He, Antimides, had been the first to learn of Valdric's illness, the first to prepare to take the throne at his death, and all, he was certain, without being suspected by anyone. While the others fought in the countryside, he remained in Ianthe. When Valdric finally died, they who thought to take the throne, those few who managed to survive his assassins, would find that he held the royal palace. And he who held the royal palace held the throne of Ophir. Now all of his careful plans were endangered, his secrecy threatened.
Something would have to be done about Synelle. He had always had plans for that sharp-tongued jade. Prating about her bloodlines. Of what use were bloodlines in a wench, except with regard to the children she could produce? He had planned to take great pleasure in breaking her to heel, and in using those bloodlines she boasted of to make heirs with an even stronger claim to the throne than himself. But now she had to be done away with, and quickly. And the barbarian as well.
He perked an ear toward Tivia. She was repeating herself. 'Enough, Raga,' he said, and the shaven-headed man desisted. Antimides pressed a gold coin into the fellow's thick-thingered hand. Raga was bought long since, but it never hurt to ensure loyalties. 'She's yours,' Antimides told the man. Raga beamed a gap-toothed smile. 'When you are done, dispose of her in the usual fashion.'
As the count let himself out of the dungeon Tivia's shrieks were rising afresh. Lost in his planning for Synelle and the barbarian, Antimides did not hear.
IX
The house on the Street of Crowns was a large square, two stories high, around a dusty central court, with the bottom floor of the two sides being given over to stables. A wooden-roofed balcony, reached by stairs weakened from long neglect, ran around the courtyard on the second level. Dirty red roof tiles gleamed dully in the late afternoon sun; flaking plaster on the stone walls combined with shadows to give the structure a leprous appearance. An arched gate, its hinges squealing with rust, led from the street to the courtyard, where a dusty fountain was filled with withered brown leaves.
'Complete with rats and fleas, no doubt,' Narus said dolefully as he dismounted.
Taurianus sat his horse and glared about him. 'For this we left a palace,' A flurry of doves burst from an upper window. 'See! We're expected to sleep in a roost!'
'You've all grown too used to the soft life in a palace,' Conan growled before the mutters could spread. 'Stop complaining like a herd of old women, and remember the times you've slept in the mud.'
''Twas better than this, that mud,' Taurianus muttered, but he climbed down from his saddle.
Grumbling men began carrying blanket rolls and bundles of personal belongings in search of places to settle themselves. Others led their horses into the stables; curses quickly floated out as to the number of rats and cobwebs. Rotund Fabio hurried in search of the kitchens, trailed by a half-running Julia, her arms full of soot-blackened pots and bundles of herbs, strings of garlic and peppers dangling from her shoulders.
Boros stood at the gate staring about him in amazement, though he certainly slept in little better as a matter of course. Synelle, Conan thought, had much to learn about what was properly provided a Free-Company.
They had attracted entirely too much attention for Conan's taste during their search for the house. Three-score armoured men on horseback, laden with sacks and cloak-wrapped bundles till they looked like a procession of country peddlers, could not help but draw eves even in a city that assiduously attempted to avoid seeing anything that might be dangerous.
The Cimmerian would just as soon they could all have become invisible till the matter of Timeon's death was forgotten. And he was none too eager to look into any of those bundles, most of which clinked and seemed heavier than they had a right to be. For all his injunction against looting he was sure they were filled with silver goblets and trinkets of gold. More of those following him than not, the Ophireans most certainly, were light-fingered at the best of times.
Giving his horse over to one of the men, the big Cimmerian went in search of a room for himself, his blanket roll over one shoulder and the sack containing the bronze under his arm. Save for weapons and armour, horse and change of clothes, they were all the possessions he had.
Soon he found a large, corner room on the second floor, with four windows to give it light. A wad of straw in one corner showed that a rat had been nesting there. Two benches and a table stood in the middle of the floor, covered with heavy dust. A bed, sagging but certainly large enough even for his height, was jammed against a wall. The mattress crackled with the sound of dried husks when he poked it, and he sighed, remembering the goose-down mattress in Timeon's palace.
