Conan: The Road of Kings

by Wagner, Karl Edward

  Capellas managed to lead his forces across half of Zingara, before Conan at length overtook him on the banks of the Thunder River. This was the sternest test yet for the Zingaran Revolutionary Army, as Capellas’ were seasoned troops and the pretender was an experienced field commander. The battle raged in the balance throughout the long day, until Conan’s mercenary reserves broke Capellas’ flank and forced his routed troops into the river. Cutting off a limb to escape the trap, Capellas sacrificed his encircled troops and retreated northward with his cavalry. Conan gave pursuit once the invaders trapped against Thunder River had been annihilated, finally catching up with Capellas as he forded the Alimane to safety in Poitain. Conan had crossed at another ford, and met Capellas’ cavalry in midstream. The depredations Conan had witnessed along the pretender’s advance and retreat sealed the man’s fate when Capellas protested that Conan’s ambush had broken international treaty, and Capellas never crossed the Alimane.

  Then came word that the savage Picts, whose tribes dwelt in the wilderness beyond Zingara’s northwestern borders, had discovered that the frontier forts were no longer garrisoned, and were making bold raids along the Black River.

  Conan marched his weary troops across the northern frontier, knowing from experience that once the Picts decided they could cross the frontier with impunity, they’d burn every settlement between the border and Kordava. By forced marches the Zingaran Revolutionary Army reached the frontier in time to regarrison the forts that had been left to shift for themselves following the reorganization of the army. Several Pictish raiding parties, emboldened by past success, were intercepted and wiped out. The Picts retreated into their impenetrable wilderness, to wait for Zingara to doze again.

  Thus when Conan at last returned to Kordava, he had been out of touch with events in the capital for many weeks. At times Mordermi had dispatched emissaries, other times vague gossip and rumors reached him. Conan had been on the move almost constantly, fighting all along the frontier. The Cimmerian had too much to worry about with his army to give a thought to the longwinded and pointless debates that were doubtless preoccupying the members of the revolutionary committee. Mordermi sent word to him where he was needed, and Conan had no curiosity beyond completing his task. Now, the hinterlands quiet if not peaceful, the Cimmerian elected to return to Kordava to reprovision and let his men enjoy a well deserved rest.

  There had been changes during Conan’s absence.

  This became evident the moment Conan entered Kordava. A long row of wooden stakes had been set into the earth before the city’s main gate. Impaled upon the stakes, decomposing human heads grinned crookedly at those who passed by. It was a common enough practice to display the heads of executed criminals in such a grisly fashion. Conan wondered whether Mordermi had decided to discontinue the old custom of leaving bodies swaying upon the Dancing Floor or whether the gallows had been too busy of late for this refinement.

  The Cimmerian halted, doubting his eyes. Perhaps this was some distortion of decay. He knew it wasn’t. One of the heads that greeted his return was that of Carico.

  Conan continued to stare in disbelief. Ranging along the row of severed heads, he was able to recognize others whose faces he thought he knew—men he remembered as friends and followers of Carico.

  Conan spurred his horse for the palace, after ordering his troops to their barracks. As he rode through the streets, he saw recent signs of civil strife. Shops stood broken-fronted and empty; crumpled walls showed the charred ends of timbers. An atmosphere of tension and fear overshadowed Kordava, where an aura of hope had existed at the time of Conan’s departure. Squads of the Final Guard were stationed throughout the city, standing silently in readiness to destroy.

  Conan had heard nothing of this—clearly a major riot had taken place very recently. Had there been no time to summon the army back to Kordava? Or had Mordermi been confident that the Final Guard could deal with the situation? And why the violence? Why was Carico’s head given a felon’s disgrace?

  Mordermi would know the answers. Conan would find Mordermi.

  The palace was closely guarded by the warriors of black stone as well as by a strong garrison of the Zingaran Revolutionary Army. Several officers whom Conan did not recognize rushed forward to receive their general and to escort him to Mordermi. As he moved through the palace, Conan could not fail to notice that during his absence Mordermi seemed to have renovated the looted palace on a scale of luxury Rimanendo would have envied.

