Read Conan The Destroyer Online

Authors: Robert Jordan

Conan The Destroyer (9 page)

BOOK: Conan The Destroyer
8.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Carefully he scrubbed out a section of the diagram with his foot, then stepped out. The rest he could dispose of later. Now there was a matter more important. The lifeless-eyed necromancer smiled thinly—it touched no more than his lips—down at the lovely face she turned up to him in her unbroken sleep. A matter infinitely more important.
Crystalline stairs that chimed beneath his hurried tread carried him down into the palace. To the chamber of mirrors, he hastened, and beyond, to a room like no other in that sparkling faceted structure, nor like any other to be found on the face of the earth.
Elsewhere in that crystal palace was there always light and brightness, without need of lamp or sun. Here was darkness. The walls seemed tapestried with blackest shadow, if walls there were, or ceiling or floor, for the chamber appeared to extend in all directions infinitely, and no spark of light in it save two. Brightness framed the doorway that gave entrance from the chamber of mirrors, but that brightness failed abruptly at the very door. No pool of light stretched from it. The second light was indeed a pool, a soft glow without apparent source that surrounded a huge bed piled high with silken cushions. On that bed Amon-Rama laid his slight burden.
He looked down at her, no expression in his flat black eyes, then slowly traced one hand along the line from slim ankle to rounded thigh to tiny waist to swelling breast. Normal vices had been burned out of him by his thaumaturgies long years ago, but others remained, others that gave him dark pleasures. And, he thought, as he had not the same use for the girl as that foolish woman, Taramis, there was no reason for him not to indulge himself in them. But when his sport with the others was done. Now that the girl, the One, was finally in his grasp, his impatience was gone. Now was a time for preparations.
“Hear me now!” he called, his voice rolling into vast distances. “No door, no window, no crack nor opening to air. So do I say it, so must it be!”
The crystal palace tolled brazenly like a great bell, and it was so. The palace was sealed.
“Let us see first how they deal with that,” he murmured.
With a final glance at Jehnna’s unmoving form, he made his way from the place. When he had shut the door behind him, only the one pool of light remained, and Jehnna floated in the midst of infinite dark.
 
E
erily pearlescent darkness still filled the crater when Conan woke, but he did not need a paling of the sky to the east to tell him that dawn approached. To cross the lake at dawn they must be awake before dawn, therefore he had awakened in good time. It was a useful trick he had, though he would admit that too much wine could befuddle it.
Tossing aside his blankets, he sheathed the bared broadsword that had lain by him through the night and rose, stretching. He frowned as his eye fell on Jehnna’s empty blankets. Swiftly he scanned the slope of the crater above their camp. The horses stood with heads down, sleeping. Nothing moved.
He bent to prod Akiro and Malak. “Wake,” he said quietly. “Jehnna is gone. Up with you.”
Leaving then—Malak spluttering and cursing, Akiro muttering direly about his age and need for sleep—Conan strode to where Bombatta and Zula slept, one to either side of the empty blankets where Jehnna had been. He glared at the scar-faced warrior, snoring in a low buzz, and planted his booted foot in the man’s ribs.
With a startled yelp Bombatta came awake. A heartbeat later he was snarling to his feet, hand darting to his tulwar. “I will kill you, thief! I—”
“Jehnna is gone,” Conan said with grim coldness. “You all but tie her to you, then let her disappear. She could be dead!”
Bombatta’s fury vanished with the first words. He stared at her blankets as if struck in the head.
“The horses are all here,” Malak called.
The ebon-armored man shook himself. “Of course they are!” he roared. “Jehnna would not ride away from her destiny.”
“Destiny!” Zula sneered. “You call it her destiny. Why can she not choose her own destiny?”
“If you have done something with her,” Bombatta grated, and the black woman bristled back.
“I? I would never harm her! It is you who think she is a plaything, to be used as you see fit!”
The scars stood out as white lines across the big warrior’s face. “You diseased she-jackal! I will carve you—”
“Fight later!” Conan snapped. “Now we must find Jehnna!”
Tension between the two lessened, but did not disappear. Bombatta sheathed his half-bared tulwar with a growl deep in his throat, and Zula’s lip curled angrily as she lowered the staff she held in both hands.
Akiro had knelt by Jehnna’s blankets and begun running his hands over them. Now his lips moved silently, and his eyes closed. When he opened them again only dead-white spheres showed. Malak gagged loudly and turned away.
“The girl was taken by a bird,” the old man announced.
“Old fool,” Bombatta muttered, but Akiro continued as if he had not spoken.
“A great bird, a bird of smoke that moved without sound. It carried her in its talons.” His eyelids dropped, and opened on normal black eyes.
