The Lair of the Ice Worm

All day, the lone rider had breasted the slopes of the Eiglophian Mountains, which strode from east to west across the world like a mighty wall of snow and ice, sun­dering the northlands of Vanaheim, Asgard, and Hyperborea from the southern kingdoms. In the depth of winter, most of the passes were blocked. With the coming of spring, however, they opened, to afford bands of fierce, light-haired northern barbarians routes by which they could raid the warmer lands to the south.

This rider was alone. At the top of the pass that led southward into the Border Kingdom and Nemedia, he reined in to sit for a moment, looking at the fantastic scene before him.

The sky was a dome of crimson and golden vapors, darkening from the zenith to the eastern horizon with the purple of oncoming evening. But the fiery splendor of the dying day still painted the white crests of the mountains with a deceptively warm-looking rosy radiance. It threw shadows of deep lavender across the frozen surface of a titanic glacier, which wound like an icy serpent from a coomb among the higher peaks; down and down until it curved in front of the pass and then away again to the left, to dwindle in the foothills and turn into a flowing stream of water. He who traveled through the pass had to pick his way cautiously past the margin of the glacier, hoping that he would neither fall into one of its hidden crevasses nor be overwhelmed by an avalanche from the higher slopes. The setting sun turned the glacier into a glittering expanse of crimson and gold. The rocky slopes that rose from the glacier's flanks were dotted with a thin scattering of gnarled, dwarfish trees.

This, the rider knew, was Snow Devil Glacier, also known as the River of Death Ice. He had heard of it, al­though his years of wandering had never before chanced to take him there. Everything he had heard of this glacier-guarded pass was shadowed by a nameless fear. His own Cimmerian fellow-tribesmen, in their bleak hills to the west, spoke of the Snow Devil in terms of dread, although no one knew why. Often he had wondered at the legends that clustered about the glacier, endowing it with the vague aura of ancient evil. Whole parties had vanished there, men said, never to he heard of again.

The Cimmerian youth named Conan impatiently dis­missed these rumors. Doubtless, he thought, the missing men had lacked mountaineering skill and had carelessly strayed out on one of the bridges of thin snow that often masked glacial crevasses. Then the snow bridge had given way, plunging them all to their deaths in the hue-green depths of the glacier. Such things happened often enough, Crom knew; more than one boyhood acquaintance of the young Cimmerian had perished thus. But this was no reason to refer to the Snow Devil with shudders, dark hints, and sidelong glances.

Conan was eager to descend the pass into the low hills of the Border Kingdom, for he had begun to find the simple life of his native Cimmerian village boring. His ill-fated adventure with a band of golden-haired Aesir on a raid into Vanaheim had brought him hard knocks and no profit. It had also left him with the haunting memory of the icy beauty of Atali, the frost giant's daughter, who had nearly lured him to an icy death.

Altogether, he had had all he wanted of the bleak north-lands. He burned to get back to the hot lands of the South, to taste again the joys of silken raiment, golden wine, fine victuals, and soft feminine flesh. Enough., he thought, of the dull round of village life and the Spartan austerities of camp and field!

His horse picked its way to the place where the glacier thrust itself across the direct route to the lowlands. Conan slid off his mount and led the animal along the narrow pathway between the glacier on his left and the lofty, snow-covered slope on his right. His huge bearskin cloak exaggerated even his hulking size. It hid the coat of chain mail and the heavy broadsword at his hip.

His eyes of volcanic blue glowered out from under the brim of a horned helmet, while a scarf was wound around the lower part of his face to protect his lungs from the bite of the cold air of the heights. He carried a slender lance in his free hand. Where the path meandered out over the surface of the glacier, Conan went gingerly, thrusting the point of the lance into the snow where he suspected that it might mask a crevasse. A battle-ax hung by its thong from his saddle.

He neared the end of the narrow path between the glacier and the hillside, where the glacier swung away to the left and the path continued down over a broad, sloping surface, lightly covered with spring snow and broken by boulders and hummocks. Then a scream of terror made him whip around and jerk up his helmeted head.