  Mordermi greeted Conan warmly and ushered him in to his private chambers. “You got back before I could reach you,” he explained, pouring wine for the Cimmerian. “Things came to a head here the other night. Nothing I wasn’t prepared to handle, but if I hadn’t had the Final Guard to rely on, it might have been a different story.”

  Conan glared at Callidios, who lounged insouciantly in one of the chairs. “What happened?” Conan demanded. “I saw a sight I’d never thought to see outside the city gate.”

  “Then you can probably guess what took place,” Mordermi told him, his tone expressing anguish. “They never could agree on anything—the. revolutionary committee, that is. When the White Rose was no more than a debating society, it mattered little who argued what. When the White Rose suddenly was thrust in a position of power, and their philosophies could be put into effect—then their differing ideas as to their new order touched off deadlier dissension. It was building up at about the time you took the field. Avvinti maintained that only the landed classes should have a voice in government; Carico insisted that every man, beggar or lord, should have an equal vote. You’ve heard them go at it. I’d hoped that Santiddio might get them to accept some sort of compromise, but this was not to be.”

  Mordermi paused to take a swallow of wine. His face was bitter. “Avvinti was assassinated—poisoned. It was obvious that Carico had ordained his death. Just how deeply Carico had conspired became evident when I ordered his arrest. Carico’s faction broke away from the revolutionary committee, began rioting in the streets demanding his release. I regret that Carico had decided that a second revolution would place him in power. It pained me to order his execution, but I was left with no choice. Callidios summoned the Final Guard to suppress the street riots. A certain amount of bloodshed was unavoidable, but order has been restored.”

  “And Santiddio?” Conan inquired grimly.

  “Santiddio reacted in a rather hysterical manner when I was forced to dissolve the revolutionary committee and to declare martial law. This is purely an emergency measure to maintain order, of course, and one which I’m sure will be short term. However, Santiddio was not inclined to see reason. He began making some totally false accusations—very painful to me, considering our long friendship.”

  “What happened to Santiddio?” Conan pressed him.

  “Under the circumstances, I had no recourse but to order his arrest. However unfounded and irrational such charges clearly are, I can’t have a popular figure publicly accusing me of betraying the revolution for my own purposes.”

  “Just how unfounded and irrational are such charges?” Conan demanded.

  “It’s good that I know you are my friend, Conan. Otherwise that might have been a very dangerous attitude. As you yourself know best, I have enemies everywhere—at the borders of Zingara and here in my own palace. I’ve fought hard to win my throne, and I’m not about to let others steal what I have won.”

  “Carico might have fought Avvinti in the heat of anger,” Conan mused, “but Carico was no poisoner. Those were some of Avvinti’s well-born friends in command of the palace guard, weren’t they? Removing Carico must have set you in good with the gentry; Carico’s talk of turning their estate over to the people had them worried.”

  Mordermi refilled Conan’s goblet. “You know as well as I do that most of Carico’s ideas were lunacy. And you’re jumping to the same absurd conclusions that Santiddio did. You have to remember that words and actions taken out of context may have a sinister aspect that is utterly
without real basis. For example, your defense of the barricades at Eel Street made you a hero. And yet, it has been reported to me that you actually deserted your post at one point, and that you made a brash statement to the effect that if Mordermi wasn’t standing by, you’d take command of the revolutionary movement yourself. Desertion and treason—taken out of context, of course, but grounds to order your arrest.”

  “Is that a threat?” Conan growled, starting forward. “Is that how Santiddio was arrested? Where is he, and let me talk to him!”

  “That’s already being arranged,” Mordermi said truthfully. “I was afraid that primitive code of honor might cause problems in getting you to listen to reason.”

