The others drew back as the girl began to circle the smithy. Her path spiralled outward, her dark cloak swirling about her. Although she did not move swiftly, her movements were quite deliberate. She cocked her head as if she were listening for something. She must have heard it because the pattern of her movements shifted, narrowing, leading her to a shadowed corner.
'There, Father, I have it.'
She gestured casually and a wooden plank peeled back as if a leather flap. She reached down into the dark recess and removed a golden box. Bearing it in both hands, she approached her father. On bended knee, with her head bowed, she raised the box to him.
Khalar Zym set his great sword down and reached for the box with trembling hands. He removed the lid and stared. His eyes glistened. His mouth hung open for a heartbeat. He grasped the thing in the box and raised it up with the gentle reverence of a father holding his child for the first time.
'You have served me well, daughter. Your mother would be proud.'
The girl’s head remained bowed, but she smiled most contentedly.
Khalar Zym rubbed a thumb over the fragment of bone lovingly, then his eyes narrowed and his visage became cruel. 'Oh, Cimmerian, you could have saved me much trouble. As I would have given you glory, so shall I now give you pain. But how? Oh, yes, yes . . .'
He gazed at his daughter. 'Marique, would you like a brother? We can take this Cimmerian, bend him to our will.'
The girl shot Conan a venomous glance, then smiled up at her father. 'As you wish.'
'My lord, you cannot.' Lucius shook his head, a bloody cloth held to his face.
' ‘Cannot,’ Lucius? Did you say I cannot do something?'
The large man blanched. 'No, my lord, I meant . . .' The Aquilonian drew his short sword. 'I meant that I hoped you would give me the honour of dispatching this barbarian.'
'While that might give you satisfaction, Lucius, it will do nothing to give my Cimmerian friend pain.' Khalar Zym tapped the bit of mask against his chin. 'No, I know what we shall do. Remo, Akhoun, more chains. The rest of you, gather the men, fire the rest of the village.'
At Khalar Zym’s instruction, his henchmen attached another chain to the helmet and looped it over a rafter. This they placed in Conan’s hands in the middle of the forge floor, while they hung a counterbalance above his father’s head. The boy hung on tightly. The first quiver of his arms had sent a droplet of burning metal sizzling into his father’s shoulder.
Khalar Zym crouched beside Corin. 'This is the only way which I may punish you, Cimmerian. You do not cry out with pain. You fear no insult to honour. The worst I can do to you is to let you watch your son die trying to save you. And we both know, you and I, as fathers, that is precisely what shall happen.'
Zym stood and led his men from the forge. Torches thrown on the roof and laid against the walls from outside started fires that greedily consumed the building. Marique lingered, studying the great sword. She smiled at her reflection in its blade, then picked it up. She hesitated, and in the reflection her eyes met Conan’s.
She spun, watching him warily. 'It is a good thing you die here, Cimmerian. Were you to live, you would prove troublesome.' She gazed after her father, then strode quickly to Conan’s side and licked sweat and blood from his cheek. Her voice became a whisper. 'Not that this might prove wholly unwelcome, but we shall never know.'
In a swirl of cape she departed. From outside, men cheered their great victory, but the rising crackle of flames swallowed all sound of their retreat.
Corin met his son’s gaze. Though collared and chained to the helmet, begrimed, bloody, and exhausted, he did not look defeated. 'Conan, you cannot save me. Save yourself.'
Already the chain had begun to get hot, but the boy shook his head. 'A Cimmerian warrior does not fear death.'
'Nor does he rush foolishly to embrace it.' Corin raised a hand to the chain on his collar. 'Let go of the chain, boy.'
'I’m not afraid to die.' A fiery coal fell from the ceiling, burning Conan’s cheek. It smarted fiercely, but to brush it away would be to doom his father. Conan snarled against the pain, but held on.
'Conan, look at me.'
The boy looked up into his father’s eyes. 'Your mother . . . she wanted more for you in this life than fire and blood. As do I.' Corin’s grip tightened on his chain. 'I love you, son.'
