Rain dripped from leaves a hundred feet overhead, a slow, green-filtered tattoo on the forest floor. It was not the clean rain of the Cimmerian highlands but a thick, humid mist that clung to the skin and smelled of rot and exuberant life entwined. Conan moved through the undergrowth, his broadsword silent in its scabbard, his eyes scanning the gloom. The Aquilonians, in their civilized wisdom, had blazed a trail. White slashes on the trunks of ironwood and black-bark trees, marching in a neat, arrogant line deeper into the Pictish Wilderness. Fools. A trail was an invitation, not a highway. He spat. Their dyes were shoddy, too; the rain made the crimson of their cloaks run like cheap wine.
He was a scout, they’d said. A mercenary to guard the flanks of their precious new settlement, Sulland, a pimple of cut timber and misplaced pride on the edge of a continent that wanted to swallow it whole. His task was to find the war-chief, Zanthur-Kel, who was doing what Picts had only ever done in nightmares: uniting. But a patrol of ten legionaries had vanished three days ago, and their captain, a stiff-backed pup named Valerius, had paid Conan a handful of silver to find them.
The Cimmerian halted. His nostrils flared, filtering the miasma of decay. Beneath the sweetness of mouldering blossoms lay a scent that did not belong. The thin, sharp tang of old iron. He ghosted from the pathetic trail, his moccasins making no sound on the mulch. Twenty paces in, he found it. A broken spear-shaft, its Aquilonian make unmistakable. The head was gone. There was no blood. No sign of a struggle. Just a snapped shaft, as if a giant had broken it over his knee.
He crouched, his barbarian senses alive, a thousand times sharper than those of the city-bred men he tracked. The tracks of the ten soldiers were clear, their hobnailed sandals churning the soft earth. But they were… wrong. They walked in single file. No chatter, no breaking of ranks. Just a grim-faced procession. And alongside them, another set of prints. A single man, barefoot. The splay of the toes was wide, the heel deep-set. A Pict. But only one.
Ten legionaries would have made short work of a single warrior. They would not have been led by him like sheep to a pen. Conan frowned, his heavy black brows knitting. This was not the aftermath of an ambush. It was something else. He followed the tracks, his hand resting on the worn leather hilt of his sword. The forest grew darker, the trees thicker, their branches weaving a canopy that starved the light. The air grew thick, heavy in his lungs. A familiar pressure built behind his eyes, the same feeling he got in deep caves or earthen tunnels far from the sky. Crom, he hated being buried, hated the weight of the earth overhead. Here, the weight was of wood and leaves and centuries of silence.
The tracks led to a place he knew only from the hushed warnings of the Border Kingdom traders and the fearful whispers of the Picts he’d interrogated. A small, unnatural clearing dominated by a single pillar of black, greasy-looking stone. A monolith, thirty feet high, ancient when Aquilonia was a dream in a madman’s mind.
Valerius had scoffed when Conan mentioned the tales. "Just Pictish superstition to keep our patrols away, Cimmerian. They fear we will chop down their magic trees." The boy had laughed. Conan hadn’t.
The Cimmerian slowed, his eyes narrowed to slits. The stench hit him first. A coppery fist of it, mingled with the sweet rot of the forest floor and something else, something acrid and wrong. He saw the bodies.
Ten of them. Dressed in the leather and steel of the Aquilonian border legion. They weren't scattered as they would be in a fight. They were arranged. Laid out in a precise, ten-pointed star around the base of the monolith, their heads pointing inward, their feet pointing out. Each man’s throat was cut from ear to ear, with a terrible, surgical precision. But there was almost no blood on the ground. The earth was dark and damp, but not saturated. The bodies themselves were pale, waxy, and seemed… deflated.
Picts? No. Conan had seen Pictish savagery. They hacked and they tore. They took heads and limbs as trophies. Their work was manic, a frenzy of hatred. This was cold. This was ritual. His gaze swept the clearing, missing nothing. The soldiers’ swords were still in their sheaths. Their shields lay beside them. No man had drawn a weapon. They had walked to their deaths.
Conan stepped closer, his moccasins sinking slightly into the strangely barren soil around the stone. He looked at the monolith itself. The surface was slick, almost oily, even where the rain didn't fall. And carved into it, at the height of a man’s chest, was a symbol that hadn’t been there before. He knew it was new because it was still wet. A dark, viscous fluid, already thickening, dripped from the deep grooves of the carving. He touched a finger to the edge of the line, then brought it to his nose. Blood.
The symbol was a spiral, but it was wrong. It coiled inward, tight and suffocating, and at its center was a single, staring eye composed of three jagged intersecting lines. It was a brand of potent sorcery; he could feel the evil of it thrumming in the air, a low vibration that resonated in his bones. He had felt such things before, in the cursed ruins of Stygia and the haunted swamps of the Black Coast.
Behind him, a twig snapped.
Conan spun, his sword clearing its scabbard in a single, fluid motion that was faster than sight. The blade’s hiss cut the air. Nothing. Only the pressing, watching forest. The wind, which had been still, now slithered through the branches and carried whispers he could not quite understand. He scanned the tree line, a predator poised to strike. There was no one. The sound had been a lie, a trick of the straining silence.
Or it wasn't.
His eyes went from the forest back to the drained men, then to the blood-slick symbol on the stone. The blood had not just been used to draw the symbol. It had been the price of admission. The stone hadn't been carved; it had been fed. He looked up at the canopy, at the dark spaces between the leaves. He felt eyes on him now, a thousand of them. They were not human. The true enemy was not a Pict chief with a painted face and a stone axe. The enemy was the dark soul of this forest, and someone had just offered it a feast. The ground beneath his feet seemed to hum, and for the first time since entering the wilderness, Conan felt a shard of cold that had nothing to do with the rain.