Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza (21 page)

“One is a leader of flesh and blood. Will you be he?”

“You might do better with someone else—” Conan began, with a wry twist to his mouth.

“There is no one else,” the skeletons replied. “There has been no one else for all the time we have been here. There will be no one else in time to fight Grolin and the sorcerer. You will lead us.”

Conan was tempted to reply to this command with one of the salutes he had learned. He decided against it. The skeletons might be a trifle lacking in humour.

“The second thing we need is all our strength. As many more of us as you see here remain afar from the world. When we all move together, we are mighty. As we are now, we are not. The Death Lord will come again.”

That made sense. No captain worth the price of his helmet straps went willingly into battle with less than his full strength. Books were filled with the names of those who had done otherwise—and Conan had seen too many battlefields littered with the bodies of their men.

“The third thing we need is blood. Blood gives movement. Movement gives strength. Strength gives victory. Victory saves the world from the Death Lord of Thanza.”

“Blood,” Conan mused. He remembered how he had put all this in motion when his scraped and bleeding flesh touched the first skeleton. Then the work had gone on, with the blood of the water dragon.

“The water dragon’s blood has lost its power,” he said.

“There is strong blood here,” the skeletons replied. “It will give our comrades movement. Movement will give strength. Strength will give...”

Conan was not listening. He was looking at the skeletons. All of them were looking back, in a way that left him in no doubt whose “strong blood” they wanted to revive their comrades.

He had stepped away from the wall while he was talking to the skeletons. Now he withdrew three paces, until once again his shoulders were against the stone.

Then he drew his sword.

In the wounded camp, Tharmis Rog had just hobbled back from the burying ground when Sergeant Julilius accosted him.

“We finally made that deserter from Grolin’s band fit to talk,” he said. “I doubt me he’ll last out the day, but he’s said enough to earn himself a peaceful end.”

Rog sat down on a stump. He could walk with a stick now, but running or marching with a heavy pack would be well beyond him for days. A small voice whispered at the back of his mind, hinting that his soldiering days were over for good.

As often as the voice whispered, he told it to be silent. At this moment, he felt like doing the same to the sergeant. Rog was just back from seeing to the burial of another Ranger, the fourth to die of his wounds since the company divided.

Lysinka’s healer was a hard-bitten, hard-handed, but soft-hearted woman, without whose help there might have been twice as many dead. But she was only a skilled healer, not a worker of miracles. After the inward festering began in Lopetas’s belly, he was doomed, and now another boy who had never been a man was gone.

Rog considered whether he had seen this too often in his many years of war. By Mitra, he’d been a soldier longer than the Cimmerian had lived, and Conan was no green youth! If the voice started whispering that he did not want to see any more boys die, maybe he would listen to it.

Meanwhile, he would listen to Julilius.

“So what did the man say?”

It seemed that Grolin was now obsessed with something called the Mountain of the Skull, where the Soul of Thanza was supposed to reside. A sorcerer might or might not be helping him turn that obsessive dream into stark reality.

Meanwhile, Conan, Lysinka, and Klarnides held Grolin’s old citadel with a firm grip. They too seemed to be in search of the Mountain of the Skull. How far either side had gone on their quest, the man did not know.

He was quite sure that he wanted to be far away when either of them found what they sought. Unfortunately, while he had begun his escape in good time, an ill-tempered bear had delayed him, and perhaps ended his journeys in this world.

“Hard way to go, even for a bad man,” Rog said finally. “See that the healer gives him a good stiff dose of her green draught tonight.”

“She’s making up the red draught now,” Julilius said. “Threatened to dose Cartos with it the next time he patted her bottom.”

“He must be healing faster than we thought,” Rog said. “I’ll remind him that worse than a red-draught flux will afflict him if he does that again.” The healer’s red draught was a potent purgative.

Both men looked at the sky to the north, as if they hoped to see what the deserter had not said written in the clouds. The clouds being blank as always, they turned away after a moment.