A bowshot away to his left, where the glacier leveled off before beginning its final descent, a group of shaggy, hulk­ing creatures ringed a slim girl in white furs. Even at this distance, in the clear mountain air, Conan could discern the warm, fresh-cheeked oval of her face and the mane of glossy brown hair that escaped from under her white hood. She was a real beauty.

Without waiting to ponder the matter, Conan threw off his cloak and, using his lance as a pole, vaulted into the saddle. He gathered up the reins and drove his spurs into the horse's ribs. As the startled beast reared a little in the haste with which it bounded forward, Conan opened his mouth to utter the weird and terrible Cimmerian war cry ... then shut it again with a snap. As a younger man he would have uttered this shout to hearten himself, but his years of Turanian service had taught him the rudiments of crafti­ness. There was no use in warning the girl's attackers of his coming any sooner than he must.

They heard his approach soon enough, however. Al­though the snow muffled his horse's hoofs, the faint jingle of his mail and the creak of his saddle and harness caused one of them to turn. This one shouted and pulled at his neighbor's arm, so that in a few seconds all had turned to see Conan's approach and set themselves to meet it.

There were about a dozen of the mountain men, armed with crude wooden clubs and with stone-headed spears and axes. They were short-limbed, thick-bodied creatures, wrapped in tattered., mangy furs. Small, bloodshot eyes glared out from under beetling brows and sloping fore­heads; thick lips drew back to reveal large yellow teeth. They were like leftovers from some earlier stage of human evolution., about which Conan had once heard philosophers argue in the courtyards of Nemedian temples. Just now, however, he was too fully occupied with guiding his horse and aiming his lance to spare such matters more than the barest fleeting thought. Then he crashed among them like a thunderbolt.

Conan knew that the only way to deal with such a number of enemies afoot was to take full advantage of the mobility of the horse ... to keep moving, so as never to let them cluster around him. For while his mail would protect his own body from most of their blows, even their crude wea­pons could quickly bring down his mount. So he drove to­ward the nearest beast-man, guiding his horse a little to the left.

As the iron lance crushed through bone and hairy flesh, the mountain man screamed, dropped his own weapon, and tried to clutch at the shaft of Conan's spear. The thrust of the horse's motion hurled the sub-man to earth. The lance head went down and the butt rose. As he cantered through the scattered band, Conan dragged his lance free.

Behind him, the mountain men broke into a chorus of yells and screams. They pointed and shouted at one an­other, issuing a dozen contradictory commands at once. Meanwhile Conan guided his mount in a tight circle and galloped back through the throng. A thrown spear glanced from his mailed shoulder; another opened a small gash in his horse's flank. But he drove his lance into another moun­tain man and again rode free, leaving behind a wriggling, thrashing body to spatter the snow with scarlet.

At his third charge., the man he speared rolled as he fell, snapping the lance shaft. As he rode clear, Conan threw away the stump of the shaft and seized the haft of the ax that hung from his saddle. As he rode into them once more, he leaned from his saddle. The steel blade flashed fire in the sunset glow as the ax described a huge figure-eight, with one loop to the right and one to the left. On each side, a mountain man fell into the snow with a cloven skull. Crim­son drops spattered the snow. A third mountain man, who did not move quickly enough., was knocked down and trampled by Conan's horse.

With a wail of terror, the trampled man staggered to his feet and fled limping. In an instant, the other six had joined him in panic-stricken flight across the glacier. Conan drew rein to watch their shaggy figures dwindle ... and then had to leap clear of the saddle as his horse shuddered and fell. A flint-headed spear had been driven deep into the animal's body, just behind Conan's left leg. A glance showed Conan that the beast was dead.

“Crom damn me for a meddling fool!” he growled to himself. Horses were scarce and costly in the northlands. He had ridden this steed all tie way from far Zamora. He had stabled and fed and pampered it through the long win­ter. He had left it behind when he joined the Aesir in their raid, knowing that deep snow and treacherous icewould rob it of most of its usefulness. He had counted upon the faith­ful beast to get him back to the warm lands, and now it lay dead, all because he had impulsively intervened in a quarrel among the mountain folk that was none of his affair.

