The fencing-master was quick to draw his sword and join Svoretta, and so the Cimmerian battled the two of them. He did so with a blinding rain of strokes, weaving a clashing, glinting hedge of menace in the yellow light of the hall lamps. A powerful cut drove Eubold's saber down and aside, forcing it out of action for a moment; it was as a follow-up to this, seemingly an afterthought, that Conan's blade licked under Svoretta's cape to emerge red-splashed.
The spy-chief staggered, grunting in guttural pain, his hands clutching at himself beneath his tunic. His eyes widened in horror to discover the extent of his wound. Fumblingly he dropped his sword and with a paralytic sideward lurch, pitched to the floor.
"If I trusted you to die by yourself, I would let you do so," Conan told his fallen foe, who lay straining to breathe, gasping in slow, toiling shudders. "Yet I would rather not live out my years in fear of your poison-cup, or your henchmen at my back." Ignoring the watching Eubold, he raised his saber high over the spymaster's neck, then brought it down, using the arching strength of his entire body. At its chopping crunch, the fallen man's motions ceased and his head rolled free.
Conan looked to Eubold, who had not renewed his attack; the fencing-master stood well clear of Svoretta's spreading gore, gazing back up the corridor where three armed men jostled into view. Rebels they were, sporting the now-familiar combination of wedding-guests' raiment and ready swords. They conferred calmly together, advancing at a walk.
Eubold turned to face Conan. The scrapes and bruises his face had gained during their first encounter had almost healed, although their last yellowing traces lent a jaundiced look to his sweat-gleaming stare. He raised his sword none too heartily; his eyes darted involuntarily to his companion's cloaked, blood-smirched body on the floor.
"Well, fencing-master, I see you are ready to tutor me once again." The Cimmerian lashed his blade forth and back, slicing air audibly. "I have learned much since our last meeting, as you can see."
Spitting a curse, Eubold turned and pounded away toward the three advancing rebels, preferring their mercies to those of his former pupil. Conan watched him go, disappointed but reluctant to follow.
Closing swiftly with his adversaries, the fencing-master drove between two of them with wild slashes and parries, wounding the sword-arm of one; but he failed to break completely through their rank, and the third man ducked and stabbed low to pierce his leg. Then, moving at their leisure, the three surrounded the limping tutor; gradually overwhelming his desperate defenses, their blades scored further cuts.
Conan did not stay to watch the inevitable end; he wanted no more to fight these rebels than to join them. While they were still enthusiastically and bloodily occupied, he turned to sprint in the opposite direction.
That route, as luck would have it, angled directly toward the center of the Manse, whence echoed more cries and clashings of steel. A recklessness blazed in the outlander's heart, fueled in part by the prospect of taking loot amid the havoc. But no stray imaginings could have prepared him for the encounter that awaited him then: mere paces ahead, Baron Baldomer Einharson strode forth into the corridor through a side door of his apartment.
The baron may have understood the feral hatred that blazed from Conan's steel-blue eyes; whether he did or not, he was followed by a fully armored man of the Iron Guard, who clearly knew no qualms as to Conan's identity or allegiance. At a gesture from the old warlord, the helmeted trooper blocked the passage and swung his sword in a level stroke, meeting the Cimmerian's upraised weapon with a ringing clang.
Thus battle was joined. The two warriors hovered an arm's length apart and hacked resolutely at one another. The guardsman's blade dashed time and again toward the youth's unhelmeted, black-tousled head, only to be ducked beneath or beaten aside; Conan's saber struck repeatedly at the neck and groin of the guard's cuirass, with no more effect than to brighten the polish of the supple black steel. The trend of the wordless, desperate combat was an unclear as its purpose, and the baron deigned neither to speak nor join in; he watched the contest coolly while buckling on his armor-scaled gauntlets.
Inflamed with battle-lust, Conan soon wearied of the futility of fencing with the armored man. Darting inside one of the ponderous swordswings, he grappled with him chest to chest; an instant later he used the guard's own top-heavy momentum to throw him off balance over his hip. As his foe clattered to the floor, Conan was astraddle him; savagely he wrenched and twisted at the helmeted head, clubbing with his swordhilt at the leather-sheathed joint of the man's spine 'twixt helm and scapular plate. In a few moments the guard lay quiescent, his head cocked aside at an unnatural angle.
