Chapter Text
I.
The fire came from the east.
Conan had seen falling stars before, had made camp beneath their trails, had heard old men claim they were gods dying or gods being born, had learned to care nothing for either interpretation. A falling star was a falling star. It left a mark and then it was done.
This one was not done.
It came down trailing light the color of bad water, greenish and wrong, and the sound it made was not the silence of distant fire but something that grew, a roar that pressed against his ears like a hand. He was in the hill country south of the Kothian border with nothing particular to do and enemies who were two days behind him at best, and he stood in the long grass and watched the thing fall and calculated where it would strike and moved, because he had learned early that the world could always find new ways to kill a man who stood still waiting to see what happened next.
It struck a rocky flat perhaps half a league off. The ground shook once, like a sleeping giant turning over. A column of smoke and green-lit dust rose into the evening air.
He went toward it anyway. This was also something he had learned.
She was at the center of the crater, and the crater was ringed with stones.
Not ordinary stones. They glowed with the same sick green light that had trailed the fall, scattered in the churned earth like the teeth of something enormous, and even standing at the crater's edge Conan felt the radiation of them. Not heat, not cold, but the particular wrongness he had learned to recognize after years of handling things that should not be handled. Cursed steel had a feeling. Sorcerous artifacts had a feeling. Objects that had been touched by powers that did not originate in any human working had a feeling, and the feeling was always some variation of the same thing: a pressure behind the eyes, a faint nausea at the base of the throat, the sense that something in the air was reading him.
The stones had that feeling, amplified.
He had picked up cursed blades before. He had carried idols that priests had fled from. He had walked through ritual circles drawn in blood while the sorcerer who'd drawn them screamed warnings. The feeling never went away and he had never learned to like it, but he had learned that it was information, not a sentence. The thing doing the reading was not always capable of doing more than reading, and distance from the source was what governed severity.
He ignored the awareness and went down into the crater because there was a woman in it.
That she was a woman he could see from twenty paces. That she was alive he could see from ten, the shallow movement of her chest, the fingers that curled and uncurled against the dirt. That she was like no woman he had ever seen he understood at roughly the same moment, and Conan had seen women on four continents and in circumstances ranging from royal courts to slave markets to battlefields, and he was not a man easily struck.
He was struck.
She lay on her back with her hair spread around her like something spilled. It was clean, impossibly clean given the crater and the fall, and it caught the sick green light of the stones and gave back something else entirely, and he had no word for the color of it in Cimmerian or in any of the dozen languages he'd accumulated since. He discarded trying. She was dressed in cloth that was not cloth, that had no texture he recognized, red and blue in colors that seemed to generate their own faint light, and she was built with the particular quality of proportion that made Conan understand, on some level below thought, why men built temples.
He was also close enough to the stones now that the pressure had become something specific. Not the dull ambient wrongness of proximity. Something that knew he was there and was making an assessment. He had felt this before, standing in the inner chambers of a Stygian tomb while the air around him tightened, the sensation of being weighed by something that had no face. The stones were not sentient. He did not think the stones were sentient. But whatever had made them had made them to do something, and that something was running, and it could feel him the way an open flame can feel a hand held over it.
He stopped before the inner ring of them, took stock. She was breathing. The stones were between him and her. Her skin, where it was exposed, had the particular gray-tinged pallor of something dying.
He studied the math of this for roughly two seconds and then walked through the inner ring of stones.
It hit the way cursed steel hit. Not a wound, nothing so clean as that, but the sensation of a hand reaching past the skin and taking hold of something underneath it, something that had no name because it did not normally get touched. He had felt this gripping the hilt of a blade a dying sorcerer had cursed with his last breath. He had felt it passing through a doorway that had been sealed with blood-working. It was the feeling of something foreign making contact with whatever it was that he was, below the body, and registering displeasure at the contact.
His vision swam. He kept walking. He had walked through worse things than pain, and the distance was perhaps four steps, and Conan of Cimmeria did not die in a hole in the ground because of rocks.
He crouched beside her. Up close, the wrongness of her situation was clearer. The way the green light from the nearest stones made her flinch even unconscious, the fine trembling in her hands, the quality of her pallor that was less like illness and more like something having its source cut off.
He touched her shoulder. Her eyes opened.
They were blue. This was also something he decided to stop thinking about immediately, because there was the matter of the rocks.
Her lips moved. The language was not any language he knew, not Aquilonian, not Stygian, not any of the trade pidgins of the eastern coast. It had too many sounds in it, sounds that seemed to belong to a different kind of mouth. She tried again, and he could see the effort cost her, the way trying to speak cost a drowning man.
"I cannot understand you," he said.
Something shifted in her face. Recalculation. She tried once more, and this time the words were in a language he knew, accented strangely, the vowels shaped by a mouth that had learned this language from outside, the way you learn a thing you were not born to.
"The stones," she said. Each word arrived separately, with effort behind it. "I cannot... the stones are killing me. You must carry me away from them."
He looked at the stones. He looked at her. He looked at the distance to the crater's edge.
"It will cost you," he said. Not a question.
"It is already costing me." Her eyes held his, and whatever she was (and he was fairly sure at this point that she was not precisely what he would call human) she was not stupid and she was not lying. "And you. I know. I am sorry for it. Please."
He said nothing. He got his arms under her and lifted.
