rm, girl. Point him out to me, or I will have Sitha whip you.”
A low moan rose in her throat, and she opened her large eyes long enough to roll them in terror at the huge S’tarra behind her. “I cannot,” she whispered. Her body trembled, and tears streamed down her face in silent sobs, but she would speak no more.
Amanar made an exasperated noise. “Fool girl. All you do is delay me for a few moments. Take her, Sitha. Twenty strokes.”
Fanged mouth open in a wide grin, the massive S’tarra gathered her hair once more in its fist, lifting her painfully as they left. Tears rolled down her face all the harder, yet still her sobs were soundless.
The mage studied the images further. She had actually answered his question, in part at least, though she likely thought she had protected the man. But she had named this Conan a thief, and thieves did not ride with more than a score of armed men at their backs.
From within his serpent-embroidered black robe he produced the things he needed for this simple task. A red chalk scribed a five-pointed star on the stone floor. From a pouch he poured a small mound of powder on each of the points. His left hand stretched forth, and from each fingertip a spark flew to flare the powders to blinding flame. Five thin streams of acrid red smoke rose toward the distant ceiling.
Amanar muttered words in a dead tongue, made a gesture with his left hand. The smoke was suddenly sucked back down onto the pentagram, swirling and billowing as if whipped by a great wind, yet confined to the five-pointed star. He spoke one further word, and with a sharp crack the smoke was gone. In its place was a hairless gray shape no higher than his knee. Vaguely ape-like in form, with sharply sloping forehead and knuckles brushing the stone floor, its shoulders bore bony wings covered with taut gray hide.
The creature chattered at him, baring fangs that seemed to fill half its simian face, and sprang for the mage. At the boundary of the pentagram it suddenly shrieked, and was thrown back in a shower of sparks to crumple in the center of the star. Unsteadily it rose, claws clicking on the stone. The bat-like wings quivered as if for flight. “Free!” it barked shrilly.
Amanar’s lip curled in disgust and anger. He was far beyond dealing with these minor demons personally. That the girl had forced him to it was a humiliation he would assuage personally, to her great discomfort.
“Free!” the demon demanded again.
“Be silent, Zath!” the necromancer commanded. The gray form recoiled, and Amanar allowed himself a small smile. “Yes, I know your name. Zath! An you fail to do as I command, I’ll use the power that gives me. Others of your kind have from time to time annoyed me, and have found themselves trapped in material bodies. Bodies of solid gold.” Amanar threw back his head and laughed.
The ape-like creature shuddered. Its dead-white eyes watched the sorcerer malevolently from beneath bony eyebrow ridges, but it said, “Zath do what?”
“These two,” Amanar said, touching the images of Conan and Karela. “Discover for me their names, and why they follow one of my S’tarra.”
“How?” the demon shrilled.
“Play no games with me,” Amanar snapped. “Think you I do not know? If you are close enough to an ordinary man to hear his speech, you can hear his thoughts as well. And you may as well stop trying me. You know it will not work.”
The demon chattered his fangs angrily. “Zath goes.” With a thunderous clap, it disappeared. A wind ruffled Amanar’s robe as air rushed into the pentagram.
The sorcerer dusted his hands as though he had touched something demeaning, and turned back to the mirror. For a time the images rode on, then suddenly one of their number pointed aloft. Consternation swept across their faces. Crossbows were raised, bolts loosed at the sky.
A snap sounded in the chamber, and the ape-like demon was back in the pentagram, flexing its wings and fondling a crossbow quarrel. “Try to kill Zath,” it giggled, and added contemptuously, “With iron.” The demon amused itself by poking the quarrel through its bony arm. The crossbow arrow left no wound.
“What of that which I sent you for?” Amanar demanded.
The demon glared at him a moment before speaking. “Big man named Conan. Woman named Karela, called Red Hawk. They come for pendants, for girl. Free!”
Amanar smiled at the images on the mirror, recovering now from their encounter with Zath and riding on. The lovely Velita’s thief, and the famed Red Hawk at the same time, with her band. There were many uses to which such beings could be put.
“Ahead of these people,” he said to the demon without taking his eyes from the mirror, “is one of my S’tarra. It is wounded, but yet lives. You may feed. Now, go.” The necromancer’s smile was far from pleasant.
The slopes of the twisting valley steepened and grew bleaker as the bandits rode. Conan eyed a thornbush, of which there were even fewer here than had been along the trail earlier. It was stunted and bent as if something in air or soil distorted the dark branches into an unwholesome simulacrum of the plant it had once been. All the scrub growth they passed grew more like that the further they went along the wounded snake-creature’s trail.
“Fitting country,” Hordo muttered just loud enough for Conan to hear. His lone eye watched Karela warily, where she rode at the column’s head. “First snake-men, then that flying Mitra-alone-knows-what.”
“It didn’t hurt anyone,” Conan said flatly, “and it went away.” He was not about to say anything that might dissuade the others from turning back, but at the same time he could not entirely dispel his own sense of unease.
“It was hit,” the one-eyed man went on. “Two bolts at least, but never a quiver out of it. ’Tis only luck the rest of these rogues didn’t turn tail on the moment.”
“Mayhap you should turn back, Hordo.” He twisted in his saddle to peer down the line of mounted bandits straggled behind him on the winding valley floor. Greed drove them forward, but since the strange creature was seen flying above them, seeming to follow them, every man watched the gray skies and stony slopes with sullen eyes. From time to time a man would touch his bandaged wounds and look thoughtfully back the way they had come.
Conan shook his black-maned head at the bearded brigand. “If she says she has decided to turn back, they’ll follow her gratefully; if she pushes on, they’ll begin dropping away one by one.”
“You of all men should know she’ll not turn from this trail. Not so long as you go on.”
Conan was spared answering by a loud hail from Aberius. The weasel-faced bandit had been riding ahead of them to track the wounded snake-creature. Now he sat his horse where the trail wound around a rock spire ahead, waving his arm over his head.