Red Nails, Polished Read online

as much a part of her as her lusts and rages. She could endure a situation like this with a coolness impossible to a civilized person.

  "Can't we get into the trees and get away, traveling like apes through the branches?" he asked desperately.

  She shook her head. "I thought of that. The branches that touch the crag down there are too light. They'd break with our weight. Besides, I have an idea that devil could tear up any tree around here by its roots."

  "Well, are we going to sit here on our rumps until we starve, like that?" he cried furiously, kicking the skull clattering across the ledge. "I won't do it! I'll go down there and cut her damned head off--"

  Conyn had seated herself on a rocky projection at the foot of the spire. She looked up with a glint of admiration at his blazing eyes and tense, quivering figure, but, realizing that he was in just the mood for any madness, she let none of her admiration sound in her voice.

  "Sit down," she grunted, catching his by his wrist and pulling his down on her knee. He was too surprised to resist as she took his sword from his hand and shoved it back in its sheath. "Sit still and calm down. You'd only break your steel on her scales. She'd gobble you up at one gulp, or smash you like an egg with that spiked tail of hers. We'll get out of this jam some way, but we shan't do it by getting chewed up and swallowed."

  He made no reply, nor did he seek to repulse her arm from about his waist. He was frightened, and the sensation was new to Valerian of the Red Sisterhood. So he sat on his companion's--or captor's--knee with a docility that would have amazed Zarallo, who had anathematized his as a he-devil out of Hell's seraglio.

  Conyn played idly with his curly yellow locks, seemingly intent only upon her conquest. Neither the skeleton at her feet nor the monster crouching below disturbed her mind or dulled the edge of her interest.

  The boy's restless eyes, roving the leaves below them, discovered splashes of color among the green. It was fruit, large, darkly crimson globes suspended from the boughs of a tree whose broad leaves were a peculiarly rich and vivid green. He became aware of both thirst and hunger, though thirst had not assailed his until he knew he could not descend from the crag to find food and water.

  "We need not starve," he said. "There is fruit we can reach."

  Conyn glanced where he pointed.

  "If we ate that we wouldn't need the bite of a dragon," she grunted. "That's what the black people of Kush call the Apples of Derketa. Derketa is the King of the Dead. Drink a little of that juice, or spill it on your flesh, and you'd be dead before you could tumble to the foot of this crag."

  "Oh!"

  He lapsed into dismayed slience. There seemed no way out of their predicament, he refleced gloomily. He saw no way of escape, and Conyn seemed to be concerned only with his supple waist and curly tresses. If she was trying to formulate a plan of escape she did not show it.

  "If you'll take your hands off me long enough to climb up on that peak," he said presently, "you'll see something that will surprise you."

  She cast his a questioning glance, then obeyed with a shrug of her massive shoulders. Clinging to the spirelike pinnacle, she stared out over the forest roof.

  She stood a long moment in silence, posed like a bronze statue on the rock.

  "It's a walled city, right enough," she muttered presently. "Was that where you were going, when you tried to send me off alone to the coast?"

  "I saw it before you came. I knew nothing of it when I left Sukhmet."

  "Who'd have thought to find a city here? I don't believe the Stygians ever penetrated this far. Could black people build a city like that? I see no herds on the plain, no signs of cultivation, or people moving about."

  "How can you hope to see all that, at this distance?" he demanded.

  She shrugged her shoulders and dropped down on the shelf.

  "Well, the folk of the city can't help us just now. And they might not, if they could. The people of the Black Countries are generally hostile to strangers. Probably stick us full of spears--"

  She stopped short and stood silent, as if she had forgotten what she was saying, frowining down at the crimson spheres gleaming among the leaves.

  "Spears!" she muttered. "What a blasted fool I am not to have thought of that before! That shows what a pretty man does to a woman's mind."

  "What are you talking about?" he inquired.

