Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza (7 page)

“Very well,” Lysinka said. “I will come with ten of my men. You will send down ten of yours with the guest gifts.”

“You ask hostages?” the man said, unable to hide surprise and even indignation.

Her self-command had returned. She said, with a bland smile, “It is only just that I offer hospitality in return for hospitality. My men are as honourable as yours.”

This left much unsaid, but the man seemed prepared to accept it. Lysinka made one final gesture to Fergis—and smiled as his face fell.

He would not be among those going up the cliff. The band would give less offence to the hostages if he commanded below—and more surely avenge their chieftain, if it came to that.

IV

Conan left camp as soon as he had seen to food, wine, salves, and bandages for his men. All needed the first two, which rather to the Cimmerian’s surprise were both abundant and good. The Rangers’ noble patron had to be dipping generously into his coffers, if only out of fear of his soldiers turning bandit.

Many needed the salves and bandages. Blisters from climbing in poorly fitting boots or gripping sun-heated rocks, thorn punctures, cuts, bruises, too much sun and too little water—a day’s training like this was likely to lay men out with everything save perhaps snakebite and broken bones.

It was two-legged serpents who were in the Cimmerian’s thoughts as he left the camp well before he needed to merely to reach the meeting with Rog on time. Indeed, they weighed heavily.

He did not fear treachery from Tharmis Rog, who would have small need to risk dishonour against the Cimmerian. Rog was older than Conan and perhaps a trifle slower, but as large, as strong, and doubtless as cunning a fighter. It would be as well to end the fight before both men had hammered each other past the fitness needed for campaigning.

Nor did Conan fear Rog sending men to do what he would not stoop to do himself. A wolf did not send jackals to pull down a rival.

But there were men in the camp who hated Tharmis Rog or regretted the oath they had taken. Some had been so foolish as to speak openly in Conan’s hearing, seemingly taking him for a bluff, blunt-witted northerner with few loyalties and less of the Aquilonian tongue.

Conan remembered those men. He intended to make them remember him, if he could find a time and place where it would not weaken the Thanza Rangers. Meanwhile, such men might well be laying plots to bring Tharmis Rog down, then make it seem that Conan had slain the master-at-arms.

Such men might also have taken the course of telling Mikros where one Sellus the Northerner was to be found. Conan did not imagine for a moment that he had crippled or frightened enough of Mikros’s bullies to leave the panderer impotent. He would likely enough meet the man’s hirelings again before he left Aquilonia.

And if he met none of these, there could still be bounty hunters from Ophir, Argos, or in time even distant Turan. King Yezdigerd ruled a realm that had no fear of the wrath of Aquilonia, and it was yet another realm where a certain wandering Cimmerian warrior had a price on his head.

Altogether, there were more than enough chances for uninvited guests at this private feast, to make it prudent to approach the feasting hall by a long and winding route.

From many years’ travelling and fighting, Conan had gained the art of learning his way around a stretch of countryside or a quarter of a city within days of his arrival. Already there were parts of the land around the camp he could have crossed unerringly in the depths of night, and this evening the light was slow to fade.

Conan travelled even faster than he had expected, and could have searched all around the meadow had he not feared being seen. So instead he hid himself within the oak grove, under a cluster of bushes that offered further concealment. Perfectly hidden, he even felt it safe to lie down and sleep, for all that he removed neither clothing nor weapons.

After all, if he did not wake in time, Tharmis Rog would surely make enough noise over not finding his opponent ready, to wake not merely the sleeping but the dead.

The ruined castle high on the crags had at last begun to grow closer. For some while, Lysinka had begun to think that she and her chosen ten comrades were doomed to spend the rest of eternity on this stony, winding path up the cliffs.

It helped that the rain had stopped, a rising wind had hurled the clouds away to eastward, and an angry yellow moon shed a trifle of light below. It did not help enough, when the wind moaned and whined around the rocks like the distant murmuring of lost souls, and the cries of night birds and bats had no natural ring to them.

