by Roland Green
Prologue
Some of the wildest country in the Hyborian kingdoms lay between two of its most civilized realms. Between Aquilonia and Nemedia a long range of mountains, beginning in the north at the Cimmerian border, slashed southward to the Tybor River.
Had it not been for these mountains, Nemedia and Aquilonia might have been a single realm. Had it not been for these mountains, honest folk in the eastern provinces of Aquilonia and the western provinces of Nemedia would also not have had to look to defending their flocks and fields, homes and families, lives and honour, as often as they did.
Yet had they lived an easier life, they might also not have grown hardy, self-reliant, full of good sense, and without patience for witlings. The hunters and farmers who grew to manhood within sight of the mountains made splendid soldiers for the hosts of both realms, and for other realms as well.
It was not only the mountains themselves that made the folk who lived in their shadow hardy. It was those who lived in the mountains: outlaws, bandits, common footpads, wild beasts of whom bears and wolves were among the least fearsome, and (or so it was rumoured) other creatures who were not of the gods’ making.
On maps in cities distant from the rocky or green-clad summits, frowning slate-hued cliffs, and deep forests that could and did swallow armies, these mountains were called the Border Range. But each village in their shadows had its own name for the portion closest to them and for each peak within that portion.
Toward the southern end of the Aquilonian side of the mountains, however, one name came most readily to all tongues. It was “the Mountains of Thanza,” and it was not uttered lightly.
No one living in the reign of King Numedides of Aquilonia could say exactly what “Thanza” was or had been. Most agreed it was long departed, but whether for two centuries or two millennia men argued long and loudly. There was even more dispute as to whether it had been a man, a tribe, a realm, or even a god briefly residing in the world of men.
All tales and tale-spinners agreed on one thing. “Thanza” had been potent in magic, making forests walk and mountains fly. Like Acheron, it had in the end fallen from the very potency of its black sorcery.
Also like Acheron, some of that sorcery was said to linger in odd places in the mountains—places which no sensible man approached closer than a day’s journey.
The men of the caravan descending into Aquilonia from the pass of Oteron were prudent, or would at least have called themselves so. Furthermore, they had little choice over the way they took from the pass down into the lowlands. Four trails twisted westward from the Pass of Oteron, one of which almost deserved the name of road. At least it was passable to light carts with stout teams in good weather.
So far, the caravan had possessed all of these. They also possessed numbers and weapons, including not a few mercenaries adept with the deadly Bossonian longbow.
Most of the caravan’s goods rode loaded on a score of pack horses and mules, but the cart in the middle held a chest too heavy for any beast of burden short of a Vendhyan elephant. The cart also would have been too heavy on this road for its eight-mule team, had it not been cunningly built around the chest.
The axle on which the two iron-shod wheels turned ran through an iron tube riveted to the underside of the chest. The poles to which the mules were hitched were hinged to stout timbers. The chest was bound by iron bands similarly riveted in place. The two teamsters and the pair of guards sat on boards mounted on the iron bands.
In short, there could be no easy stealing of the chest. They who sought the chest needed to think of either dismantling the whole cart in the face of well-aimed arrows and well-wielded steel or dragging the entire apparatus off into a forest where a squirrel barely had room to pass among the trees.
Many eyes turned to the cart when their owners thought the twelve men guarding it were not looking. The twelve were a close-mouthed lot who doled out words as if each cost them a Nemedian silver royal. Clearly they were guarding not merely the cart but a secret. As clearly they would have preferred to be on the road by themselves, had travelling these lands in such scant strength not been plain madness.
Now the road wound across nearly level ground, where once, long ago, men had dug proper drainage ditches to either side of the road. The ditches were barely an arm’s length deep now and half overgrown with brush. Beyond the brush the trees began, mostly pines thicker than two men and soaring up out of sight into the shadows aloft.
Men looked up into those shadows, then hastily turned their eyes back to the road ahead. They told themselves that the strange scurryings in the brush were squirrels, and that the hootings were owls confused by the gloom under the canopy of trees as to the time of day.
They told themselves these things while they gripped their weapons or the leading reins of their animals so tightly that their knuckles stood out white against tanned and travel-soiled skin.
Among the eyes watching from within the shadowed forest was an intensely blue pair. They were set above a high-arched nose in a tanned, thin face that few ever called beautiful but fewer still readily forgot.
Save perhaps those who had given Lysinka of Mertyos mortal offence, and whose last sight on earth had been her eyes.
There were those who said that Lysinka was not wholly human, although they were careful to hold their tongues where she might hear them. No two agreed on what other blood might flow in her veins, until there were some who said it was ice water and not blood.
Nonetheless, she had in the past ten years won a reputation second to none among the “brothers of the hills" as those who lived beyond the law in the borderlands called themselves. Her forty men and women were not the largest band among the brothers, but much the best disciplined and among the best-armed. Bands twice the strength of hers gave way when they met. As for picking a quarrel with her, one band had slain their chief outright when he talked of such folly in his cups.
Lysinka’s face now held an irritation that verged on anger. She had all but stripped her camp to bring thirty of her people to the caravan road. At least there was no loot in the camp now, or none worth the blood-feud that a raid would bring upon the attackers.