  Mordermi’s voice echoed strangely, and his face seemed to blur. Conan snarled an angry reply, but his tongue felt thick. The Cimmerian glared at the goblet Mordermi had given him. It was too heavy to hold. Conan heard it crash to the floor, as he launched his body toward Mordermi. He never heard the sound of his own fall.

  Mordermi looked down at the unconscious Cimmerian, his expression regretful. “Maybe after he’s had time to sit and think about it, he’ll be more reasonable. After all, he’s no more than a barbarian adventurer. What does it matter to him whose cause he fights for, so long as it’s the winning side?”

  “You know better than that,” Callidios said. He stirred the Cimmerian’s loose form with a boot toe, admiring the effect of his craft. “He was your pawn because he trusted you. A king must know when a pawn is no longer of use to him.”

  XVI

  THE REAPER

  Eventually there came a time when the blackness of his mind merged into the blackness of a dungeon cell. Conan lifted himself with his arms, retched as the effort stunned him with nausea.

  “Here, drink some of this.” Santiddio held a basin of tepid water to his lips.

  Conan drank clumsily, his tongue dry and metallic. He rinsed his mouth and spat onto the filthy straw, seeking to cleanse the acrid taste from his mouth.

  “So,” said Santiddio. “Even you.”

  Conan made his eyes focus upon his surroundings.

  They were in one of the cells beneath the palace fortress. Faint torchlight trickled in from the corridor beyond. He and Santiddio were thrown together in a dirty cell barely large enough for one man. A thick door of iron-bound oak planks made up one side of the narrow cubicle, stone walls the others. A peephole was set with stout iron bars. There was a long row of such cells, with a guardroom at the end of the corridor that gave access to the dungeon stairs. At the other end was a torture chamber, kept in good .repair during Rimanendo’s reign.

  Conan remembered this dungeon well from what the victorious rebels had found here the night they stormed the tyrant’s castle.

  “What happened after I left Kordava?” Conan asked him, struggling to sit up against the dank wall.

  “Everything went sour. We thought that all our dreams were coming true for us; the dream became a nightmare.”

  “Mordermi told me Avvinti was poisoned. I saw Carico’s head impaled outside the city gate—Mordermi admitted to that murder. He claimed Carico was plotting a second revolution.”

  “I’ve heard that tale. The people of Kordava didn’t like it any better than you did. There were riots in the streets to protest Mordermi’s arrest of the revolutionary committee—and that was when the devil sent out the Final Guard to restore order. Mordermi called the massacre he ordered a conspiracy by Carico and his faction.”

  “I can’t understand this from Mordermi,” Conan swore.

  “Maybe none of us ever really knew what was going on in his heart. Sandokazi thinks Callidios has some sort of hold over him. Callidios would be capable of anything.”

  Santiddio scratched at the raw scabs that crusted his face. They hadn’t gulled him into a cell with a gift of drugged wine.

  “I should have seen this coming,” he said bitterly. “We accepted Callidios with open arms. Our cause was just; use any means to achieve its goal. Maybe our revolution would have been crushed without Callidios, maybe we could have beaten Rimanendo on our own in time. It never occurred to us that the same weapon could be used to crush our own cause. After all, Mordermi has been a champion of the common folk for years, and Callidios was a fellow revolutionary.”

  “Of course, in retrospect we were all probably too busy squabbling among ourselves to pay attention to anything other than our personal theories as to how the new government should be organized. I suppose that in time we’d eventually have come together in compromise. Mordermi took matters into his own hands, instead. He’s discredited the White Rose by making it appear that we were each of us conspiring against the others.”

  “The great lords will follow any ruler who doesn’t pose a threat to the present social order. They’d have been pleased to see Avvinti on the throne; certainly they’d never have accepted Carico’s radical social changes. Even with the army, it would have been a long struggle just to enforce any moderate social reforms beyond Kordava. With this coup Mordermi removed a dangerous rival in Avvinti, then won the allegiance of the aristocracy by blaming the murder on Carico, dissolving the revolutionary committee, and destroying the White Rose under the pretense of restoring civil order. You can be certain that it wasn’t coincidence that Mordermi waited until you were far in the field—winning his battles—before he made his move against us.”