Think of the mud, he reminded himself sternly.
Machaon's voice drifted up from the courtyard. 'Conan, where are you?
There's news!'
Tossing his burdens on the bed, Conan hurried out onto the balcony.
'What word? Has Synelle summoned us?'
'Not yet, Cimmerian. The assassins were busy last night. Valentius fled his palace after three of his own guards turned their blades on him.
'Tis said others of his men cut them down, but the lordling now seems affrightened of his own shadow. He has taken refuge with Count Antimides.'
Conan's eyebrows went up. Antimides. The young fool had unknowingly put himself in the hands of one of his rivals. Another lord removed from the race, this one by his own hand, in a manner of speaking. Who stood next in the blood-right after Valentius? But what occurred among the contending factions, he thought, no longer concerned him or his company.
'We're done with that, Machaon,' he laughed. 'Let them all kill each other.'
The grizzled veteran joined his laughter. 'An that happens, mayhap we can make you King. I will settle for count, myself.'
Conan opened his mouth to reply, and suddenly realised a sound that should not be there had been impinging on his brain. Creaking boards from the room he had just left. No rat made boards creak. His blade whispered from its sheath, and he dove through the door, followed by Machaon's surprised shout.
Four startled men in castoff finery, one just climbing in the window, stared in shock at the appearance of the young giant. Their surprise lasted but an instant; as he took his first full step into the room, swords appeared in their fists and they rushed to attack.
Conan beat aside the thrust of the first to reach him, and in the same movement planted a foot in the middle of his opponent's dirty grey silk tunic. Breath left the man in an explosive gasp, and he fell in a heap at the feet of a thick-mustached man behind him. The mustached man stumbled, and the tip of Conan's blade slashed his throat in a fountain of blood. As the dying man fell atop the first attacker, a man with a jagged scar down his left cheek leaped over him, sword hacking wildly.
Conan dropped to a crouch-whistling steel ruffled the hair atop his head-and his own blade sliced across scar-face's stomach. With a shriek the man dropped in a heap, both hands clutching at thick ropes of entrails spilling from his body. A sword thrust from the floor slid under the metal scales of Conan's hauberk, slicing his side, but the Cimmerian's return blow struck through grey-tunic's skull at the eyes.
'Erlik curse you!' the last man screamed. Sly-faced and bony, he had been the last into the room, and had not joined in the wild melee.
'Eight of my men you've slain! Erlik curse all your seed!' Shrieking, he dashed at Conan with frenzied slashes.
The Cimmerian wanted to take this man alive, in condition to answer questions, but the furious attack was too dangerous to withstand for long. A half-mad light of fear and rage gleamed in the man's sweaty face, and he screamed with every blow he made. Three times their blades crossed, then blood was spurting from the stump of sly-face's neck as his head rolled on the floor.
With a clatter of boots mercenaries crowded into the room, led by Machaon, all with swords in hand. 'Mitra, Cimmerian,' the tattooed man said, scanning the scene of carnage. 'Couldn't you have saved just one for us?'
'I didn't think of it,' Cona
n replied drily.
Julia forced her way through the men. When she saw the bodies her hands went to her face, and she screamed. Then her eyes lit on Conan, and her composure returned as quickly as it had gone. 'You're wounded!' she said. 'Sit on the bed, and I will tend it.'
For the first time Conan became aware of a razor's edge of fire along his ribs, and the blood wetting the side of his hauberk. ' 'Tis but a scratch,' he told her. 'Get these out of here,' he added to Machaon, gesturing to the corpses.
Machaon told off men to cart the dead away.
Julia, however, was not finished. 'Scratch or not,' she said firmly, 'if it is not tended you may grow ill. Fetch me hot water and clean clothes,' she flung over her shoulder, as she attempted to press Conan toward the bed. 'Clean, mind you!' To everyone's surprise two of the mercenaries rushed off at her command.
Amused, Conan let her have her way. Muttering to herself she fussed over getting his metal-scaled leather tunic off. Gently she palped the flesh about the long, shallow gash, a thoughtful frown on her face. She seemed unconcerned about his blood on her fingers.