As his panting breath slowed and the red mist of battle fury faded out of his eyes, he turned toward the girl for whom he had fought. She stood a few feet away, staring at him wide-eyed.

“Are you all right, lass ?” he grunted. “Did the brutes hurt you? Have no fear; I'm not a foe. I am Conan, a Cimmerian.”

Her reply came in a dialect he had never heard before. It seemed to be a form of Hyperborean, mixed with words from other tongues ... some from Nemedian and others from sources he did not recognize. He found it hard to gather more than half her meaning.

“You fight ... like a god,” she panted. “I thought “ you Ymir come to save Ilga.”

As she cabled, he drew the story from her in spurts of words. She was Ilga of the Vimnian people, a branch of the Hyperboreans who had strayed into the Border Kingdom. Her folk lived in perpetual war with the hairy cannibals who dwelt in caves among the Eiglophian peaks. The struggle for survival in this barren realm was desperate; she would have been eaten by her captors had not Conan rescued her.

Two days before, she explained, she had set out with a small party of Vinmians to cross the pass above Snow Devil Glacier. Thence they planned to journey several days' ride northeast to Sigtona, the nearest of the Hyperborean strongholds. There they had kinsmen, among whom the Vimnians hoped to trade at the spring fair. There Ilga's uncle, who accompanied her, also meant to seek a good husband for her. But they had been ambushed by the hairy ones, and only Ilga had survived the terrible battle on the slippery slopes. Her uncle's last command to her, before he fell with his skull cleft by a flint ax, had been to ride like the wind for home.

Before she was out of sight of the mountain men, her horse had fallen on a patch of ice and broken a leg. She had thrown herself clear and, though bruised, had fled afoot. The hairy ones, however, had seen the fall, and a party of them came scampering down over the glacier to seize her. For hours, it seemed, she had run from them, But at last they had caught up with her and ringed her round, as Conan had seen.

Conan granted his sympathy; his profound dislike of Hyperboreans, based upon his sojourn in a Hyperborean slave pen, did not extend to their women. It was a hard tale, but life in the bleak northlands was grim. He had often heard the like.

Now, however, another problem faced them. Night had fallen, and neither had a horse. The wind was rising, and they would have little chance of surviving through the night on the surface of the glacier. They must find shelter and make a fire, or Snow Devil Glacier would add two more victims to its toll.

Late that night, Conan fell asleep. They had found a hollow beneath an overhang of rock on the side of the glacier, where the ice had melted away enough to let them squeeze in. With their backs to the granite surface of the cliff, deeply scored and striated by the rubbing of the glacier, they had room to stretch out. In front of the hollow rose the flank of the glacier ... clear, translucent ice, fissured by cavernous crevasses and tunnels.

Although the chill of the ice struck through to their bones, they were still warmer than they would have been on the surface above, where a howling wind was now driving dense clouds of snow before it.

Ilga had been reluctant to accompany Conan, although he made it plain that he meant the lass no harm. She had tugged away from his hand, crying out an unfamiliar word, which sounded something like yakhmar. At length, losing patience, he had given her a mfld cuff on the side of the head and carried her unconscious to the dank haven of the cave.

Then he had gone out to recover his bearskin cloak and the gear and supplies tied to his saddle. From the rocky slope that rose from the edge of the glacier, he had gathered a double armful of twigs, leaves, and wood, which he had carried to the cave. There, with flint and steel, he had coaxed a small fire into life. It gave more the illusion of warmth than true warmth, for he dared not let it grow too large lest it melt the nearby walls of the glacier and flood them out of their refuge.

The orange gleams of the fire shone deeply into the fis­sures and tunnels that ran back into the body of the glacier until their windings and branchings were lost in the dim distance. A faint gurgle of running water came to Conan's ears, now and then punctuated by the creak and crack of slowly moving ice.