  Without answering his question, she descended to the belt of leaves and looked down through them. The great brute squatted below, watching the crag with the frightful patience of the reptile folk. So might one of her breed have glared up at their troglodyte ancestors, treed on a high-flung rock, in the dim dawn ages. Conyn cursed her without heat, and began cutting branches, reaching out and severing them as far from the end as she could reach. The agitation of the leaves made the monster restless. She rose from her haunches and lashed her hideous tail, snapping off saplings as if they had been toothpicks. Conyn watched her warily from the corner of her eye, and just as Valerian believed the dragon was about to hurl herself up the crag again, the Cimmerian drew back and climbed up to the ledge with the branches she had cut. There were three of these, slender shafts about seven feet long, but not larger than her thumb. She had also cut several strands of tough, thin vine.

  "Branches too light for spear-hafts, and creepers no thicker than cords," she remarked, indicating the foliage about the crag. "It won't hold our weight--but there's strength in union. That's what the Aquilonian renegades used to tell us Cimmerians when they came into the hills to raise an army to invade their own country. But we always fight by clans and tribes."

  "What the devil has that got to do with those sticks?" he demanded.

  "You wait and see."

  Gathering the sticks in a compact bundle, she wedged her poniard hilt between them at one end. Then with the vines she bound them together and, when she had completed her task, she had a spear of no small strength, with a sturdy shaft seven feet in length.

  "What good will that do?" he demanded. "You told me that a blade couldn't pierce her scales--"

  "She hasn't got scales all over her," answered Conyn. "There's more than one way of skinning a panther."

  Moving down to the edge of the leaves, she reached the spear up and carefully thrust the blade through one of the Apples of Derketa, drawing aside to avoid the darkly purple drops that dripped from the pierced fruit. Presently she withdrew the blade and showed his the blue steel stained a dull purplish crimson.

  "I don't know whether it will do the job or not," quoth she. "There's enough poison there to kill an elephant, but--well, we'll see."

  Valerian was close behind her as she let herself down among the leaves. Cautiously holding the poisoned pike away from her, she thrust her head through the branches and addressed the monster.

  "What are you waiting down there for, you misbegotten offspring of questionable parents?" was one of her more printable queries. "Stick your ugly head up here again, you long-necked brute--or do you want me to come down there and kick you loose from your illegitimate spine?"

  There was more of it--some of it crouched in eloquence that made Valerian stare, in spite of his profane education among the seafarers. And it had its effect on the monster. Just as the incessant yapping of a dog worries and enrages more constitutionally silent animals, so the clamorous voice of a woman rouses fear in some bestial chest s and insane rage in others. Suddenly and with appalling quickness, the mastodonic brute reared up on its mighty hindlegs and elongated its neck and body in a furious effort to reach this vociferous pigmy whose clamor was disturbing the primeval silence of its ancient realm.

  But Conyn had judged her distance with precision. Some five feet below him the mighty head crashed terribly but futilely through the leaves. And as the monstrous mouth gaped like that of a great snake, Conyn drove her spear into the red angle of the jawbone hinge. She struck downward with all the strength of both arms, driving the long poniard blade to the hilt in flesh, sinew and bone.


  Instantly the jaws clashed convulsively together, severing the triplepieced shaft and almost percipitating Conyn from her perch. She would have fallen but for the boy behind her, who caught her sword-belt in a desperate grasp. She clutched at a rocky projection, and grinned her thanks back at him.

  Down on the ground the monster was wallowing like a dog with pepper in its eyes. She shook her head from side to side, pawed at it, and opened her mouth repeatedly to its widest extent. Presently she got a huge front foot on the stump of the shaft and managed to tear the blade out. Then she threw up her head, jaws wide and spouting blood, and glared up at the crag with such concentrated and intelligent fury that Valerian trembled and drew his sword. The scales along her back and flanks turned from rusty brown to a dull lurid red. Most horribly the monster's silence was broken. The sounds that issued from her bloodstreaming jaws did not sound like anything that could have been produced by an earthly creation.

  With harsh, grating roars, the dragon hurled herself at the crag that was the citadel of her enemies. Again and again her mighty head crashed upward through the branches, snapping vainly on empty air. She hurled her full ponderous weight against the rock until it vibrated from base to crest. And rearing upright she gripped it with her front legs like a woman and tried to tear it up by the roots, as if it had been a tree.

  This exhibition of primordial fury