'It seems you are ahead once more,' Machaon said ruefully, before leaving them alone.
'What did he mean by that?' she asked absently. 'Don't talk. Let the wound lie still. There are no ribs broken, and I will not have to sew it, but after it is bandaged you must take care not to exert yourself.
Perhaps if you lie-' She broke off with a gasp. 'Mitra protect us, what is that evil thing?'
Conan followed her suddenly frightened gaze to the bronze figure, lying on the bed and now out of the sack. 'Just something I bought as a gift for Machaon,' he said, picking it up. She backed away from him. 'What ails you, girl? The thing is but dead metal.'
'She is right to be affrighted,' Boros said from the door. His eyes were fixed on the bronze as on a living demon. 'It is evil beyond knowing. I can feel the waves of it from here.'
'And I,' Julia said shakily. 'It means me harm. I can feel it.'
Boros nodded sagely. 'Aye, a woman would be sensitive to such. The rites of Al'Kiir were heinous. Scores of men fighting to the death while the priestesses chanted, with the heart of the survivor to be ripped from his living body. Rites of torture, with the victim kept alive and screaming on the altar for days. But the most evil of all, and the most powerful, was the giving of women as sacrifices. Or as worse than sacrifices.'
'What could be worse than being sacrificed?' Julia asked faintly.
'Being given to the living god whose image that is,' Boros answered, 'to be his plaything for all eternity. Such may well have been the fate of the women given to Al'Kiir.'
Julia swayed, and Conan snapped, 'Enough, old man! You frighten her. I remember now that you mentioned this Al'Kiir once before, when you were drunk. Are you drunk now? Have you dredged all this from wine fumes in your head?'
'I am deathly sober,' the grey-bearded man replied, 'and I wish I were pickled in wine like a corpse. For that is not only an image of Al'Kiir, Cimmerian. It is a necessary, a vital part of the worship of that horrible god. I thought all such had been destroyed centuries ago.
Someone attempts to bring Al'Kiir again to this world, and did they have that unholy image they might well succeed. I, for one, would not care to be alive if they do.'
Conan stared at the bronze gripped in his big hand. Two men had died attempting to take it from him in the shop. Three more perished in the second attack, and that that had been for the same thing he no longer doubted. Before he himself died, sly-face had accused Conan of slaying about eight of his men. The numbers were right. Those who wanted to bring back this god knew the Cimmerian had the image they needed. In a way he was relieved. He had had stray thoughts that some of these attacks, including the one just done, were Karela's work.
The men fetching the hot water and bandages entered the room; Conan thrust the image under his blanket roll and signed the others to silence until they were gone.
When the three were alone again, Julia spoke. 'I'll tend your wound, but not if you again remove that evil thing from its hiding. Even there I can sense it.'
'I'll leave it where it is,' the young Cimmerian said, and she knelt beside him and busied herself with bathing and bandaging his wound. 'Go on with your telling, Boros,' he continued. 'How is it this god cannot find his own way to the world of men? That seems like no god to fear greatly, for all his horns.'
'You make jokes,' Boros grumbled, 'but there is no humour in this. To tell you of Al'Kiir I must speak of the distant past. You know that Ophir is the most ancient of all the kingdoms now existing in the world, yet few men know aught of its misty beginnings. I know a little.
Before even Ophir was, this land was the centre of the worship of Al'Kiir. The strongest and handsomest of men and the proudest and most beautiful of women were brought from afar for the rites of which I have spoken. But, as you might imagine, there were those who opposed the worship of Al'Kiir, and foremost of these were the men who called themselves the Circle of the Right-Hand Path.'
'Can you not be shorter about it?' Conan said. 'There's no need to dress the tale like a story-teller in the marketplace.'
Boros snorted. 'Do you wish brevity, or the facts? Listen. The Circle of the Right-Hand Path was led by a man named Avanrakash, perhaps the most powerful practitioner of white magic who has ever lived.'
'I did not know there was such a thing as white magic,' Conan said.
'Never have I seen a sorcerer who did not reek of blackness and evil as a dunghill reeks of filth.'
