Conan and the Shaman's Curse by Sean A. Moore

The sharp-edged steel bit into the beast’s torso, sundering it into tumbling halves.
    The gutted Ganak, who, incredibly, still breathed, looked up into Conan’s eyes, smiling weakly before slumping to the sand. Conan glanced at the man’s ravaged belly, tom open to the spine. He would slay ten Kezatis in payment for that fallen warrior’s demise.
    Diving talons and slashing beaks filled the air around his head, giving him ample chance to attain his mark. His flashing blade clove a neck, adding a leathery head to the heap at his feet. Then the Kezati wave veered skyward, preparing for another assault.
    During this pause, the Ganaks again set the blades of their oars against the ground—all but the white-haired man, whose face paled as he stared at Conan. The others nervously averted their eyes from the Cimmerian, as if they feared to look him in the face. “Kulunga...” the giant warrior whispered, then Conan saw that the scarred man’s gaze was directed at his sword, not at him. Blood from Kezatis, thin and purple, trickled from its gleaming point.
    Conan was about to speak, but the shrieks of the swooping Kezati would have drowned his words. The Cimmerian readied his sword for the second wave of airborne warriors. He counted five fallen Ganaks, but smiled grimly at the tally of nearly thirty dead Kezati. Those spear-oars had taken their toll. Even so, thirty was but a tithe of that hook-billed army’s number. Determined to account for more of the vile things, Conan flexed his arms, poising his legs to respond more swiftly this time. A few paces away, the Ganak speaker lifted a dead man’s oar from the ground and raised it to meet the screaming Kezati.
    Conan looked into the rounded, red eyes of a vulture-beast before shearing the creature asunder. Three others plunged simultaneously toward him, talons extended like small daggers, beaks open to strike. The Cimmerian tried to spring away from two while slashing at the third, but his ankle turned on a skull beneath his foot. Stumbling, he smote blindly with his sword, stopping only one of the Kezati. The untouched pair screeched triumphantly, their beaks stretching toward Conan’s unprotected flesh.
    The Cimmerian heard a swish in the air behind him, and the white-haired Ganak’s oar swept into the path of the Kezati attackers. It batted one aside, striking the other’s wing and snapping bone. Wielding the oar like a quarter-staff, the Ganak: lashed out with the flattened end and hit one Kezati hard enough to crack its thick skull. The other, unable to fly, screamed and folded its wings. Bending its legs, it sprang toward the prone Cimmerian. Conan thrust his sword into its path, spearing it through the belly. He rolled to his feet and finished it off with a single thrust, before feeling something sharp graze the skin on the back of his neck. A sharp pain knifed through his scalp as a Kezati tore a lock of his hair from his head. He heard the sharp clack of a beak behind him.
    Whirling around, he swung his sword and blocked the slashing attack. His steel splintered the hardened beak and sheared off the top of the fleshy skull. But more of the things fell toward him from the sky, like a rain of red-feathered demons from Hell’s foulest storm clouds. Conan hacked at one beast and swivelled to face another.
    He suspected that the attacks from behind were deliberate tactics. Devious minds lurked behind those vulture-like faces. The things kept Conan shifting and spinning constantly. Two or three of them would converge on him, forcing him to move quickly or catch a beak in the back of his neck. And always another deadly wave hovered near, driving him away from the heaps of bones toward the water’s edge.
    A few paces from him, the long-haired Ganak deftly whirled an oar, knocking Kezati to the ground and spearing those who arose too slowly. The Cimmerian could afford no glance toward any of the other Ganaks, for the relentless hail of stabbing beaks and slashing