She was heavier than she looked by a significant margin, not fat, not muscled in any conventional sense, simply denser, as if the space she occupied contained more than it should. He filed this away and carried her up the slope of the crater. Each step across the ring of stones renewed the grip on whatever it was the stones gripped, and each step was its own specific negotiation with his legs and with his stomach and with the part of his brain that was suggesting, helpfully, that he put her down and leave. He did not put her down. He cleared the outer ring and kept walking, ten more paces, twenty, until the air felt like air again and the grip released, the way it always released when you set the cursed thing down. Not all at once, but in stages, the foreign pressure withdrawing back to wherever it had come from, leaving behind a faint residue that he knew from experience would be gone by morning.
He set her down in the long grass and straightened up and stood very still for a moment while his body finished deciding whether it was going to embarrass him.
It decided not to.
He turned back to look at the crater. The green glow pulsed once, twice, and then a cloud passed over the moon and he could see nothing.
She recovered faster than anything had a right to.
Within the hour she was sitting up. Within two she was standing, and the color had returned to her skin, which in the moonlight was (he was, again, not going to think about it). She had moved twenty paces away from him to do something that looked like stretching but wasn't, movements that seemed to test whether her body was still the body she remembered, and he sat on a rock and cleaned his knife and did not stare.
He stared occasionally.
"You are healed," he said, when she came back.
"Recovering." She looked at him with an expression he couldn't fully parse, gratitude was in it, and something that might have been guilt, and underneath both of those something almost like relief, as if she'd been worried he might want something complicated for what he'd done. "You were hurt."
"I have been hurt before."
"You walked through them anyway."
"You asked me to."
She looked at him for a long moment. He returned the look without particular expression. He had found, over the years, that a certain quality of stillness unsettled people who expected something from him, and this was useful.
"I owe you a debt," she said.
"You don't."
"In my—" She stopped. Started again. "Where I come from, you owe what you owe. You carried me out of the stones. I will carry you out of wherever you need to go." She paused. "Literally."
Conan looked at her.
She looked back.
"How far?" he said.
It was deeply undignified.
She carried him the way you'd carry something breakable, both arms, his back against her chest, his legs dangling in a manner that he was going to choose not to think about. The ground dropped away with a speed that his stomach logged as a grievance. The wind hit his face like a moving wall. She was flying, he realized, not like a bird, not angling or banking, simply moving through the air as if the air had been notified of her intentions and gotten out of the way.
She was strong. He'd known this, had felt the density of her when he'd lifted her. Lifting him presented no more challenge than lifting a sword would present to him. She held him as if he weighed nothing at all, and he did not like being something that weighed nothing.
He also did not like being this high. He had no particular fear of heights. He had free-climbed towers under combat conditions, had scaled cliff faces in the dark, and none of this was the same as being a thousand feet above the ground in the arms of a woman moving faster than a hawk. The Kothian hills were a wrinkled blanket below them. The stars were closer. The cold was extraordinary and arrived from every direction simultaneously.
He said nothing. He was not going to give the sky the satisfaction.
He had told her the Zamoran border, a specific river crossing, and she had nodded as if this were the same as asking her to cross a street. She moved without apparent effort, without strain, her breathing unchanged, and this was also something he was going to choose not to think about. The contrast between what she was capable of and the state he had found her in, helpless in a hole because of rocks.
Everything had its weakness. He had learned this repeatedly and in expensive ways.
"You are not frightened," she said. The wind tore at the words.
"No."
"Most would be."
"I've noticed most isn't usually useful."
She was quiet for a moment. Below them a river caught moonlight and he recognized the bend of it. They were making in minutes what would have taken him three days on foot.
"Your name," she said. "What are you called?"
"Conan."
The word seemed to satisfy some requirement he couldn't identify. "Conan," she repeated.
"And yours?"
She told him.
The sound of it was unlike anything that had ever been produced by a human throat in his presence, not the clicks of the southern tribal languages he'd heard, not the consonant clusters of eastern tongues, not anything he had a category for. It had more dimensions than names were supposed to have. The beginning of it started somewhere near kh- and then went somewhere his mouth did not know how to follow.
"Kh—" he began, and stopped.
She waited.
He tried twice more. Each time the beginning was there and the rest was not.
"The beginning," he said finally. "Just the beginning. The rest is not mine."
She looked at him (they were still moving, she had turned her head to look at him while flying, which said something about her confidence in the air) and something crossed her face that he didn't have a name for. Not amusement exactly. Recognition, maybe. The expression of someone who had been called by half their name before and found it more honest than the butchered whole.
"Then that is what you have," she said, and turned back to face the direction they were moving.
She set him down on the near bank of the river crossing with the same careful competence she'd used to lift him. He found his feet. Stood. The ground's solidity was, he admitted to no one, a significant relief.
She was already two paces back, looking at the sky.
"The debt is paid," she said.
"It was paid the moment you asked and I walked into the stones."
She looked at him then, and there was something in her face that might have been surprise, or might have been something with no word in any language he spoke. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he had spent long enough in her company to know that this was not merely the appearance of her but something underneath it, the way certain weapons were beautiful, not decoratively but in the sense of being exactly what they were, without apology, without qualification.
She rose without running, without jumping, simply lifted from the ground as if remembering that gravity was something she participated in voluntarily.
"Conan," she said, from somewhere above him.
He looked up.
"Kh-," he said. There was, unmistakably, something in the way he said it. And then she was gone, up and east and out of sight in the time it took him to blink, and the sky was just the sky again.
He stood for a moment on the riverbank in the dark.
Then he found the ford and crossed it, and got on with things.