"Ah, my son! You have attained mature fighting skill at last." Baldomer, his armor now lacking only a helmet, stood regarding the panting victor, the sane half of his face set in a smile of noble resignation. "It prides me to see you prevail, though my heart is saddened by your bloody rebellion."
"I am not your son," Conan told him, breathing heavily as he rose to his feet. "Favian is dead, slain by the bride he brought to his chamber to ravish."
The baron shook his head, smiling grimly. "Nay, boy, do not tease; that was the northern savage I sent to wait in your place. Now see you the timely unfolding of your father's wisdom? And yet you shake your head. If you wouldst forfeit your noble name and deny your lineage"-Baldomer reached to his belt, drawing his long straightsword from its sheath with surprising smoothness and ease-"then we must fight, resolutely and to the death! Yet be assured, son"-his eyes gleamed madly on his false child -"that whichever one of us pours out his blood on these ancient tiles, it will be noble blood!"
So saying, the baron opened combat with a sideways slash of his blade. It was no great challenge to avoid, yet when Conan replied with a downward stroke, the straightsword was suddenly before him again, turning aside his saber and boring perilously through his defenses. Only an urgent expenditure of his strength blocked the thrust, breaking apart the combatants. Conan realized that he faced a subtle foe, strong with madness and seasoned by countless campaigns. Deliberately he set about stalking the elder man so as to wear down his strength, darting at him only occasionally with swift, forceful strokes.
"Not so easy, stripling, is it, this killing game?" Baldomer gave ground smoothly before Conan's greater exertions, parrying and sidestepping watchfully. His economy of motion left him ample breath for speech as he kept eye and blade trained on his foe. "My sword would far better have been raised in your behalf, son. Yet I knew that someday you would turn on me, however much I tried to set you on the right path." The old warlord let a powerful overhand blow of Conan's slide off his sword and his armor, seeming to stagger under its force, before his blade lashed menacingly close to the younger man's throat.
"In the Einharson blood there courses a turbulent strain," the baron proclaimed, backing away again, "that distills forth every few generations in the darkest crimes-parricide, fratricide, suicide! So it must be, perhaps; a sanguine recklessness is needed for efficient rule. I prayed against it to our holy forebears . . . and yet, since your childhood, Favian, I have sensed an overlarge share of that evil ferment in you!"
The residential corridor was left behind them now, their contest having carried them onto the wide, balustraded mezzanine overlooking the Manse's entry hall. Here the combat was exposed to others' view. The stairhead was held by Iron Guardsmen wielding pikes and sabers, and the lower stairs were crowded with rebels fighting their way upward across scattered corpses. Unsure, perhaps, of which of the aristocratic-seeming duelists to support, none of the nearby defenders came to Baldomer's aid. Yet both sides paused in their fighting to watch the noble passage of arms.
Conan spoke for the first time. "You accuse others of fratricide and black crimes," he said, whirling his blade through air as he edged closer. "But what deed could be viler, old baron, than the murder of your own wife out of the north, your Lady Heldra?"
"Aye, boy, the death of your mother! A great crime indeed." Baldomer glanced swiftly around
at the watchers, his voice beginning to rasp with effort or emotion. "Done by the rebels you league with even now in your unnatural treason! But why broach the matter here?"
"Because you lie!" Conan punctuated his words with a saber swipe at the baron's head, stiff-necked and slow to bend, so that the old man's long gray hairs were disarranged by the passing stroke. "After your battle-wounds unmanned you, you had no more use for a wife. You grew to hate her," Conan grated between heavy breaths, "and so you ordered her death. Svoretta carried it out, poisoning her as he tried to poison me. Together you blamed it on rebels!"
"Nay, a calumny! She was unfaithful!" Baldomer's voice spat out the words, his good eye flaring as wildly as his wounded. "I loved her still, but she betrayed me, so the spymaster said. How could I let it be known?" His face, suffused by emotion, clenched so fiercely that for once its battle-wound was invisible. "She betrayed me! Even as you do now, treacherous boy!"
