling centre of the maelstrom—from where the now-motionless body of the serpent had emerged. Conan wondered where its tail might be; the thing had been at least thrice the length of the ship.

Other snakes he had slain had whipped their bodies about in their death throes, but this brute had kept its end submerged throughout the battle. Perhaps it was anchored deep in the bowels of a reef or even the floor of the ocean.

But he had no time to ponder this further, thinking instead of how to escape from the sinking Mistress. The ship’s only launch had been taken, so Conan set to the task of hastily slapping together a crude raft. He dragged up the cargo hold’s door, noting with alarm that the hold wallowed in water. Lashing wood from a crate to the door with a length of hawser, he fashioned a makeshift and far from seaworthy craft. He hoped it would hold together long enough to bear him to an island, if not to the southern coast.

He left a length of rope ties to the crude craft, lowering it into the water. If only he could find some supplies... he eyed the hold wistfully, knowing that the time for foraging was well past. Lack of water would slim his chances of survival... with even a small barrel, he could last for weeks.

Swearing, he raced for the hatch to the officer’s quarters, where the food and water would be found. Perhaps the galley would not be as flooded as the cargo hold had been.

As Conan neared the hatch, a muffled shout reached his ears. Startled, he paused and pressed his restored ear against the wood. From within, he heard a familiar voice.

“Cower here if you wish and drown like rats! Set take both of you dogs!” Khertet’s loud curse boomed through the door.

“Nehebku will strip your insolent flesh and crack your bones, Stygian whoreson!” Chadim yelled back, his voice tight with panic.

Jhatil’s strained tones cut short any reply that Khertet might have made. “Enough, both of you! The water rises to our knees already, and you waste precious time. Perhaps Nehebku’s gullet is too full of ape-meat to worry with morsels like us. Better to risk whatever awaits us above than to spend out last breath trading insults.”

A vague memory returned to Conan, of chasing prey into a hold and being unable to pursue them further. Conan heard the sounds of frantic scraping and hammering from the other side of the door, noticing for the first time that the hard wood bore wide, shallow dents, in the shapes of massive fists. He put his hands against them, noting with awe that his alter ego’s bestial paws were twice the size of his own. The door must have been barricaded against him.

Abandoning any hope of recovering a barrel of water, Conan quickly surveyed the fallen, retrieving the best sword he could find. Before he could return to his makeshift raft, the closed hatch burst open. Khertet emerged, his dusky face flushed as he saw the Cimmerian awaiting him. He lifted his thin-bladed sword, a master armourer’s work forged of unbreakable Akbitanan steel.

VI

Steel Vengeance

“You!” Khertet screamed at Conan. “Barbarian dog, I’ll—” he stepped back, gaping at the slain serpent. The beast’s gory head lolled on the besmeared foredeck, its single eye frozen in a death-stare.

As the two men faced each other, the ailing ship continued to spin slowly, so that Khertet now stood between Conan and the raft. Conan’s blood seethed with red-hot fury. “Stygian scum—join your crew in Hell!” Leaping with the speed of a panther, Conan lifted his blade, aiming a slash at Khertet’s swarthy neck.

The wily Stygian regained his composure just in time to raise his blade, parrying Conan’s lunge. He whirled and countered with a thrust of his own, nicking the Cimmerian’s forearm.

Ignoring the dripping wound, the barbarian aimed another brutal swipe at Khertet. There was no time for prolonged swordplay, and Conan knew that Khertet’s weapon—forged from metal as resilient as it was rare— was both stronger and lighter than his own. He would of necessity have to beat Khertet by brute force. Knotted muscle and iron-hard sinew propelled a slash that the Stygian parried by sheer reflex, sparks flying from both weapons at the impact.