Pure joy bubbled through him. He imagined himself—now properly armed—killing a dozen of the painted savages. Maybe the four he’d slain were the vanguard of a war band! While he knew this wasn’t true, given their ragged condition, he could wish it were true. It would make for a better telling of the story.

That thought sobered him. Though he cared only for what his father thought, he couldn’t help but notice the looks on the other faces. Ardel and the other young men looked shamed—as well they should—and resentful. They’d given in to panic while a younger man had not. Even at that young age, Conan recognized that they would eventually forget their shame, and instead revel in remembering that they had been present when Conan brought his trophies to the village.

The others—the warriors—their reactions had been easy to read as well. Some refused to believe. Some of them had been in combat, but had never killed an enemy. Others, knowing just how difficult that was, couldn’t believe so young a man had done it alone. But the vast majority remembered the omen of his birth. For them, his return, his accomplishment, only confirmed their belief in his destiny. While this made most of them happy, a few had looked away from him, believing that such a great destiny would afford Conan a life poor in peace and happiness.

Had he been older, he would have understood that sentiment, but even if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered. Crom gave men courage. Crom meant for men to survive by their wits and the strength of their arms. Crom guaranteed nothing more, and certainly no peace or happiness. Conan was a Cimmerian warrior, and a warrior’s life he would lead.

Conan cut through the forest and scaled the rock face leading toward the meadow where he had placed his traplines. As he clambered to the top and crouched to rest, he heard the jingle of tack and the creak of leather. Below, along the track at the cliff’s base, came a half-dozen riders, armored in leather and light mail. Conical steel caps covered their heads and bloodred scarves half hid their faces.

Conan crouched behind a fallen tree. He’d never seen such men before, not even on the trip south with his father to visit a market town. Even so, something about their swarthiness and the shape of their helmets struck a chord with him. His grandfather had spoken of such men from his travels. Zamora? Zingara? It was someplace distant and exotic.

The riders slowed as they cut across his track. The leader glanced toward the rock face, where the tracks ended, and shook his head. Then he studied Conan’s back trail, but the forest and hills, with their deep drifts of snow, provided no easy passage for horsemen. With the wave of a hand and a harsh command, he started his men farther down the game trail that would, a mile or so farther north, cut across a road that led to the village.

Outrage, contempt, and fear warred in Conan’s breast. That such men would dare come into Cimmeria infuriated him. They had to be very foolish, though a small part of him imagined they might have come north to settle some generational blood feud with his grandfather.

The way the lead rider studied the tracks and didn’t even bother to glance up at the top of the cliff fortified Conan’s suspicion that they were stupid. Sure, the size of his track, the length of his stride, suggested that he was still a boy, but to so casually imagine that a rock face could not be climbed was folly. Steppes dwellers! Conan spat disgustedly, then cut down and around off the hill. Though going back down the cliff face would be faster, if the horsemen returned, he’d be trapped.

He picked his way across the horsemen’s back trail, stepping only in the tracks they’d left, then plunged through brush and cut slightly south. If he ran fast, if he encountered no trouble, he could reach the village before the horsemen and warn his father. Noting that he’d heard no blasts from the signal horns the other Cimmerians carried, he felt a surge of courage—not because he had a desire to be a hero, but because he did not want to leave his village unprotected.

At no point had it occurred to him that the riders might be innocent travelers. They’d had the look of hard men about them. They had no remounts or pack animals in tow, which meant they’d entrusted those things to others. They had to have known his tracks were fresh, yet they did not call out in a friendly manner. And the trail they rode branched off from the larger trade route to the south, which would have afforded them a direct and easy path to the village.

No, he was certain that they were part of something larger and, worse yet, imagined they were part of a cordon to make sure no one got away. His grandfather had talked about having had such duties, but had never said too much or anything good about them.

Conan burst from the woods, his lungs burning, aghast at the sight of his village.

