The Conquering Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard

poles, and was carrying his share of the load with one hand, while the other gripped his naked broadsword, and his restless gaze roved the sinister walls about them. The shadows were thickening. A darkening blue mist seemed to blur the outlines of the foliage. The forest deepened in the twilight, became a blue haunt of mystery sheltering unguessed things.
    They had covered more than a mile, and the muscles in Balthus’ sturdy arms were beginning to ache a little, when a cry rang shudderingly from the woods whose blue shadows were deepening into purple.
    Conan started convulsively, and Balthus almost let go the poles.
    “A woman!” cried the younger man. “Great Mitra, a woman cried out then!”
    “A settler’s wife straying in the woods,” snarled Conan, setting down his end of the litter. “Looking for a cow, probably, and – stay here!”
    He dived like a hunting wolf into the leafy wall. Balthus’ hair bristled.
    “Stay here alone with this corpse and a devil hiding in the woods?” he yelped. “I’m coming with you!”
    And suiting action to words, he plunged after the Cimmerian. Conan glanced back at him, but made no objection, though he did not moderate his pace to accommodate the shorter legs of his companion. Balthus wasted his wind in swearing as the Cimmerian drew away from him again, flitting like a phantom between the trees, and then Conan burst into a dim glade and halted crouching, lips snarling, sword lifted.
    “What are we stopping for?” panted Balthus, dashing the sweat out of his eyes and gripping his short sword.
    “That scream came from this glade, or near by,” answered Conan. “I don’t mistake the location of sounds, even in the woods. But where –”
    Abruptly the sound rang out again –
behind them
; in the direction of the trail they had just quitted. It rose piercingly and pitifully, the cry of a woman in frantic terror – and then, shockingly, it changed to a yell of mocking laughter that might have burst from the lips of a fiend of lower Hell.
    “What in Mitra’s name –!” Balthus’ face was a pale blur in the gloom.
    With a scorching oath Conan wheeled and dashed back the way he had come, and the Aquilonian stumbled bewilderedly after him. He blundered into the Cimmerian as the latter stopped dead, and rebounded from his brawny shoulders as though from an iron statue. Gasping from the impact, he heard Conan’s breath hiss through his teeth. The Cimmerian seemed frozen in his tracks. Looking over his shoulder, Balthus felt his hair stand up stiffly. Something was moving through the deep bushes that fringed the trail – something that neither walked nor flew, but seemed to glide like a serpent. But it was not a serpent. Its outlines were indistinct, but it was taller than a man, and not very bulky. It gave off a glimmer of weird light, like a faint blue flame. Indeed, the eery fire was the only tangible thing about it. It might have been an embodied flame moving with reason and purpose through the blackening woods.
    Conan snarled a savage curse and hurled his axe with ferocious will. But the thing glided on without altering its course. Indeed it was only a few instants’ fleeting glimpse they had of it – a tall, shadowy thing of misty flame floating through the thickets. Then it was gone and the forest crouched in breathless stillness.
    With a snarl Conan plunged through the intervening foliage and into the trail. His profanity, as Balthus floundered after him, was lurid and impassioned. The Cimmerian was standing over the litter on which lay the body of Tiberias. And that body no longer possessed a head.
    “Tricked us with its damnable caterwauling!” raved Conan, swinging his great sword about his head in his wrath. “I might have known! I might have guessed a trick! Now there’ll be five heads to decorate Zogar’s altar.”
    “But what thing is it that can cry like a woman and laugh like a devil, and shines like witch-fire as it glides through the trees?”