With thirty fighters it should have been simple to attack the caravan from both sides and both ends. Neither man nor beast should escape. She had sought complete victory—and then her guide had led the band astray for the best part of an hour before regaining the trail. Now there could be no crossing the road without being seen, thus no attack from both sides.
Lysinka looked at the two fighters, a man and a woman, who were tying the guide to a tree. The man already bore signs of the chieftain’s wrath. Then Lysinka whirled about so fiercely that the single waist-length braid of her blue-black hair swung like a whiplash.
“You!” she snapped. “You still say that it was a mistake, your taking us down the wrong trail?”
“I say it, and it is the truth.” The man’s voice was steady in spite of his wounds, and he met her eyes without flinching.
“Ever heard of trial by battle?” Lysinka said more quietly.
“Against you?” The man laughed. “How could justice come from that? You are my master with every weapon either of us can wield.”
“Of course,” Lysinka said, with a mirthless smile. “I was thinking of setting you free, to join the fight. If the gods leave you standing at the end of it, we know their judgement. If you die, likewise.
“But do not even think of fleeing, not where I can hear it! Then your death will be certain but not swift.” “I would have expected no less,” the man replied. He seemed readier to laugh than to plead.
“Do I have so few secrets now?” Lysinka said, almost smiling again. She s
eemed to be asking the trees and the sky rather than men.
“If there was less known about you, Lysinka,” the man said, “fewer would go in fear of you. Men fear the unknown, to be sure. What is known to be deadly, such as the great bear, the asp, or Lysinka of Mertyos, is feared even more.”
Lysinka laughed softly. “My friend, you have not earned freedom. But you have earned my oath—your death will be swift and clean, no matter what you do.”
The exchange of courtesies came to an abrupt end as a messenger slipped into the clearing. Like all but tin- rawest of Lysinka’s fighters, he had learned to walk so cat-footed that he was among the others before they heard him.
“The caravan is close to our chosen place,” the messenger said. He was a youth barely old enough to shave, but he spoke with assurance. It was known among Lysinka’s fighters, friends, and foes that she did not care for those who cringed to her.
"Cut him loose,” the chieftain said to those binding the guide "Do not let him out of your sight, or your blood will answer for it.”
Without waiting for a reply, Lysinka shifted her quiver to an easier position across her muscular back and followed the messenger.
The caravan’s guards numbered some forty, and few of them were witlings or lacking weapons craft. Such did not live long in the borderlands; or if they lived, no caravan wishing to reach safety would hire them.
However, Lysinka’s thirty had the advantage of surprise. It was an ancient Khitan king, known as both sage and warrior, who had first put into words this piece of war-wisdom:
“Surprise halves the strength of the defenders and doubles that of the attacker.”
But the king spoke only of battles in which magic played no part. In moments, the battle around the caravan ceased to be such.
Arrows whistled from behind trees, seemingly aimed at the caravan’s arches. Dim light and bad shooting sent more than a few arrows astray. Bossonian bows leaped into muscular hands and returned arrow for arrow. The return shafts did even less harm than the attackers’, aimed as they were against archers cunningly hidden among trees instead of exposed on the road.
But four of the caravan’s dead were from the twelve around the cart. Two others reeled about, past fighting for today.
From the forest, Lysinka saw the cart suddenly exposed. So did those among the caravan guards. Greed and curiosity turned them from guarding their master’s goods to seeking the chest. Renegade guards and bandits from the forest collided in a desperate close-quarters fight that boiled up around the cart.
Through the tangle of fighters stalked Lysinka. Long-limbed and swift, she chose to fight with broadsword and dagger rather than weigh herself down with a shield, and she forswore armour except a helmet and greaves. Her true armour was her sure sight, her swiftness, and the sharpness of her steel, which had kept her alive through more deadly fights than she had years.
She had cleared a path almost to the cart when the magic struck.
It was not magic that announced itself by thunderbolts, blinding light, flames, smoke, or pungent odours. Indeed, it was a moment before Lysinka or anyone else noticed that the iron bands locking the chest into the cart were beginning to glow.
The glow brightened, then wavered and crept down to the side beams of the cart. At the same time, the axles on either side of the cart snapped into showers of sawdust, as though instantly turned rotten by wood borers.
The chest thumped to the ground as the iron bands melted through and clattered free. The wheels tottered and fell over. Then the hinges where the trail poles joined the cart frame blazed like miniature stars, so that for a moment men ceased fighting to clap their hands over their eyes.
When they opened their eyes again, they saw the chest soaring toward the treetops. It trailed smoke, and some said afterwards they saw pieces falling from it. But it was still something as heavy as a half-grown bull, and it was flying faster than any bird when it vanished beyond the trees.
It was only then that Lysinka and others noticed that the cart’s remaining guards were all sprawled on the mad The lour pierced by arrows looked dead, but two had not been mortally stricken.
As for their six comrades, none of them bore any wounds or signs of violence, save a trickle of blood from the mouth of one and the nose of another. Their laces turned to the sky they would never see again, they lay as still as the ground itself.