Flaming arrows rose from the south, arcing down like falling stars. They landed among the southernmost huts, sticking deep in thatched roofs. The huts began to burn. The breeze swirled dark smoke through the rest of the village, washing it over the Cimmerian defensive lines.

And there, at the center, stood Corin, magnificent, the great sword he’d forged for his son held high. He directed the defenses, pointing men and women to their places in the lines. Conan instinctively understood what his father was doing and desperately wished he were at his side. A couple hundred yards of snowy fields separated him from the village, so he rose to sprint.

A loud metallic hiss to his right stopped him. Armored men in closed ranks were stepping from the forest. Aquilonians, surely, for Conan had seen their like before. The short swords they unsheathed in unison were not unlike the sword he bore. And their shields, tall ovals, were standard in Aquilonian legions, though he’d never seen the crest before. A human face, or so it appeared, with tentacles writhing around it—the very sight of the crest set Conan’s flesh to crawling.

The Aquilonians began a measured march toward the village. Two drummers paced behind them, hammering out a rhythm to which the soldiers marched. Conan’s heart pounded double time to that beat, and he sprinted twice as fast, quickly outdistancing the Aquilonians.

Then trumpets blasted and horsemen broke from the wood lines, racing across the snowy fields. No lightly armed scouts these, but heavily armored cavalry, with horses encased in layers of steel armor. The warriors bore curved swords with heavy points, equally suited to slashing or stabbing. The warriors would have towered over Conan were they on foot, but in the saddle, they became juggernauts of destruction.

Hoofbeats thundered despite the muffling snow. Conan ducked and dodged to avoid being trampled beneath steelshod hooves. He spun to the ground, escaping the last of them, ending on his knees, facing away from the village. He struggled to his feet and started to turn, but the centermost Aquilonian ranks parted as if they were a curtain, and a lone warrior came riding through.

It would have been easy to mistake him for one of the cavalry, for his horse had been similarly armored and his sheathed sword bore a resemblance to the scimitars the others carried. But something about him, about the way he sat tall in the saddle and studied the battlefield with a hawk’s serene gaze, marked him as different. He, too, bore a shield with the tentacled mask on it, but less as a tool of war than as a proud emblem.

Conan didn’t know who he was, but he knew he was dangerous. He spun and sprinted for the village, certain that if that man reached it, no one would be left alive.

The young Cimmerian warrior plunged headlong into the furious battle, hyperaware of everything going on around him. Sounds sorted themselves into the harsh din of metal-on-metal impact, or the wet crack of sword cleaving bone. The hiss of air from punctured lungs differed from the wet gush of entrails flowing from a slashed belly. Men shouted. Some gave orders, others begged for mercy. Words came in hard, guttural tongues and in the more familiar Cimmerian. Light flashed from blades, blood splashed red and filled the air with a tang that erased the scent of smoke.

Conan caught the first glimmer of the knowledge that would keep him alive: combat appeared to be chaotic, but, in fact, had an order and flow. Currents ran through it, strength channeled against weakness, and weakness ebbed until it could attack greater weakness. Lines surged and collapsed, voids opened and were filled. To move with the energies was to survive. To hesitate or defy them was to be drowned in a river of blood.

More arrows sped through the air, launched by female warriors. Conan grabbed the arm of an Aquilonian warrior and spun him around, using him as a shield. Three arrows thudded into his chest, but Conan slipped from beneath his falling body, then slashed another Aquilonian across the hamstrings, crippling him.

Hulking warriors whose skin was so dark it almost appeared purple, with round shields and long spears, rushed through the village, impaling victims. Before Conan could finish the Aquilonian, one of the Kushites knocked him to the ground. Conan leaned away from the thrust that should have pinned him to the earth, then stabbed up. His blade opened the man’s belly and he ripped the sword free. Blood sprayed and the warrior fell, but Conan was already up and away.