“A fool?” Conan said to Bombatta. “You are the fool. And me. We should have expected the Stygian to do something.”
“Where did this bird take her?” Zula asked.
Akiro pointed across the lake to the crystal palace. “There, of course.”
“Then we must follow,” she said.
Conan nodded wordless agreement. As one he and Bombatta ran to the hide boat, wrestled it to the water.
“But it may be ensorceled,” Malak protested. “Akiro said so.”
“We must take the chance,” Conan replied. He stood knee deep in the water beside the narrow vessel. “In! Quickly!”
In a quick scramble they filled the boat, Zula in the middle between Akiro and Malak, Conan and Bombatta on the ends. Paddles in the big men’s hands dug furiously at the water, and the slim boat knifed away from the shore.
“Sigyn’s Bowl!!” Malak howled abruptly. “I forgot! I am leaving this morning! Turn back!”
Conan did not slow the steady work of his powerful arms and shoulders. “Swim,” he said curtly.
The small thief looked at the liquid beneath them and shuddered. “Water is for drinking,” he muttered, “when there is no wine.”
With neither wind nor wave to hinder and two strong men working the paddles, the hide boat all but flew over the lake. Ripples from its passage spread incredibly far, for no other thing disturbed that glassy surface. The crystal palace loomed before them. Along its border with the water there was a landing, perfectly ordinary except that it, too, seemed carved from a single huge gem. The sun topped the crater’s rim as they reached the palace, and the vast structure became a riot of scintillation.
Conan held the boat close to the strange landing while the others clambered out. When he was on the glittering stone as well, he lifted the hide boat from the water. A thief did not last long in Shadizar who failed to plan for his exits and escapes. For now the lake was still, but he would not risk something sweeping the craft away, not until he knew of some other means of leaving that unnatural palace.
The boat secured, he turned his attention to the palace. Smooth, sparkling walls met his eyes. Far to the right and left were the ends of crystal colonnades with tall, fluted columns of pellucid stone. Above rose featureless, vitreous expanses of sheer wall topped by faceted domes and glittering spires stretching toward the sky.
“Fascinating,” Akiro murmured, stroking his fingertips over the crystal wall. “There are no joins. It is truly one single gem. All of it. Fascinating.”
“Better it were ordinary marble,” Conan said roughly. “I could contrive a means to scale that. Come. We must find a doorway of some sort.”
“There is none,” Akiro said without breaking his abstract reverie.
“How,” Conan began, then thought better of asking how the wizard knew there were no doors. “Then how in Zandru’s Nine Hells do we get in?” he asked instead.
Akiro blinked in surprise. “Oh, that part is easy.” He walked to the edge of the landing and pointed to the water. “Down there is an opening. I could sense it the very first time I tried, perhaps because it is the
only
opening I found. It is big enough for our uses.”
“A means of getting water from the lake?” Zula said doubtfully.
“I do not like water,” Malak grumbled, but it was the palace he eyed nervously.
Conan knelt beside the round-bellied mage and peered at the water’s surface. It was unruffled once more, and he could see nothing but his own image. It could not be possible, he told himself, that this Amon-Rama would build a palace with no way in, then leave such a simple entrance as this. A trap, he thought, with Jehnna for bait. Then let the trapper discover what manner of creature it was he meant to snare. He breathed deeply to flush his lungs with air, and dove into the lake. Only a small splashed marked his entrance
There was a grayish clarity to the water below the surface. The Cimmerian took himself deeper with powerful strokes, searching along the face of the landing. The crystal surface was unmarked by the slimes and green things that grew on normal stonework immersed so.
Quickly he found the opening, a great pipe nearly as wide as his out-stretched arms, with a crosshatch of thick iron bars across it. Seizing the bars, he braced his feet against the wall beside the pipe and heaved. Nothing gave, not even the slightest. Harder he pulled, till his sinews creaked, and still to no avail. Abruptly he was startled to see other hands beside his own. He looked up and stared into the straining face of Bombatta, stripped of his black armor. Conan threw himself into redoubled effort. Bone and thew quivered, and lungs burned.
Suddenly, with a sharp crack, one bar tore loose in a shower of jewel-like shards. The grating shifted in Conan’s hands, and he found he had more leverage. Crystal splintered and broke, and one by one the other bars came free.
Letting the grate fall, the Cimmerian sped back to the surface. As his head broke water he gulped air. He did not look around when Bombatta surfaced beside him. From the landing’s edge three anxious faces peered down.
“The way is open,” Conan said between pants. “Come.”
“Wait but a moment,” Akiro said. “Regain your breath. We must make a plan.”
“No time,” Conan replied. One last breath he drew, then rolled over and swam downward again.
