Part 20 (1/2)
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 fivepointed 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 brus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.suage 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 Skim.”
”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 apelike 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 pa.s.sed 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.”