Conan went out again into the biting wind, to hack from the stiffening body of his horse some thick slabs of meat. These he brought back to the cave to roast on the ends of pointed sticks. The horse steaks, together with slabs of black bread from his saddle bag, washed down with bitter Asgardian beer from a goatskin bottle, made a tough but sustaining repast.

Ilga seemed withdrawn as she ate. At first Conan thought she was still angry with him for the blow. But it was gradu­ally borne upon him that her mind was not on this incident at ah1. She was, instead, in the grip of stark terror. It was not the normal fear she had felt for the band of shaggy brutes that had pursued her, but a deep, superstitious dread some­how connected with the glacier. When he tried to question her, she could do nothing but whisper the strange word, “Yakhmar! Yakhmar!” while her lovely face took on a pale, drawn look of terror. When he tried to get the meaning of the word out of hers she could only make vague gestures, which conveyed nothing to him.

After the meal, warm and weary, they curled up together in his bearskin cloak. Her nearness brought to Conan's mind the thought that a bout of hot love might calm her mind for sleep. His first tentative caresses found her not at all unwilling. Nor was she unresponsive to his youthful ardor; as he soon discovered, she was not new to this game. Before the hour of lovemaking was over, she was gasping and crying out in her passion. Afterwards, thinking her now relaxed, the Cimmerian rolled over and slept like a dead man.

The girl, however, did not sleep. She lay rigid, staring out at the blacloiess that yawned in the ice cavities beyond the feeble glow of the banked fire. At last, near dawn, came the thing she dreaded.

It was a faint piping 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 neither move nor speak, even to rouse the snoring youth beside her.

Then two disks of cold green fire appeared in the mouth of the nearest ice tunnel - two great orbs that burned into her young soul and cast a deathly spell over her. There was no soul or mind behind those flaming disks ... only remorse­less hunger.

Like one walking in a dream, Ilga rose, letting her side of the bearskin cloak slide to her feet. Naked, a slim white form against 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.

Conan awoke suddenly. Some eery premonition - some warning from the barbarian's hyperacute senses - sent its current quivering along the tendrils of his nerves. Like some wary jungle cat, Conan came instantly from deep, dreamless slumber to full wakefulness. He lay without movement, every sense searching the air around him.

Then, with a deep growl rumbling in his mighty chest, the Cimmerian heaved to his feet and found himself alone in the cavern. The girl was gone. But her furs,, which she had discarded during dieir lovemaking, 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 himself through the narrow space between the overhang and the flank of the glacier. Outside on the snow, the wind had died. Although Conan sensed dawn in the air, no gleam of morning had yet dim­med the diamond blaze of thousands of throbbing stars overhead. A gibbous moon hung low above the western peaks, casting a wan glow 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 streams of ice-melt that run along the bottoms of glaciers.

The hairs on Conan's nape prickled at the weirdness of the girl's disappearance. At heart a superstitious barbarian, he feared nothing mortal but was filled with dread and loathing by the uncanny supernatural beings and forces that lurked in the dark comers of his primeval world.

Then, as he continued to search the snow, he went rigid. Something had lately emerged from a gap in the ice a few strides from the overhang. It was huge, long, soft, and sinuous, and it moved without feet. Its writhing track was clearly visible in the curving path that its belly had crushed in the soft whiteness, like some monstrous serpent of the snows.

The setting 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 from the glacier ... up, toward the wind­swept 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 them.

A little further on, he came upon the girl ... or what was left of her. Her head was gone, and with it most of the flesh of her upper body, so that the white bones gleamed like ivory in the dimming moonlight. The protruding bones had been cleaned, as if the flesh had been sucked from them or rasped off by some many-toothed tongue.

Conan was a warrior, the hard son of a hard people, who had seen death in a thousand forms. But now a mighty rage shook him. A few hours before., this slim, warm girl had Iain in the mighty circle of his arms, returning passion for passion. Now nothing was left of her but a sprawled, headless thing, like a doll broken and thrown away.