“No,” Conan said.

The skeletons continued to stare at him. He found the eyeless stares more uncanny with each passing moment. Perhaps the skeleton warriors’ dead stares had some power over the minds of the living?

Or perhaps they were just confused? Conan suspected that he would be too, if he had slept as long as these men and then wakened with only bones and weapons to hold his spirit, if he had one.

Best do more to end the confusion.

“No, you may not have my blood, however strong it is,” he said.

“It is very strong blood,” the leader replied. “Never had we dreamed of such strong blood. Blood gives movement. Movement gives—”

Conan raised his sword. “The next one of you who chants that again, I will chop to pieces. Then I will pick up his fallen bones and use them to smash his comrades until I collapse.

“Maybe you can take my blood then. But it won’t be as strong. There won’t be as many of you. And I might just throw myself into the pool before I die, so that none of you or your friends will have anything from me except being killed all over again.

“I can be a. fair bit more dangerous than any Death Lord, if you cross me.”

Conan’s anger had been said to terrify demons. While no one could say that the skeleton warriors were frightened, certainly they now looked more at one another than at Conan, and they neither picked up their weapons nor advanced.

At last the leader stepped forward, crossing his arms over his ribs with a marvellously human gesture. It hinted of a man who had been brave and shrewd when he had flesh and blood on his bones.

“It seems that we need of you two things, Cimmerian, and you can give us one or the other. We need you to lead us. We also need strong blood, that all of us may be prepared to lead. Do you swear by all that you hold sacred, you cannot give us both?

Conan ran through the names of all the gods he knew, except Crom. Some of these he had never held sacred, or even accorded much respect, but the names seemed to impress the skeletons. As living men, they had doubtless come from many lands and worshipped many gods.

“It’s not that I would refuse to do what you’re asking if I could,” Conan finished. “A good leader is always ready to shed his blood for the men he leads. But if you need a leader, you need him with all his blood intact and all his strength. Strong blood makes movement, in living men as well as in bony ones.”

“I thought we were not going to chant that again,” the leader said. It was impossible to doubt that had he been a living man, he would have smiled.

Conan felt a strong urge to do something to lead these warriors out of their dilemma. No good soldier liked to leave comrades out of a battle, any more than a good leader liked to be weakened.

An idea glimmered in Conan’s mind—far off and dim, like a single candle in a cave no larger than this.

“Must strong blood be human?” he asked.

The others looked about, their gaze finally resting on the water dragon’s remains. Their leader slowly shook his head.

“Human blood is best. But if the living creature is strong, it will create movement... and everything else.”

“Good. Then let me lead as many of you as are willing, up inside the mountain to the caves above. Those caves shelter flying serpents. They are strong, fast, brave, and fierce. If their blood isn’t strong enough, then I don’t know what is!”

Conan would have sworn that the leader was frowning. “Are they... are they creatures of the Death Lord?”

“I said that there is no living Death Lord. But that may change, if we stand around here arguing while Grolin snatches the Soul above.”

“You did not answer me.”

“Then ask a question that I can understand well enough to answer!” Conan snapped. He had never been overfond of law courts, and the leader was beginning to sound more like a pleader than a warrior.

“Are the flying snakes creatures of magic?” the leader asked.

Conan frowned. He could at least try to answer that question.

“They could be. I’ve never seen anything like them elsewhere or before. But they can be killed. I’ve killed some with this sword. Does that make them fit to give you blood?”

The leader looked along the line of his followers. Conan saw some of them nod. Others shook their heads. More looked at the rock at their feet.

“I think you have given us hope, which is almost as great a gift as blood,” the leader said. “We will not take your blood unless the serpents’ blood is useless.”

In his mind, Conan vowed that they would not take his blood at all, Death Lord or no Death Lord. Then inspiration came again.

“Can you carry your comrades up to the caves, the ones who cannot move?”

“We can, but that makes the fighting more dangerous to all of us.”