Lysinka told herself to rein in her fancies and trust he who called himself the lord of Thanza until he betrayed that trust. No wise chief would willingly sacrifice ten of his men for a merely equal number of foes. His own men would fling him from the cliffs if he did.

Except that Lysinka would be one of the dead. She was not one to swell with vainglory, but she knew that her band would be maimed past repairing by her death.

Well, if it came to that, she would do her best to take his lordship with her. Then two headless bands might draw off, the one from the other, and her comrades live to mourn her. They would never find her body, not in this wilderness of stone that had driven the trees to retreat like a pack of mangy dogs.

A new note in the wind struck shrill and harsh. It rose until Lysinka wanted to plug her ears with her hood, until the lost souls seemed to be shrieking in rage rather than whispering in loneliness.

She stiffened as invisible fingers seemed to touch her. They plucked and caressed her brow, her ears, her throat, and more intimate places. She found herself breathless yet wanting to scream in rage and terror.

She barely heard a shout from up ahead. To save her own soul she could not have said who shouted. She needed no hearing to see the fate of the man just ahead of her.

In one moment he was bracing himself, one hand on a heavy staff with its butt jammed into a crevice, the other groping for a handhold. In the next moment the staff snapped like a twig. The man reeled, overbalanced, clawed his other hand bloody trying to keep his handhold, then lurched over the edge of the path.

Lysinka tried to shut out the fading sound of his scream and the sight of his blood on the rock. She drew a shuddering breath and found that she was gripping her staff with both hands, as if ready to wield it against an opponent. If anything, visible or invisible, touched her again...

The Thanzans ahead of her were making every rite of aversion she had seen in the borderland and a few she did not recognize. She licked her lips several times and at last found her voice.

“What—was that the wind?”

“Aye, lady,” one man said. He kept his face averted from her, and the wind piped about them so that most of his words were lost. But she heard enough to learn of something called the Spider Wind, which plucked men from where it would, when it would, as if it were a living thing with an appetite sated only by human flesh.

Lysinka thought she knew most of the true dangers and many of the legendary ones of the Thanzas. But she had never heard of the Spider Wind.

How did one sell one’s life dearly against such?

She had not found even the vaguest of answers, before they reached the end of the climb, and torchlight and the smell of roasting meat made the terrors of the climb seem a child’s nightmare.

At least for a while.

When Conan awoke, the last light had long since departed from the sky. Within the oak grove, it was as dark as the tunnels beneath a temple of Set. Save that the Cimmerian smelled rich forest soil instead of ancient dust, heard night birds calling instead of water dripping, and saw fresh human footprints, rather than the marks of the sacred serpents.

For the same reason that he had taken the long way to the scene of combat, Conan had brought sword, dagger, and various lesser knives. He and Tharmis Rog would fight barehanded; those they might meet on the way could well be less honourable.

His sheathed dagger dangling about his neck, Conan crawled swiftly on the trail of the men. He soon thought he could have marched along with a drummer and a trumpeter. The newcomers had so little march discipline or knowledge of the forest that cracking twigs and rustling leaves made a trail as plain to Conan’s senses as that left by their boots.

If matters went on as they had begun there would be no need to warn Tharmis Rog.

For a while, it seemed that matters would go just that way. The men and their pursuer had to be halfway through the grove now. From the occasional word they let drop, Conan knew they were Aquilonian, some perhaps not native speakers. He recognized no voices.

Time for a prisoner to answer a few pointed questions—or the dagger’s point, if all else failed.

Deed followed thought as quickly as the Cimmerian could find a man a little apart from his comrades. That did not take long—these men were city folk, to whom a forest was as alien as a city would have been to the boy Conan.

The Cimmerian’s chosen prey braced himself against a gnarled, arching oak root, scratched himself and bent over to tie the laces of his boots. He was thus engaged when the Cimmerian snaked under the arch in the root and snatched the man off his feet.

The man went down face-first. As he struggled to rise and shout at the same time, a massive hand pressed his face into the leaf mould and rotten fungus.

“You can speak quickly or die slowly. Chose.”

