If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by Blades & Alchemy by Jack Mackenzie. This is the first of three books collecting the 
entire saga of Ka Sirtago and Poet, Mackenzie’s two lovable sword-swingers who begin by defending the empress and emperor against a deadly beast whose secrets threaten to topple a neighboring kingdom.With Sirtago’s mighty sword and Poet’s deadly twin daggers, these two adventurers travel the land, plying their trade as hired swords to the Kajaghn fighters and outsmarting a sorceress who plans to raise an eldritch being, a demon who sleeps in caves far below the deep desert. This book contains eight stories including a new story “Frozen Doom”.
Lin Carter always brought a little Tolkien to his Conan pastiches. Case in point is the shadow-bat from “The Hand of Nergal” by Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter that appeared in Conan (1967). These critters have more than a little Ringwraith in them. Conan, a mercenary, is riding in the army of the King of Turan about to engage the forces of an unruly satrap, Munthassam Khan. Over the battle field appears:
Leaning on his dripping blade and resting his sinewy arms for a moment, he stared at the weird shadow-things. For they seemed to be more shadow than substance–translucent to the sight, like wisps of noisome black vapour or the shadowy ghosts of gigantic vampire bats. Evil, slitted eyes of green flame glared through their smoky forms.
The army’s general, Bakra of Akif, faces off against one of these shadowy fiends:
With a ringing oath, the proud commander drew his tulwar and laid about him with the flat of the blade. Perhaps he could have rallied the ranks, but one of the devil-shadows swooped on him from behind. It folded vaporous, filming wings about him in a grisly embrace and he stiffened. Conan could see his face, suddenly pale with staring, frozen eyes of fear–and he saw the features through the enveloping wings, like a white mask behind a veil of thin, black lace.
The army flees, though Conan attempts to turn the tide. The panicking soldiers ignore him and run. The Cimmerian ends up fighting one of the bats himself:
Setting his feet squarely, he swung the great sword, pivoting on slim hips, with the full strength of back, shoulders, and mighty arms behind the blow. The sword flashed in a whistling arc of steel, cleaving the phantom in two. But it was, as he had guessed, a thing without substance, for his sword encountered no more resistance than the empty air. The force of the blow swung him off balance, and he fell sprawling on the stony plain.
Above him, the shadowy thing hovered. His sword had torn a great rent through it, as a man’s hand breaks a thread of rising smoke. But, even as he watched, the vaporous body reformed. Eyes like sparks of green hell-fire blazed down at him, alive with a horrible mirth and an inhuman hunger.
Striking the bat, Conan’s sword-arm goes numb (remember Merry stabbing the Witch-King?). But the shadow-bat flees when the Cimmerian pulls an amulet from his pouch. He had luckily found this bauble the day before. All the shadow-bats leave and do not appear again in this tale. Conan will deal with the evil god, Nergal, whose severed hand created the magical flyers but not the winged fiends again.
This version of the tale was adapted into comic book form by Roy Thomas in Conan the Barbarian #30, September 1973. The artwork was by John Buscema and Ernie Chan. The colorist, Glynis Wein, got to have some fun with rendering the bats in blue ink to make them stand out.
Now we know that these are Lin Carter monsters simply because the fragment that he worked from has survived and even been the source of several other comic interpretations. Howard did not have bats. As I said before, they came from Lin, and he was partly inspired by Tolkien.
Lin’s story suggests that touching these ephemeral beasties fills the body with cold since they have been summons from the depths of space. This is a nice Lovecraftian touch if not Tolkienian. Howard used it himself in “The Vale of Lost Women” with its Devil of the Outer Dark. The one big difference is that these shadow-bats are ghostly while the Devil was solid enough for Conan to fight in the usual way. No amulet was involved in defeating it, just cold steel.
The Conan saga features several winged monsters including the shadow-bats but sorcery turned against armies is not that common:
The grisly host of flying terrors had driven the army of General Bakra from the field, or slain those that did not flee fast enough. But the grinning host of Munthassem Khan they had not touched– had ignored, almost as if the soldiers of Yaralet and the shadowy nightmare things had been partners in some unholy alliance of black sorcery.
This image of an army being harassed by flying, sorcerous monsters is again, Tolkien. In The Return of the King (1955), the armies of Gondor and Rohan fight the creatures of Mordor on the Pelennor Fields. We get oliphants and orcs but also the Nazgul flying around on their fell beasts. This is the picture Carter brings to Conan just as Robert Jordan will have armies of orcs in Conan the Invincible (1982). It’s an understandable desire to bring these two franchises together, being the two pillars of heroic fantasy, but I have to admit, I don’t usually care for it. The shadow-bats seem less egregious but just as obvious. The adapters that came after Carter felt these monsters too Carterian and did the story without them.
Conclusion
As a monster writer I am always curious about creatures that are seemingly invincible. Of course, Conan in his best Mary-Sue fashion possesses the one thing that can repel these phantom killers. Oddly, the shadow-bats are phantoms but can kill the human soldiers quite effectively. Do their phantom limbs become solid? This is never explained. And to be honest, Carter doesn’t really have time to get into it. The shadow-bats are there to destroy the army and allow Conan to go to the city of Yaralet with the slave Hildico and onto the ultimate confrontation between Nergal and Tammuz. This battle is witnessed from afar and as with all such titanic fights, leaves the hero to be spectator rather than combatant (as most Ray Harryhausen movies can show you). I kinda wish the shadow-bats would show up again but they have been dispersed by Munthassam Khan and can not be recalled.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
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