The Shadow of the Vulture is a short story by American writer Robert E. Howard, first published in The Magic Carpet Magazine, January 1934.

In Istanbul, the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent sends home members of a Holy Roman diplomatic envoy whom he has kept imprisoned for nine months.

The Ottoman Grand Vizier Pargalı Ibrahim Pasha entrusts the widely feared soldier, Mikhal Oglu, with hunting down Von Kalmbach and retrieving his head.

He meets a belligerent, red-haired woman who fights alongside the men – ‘Red’ Sonya of Rogatino, revealed to be the sister of Suleiman's favourite harem girl, Hurrem Sultan.

Von Kalmbach, however, is drugged and kidnapped by the traitors in Vienna – an Armenian merchant and his son, who had been in communication with the Sultan's vizier and hoped to claim the knight's head.

It was revealed in the narrative that she was sibling to the favourite of Sulemain himself, the Ruthenian harem girl Roxelana, who ended up marrying him as his sole legal wife.

Roy Thomas and Barry Smith, in Marvel Comics' Conan the Barbarian title, transposed Red Sonya into the Hyborian Age, changing the spelling of her name in the process.