  Santiddio seemed almost to admire the enormity of the coup. He shrugged his shoulders in resignation. “So Mordermi now looks like everything a king should be to the great lords. They’ll not interfere with his reign now. You secured peace along the frontier for him. Now he’ll simply move his officers into the army you put together for him. And he still has Callidios and the Final Guard. I think it will not be very long before we see Zingaran soldiers marching into Argos and Aquilonia.”

  “They may well so march,” Conan allowed gloomily, “but I doubt we’ll be here to see them. Mordenni knows he can’t let us live after this. I’m surprised to be sitting here talking with you. It would have been just as easy to spirit the poison that Avvinti drank into my wine.”

  “Thus far Mordermi has sought to maintain a façade of legality to his actions,” Santiddio suggested. “Sandokazi’s plea spared my life thus far, I’m certain. Perhaps Mordenni hopes he can dupe you into rendering him some further service. But in time, once the people have forgotten the heroes of the Pit, we’ll be tried on some invented charges, found guilty of treason, and sent to feed ravens on the Dancing Floor.”

  Conan laughed without humor. “You and I have followed a long and difficult road, just to find ourselves walking in a circle. Are we two once again to stand together upon the Dancing Floor?”

  “Well, I don’t think we’d better count on Mordermi for our rescue this time,” Santiddio grinned sourly.

  “I think we may have owed that one to Sandokazi,” Conan said. “What will happen to her now?”

  “She has thrown her lot in with Mordermi,” Santiddio sighed. “Not that I could expect her to join us in a cell, when she will wear a queen’s crown if she remains with Mordermi. She loves the treacherous bastard, and she’ll not desert him even now.”

  “Nor will she stand by and let her brother rot in a cell,” a new voice spoke.

  Conan was on his feet in an instant, despite the stupor of the drug that still left his muscles rubbery.

  Sandokazi peered in at them through the barred peephole. Her eyes held a wild, dreamy gaze.

  “’Kazi!” Santiddio blurted. “Does Mordermi know you’re here?”

  “No, nor does anyone else,” his sister smiled slowly. “He and Callidios are deep in schemes again. I’m certain Callidios wants him to order Conan’s execution immediately, but Mordermi hasn’t sunk so deep into the renegade’s influence to agree that easily to a friend’s murder.”

  “Your lover’s scruples in such matters are well known,” Conan snarled. “He and I will share another drink to our friendship, but the wine will be of my choosing
.”

  “You mustn’t blame Mordermi for what has happened,” Sandokazi begged him. “Mitra, why didn’t we heed your counsel when the Stygian first crept into our lives!”

  “That’s another mistake I’ll see to when I get out of here,” Conan vowed. “It was Mordermi who poured drugged wine for me.”

  “If it had been Callidios, you’d never have awakened,” she argued fiercely. “How can you both be such fools! Mordermi was as deadly a foe of Rimanendo and his tyranny as any of us were. While we discussed ways of elevating the masses through social reform, Mordermi was distributing the spoils of his thefts to the poor. Callidios changed all this! I scarcely know Mordermi these days. That sorcerer has a spell over Mordermi. Kill Callidios, and Mordermi will be freed of his dark influence.”

  “What are you doing here, ’Kazi?” her brother asked again. “Did Mordermi send you to make a truce?”

  “I’m here to set you free,” Sandokazi explained, adding a wild giggle that made both men stare at her.

  She held up a set of keys. “I’ve spied on Callidios,” she told them, slurring her words somewhat. “I know where he keeps his precious yellow lotus. I dropped crumbs of the dried gum into the pipe bowl, as I’ve watched the Stygian do. But I crouched outside the guardroom door while they slumbered over their cups, and I blew the heavy fumes into the chamber. The air is still down here; the fumes grew deeper, and so did the snores of the guards. No one awoke when I crept in and stole the keys to the cells.”