“You wouldn’t need to carry all of them. Just one will do, to see if his blood will serve. Then we can drop the dead serpents down here, before their blood weakens. If we leave some of your men here, they can wake up the others and lead them to us.

“Then we can go hunting whatever needs to be hunted.”

The skeletons bent to pick up their weapons, and Conan raised his sword. But they were not attacking. They began to strike their steel rhythmically on their ribs until, the clang and crash hammered at Conan’s ears.

At least for the moment, he had trustworthy allies and a place to go. With luck, his friends on the surface would not have to worry about the flying serpents much longer.

Then matters would go as the gods decreed, and Conan had not expected them to warn him about their wishes since he was a lad in Cimmeria!

Grolin was leading his men because the sorcerer had to guide them through this wilderness of rocks and would speak to no one else. Sometimes he did not even speak to Grolin, and then the baron would break into a chill sweat in spite of the mountain wind.

He could have sworn that the slope ahead looked different each time he studied it. Was that his imagination, which he knew to be working with greater vigour than usual? Or was it magic at work on this mountainside, changing the shape of the land the way the sorcerer had changed his shape each time he appeared to Grolin?

“A profitless question,” the baron heard in his mind. “I can guide you whether it is magic or only your fear that makes the rocks dance before your eyes.”

Then, well below him and near the limits of his vision, Grolin saw something. It was not rock, and it was not dancing.

It was an armed party on his trail.

At first he thought it was Conan and whatever weird allies he might have discovered within the mountain. That idea made his blood run even colder than the wind.

Then he saw that there were too many. He also thought he recognized the lithe figure leading the party.

He fell back to the end of his own line, ordered it to halt and go to cover, and crouched beside a boulder. He ignored the sorcerer who was fussing at him in his mind. This was business for warriors, not for nameless wizards who hid in various guises from real dangers.

He did recognize the leader. Lysinka and her people were on his trail. Also some of the Thanza Rangers. Whatever else might have happened since Conan entered the Mountain of the Skull, the unlikely alliance of bandits and Aquilonian soldiers still held.

This meant Grolin had enemies of twice his own strength on his trail.

“Up!” he called to his men. Then he ran as fast as the slope allowed, back to the head of the line.

He said nothing to the sorcerer. But after a moment, he heard the voice in his mind again.

“Bear left, at that rock with the reddish streak down one side. The ground on the right side is too loose and crumbly for marching...”

There was no returning the way Conan had come. The skeletons could not swim, the Cimmerian could not face another water dragon, and the way led nowhere save to the bottom of the shaft down which he had fallen.

Fortunately the skeletons had some memories of the interior of this mountain. Sharing them with Conan, they enabled him to find a useful way upward from the cave where they stood. Time had little meaning in this endlessly-twilit underworld, but it could not have been more than a few hours before the Cimmerian hillman found himself climbing as he had never climbed before.

He had clambered up mountains, through mazes of caves, tunnels, and shafts. He had indeed done this many times, sometimes retreating, sometimes advancing to battle with stranger foes than flying serpents. But he had never advanced with twenty-odd armed skeleton warriors climbing behind him, making a din that would deafen a god.

Nor had he climbed with one of those warriors’ comrades on his back, the skeleton disassembled into its individual bones and wrapped firmly into a bundle with thongs cut from the water dragon’s hide. In spite of their stony composition, the bones were not too great a burden for the Cimmerian, even on the roughest ascent.

The burden would, however, slow him in a fight. He hoped the unknown warrior would not mind being brusquely put out of harm’s way, when Conan and his strange company reached the caves of the flying serpents.

The serpents would surely be alert and ready to fight. The sound of the climb would not only deafen gods, it would awaken any creature with ears in its skull!

XIV

Lord Grolin thought at first he could simply outrun Lysinka’s fighters. He had, after all, a considerable head start, as well as guidance from the sorcerer through the mysteries of the upper slopes. He even knew what the mouth of the cave looked like.