Corin yanked and his body fell. The chain ripped free of Conan’s grasp. Molten metal poured down over the smith, outlining his features in red-gold as the forge’s light had often done, then liquefied them.
Conan darted toward his father, but the blast of heat from the metal drove him back. A rafter cracked, cutting him off. The heat forced him to the doorway. The boy stumbled through, expecting a spear thrust or an arrow. He tumbled into a snow bank, burying his face and hands. The snow cooled his seared flesh but could do nothing to erase the image of his father’s death.
The boy rolled over and looked at his blistered hands. Each link had left its mark on his flesh. He tried to remember his father’s hands, so big, so callused, and yet so gentle when circumstance required. Already that memory had begun to fade within the liquid metal pool that had consumed his father. Conan pressed his hands into the snow again and waited for numbness to swallow the pain.
He had no idea how long he lay there. Though he did not fear death, in that moment he was not so certain that he was fond of living. He knew that if Crom meant him to live, he would live―the courage and strength to do so would have been born in him. But there, with the forge burning and the stink of roasting flesh filling the grey smoke, Conan saw little reason to move.
Then he heard something. Not a random sound like fire’s crackle or the hiss of bubbling water. A voice. A voice free from pain and full of joy. In this place, at this time, that could herald only one thing.
Conan rolled to his feet and looked about warily. There, through a swirl of smoke, he saw two things. A raider, one of the heavy cavalry, kneeling over the body of a woman. He grabbed a double handful of her hair and pulled back, stretching her throat and opening her mouth in a silent scream. Then he pressed the edge of his sword to her hairline and, in one swift stroke, harvested her scalp.
And, halfway between the raider and Conan, a Cimmerian sword had been stabbed into a snow bank, forgotten.
Swiftly and silently, fluidly, the last Cimmerian warrior ran forward. He grasped the sword’s hilt with his left hand, mindless of the pain of bursting blisters. He splashed through a puddle of snow melt that he could have run around, because he wanted the raider to know he was coming.
The man heard the sound and half turned toward it. His right hand came up to ward off the sword, but Conan’s first cut separated wrist from arm. Before the raider could scream, a second blow dented his helmet. He sagged to the side, dazed, and stared up.
Conan buried the sword in his throat and watched the light flow out of his eyes.
Conan sat down beside the dead raider and looked at the burning village. The boy he had been that morning would not have wanted to cry, but could never have held back the tears. The man he had become understood the desire to weep, but could never let him give in to weakness. Crom cared not for the lamentations of mortals, and Conan, determined to be make Marique’s comment into a prophecy, had no time to mourn.
As night came on and the warmth of fires faded, he freed the sword from the raider’s throat, took a knife from his body, scavenged meagre supplies, and set off to find his grandfather.
IX
CONAN AWOKE WITH a start. He couldn’t feel his hands. He pulled them from beneath the heavy aurochs skin that was all but smothering him. They’d become as large as hams, or at least the cloth wrapping them was. And when he tried to tense his fingers, he couldn’t move them much, but something inside the cloth squished and a noxious scent poured out.
A stick clacked against the foot of the bed. 'Boy, if you pull those poultices apart again, I will let your hands rot off.'
He looked and could only see
a silhouette moving through the hut’s darkened interior. Still, there was no mistaking the voice. 'Grandfather?' Conan meant to ask the question forcefully―befitting a warrior―but it came out as a croak, and a weak one at that.
'No other fool would take you in, Conan.' The old man stirred coals in the hearth, then tossed on more wood. A little blaze began to flare. Connacht, leaning heavily on the stick, walked to the bedside and peered down at the boy. He placed a hand on his forehead. 'Good. I think the fever’s broken. Death wanted you, boy, but we cheated him, we did.'
'Water?'
The old man helped Conan sit up and drink. He didn’t let the boy have too much, or drink it quickly. With his bandaged hands he couldn’t have managed the cup anyway, so Conan drank at the dictated pace. He nodded when done.
'How long?'
