Part 8 (1/2)

The girl, however, did not sleep She lay rigid, staring out at the blackness that yawned in the ice cavities beyond the feeble glow of the banked fire At last, near dawn, ca sound-a thin, ullulating thread of music that wound around her mind until it was as helpless as a netted bird Her heart fluttered against her ribs She could neitheryouth beside her

Then two disks of cold green fire appeared in the reat orbs that burned into her young soul and cast a deathly spell over her There was no soul or er

Like one walking in a drea her side of the bearskin cloak slide to her feet Naked, a sliainst the dimness, she went forward into the darkness of the tunnel and vanished

The hellish piping faded and ceased; the cold green eyes wavered and disappeared And Conan slept on

Chapter Four

Conan awoke suddenly So fro along the tendrils of his nerves Like sole cat, Conan came instantly from deep, dreamless slumber to full wakefulness He lay withoutthe air around hihty chest, the Cimmerian heaved to his feet and found hione But her furs, which she had discarded during their love, were still there His brows knotted in a baffled scowl Danger was still in the air, scrabbling with tenuous fingers at the edges of his nerves

He hastily donned his garments and weapons With his ax in his clenched fist, he thrust hi and the flank of the glacier Outside on the snow, the wind had died

Although Conan sensed dawn in the air, no glea had yet di stars overhead A gibbous low of pale gold across the snow fields

Conan's keen glance raked the snow He saw no footprints near the overhang, nor any sign of struggle On the other hand, it was incredible that Ilga should have wandered off into the labyrinth of tunnels and crevasses, where walking was almost impossible even with spiked boots and where a false step could plunge one into one of those cold strealaciers

The hairs on Conan's nape prickled at the weirdness of the girl's disappearance At heart a superstitious barbarian, he feared nothingby the uncanny supernatural beings and forces that lurked in the dark corners of his primeval world

Then, as he continued to search the snow, he went rigid Soap in the ice a few strides fro, soft, and sinuous, and ittrack was clearly visible in the curving path that its belly had crushed in the soft whiteness, like so moon shone faintly, but Conan's wilderness-sharpened eyes easily read the path This path led, curving around hillocks of snow and outjutting ledges of rock, up the hillside away frolacier-up, toward the ept peaks He doubted that it had gone alone

As he followed the path, a bulky, black, furry shadow, he passed the place where his dead horse had lain Now there was little left of the carcass but a few bones The track of the thing could be discerned about the remains, but only faintly, for the wind had blown loose snow over theirl-or as left of her Her head was gone, and with it lea bones had been cleaned, as if the flesh had been sucked froue

Conan was a warrior, the hard song of a hard people, who had seen death in a thousand fore shook hiirl had lain in thepassion for passion Now nothing was left of her but a sprawled, headless thing, like a doll broken and throay

Conan runt of surprise, he found that it was frozen solid and sheathed in hard ice

Chapter Five

Conan's eyes narrowed thoughtfully She could not have left his side o, for the cloak had still held some of the warmth from her body when he awoke In so brief a time, a warlittering ice It was not according to nature

Then he grunted a coarse expletive He kneith inward loathing and fury, what had borne the sleeping girl froends told around the fire in his Cimmerian boyhood One of these concerned the dread riotten whisper of horror in Ciher ani came the scaled and plated reptiles and fishes, whose tes But the Remora, the worm of the ice lands, seemed unique in that it radiated cold; at least, that was how Conan would have expressed it It gave out a sort of bitter cold that could encase a corpse in an armor of ice within minutes Since none of Conan's fellow-tribesmen claimed to have seen a Re extinct

This, then, a had dreaded, and of which she had vainly tried to warn hiri to its lair and slay it His reasons for this decision were vague, even to himself But, for all his youthful impulsiveness and his wild, lawless nature, he had his own rude code of honor He liked to keep his word and to fulfill an obligation that he had freely undertaken While he did not think of himself as a stainless, chivalrous hero, he treated woh kindness that contrasted with the harshness and truculence hich hehis lusts upon wo, and he tried to protect them when he found them dependent upon hi his rough act of love, the girl Ilga had placed herself under his protection Then, when she needed his strength, he had slu about the hypnotic piping sound by which the Remora paralyzed its victiht sleeper-sound asleep, he cursed hinorant fool not to have paid round his powerful teeth and bit his lips in rage, determined to wipe out this stain on his code of honor if it cost hihtened in the east, Conan returned to the cave He bundled together his belongings and laid his plans A few years before, heto his ies of his weapons to see hih

But experience, if it had not yet tas of caution