Conan decided that the man’s gasps and grunts promised cooperation and rolled him over, while drawing his own dagger. When the man breathed freely again, the steel was at his throat.

No night-sight much less keen than Conan’s could have made out the man’s features, but the scar from the right ear across the cheek to the corner of the mouth was unmistakable. Conan had last seen this man writhing on the floor of the Golden Lion after the Cimmerian’s boot took him in the stomach.

“Mikros does not give up easily, does he?” Conan said, in an almost conversational tone.

“Ahhh—” the man gasped.

“The worse for your friends,” Conan said. “How many are there?”

The man shook his head. The dagger’s point pricked harder.

“Ten—a dozen—no more,” the man said, eyes huge and showing mostly whites.

“My thanks,” Conan said. He cracked the man’s head smartly against the root and the bully went limp. He still breathed, but it would be dawn before he regained his senses and days before his head stopped aching.

Conan resumed his pursuit, more swiftly now that he knew whom he sought. He was still well behind the panderer’s men when he found a gap in the trees that showed him the meadow. The moon silvered the grass, the fallen trees, and the boulder against which Tharmis Rog sat, his broad back protected by the stone and his sword across his knees.

His head was bowed on his chest, and Conan thought briefly that it would hardly be a fair fight if the man were half-asleep or fuddled with wine. Of more immediate importance, Mikros’s men were preparing to attack.

A dark silhouette rose to Conan’s left, another to his right. The leftward man was nocking an arrow to a bow, the other lifting a short spear.

Conan cupped his hands, took a deep breath, and bellowed:

“’Ware, Tharmis Rog! We’ve another fight before ours!”

The fare in the lord of Thanza’s camp was frugal but well-prepared. After ten days of marching through the forest, Lysinka was ready to praise the cook out of more than mere politeness.

“I thank you on his behalf,” her host replied. “But then, he was a good cook when he served me at the manor on the Rhyl. He has not lost his skill by moving to the Thanzas.”

Lysinka did her best not to look confused. The Rhyl was a river in Nemedia, several days’ ride from the Border Range and well to the north of the Thanzas.

The man laughed. It was a robust laugh and under other circumstances might have warmed Lysinka’s spirit. Here on this dark windy crag, she felt more as she had when the Spider Wind fumbled at her.

“I hold the rank of baron in both Nemedia and Aquilonia.”

‘Then why do you choose to live here, which is really neither, nor indeed any place fit for civilized folk?”

“Perhaps I am not civilized enough. Or at least so my enemies in both lands have said. My life would be forfeit within the reach of either realm’s justice. So I live here, with my followers.”

“And conjure your food and weapons from the air and the rocks?” Lysinka said.

“Such curiosity can be dangerous, Countess.”

“You have not earned the right to use that name, my friend. Indeed, you have not even told me if you have one, other than ‘lord of Thanza.’”

“You may call me Grolin,” the baron said. “May I ask that you walk apart with me for a short while? I mean no harm and indeed hope that it will be for our mutual good.”

Lysinka decided that if the walk led to a certain kind of wrestling bout, Grolin might well find himself fit for work as a eunuch in Vendhya. But time enough for that if it proved necessary.

Grolin led the bandit chieftain away from the firelight, up a crumbling flight of stairs that he allowed her to mount unassisted, and across a floor that showed gaps large enough to swallow an ox. Safely on what was left of a curtain wall, they had a splendid view out over the nighted forest, tinted unnatural shades of silver, grey, and blue by the moon.

“The chest is what you seek, is it not?” Grolin asked.

“I can hardly pretend otherwise, can I now?” Lysinka replied. Her voice held a bitter edge.

“You did yourself no harm by revealing your desire,” Grolin said. “It is one I share. Together, we may attain it.”

“And fighting some mad wizard for its possession?”

“You were ready to do that with your unaided steel, Lysinka. Together, we can do better. You have thirty stout fighters. I have a sorcerer. Or at least one who finds this quest worthy.”

Lysinka frowned. Grolin was flinging open a door to a whole new world, much too large for her to grasp readily. She said the first thing that came to her mind, to avoid seeming a witling.