The clangor of sword and ax had died away; the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow.  The bleak, pale sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blade where the dead lay as they had fallen.  The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads, drawn back in their death throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in a last invocation to Ymir the frost giant, god of a warrior race.

Across the reddened drifts and the mail-clad forms, two figures glared at each other.  In all that utter desolation, they alone moved.  The frosty sky was over them, the white illimitable plain around them, the dead men at their feet.  Slowly through the corpses they came, as ghosts might come to a tryst through the shambles of a dead world.  In the brooding silence, they stood face to face.

Both were tall men, built as powerfully as tigers.  Their shields were gone, their corselets battered and dented.  Blood dried on their mail; their swords were stained red.  Their horned helmets showed the marks of fierce strokes.  One was beardless and black-maned; the locks and beard of the other were as red as the blood on the sunlit snow.

"Man," said the latter, "tell me your name so that my brothers in Vanaheim may know who was the last of Wulfhere's band to fall before the sword of Heimdul."

"Not in Vanaheim," growled the black-haired warrior, "but in Valhalla shall you tell your brothers that you met Conan of Cimmeria!"

Heimdul roared and leaped, his sword flashing in a deadly arc.  As the singing blade crashed on his helmet, shivering into bits of blue fire, Conan staggered, and his vision was filled with red sparks.  But, as he reeled, he thrust with all the power of his broad shoulders behind the blade.  The sharp point tore through brass scales and bones and heart, and the red-haired warrior died at Conan's feet.