Conan mastered himself to examine the corpse. With a grunt of surprise, he found that it was frozen solid and sheathed in hard ice.

Conan's eyes narrowed thoughtfully. She could not have left his side more than an hour ago, for the cloak had still held some warmth from her body when he awoke. In so brief a time, a warm body does not freeze solid, let alone become encased in glittering ice. It was not according to nature.

Then he grunted a coarse expletive. He knew now, with inward loathing and fury, what had borne the sleeping girl from his side. He remembered the half-forgotten legends told around the fire in his Cimmerian boyhood. One of these concerned the dreaded monster of the snows, the grim Remora ... the vampiric ice worm whose name was an almost forgotten whisper of horror in Cimmerian myth.

The higher animals, he knew, radiated heat. Below them in the scale of being came the scaled and plated reptiles and fishes, whose temperature was that of their surroundings. 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 Remora., Conan had assumed that the creature was long extinct.

This, then, must be the monster that Ilga had dreaded, and of which she had vainly tried to warn him by the name yakhmar.

Conan grimly resolved to track the thing 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 women with a rough kindness that contrasted with the harshness and truculence with which he met those of his own sex. He refrained from forcing his lusts upon women if they were unwilling, and he tried to protect them when he found them dependent upon him.

Now he bad failed in his own eyes. In accepting his rough act of love, the girl Ilga had placed herself under his protection. Then, when she needed his strength, he had slumbered unaware like some besotted beast. Not knowing about the hypnotic piping sound by which the Remora paralyzed its victims and by which it had kept him - usually a light sleeper - sound asleep, he cursed him­self for a stupid, ignorant fool not to have paid more heed to her warnings. He ground his powerful teeth and bit his lips in rage, determined to wipe out this stain on his code of honor if it cost him his life.

As the sky lightened in the east, Conan returned to the cave, He bundled together his belongings and laid his plans. A few years before, he might have rushed out on the ice worm's trail, trusting to his immense strength and the keen edges of his weapons to see him through. But ex­perience, if it had not yet tamed all his rash impulses, had taught him the beginnings of caution.

It would be impossible to grapple with the ice worm with naked hands. The very touch of the creature meant frozen death. Even his sword and his ax were of doubtful effectiveness. The extreme cold might make their metal brittle, or the cold might run up their hafts and freeze the hand that wielded them.

But - and here a grim smfle played over Conan's lips - perhaps he could turn the ice worm's power against itself.

Silently and swiftly he made his preparations. Gorged, the gelid worm would doubdess slumber through the day­light hours. But Conan did not know how long it would take him to reach the creature's lair, and he feared that another gale might wipe out its serpentine track.

As it turned out, it took Conan little more than an hour to find the ice worm's lair. The dawning sun had ascended only a little way above the eastern peaks of the Eiglophians, making the snow fields sparkle like pavements of crashed diamonds, when he stood at last before the mouth of the ice cave into which the writhing snow track led him. This cave opened in the flank of a smaller glacier, a tributary of the Snow Devil. From his elevation, Conan could look back down the slope to where this minor glacier curved to join the main one, like the affluent of a river.

Conan entered the opening. The light of the rising sun glanced and flashed from the translucent ice walls on eirner side, breaking up into rainbow patterns and poly­chrome gleams. Conan had the sensation of walking by some magical means through the solid substance of a colos­sal gem.

Then, as he penetrated deeper into the glacier, the dark­ness congealed around him. Still, he doggedly set one foot before the other, plodding onward. He raised the col­lar of his bearskin cloak to protect his face from the numb­ing cold that poured past him, making his eyeballs ache and forcing him to take short, shallow breaths to keep his lungs from being frosted. Crystals of ice formed like a delicate mask upon his face, to shatter with each move­ment and as quickly to re-form. But he went on, carefully holding that which he carried so gingerly inside his cloak. Then in the gloom before him opened two cold green eyes, which stared into the roots of his soul. These lumin­ous orbs cast a gelid, submarine light of their own. By their faint, fungoid phosphorescence, he could see that there the cavern ended in a round well, which was the ice worm's nest. Coil on undulating сой, its immense length was curled in the hollow of its nest. Its boneless form was covered with the silken nap of diick white fur. Its mouth was merely a jawless, circular opening, now puckered and closed. Above the mouth, the two luminous orbs gleamed out of a smooth, rounded, featureless, eel-like head.