He ran toward where he’d last seen his father, but the Cimmerian lines had been shattered. Arrow-stuck bodies lay everywhere. The black shafts had spared no one. Ardel lay curled up around one in his middle; his head connected to his body by a slender ribbon of flesh. His father, Ronan, lay not far away, impaled on a Kushite spear. A half dozen of the enemy lay at his feet. Elsewhere other Cimmerians lay, similarly surrounded by the enemy dead, but where the Cimmerians were only a village, the enemy seemed composed of nations.

The massacre would spare no one.

Look where he might, Conan could not find his father. He cut through the village, slashing and stabbing, too quick to be hit, too small to be followed, and too easily lost in the smoke to be hunted. A bloody-handed raider staggered from one hut, a red hand held high to display a necklace of copper beads. Conan slashed her knee, then took her head with the return stroke before he’d even noticed she was female. It mattered not to him. She was an enemy, he was a Cimmerian warrior, so no greater consideration of circumstances need be given.

He gained the smithy and felt relief, for the fires consuming the southern half of the village had not yet reached it. He slipped past the open doorway, seeing a number of figures inside, and made his way into the woodshed. He closed that door behind him and crossed to the smaller inside door by the forge. The crack between door and jamb gave him a perfect view of the interior.

What he saw made his gorge rise, but he kept the vomit down.

Corin stood within a circle of the enemy, his shoulders slumped with weariness. His father’s clothes were soaked in blood. A black-shaft arrow had pierced the right shoulder. One of the archers, regal in her leather armor, smiled grimly, leading Conan to believe that her bow had sped that arrow. For that I will kill you.

The others gathered there likewise appeared to be leaders of the various contingents that still swarmed over the village. A corpulent Aquilonian general with unkempt hair and armor remarkably clean of blood watched Corin with piggish eyes. Another man, even larger and clearly sharing bloodlines with the heavy cavalry, had supplemented his armor with a sheaf of chains. The Kushite chieftain carried a massive war club festooned with metal shards and sharpened bones. The last man bore facial tattoos that Conan could not recognize, yet would never forget, and studied Corin the way a cat studies a dying mouse.

And there, standing tall among them, was the man who had ridden through the Aquilonian ranks. Corin evinced no fear of him, but the others did. Conan smiled with pride for his father, but his blue eyes glittered with cold contempt for the others.

The leader, hand resting on the hilt of what appeared to be a double-bladed scimitar, paraded before Conan’s father with the air of prince. “There is no shame in kneeling before Khalar Zym. All these fighters have surrendered, left their lands, and sworn their allegiance to me.” The man inspected his fingernails, then picked up the Cimmerian great sword. “They’ve done so because they know I will one day be a god.”

Corin’s eyes narrowed. “God or not, one day you will fall.”

The leader rolled his eyes, then with a wave of his hand summoned forth a robed figure from the shadows. The acolyte bore a mask that looked exactly like the crest on the invaders’ shields, save that it was missing a piece. The brown-gold of aged bone, covered in a scaly flesh, the mask appeared unspeakably ancient and evil. Conan stared at it, entranced and revolted at the same time.

The bandit leader glanced at the mask, then smiled at its reflection on the sword’s blade. “You know, of course, what this is. The Mask of Acheron. One piece is yet missing. You have it here.”

Corin’s face betrayed nothing to the outsiders, but Conan could read his expression well enough to know that the bandit spoke the truth. This sent a jolt through him, for he knew of no mask, knew of no secret. Perhaps it was something known only to warriors, and so his father had not yet told him. That had to be it; there could be no other explanation. It is the responsibility of which he spoke.

The bandit chuckled. “I do have an appreciation for bravery, Cimmerian, but I have a great need for the last piece. You can give it to me now . . . or die, and I shall find it myself.”

Corin smiled, his expression coming as much with ease as it did with defiance. “I prefer death.”

The bandit leader nodded. “I thought you might. Lucius, to you goes this honor.”

The Aquilonian general drew his short sword and approached, raising it to behead the smiling Cimmerian.