This time the old man ignored him. 'These men made contact with the very gods, 'tis said, and concluded a pact. No god would stand against Al'Kiir openly, for they feared that in a war between gods all that is might be destroyed, even themselves. Some-Set, supposedly, was one-declared themselves apart from what was to happen. Others, though, granted those of the Right-Hand Path an increase in powers, enough so that they in concert could match a single god. You can understand that they would not give so much to a single man, for that would make him a demigod at the least, nor enough to all of them that they could not be vanquished easily by as few as two of the gods in concert.'
Despite himself Conan found himself listening intently. Julia, her mouth hanging open in wonderment, held the ties of the Cimmerian's bandages forgotten as she followed Boros' words.
'In the battle that followed, the face of the land itself was changed, mountains raised, rivers altered in their courses, ancient seas made desert. All of those who marched against Al'Kiir, saving only Avanrakash, perished, and he was wounded to the death. Yet in his dying he managed with a staff of power to sever Al'Kiir from the body the god wore in the world of men, to seal the god from that world.
'Then came rebellion among the people against the temples of Al'Kiir, and the first King of Ophir was crowned. Whole cities were razed so that not even their memory remains. All that kept so much as the name of Al'Kiir in the minds of men was destroyed.
'The earthly body of the god? Men tried to destroy that as well, but the hottest fires made no mark, and the finest swords shattered against it. Finally it was entombed beneath a mountain, and the entrances sealed up, so that with time men should forget its very existence.
'They both succeeded and failed, they who would have destroyed the god's name and memory, for the name Tor Al'Kiir was given to the mountain, but for centuries gone only a scattered few have known the source of that name, though all men know it for a place of ill luck, a place to be avoided.
'I believed I was the last to have the knowledge I possess, that it would go to my funeral fires with me. But I have seen lights in the night atop Tor Al'Kiir. I have heard whispers of knowledge sought.
Someone attempts to bring Al'Kiir back to this world again. I was sure they would find only failure, for the lack of that image or its like, but do they get their hands on it, blood and lust and slavery will be the portion of all men.'
Conan let out a long breath when the old man at last fell silent. 'The answer is
simple. I'll take the accursed thing to the nearest metalworker's shop and have it melted down.'
'No!' Boros cried. A violent shudder wracked him, and he combed his long beard with his fingers in agitation. 'Without the proper spells that would loose such power as would burn this city from the face of the earth, and perhaps half the country as well. Before you ask, I do not know the necessary spells, and those who do would be more likely to attempt use of the image than its destruction.'
'That staff,' Julia said suddenly. 'The one Avanrakash used. Could it destroy the image?'
'A very perceptive question, child,' the old man murmured. 'The answer is, I do not know. It might very well have that power, though.'
'Much good that does,' Conan muttered. 'The staff is no doubt rotted to dust long ago.'
Boros shook his head. 'Not at all. 'Tis a staff of power, after all, that Staff of Avanrakash. Those men of ancient times revered its power, and made it the scepter of Ophir, which it still is, though covered in gold and gems. It is said 'twas the presence of that scepter, carried as a standard before the armies of Ophir, that allowed Moranthes the Great to win his victories against Acheron. If you could acquire the scepter, Conan . . .'
'I will not,' Conan said flatly, 'attempt to steal King Valdric's scepter on the off chance that it might have some power. Zandru's Nine Hells, the man uses the thing as a walking staff. It's with him constantly.'
'You must understand, Cimmerian,' Boros began, but Conan cut him off.
'No! I will put the thrice-accursed beneath the floor boards yonder until I can find a place to bury it where it will never be found. Crack not your teeth concerning any of this until I can do so, Boros. And stay away from the wine till then as well.'
Boros put on a cloak of injured dignity. 'I have been keeping this particular secret for nearly fifty years, Cimmerian. You've no need to instruct me.'
Conan grunted, and let Julia lift his arm to finish her bandaging. It was yet another rotten turnip to add to the stew before him. How to destroy a thing that could not be destroyed, or as well as could not, given the lack of trustworthy sorcerer, and such were as rare as virgin whores. Still, he was worried more about Karela than any of the rest.
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