For the first time, the baron lunged onto the offensive, his sword hacking at Conan's flitting shape with lusty abandon. This voided all of the nobleman's crafty webs of defense, and in time, even as he gave back before the relentless assault, Conan saw a chance. As a wild stroke clanged off the railing beside him, the Cimmerian clenched both hands on the hilt of his saber, driving it straight forward and up. The curving blade, which would in less strong, sure hands have been turned aside or broken, pierced through the black steel of the finely turned breastplate. Before its momentum was spent, it traveled half of its slim length into flesh and bone.
The baron's sword, relinquished in mid-stroke, bounded off Conan's backplate to crash to the floor beside him. Meanwhile, the old man's gauntleted hands gripped the blade standing out from his chest. Hanging on to it as if to a lifeline, the baron eased his transfixed body to a kneeling position.
"So it ends." Baldomer's voice, lacking its accustomed timbre, ground onward with bitter strength. "The Einharson line continues after all. Good! May this murder harden you to rulership, son." Still clutching the downturned sword with one gauntleted hand, he fumbled at his neck with the other, withdrawing a gleaming pendant on a heavy chain from inside his pierced armor. It was the gold six-bladed starburst Conan had seen him wear during his necromantic devotions at the nether shrine. "This passes to you . . . and with it, the rule of Dinander and all of our family's divine rights and protections. Be harsh, boy. ..." As small torrents of blood issued from his nostrils, the elder man relaxed his grip on the sword and settled backward to the floor. His craggy face, though pale and crimson-stained, seemed eerily composed, its features in balance at last.
With Baldomer's gold amulet dangling from one hand, Conan felt a sudden, squeamish reluctance to wrench his saber out of the baron's chest. Instead, he let go of the upstanding hilt and stooped to take up the baron's longer, straighter sword. Hanging the pendant around his own neck for safekeeping, he stood and turned to meet the stares of the fighters who, all around the gallery, had halted their combats.
The scene of the interrupted battle was not only bloody, but chaotic. The high, porched entry hall had been designed for the defense of the main doorway by means of arrow-fire, in case the great door was ever breached. Yet the outbreak of the rebellion within the Manse itself had foiled that purpose. Now the doors stood wide, a throng of attackers visible without. The Iron Guard controlled only the head of the stairs and the corridors flanking the baron's suite, standing off the host of motley-clad rebels who held the gallery below and both wings of the mezzanine. The battle lines were frozen as the fighters watched Conan -most of them thinking him Favian, he reminded himself. They were waiting to see which side he would champion.
Beyond the stair waited Durwald and a handful of nobles, including the silver-haired tutor, Lothian; they looked on in silence, as uncertain as anyone else. Abruptly then, from the corridor at their side, hurried a distraught, disheveled Calissa, flanked by two guardsmen. Taking in the scene at a glance, she rushed to her father's counselors, darting an accusing finger at Conan and breaking the -silence with her cries.
"There he is, the traitor! One murder was not enough for him; now he stands over the butchered body of my father! Take him quickly, strap him in irons! No torment is too great. . . ." The rest of her diatribe was lost in a general clatter around the chamber. The waiting combatants, inflamed or alarmed by her-words, braced their weapons in new readiness; a few even flung themselves back into battle, mouthing curses.
Seeing the guards at the stairhead shift their pikes toward him, Conan finally made up his mind. There was no place for him among Dinander's pompous overlords. He strode straightaway from them toward the wing of the mezzanine where the black-armored men stood thinnest, opposed by a dense gang of rebels. At his approach from their rear, his sword raised in undisguised menace, the Iron Guards' cordon broke and scattered apart. The rebels were quick to take advantage of their disarray, pressing forward to seize new ground. Weapons clashed on either hand as Conan, crossing swords briefly with two guardsmen, found himself among the insurgents.
They welcomed him with cheers, clapping hands on his blackmailed shoulders. To his surprise, he found the warrior-woman before him again-the one called Evadne, now wearing a man's kilt and chain vest over her yellow robe. At Conan's stare she only blinked, unsmiling, and addressed him in level, terse accents: "Noble or savage, if you join us, you are one among equals, no more, no less. Remember that." Then she turned and vanished into the press.