'A week, though now’s the first you’re right in the head.' Connacht shook his head. 'Came in fevered. Burns on your hands all infected. Had the blood poison. Lucky for you I remembered what a Shemite healer did for me once. Had to use bear fat instead of goat. Smells worse, seems to work the same.'
Conan stared at his hands as they lay like lifeless lumps in his lap. 'A week?'
'Came crashing through the bush wild-eyed and burning up.'
My father burned up . . .
'Weren’t in your right mind. Went for me with your sword, you did.'
Conan’s eyes widened. 'I didn’t . . . ?'
'Hurt me?' Connacht laughed. 'You were too weak to break an egg with a hammer, boy. How in the name of Crom did you get here?'
Conan closed his eyes. Is my father really dead? Are they all dead?
'Conan?'
The young Cimmerian shook himself. 'Raiders destroyed the village. I was the only one who survived.'
Connacht’s face became graven. 'I know you didn’t run, boy.'
'I wasn’t a coward, Grandfather. But . . .' Conan’s throat closed.
Connacht poured more water. Conan drank, both because he was thirsty and to soften the lump in his throat. Yet even when his grandfather took the cup away, he couldn’t say anything.
The old man nodded slowly. 'Seen a lot of people die. Many of them friends. Had more than one in my arms, just talking to him, easing the passage. Never an easy thing.'
Conan shook his head.
'My son?'
'I . . . I tried to save him.'
'And he wanted you to live.'
Conan nodded.
'You think he was wrong? You think he was stupid?'
The young Cimmerian looked up horrified. 'No.'
'If there weren’t no saving him, and there was a chance of saving you, he did right.' Connacht scratched at his throat. 'Like as not, you won’t see that, but it’s true.'
'I killed some of them, Grandfather.' Conan remembered the last raider. 'One was a big man, cavalry. He was taking a scalp. I took his knife.'
The old man crossed to where a belt hung on the wall and drew the dagger from its sheath. 'Turanian. Long way from home.'
'Kushites, too, and Aquilonians. And female archers.'
'Easy, son. Excite yourself and the fever will come back.' Connacht’s eyes narrowed. 'All those people this far north. Taller tale than I’ve ever told.'
Conan snarled. 'I’m not lying.'
'Didn’t say you were.'
'They wanted something. A piece of a mask. Ashuran, I think. Is there such a place?'
Connacht returned to the stool by the bed. 'Not Ashuran. Acheron, maybe, but it’s long-ago gone. Thousands of years.'
'They found it. They found what they wanted.'
'Who?'
Conan frowned. 'Klarzin. He has a daughter, Marique. And there is an Aquilonian named Lucius.'
Connacht laughed. 'There’s hundreds of Aquilonians named Lucius, boy.'
'This one has no nose.'
'Don’t know that narrows it down much.'
'I took his nose. Cut it right off.'
'Did you, now?' His grandfather nodded solemnly. 'Taking the nose off an Aquilonian makes any day a good day.'
Conan smiled, then remembered why it had been so terrible a day. He shivered and sank down again in the bed.
His grandfather brushed a lock of black hair from his forehead. 'You’ve told me enough for now. You’ll be telling me the rest later. We’ll figure it all out.'
'Good.' Conan stared at his hands. 'When we do, I’m going to kill them all.'
CONNACHT REPACKED THE poultices over the next week and a half, and Conan didn’t fight him. He didn’t have the strength. The boy wanted to be up and tracking his enemies, but it was all he could do to throw off the auroch hide and sit up when his grandfather brought him broth. After several days of that, the old man switched him to stew.
Aside from eating, all Conan could do was sleep. Sometimes nightmares had him crying out in the middle of the night, but Connacht was always there by his side. He’d listen to Conan, then tell him a story. Not quite the same stories he used to tell during his visits to the village―these were a bit more gentle―but the sound of his voice was enough to allow Conan to drift back into sleep.
A couple of times Conan woke up during the day, and on one of those occasions, he thought he heard his grandfather talking to someone outside the hut. Later that afternoon he asked if he’d been right.