Lysinka’s orders and the flats of her blades rallied her men. But in the face of such magic, and with none to rally them, the caravan men fled as if the death-pits of Acheron yawned at their heels. Abandoning honour, arms, and their masters’ beasts and goods alike, they fled frantically up or down the road. They would have fled into the forest, had the trees allowed their passage.
When the last terror-stricken shrieks and pounding feet faded and silence returned to the forest, Lysinka stood amidst her ashen-faced men, hands on hips. She softened her glare and her voice as she saw they were still there, and all of them armed.
“For this loyalty, my thanks.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” came a familiar voice. She turned to see the erring guide. He had a pouch, not his own, tucked into his belt, and was sheathing a short sword with an arm that streamed blood. “A wise man fears you more than any mage ever hatched.”
Lysinka laughed. “Have that arm tended to, at once. Now, did anyone see which way that cursed chest flew?”
No one answered, which made her think that perhaps “cursed” was not the best word she could have chosen. Then a woman spoke up.
“It was flying north by north-east, the last time I laid eyes on it. But the gods only know how much it could change course out of our sight.”
“Well, if they do, they’ll not be helping us unless we do our part,” Lysinka said. “We’ll gain a bit of silver off the leavings of these wretches. I’ll have our spies spread it around among the farms and villages to loosen tongues about strange things flying hither and yon.”
“Is it wise, to let so many know that we’re on the trail of that chest?” someone said.
Lysinka wanted to snarl but forced her voice to cold politeness. Free speaking was the law of her band, and now would be the worst possible time to break it.
“The tale of that chest will be all through the Thanzas before those wretches stop running,” she said. “Do you want some hedge-wizard or mushroom-grubber to find it first? The more who know that Lysinka’s fighters seek the chest, the fewer will seek it—or dare to keep it if they do find it.
“You’ve a reputation bought fairly, with steel and blood. Who will stand against it? No one I know.”
They accepted that pronouncement as from the lips of an oracle, Lysinka observed with pleasure. Within, she was less joyful.
North by north-east led into the wildest parts of the Thanzas. There were rumours of sorcerers lurking there, likewise bandit chiefs with the wits and the strength to match Lysinka.
She knew what she risked by seeking that chest. Soon, her fighters would know. But they could do nothing else. Otherwise they risked that hard-earned reputation. Then they would have neither the prize of the chest nor safety from the vengeance of rival bands.
To be sure, Lysinka knew she might in the end be travelling alone. Even this did not make her pause. She would rather be dead than live to hear it said that Lysinka of Mertyos had turned from danger.
I
The Tybor River rises in the southern end of the Border Range, within the region men call “Thanza.” Fed by melting snows from the mountains and by streams from the well-watered plains of three kingdoms, it swells rapidly. At last it merges with the briskly flowing Red River to form the mighty Khoratas, which marches through Argos to find the Western Sea in that land’s capital of Messantia.
The Tybor’s currents are not the swiftest, nor is it wholly free from shoals and rapids. But it is navigable almost up to the mountains, and for much of its length it forms the natural boundary between Ophir and its mighty neighbour to the north, Aquilonia.
; On a night in early summer, a man crouched on the Ophirean bank of the Tybor and studied what lay before him. He studied it with eyes of the same ice-blue tint as Lysinka’s.
The eyes stared out of a weather-beaten, harsh-featured face, past first youth and not unscarred but still showing a fierce alertness and a keen intelligence. Blue-black hair streamed down to the man’s shoulders. The hand that held a branch aside, to give him a better view of the river, was calloused yet sure in its every movement.
Then silently he returned the branch to its original position, and still silently he rose to his booted feet. He was garbed in heavy woollen breeches somewhat the worse for sweat and brambles, a similarly battered shirt of dark green linen, and a belt that supported broadsword, dagger, pouch, and waterskin.
As he stretched to his full height, one could see that he was all but a giant. Only among the Æsir and Vanir, and some tribes in the Black Kingdoms, did more than a handful of men reach his height. Everywhere else men had to look up, to meet those chill blue eyes—if they wished to do so.
The man’s name was Conan, and in the many lands 4 where he had wandered and fought, he was known simply as Conan the Cimmerian.
Conan was on the bank of the Tybor River because of his latest adventure, which concerned a certain potent jewel known as the Star of Khoraja. In the end, Queen Marala of Ophir had fled for safety to her Aquilonian kin while King Moranthes struggled to guard life and crown from enemies who sought both.
A land rent by civil strife was commonly a good hunting ground for the Cimmerian. He had few scruples about separating those with overmuch wealth from some of it, or splitting a few skulls in the process.
Also, in such times good mercenaries could command a high price, and Conan was both a doughty fighter and a seasoned leader of men. He had been a fighting man since he was fifteen and a captain before his twentieth year, battling in more lands than he had years.
But for every bulging purse waiting to be lifted or mercenary band seeking a battleworthy captain, there was another Ophirean who would think of the price on the Cimmerian’s head. King Moranthes had set it at a thousand gold crowns, enough to make a man wealthy for life.