With a quick twist he turned into the pipe, powerful strokes carrying him deeper. The light faded behind him, and he swam in darkness. Thirty paces, now. Forty, and his lungs demanded air. Fifty. And suddenly there was a glow ahead. Swiftly he swam toward it, then turned upward toward the light’s source, moving arms and legs to slow his ascent. He broke the surface with only the sound of a droplet falling.
He was in a well, he saw, walled with the same smooth crystal as made up the palace. A wooden bucket was sunk in the water next to him, its rope pulled taut. Carefully he tugged the rope. It did not give.
A deadly smile came onto his face. Amon-Rama no doubt thought himself secure, and his trap subtle. In the northlands, though, there was an ancient saying. To trap a Cimmerian is to trap your own death.
Someone surfaced beside him with a splash that echoed from the well’s walls, but he did not look to see who it was. He would allow only one thought, now. Grasping the rope, he climbed hand over hand with a grim face. The Cimmerian had entered the trap, and he hunted.
In the chamber of mirrors Amon-Rama thoughtfully tapped his pointed chin with a long, thin finger. They were inside the palace. He had forgotten the pipe that brought water to his well, and they had found his oversight quickly. Good sport was indicated.
With a malevolent smile he lightly touched a mirrored wall. It was not, of course, as if these interlopers had some chance of escape or—all the powers of darkness forfend!—victory. This palace was his in ways no king could dream of. The shriek of the crystal as the bars were torn free. That had come to him. The tread of their feet in the corridors, the disturbing of the air by their breath, all came to him. But then, he found sport in other ways than offering true hope to his prey. Their false belief in false hope sufficed, and even greater sport came when all hope was stripped away.
Now was time for preparations. He spoke a word, raised his hands, and the golden draperies shrouding the walls rolled neatly upwards revealing the five score great mirrors that surrounded the chamber. Each mirror reflected the clear plinth that held the glowing Heart of Ahriman, but none showed Amon-Rama. A lifetime drenched in darkest thaumaturgies had many peculiar effects on the earthly body of the practitioner. He
had
no reflection to be shown in any surface.
Only two breaks were there in the phalanx of mirrors. One was the door to the corridor. Through the other he could see endless dark and the bed on which Jehnna’s still sleeping form lay. It was through this last that Amon-Rama moved. A sound rolled round the chamber, like the splash of a rock in a pool of water, and there was but a single gap unmirrored in the wall. Five score and one reflections of the Heart of Ahriman waited with the original.
Akiro pulled himself from the well with a grunt and, ignoring the water that dripped from him, stood staring at gem-like walls and ornaments of gold and silver so finely wrought that it seemed the mind of man could not have conceived them. Everywhere were tapestries of other-worldly scenes and carpets that changed in infinite variety of color and pattern as he watched.
“Akiro?” Malak said.
The rotund wizard shook his head admiringly. All done with sorcery; no one of these things had ever been crafted by a human hand. It was magnificent.
“Akiro?”
Irritably the mage turned to regard the small thief. Malak’s hair hung in his face, and a pool of water about his feet splashed with a rain of drops from his garments. He looked like a drowned rat, Akiro thought, then quickly scrubbed his own dripping hair from his face. “Yes?” he snapped.
“They are going,” Malak said.
Akiro looked in the direction the other pointed, and bit back an oath that would have curdled the air. Bombata and Zula were disappearing around a bend in the corridor, and Conan was no longer to be seen. “Fools,” he muttered. “Wait!” As swiftly as he could make his old bones move, he ran after them, with Malak dogging his heels. “Half-wits!” the old mage growled. “You do not wander about a wizard’s lair as if it were a merchant’s garden! Here, anything can happen!”
As he rounded the corner, Akiro saw the others ahead, with Conan far in the lead. Sword in hand, the Cimmerian darted through a doorway at the end of the corridor, and in the same instant a door slid down with a clang, sealing the passage behind him. Bombatta and Zula rushed forward to pound on the door, he with his sword hilt, she with her staff.
Cursing under his breath Akiro ran to help, but for moments after reaching them he could only stare. The door was as transparent as glass—clearly they could see Conan, looking warily about a mirrored chamber, his broadsword at the ready—yet the blows of Bombatta and Zula rebounded as if from an iron-bound castle gate. As if to add to the hollow booming, all began to shout at once.
“Can he not hear us?” Malak cried. “Conan! Ogun’s Toenails! Conan!”
BOOK: Conan The Destroyer
8.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Bug Out by G. Allen Mercer
Owned by Him by Sam Crescent
The Italian Girl by Lucinda Riley
Destiny of Coins by Aiden James
The Suitor List by Shirley Marks
So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman