A lesser man would have charged the treeline or bellowed a challenge into the unnerving quiet. A civilized man might have frozen, his mind refusing to process the scene before him. Conan was neither. His sword, already a cold extension of his will, remained level, its point weaving a slow, lethal figure eight as his eyes scoured the darkness between the trees. The snapped twig was a taunt. A whisper in a language of traps and malice.
To answer it with brute force would be to stumble blindly into the sorcerer’s web. He had seen magic’s handiwork before, in the blasted lands south of Stygia and in the shimmering halls of mad wizards. It was a foe you did not meet head-on unless you had no other choice. Crom gave a man strength and a quick eye, but against arts that could poison the mind or turn the very earth against you, stealth was the better part of valour.
His decision was instant. He flowed backward without a sound, his broad shoulders seeming to shrink as he drew himself into the deeper shadows at the edge of the clearing. The monolith pulsed with a light only he could see, a blacker-than-black thrumming that was the source of this corruption. Every instinct screamed at him to put a league between himself and that cursed stone. But the bodies of the ten legionaries, pale and still in the gloom, held him fast. Among them was Valerius, the young, arrogant captain. Conan saw the glint of the silver the man had paid him, still clutched in his stiffening hand. To flee now would be to leave the debt unpaid.
More pressingly, a sorcerer powerful enough to perform such a ritual this close to an Aquilonian settlement was a threat that would not stop at ten soldiers. Sulland was a town of woodcutters and farmers, not wizards or demon-hunters. They were sheep, huddled at the edge of wolf country, and a wolf of a very strange kind was now among them.
His eyes fell upon a gnarled giant of a blackwood tree, its trunk thicker than three men standing shoulder-to-shoulder, its lowest branches a dozen feet up. Perfect. Sheathing his sword with a practiced, near-silent rasp, he approached the tree from its blind side, away from the clearing. The bark was rough, a ladder of ancient knobs and fissures. Using holds that would be invisible to most, he began to climb. He moved with the fluid grace of a great cat, his powerful muscles bunching and releasing, lifting his weight without apparent effort. He made no sound. Not a rustle of leaves, not the scrape of a boot. He became another shadow ascending into deeper shadows.
From a thick bough forty feet up, concealed by a curtain of broad, waxy leaves, Conan had a predator’s view of the entire clearing. The ten bodies formed their star. The monolith stood at its heart. He could see the blood-symbol clearly from here, weeping its dark fluid onto the stone. As he watched, the process he had interrupted seemed to resume.
The air grew colder. A thin, grey mist, born of no cloud, began to seep from the ground around the monolith. It did not rise and dissipate; it clung to the earth, coiling like a serpent. The blood in the carved symbol stopped dripping. Instead, the stone began to drink it. The viscous lines of the spiral glowed with a faint, internal light, the colour of a dying ember, and the fluid was drawn into the stone itself, leaving the grooves empty and starkly black.
The pressure in Conan’s skull intensified. The forest was no longer just watching; it was focusing. One by one, like embers flaring to life in a gust of wind, points of sickly yellow light began to appear in the darkness of the treeline. They manifested in pairs, hovering in the gloom. Eyes. Dozens of them, then a hundred. They were not the eyes of any beast he knew. They held an alien intelligence, cold and hungry. They blinked in unison, a silent, coordinated survey of the clearing. The snapped twig had been a test. This was the search.
Conan flattened himself further against the branch, slowing his breathing until it was barely perceptible. He was a piece of the tree, another knot in its ancient wood. The watching eyes swept the glade, passing over the bodies, lingering on the monolith, and then scanning the trees. A pair of them floated higher, drifting toward his position. He did not move. He did not even blink. He willed himself to be stone, to be wood, to be anything but warm-blooded, thinking prey. The eyes hovered ten feet from his face, unblinking, their lambent glow casting strange shadows on the leaves around him. For a long second, he felt a psychic probe, a cold finger tracing the edges of his mind. He met it with a wall of Cimmerian stubbornness, a blank canvas of ice and rock and endless, windswept plains. There was nothing for the magic to hold. After a moment that stretched into an eternity, the eyes drifted away, continuing their patrol.
A low, guttural chanting began, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was not a human voice. It was the grinding of stones, the sigh of wind through a dead man’s ribs. It was the voice of the sorcerer, woven into the fabric of the place itself. Under the power of that inhuman chant, the shadows of the ten dead soldiers began to move.
Conan’s hand tightened on the hilt of his sheathed sword. The bodies themselves lay still, but their shadows, cast long and distorted by the glowing eyes, detached from the earth. They writhed, darkening from grey to absolute black, stretching and elongating. They were no longer reflections of the men who had cast them, but living things, tendrils of animated darkness tethered to the corpses. They flowed like ink toward the monolith, ten black streams converging at its base.
As the last of the shadow-stuff touched the stone, the spiral symbol flared once, a violent pulse of nauseating purple light that made the teeth ache. The ground shuddered. The mist thickened, and the chanting stopped. Into the ringing silence, a new sound was born. A wet, tearing sound, followed by a grating scrape.
From the base of monolith, where the ten shadows had converged, something was rising. It was a mockery of a man’s shape, a construct of shadow and stolen life, given form by the forest’s own substance. Knotted roots and vines, black with absorbed magic, formed its limbs. Grave-dirt and mouldering leaves clung to a torso that shifted and reformed as it moved. It stood ten feet tall, a faceless, hulking brute of black magic and dead earth. But the worst part, the detail that made Conan’s blood run cold, was what it carried. In one gnarled, root-like hand, it clutched ten Aquilonian short swords, fused together at their hilts into a single, horrific cestus of gleaming steel—the very swords taken from the sheaths of the dead men.
The construct took a lumbering step, then another, its movements jerky and unnatural. It began to patrol the perimeter of the clearing, a mindless sentinel created to guard the profane ritual. Conan watched it, his mind racing. This was the sorcerer’s masterpiece, a guardian born of the men he had sacrificed. It was slow, but it looked immensely strong.
His eyes flickered to Valerius’s body. The captain’s coin purse, a small leather pouch, lay beside his outstretched hand. A thought, cold and sharp as a shard of ice, entered Conan’s mind. He had warned the captain about this place. He had told him not to trust the straight, easy path. Valerius had laughed, confident in his Aquilonian steel and discipline. And here was that steel, turned into a monster’s fist.
The shadow guardian halted. Its faceless head tilted, not at him, but at something in the canopy twenty yards to his left. A squirrel, chittering in alarm, broke from cover and scrambled down a tree trunk. Faster than thought, a tendril of black vine shot from the construct’s arm, crossing the distance in a blur. It speared the creature, pinning it to the bark. The squirrel gave a single, high-pitched scream, and then was silent. The light of life faded from it, absorbed into the vine, which then retracted back into the guardian’s form. The construct seemed to swell, its form becoming slightly more solid.
It fed on life. Any life.
The game had changed. He was no longer an observer. He was trapped in a cage with a monster that could sense him, a monster that grew stronger with every kill. The entire clearing was a killing floor, and the sorcerer, wherever he was, was watching through a hundred yellow eyes.
Slowly, carefully, Conan drew his broadsword. The sound of steel whispering from leather was impossibly loud in the silence. Down below, the shadow-construct froze. Its head snapped around, the cluster of roots and dirt that served as its face swivelling directly toward the blackwood tree. Toward him.
The yellow eyes in the dark all blinked out at once. They were no longer needed. The sorcerer's pet had found its quarry.
The hunter in the tree had become the hunted. The shadow-guardian let out a low groan, the sound of ancient wood splitting, and charged.