The battlefronts were moving now, because the guardsmen, at the death of their baron and the desertion of his apparent successor, fought with flagging spirit. Conan turned to join the attack, yet the defenders gave ground so fast that he stalked back almost to the head of the stair before he reached the skirmishing. Then, ere he could elbow his way among the battling rebels, his attention was drawn by fresh shouts and screams from below, down in the gallery.
He forced his way to the rail and looked over, seeing townsmen scattering back from the inner doors in panic. At the fringes of the crowd, weapons were flailing, swung by armored warriors not yet plainly in view. Conan leaned far out to see who they were. Reinforcements from the municipal barracks, perhaps?
"Flee, they have come!" From the panicking throng below, the cries drifted up to him. "It is the Einharsons! The dead barons are risen to fulfill their curse!"
CHAPTER 11
The Warlords
Staring down from the balcony, Conan felt his scalp tighten with certainty that the frightened shouts were true. Beneath him there stalked, amid the flying shapes of the rebels, gigantic warriors in weird-looking armor, antique fighters whose swords appeared rusted and evil and whose ancient copperplate-and-scale mail blazed leprous green with tarnish: the dead Einharson warlords! With a chill, Conan remembered the ancestral armor laid out on the stone coffins in the crypt beneath the Manse, and the mystical hints that its owners would someday arise to sway the fate of the province.
The attackers were fully suited and helmed, so there was no knowing what lurked inside the decrepit armor. Some of the fighters appeared to be damaged, or oddly incomplete. Yet all swung swords and battleaxes relentlessly, their grim efficiency evinced by the hacked corpses strewn behind them on the patterned floor.
No sooner had the Cimmerian comprehended the threat than it erupted close at hand. Astonished shouts were raised behind him, and he turned to see three of the hoary, sinister warriors issuing from a nearby corridor. In a dreamlike glimpse, he remembered the long stairway leading from the vicinity of Baldomer's apartment directly to the cellar; thence, doubtless, these marauders had crawled. Spitting out a bitter oath, Conan shoved past the scattering rebels to confront the nemesis.
The tall, menacing shape that first came before him was certainly the product of sorcery. Its bronze-sheathed limbs moved with the noiseless, supple ease of an insect's jointed carapace, while the eye-slits of its crested helm revealed only fluid darkness lurking within. The creature's long, notched sword plied air with a swift surety that Conan took dili
gent care to avoid; and yet the vacancies of the shriveled leathern bindings at the strange warrior's elbows and ankles did not appear to contain any form, not even bones.
Lunging in the wake of one of its long swordsweeps, Conan struck a blow at its green-mottled breastplate. He hoped to knock it over, but instead heard his blade gong hollowly on empty metal. The stabbing force of his stroke did nothing to unbalance his attacker, rather, it left Conan exposed to a recoiling blow that stung his shoulder, buffeting him aside with its casual force.
Angered, he stalked his foe afresh, waiting his turn to feint and strike; this time, though his blade-tip passed between the upper and lower arm-pieces of the ghostly warrior's suit and scattered bits of rotten strapping through the air, the being's sword-slashed arm swung on unimpaired. Its weapon grazed his ear and dented his armored shoulder with a smarting impact.
So, Conan learned, it scarcely mattered what was done to the beings' nonexistent bodies. The power of these phantom Einharsons was in their swords, which clove onward in ravaging arcs, empowered with their own mystic energy. The armor suits seemed to march behind the weapons as mere decorations, with no vital functions within, nothing in need of protection. Conan fought on doggedly, seeking some means with which to halt his phantom adversary; whether the haunted blades could be broken, or even parried, his best fencing could not discover.
As he fell back before the mailed specter's onslaught, a calm, fatalistic part of his mind took in the deteriorating situation around him. A few of the rebels on the balcony were halfheartedly battling the Einharsons, but none managed to hold their ground, and some had already fallen before the tireless threshing of the ancient swords. At first the Iron Guard moved in to exploit the vacancy left by the rebels, assuming to fight alongside the undead warriors-but apparently the weirdlings knew no allies. Conan saw one of the guardsmen stabbed through the groin by a rusty, cobwebbed sword before his blackmailed comrades had the sense to fall back from the monsters.
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