Conan Of The Isles

Smoke spurted from the hull of the dragon ship in a hundred places. The fire seemed to spread with preternatural speed. Faintly, Conan could hear the cries of trapped men. There was an impression of desperate efforts, half-seen through the breast-opening, to fight the fire. But soon flame spurted from the dragon's neck; then the wing-sails caught fire and blazed up...

'Amra!' screamed Sigurd. 'Another one, to port!'

Conan whirled with a sulphurous oath. A second dragon-ship was bearing down upon them from the opposite side. Since this one was travelling with the wind on her beam, her wing-sails helped the oars so that she moved much faster than the first ship had done.

'Milo!' roared Conan. 'Get that engine over to port!'

As the catapult crew struggled to lever their machine to the opposite side of the forecastle deck, the second dragon-ship quickly closed the distance. Conan swore at his own stupidity in letting the sight of the blazing first ship so rivet his attention that he had not been aware, until he heard Sigurd's bellow, of the approach of the second. 'Yakov!' he thundered. 'Hold your shot until the doors open!'

This time, however, the dragon-ship did not open the doors to its boarding party so soon. Instead, it gave out a hiss as of a thousand kettles. From its open mouth, a tongue of liquid flame shot out. It formed a blazing arch across the narrowing gulf. It struck the side and deck of the Red Lion. In an instant, drops of the burning liquid were running hither and yon about the deck. In a panic, the pirates ran back from the rail, some of them beating at smoldering spots in their clothing. The liquid gave off a dense, black smoke with an oily smell. Conan guessed at once that this was a natural oil, like that which seeped out of the ground in the deserts of Iranistan and southern Turan.

But he had no time to explain this to his men. A second hiss, and another jet of liquid flame struck the foresail, which in an instant blazed up like a torch. The catapult crew and the archers scattered, screaming, as the sail flamed over their heads and showered the deck with bits of burning sailcloth.

'Hard to starboard!' yelled Conan. 'Trim sail to run with the wind on the starboard beam!' For he saw that another flaming jet might destroy his mainsail and make the Red Lion a helpless hulk.

But it was too late. Again came the hiss and the jet, and the mainsail dissolved into a mass of leaping, thundering flame. The Red Lion, shorn of all motive power save the little triangular mizzen, slowed and wallowed. The grappling booms of the galley crashed down, driving their claws into the carack's deck. The doors opened, the plank extended, and the second boarding party rushed to the deck of the Red Lion.

These men had brown skins and slitted eyes, with knobby cheekbones and hawk noses. They wore bird-helms like those of the sorcerer on the green galley, and strange glassy armor over leathern jerkins. They carried curious weapons - swords with saw-toothed edges of crystal, hooked spears, and glassy globes held in slings. There were other weapons, which Conan could not, in the first moment, make out.

Yakov's archers should have met the boarding party with a deadly hail of arrows, but the archers had become as demoralized as the rest of the pirates. Conan roared and threatened from the poop, but still they milled and yammered witlessly in the waist. A few arrows whizzed into the boarders, but to little effect. The shafts splintered against and glanced off the fragile-looking armor of glass. A few of the crew mustered where the tongue of the boarding plank rested upon the Red Lion's rail.

Conan leaped down the ladder from the poop deck, his great broadsword in hand, to add his weight to the defenders. The men of the boarding party, he now saw, bore curious equipment: tubes that ran from their nostrils, inside the glass helmets, to containers on their backs. It must, he surmised, be breathing equipment of some sort. But why?

The answer came just as he reached the main deck. The foremost of the attackers paused to whirl slings and shower his men with glass globes, each about the size of an apple. The globes burst with a musical tinkle and shattered into thousands of shining shards. Where each globe struck, a billowing cloud of pale vapor arose.

More and more'of the globes smashed and tinkled; as fast as the wind blew away the vapor, more of the uncanny missiles renewed it. And Conan saw his men, milling about in the waist, sag and slump to the deck, unconscious. Down they went, man after man, until only a few still stood erect. The deck looked like a shambles, save that the fallen men lay peacefully and apparently unhurt, as if sleeping,