Replete, the ice worm took a few heartbeats to react to Conan's presence. During the countless eons that the thing of the snows had dwelt in the cold silences of Snow Devil Glacier., no puny man-thing had ever challenged it in the frozen depths of its nest. Now its weird, trilling, mind-binding song rose about Conan, pouring over him in lull­ing, overpowering, narcotic waves.

But it was too late. Conan threw back his cloak to ex­pose his burden. This was his heavy steel horned Asgardian helm, into which he had packed the glowing coals of his fire, and in which the head of his ax also lay buried, held in place by a loop of the chin strap around the handle. A rein from his horse's harness was looped around the ax helve and the chin strap.

Holding the end of the rein in one hand, Conan whirled the whole mass over his head, round and round, as if he were whirling a sling. The rash of air fanned the faintly glowing coals to red, then to yellow, then to white. A stench of burning helmet padding arose.

The ice worm raised its blunt head. Its circular mouth slowly opened, revealing a ring of small, inward-pointing teeth. As the piping sound grew to an intolerable pitch and the black circle of mouth moved toward him, Conan stopped the whirl of the helmet on die end of its thong. He snatched out the ax, whose helve was charred, smok­ing and flaming where it entered the fiercely glowing ax head. A quick cast sent the incandescent weapon looping into the cavernous maw. Holding the helmet by one of its horns, Conan hurled the glowing coals after the ax. Then he turned and ran.

Conan never quite knew how he reached the exit. The writhing agony from the thing of the snows shook die glacier. Ice cracked thunderously all around him. The draft of interstellar cold no longer wafted out of the tunnel; in­stead, a blinding, swirling fog of steam choked the air.

Stumbling, slipping, and falling on the slick, uneven surface of the ice, banging into one side wall of the tunnel and then the other, Conan at last reached the outer air. The glacier trembled beneath his feet with the titanic con­vulsions of the dying monster within. Plumes of steam wafted from a score of crevasses and caverns on either side of Conan, who, slipping and skidding, ran down the snowy slope. He angled off to one side to get free of the ice. But, before he reached the solid ground of the mountainside, with its jagged boulders and stunted trees, the glacier ex­ploded. When the white-hot steel of the ax met the frigid interior of the monster, something had to give way.

With a crashing roar, the ice quivered, broke up, hurled glassy fragments into the air, and collapsed into a chaotic mass of ice and pouring water, soon hidden by a vast cloud of vapor. Conan lost his footing, fell, tumbled, rolled, slid, and fetched up with braising force against a boulder on the edge of the ice flow. Snow stuffed his mouth and blinded his eyes. A big piece of ice up-ended toppled, and struck his boulder, nearly burying him in fragments of ice.

Half stunnned, Conan dragged himself out from under the mass of broken ice. Although cautious moving of his limbs showed no bones to be broken, he bore enough bruises to have been in a battle. Above him, a tremen­dous cloud of vapor and glittering ice crystals whirled up­ward from the site of the ice worm's cavern, now a black crater. Fragments of ice and slush poured into this crater from all sides. The whole level of the glacier in the area had sunk.

Little by little the scene returned to normal. The bit­ing mountain breeze blew away the clouds of vapor. The water from the melting of the ice froze again. The glacier returned to its usual near-immobility.

Battered and weary, Conan limped down into the pass. Lamed as he was, he must now walk all the way to far Nemedia or Ophir, unless he could buy, beg, borrow or steal another horse. But he went with a high heart, turn­ing his bruised face southward ... to the golden South, where shining cities lifted tall towers to a balmy sun, and where a strong man with courage and luck could win gold, wine, and soft, full-breasted women.