Connacht nodded. 'Aiden came up from the south to tell me your village is gone. The tribes had some skirmishes with your horde. They backtracked to the village. They burned all the bodies, hauled what they could away. They brought me some things of your father’s; said they didn’t find you among the dead.'
'Did you tell them I was alive?'
'He didn’t ask, but likely knew. No matter. No one else will.'
'Good. They won’t expect me.'
'Conan, you are not even certain who they are.'
'How many march under the crest of the tentacled mask?'
'None.'
Conan frowned. 'What?'
'I have travelled the lands, Conan. No nation bears such a crest.'
'What of this Acheron?'
Connacht brought his grandson a bowl of stew and loosened enough of the bandages to slip the poultice out, but left enough to cover the burns. 'Feed yourself and I’ll tell you of Acheron.'
'You’ve been there?'
The older man laughed. 'I’m not that old, Conan. Acheron fell in ancient days, before there was a Cimmeria. It was an evil place, so they say. Swing a dead cat, you’d hit a necromancer or three. Put four of them in a hut together and you’d have a dozen plots hatched. An evil people wanting to take over the world. So they went and concentrated and made this thing of power. A mask. And they gave it to their god-king or whatever they called him. He and his hordes cut a swath . . . well, from what you and Aidan said, you know. But imagine kingdoms falling, Conan. Nations just wiped from the face of creation.'
The boy nodded, watching his grandfather’s face for any hint of a lie. He spooned stew into his mouth, chewing unconsciously, wiping the spillage on the back of his hand.
'As the tales would have it, men from the north took exception to the rise of Acheron. Was a close thing, but armies from across the world banded together, and led by northerners, they shattered Acheron’s power. They took the mask and broke it into parts. Each contingent got one and hid it away. They hoped no one would ever be able to assemble it and create such misery again.'
Conan crunched a piece of gristle. 'How could anyone know of the mask?'
'You’ll find, boy, that there are always people nosing about in places they shouldn’t, learning things not meant to be learned, and then developing quite a problem keeping their mouths shut.' The old man grew silent for a moment, then grunted. 'You’ll run afoul of a number of them in your life.'
Conan’s spoon froze halfway to his mouth. 'Are you now a seer?'
'No, I just benefit from having seen much.' Connacht shook his head. 'People seek power, and there are some who hunt for Acheron’s secrets. Your Klarzin might be one
. Have to hope if he’s up to deviltry, the devils will take him before he can shed more blood.'
'Not devils he has to worry about.' Conan handed the empty bowl to his grandfather. 'More, please. And a favour.'
Connacht returned from the hearth with more stew. 'I’m your grandfather. What would you be having me do?'
Conan took a deep breath. 'I cannot go and kill Klarzin.'
'Now you’ve returned to your senses.'
'I need your help. My father taught me much. You taught him more. I need to know it all.'
Connacht raised an eyebrow. 'Even knowing all I taught him didn’t keep your father alive.'
'If you will not teach me, I will find another swordmaster.'
The old man thought for a moment. 'There is no dissuading you?'
'I will have my vengeance.'
'You’ll do everything I say, as I tell you to do it?'
Conan sighed, hearing his father’s words come out of his grandfather’s mouth. 'Exactly.'
'Very well. In another week we’ll begin.' Connacht stood. 'Finish your stew, then sleep. Sleep as much as you can. When you become my student, you’ll have no time at all for that nonsense.'
Had Conan entertained the thought that his grandfather was joking, the old man disabused him of the notion immediately. He established a routine that had Conan waking before dawn, crawling into bed well into the evening, and if the boy stood still at all, it would only be during some odd exercise to build strength or maintain balance. Very little of his training actually included holding a sword in hand, which irked the boy until he figured out what his grandfather was doing.
For the first two weeks, things focused on his getting his strength and endurance back, as well as keeping his hands healthy. Conan had always been slender, but his illness had reduced him to skin and bones. Connacht had him hauling water, shifting stones, running ever-longer distances, then having him sprint―all the while increasing his weight by adding rock-filled pouches or bits and pieces of old armour to his attire.
The Conan Chronology Page 7