Conan the Marauder (19 page)

"I see you prosper yet further, barbarian." The voice came from the curtain behind Bartatua's seat. Conan rose as the Vendhyan woman came around the arras. She wore fluted silver breast cups with large, smoky-red rubies in their centres, and a similar ruby cast its red glare from her navel. A silver belt rested low about her hips, and from it depended an ankle-length skirt of sheerest black silk. Her feet were bare except for numerous rings upon her toes.

Conan bowed. "In this camp, my lady, to be called a barbarian is no distinction. And if I prosper, it is because I serve the Kagan faithfully and he rewards such service generously."

"You are a careful man, Cimmerian," she said. "I had thought you a mere brainless oaf, a swaggering bravo with a strong sword arm and little else. It seems I was wrong. You and I got off to an ill start, Conan. I would like to make things easier between us. You serve the Kagan with your warrior skills. I serve him not only as concubine, but as advisor. Let us have an end to this enmity. It serves no purpose and harms only ourselves."

"I too, would see an end to these disputes," said Conan cautiously. "I have no wish to take part in the feuds that surround the Kagan. I have no ambitions beyond those of a serving soldier. How could I, when the Hyrkanians treat a foreigner at best with grudging tolerance?"

"That is wise," she said. "A man should know the limits of his ambitions as well as those of his capabilities." She came closer to him and her heady perfume rose to his nostrils. Instantly the Cimmerian was on his guard.

"You are cautious, Conan," she said. "You do not commit yourself except to voice your loyalty to the Kagan. You should have been a courtier." She poured two cups from the Kagan's flask and handed him one.

Conan took the wine and sipped lightly. "I hope not, my lady. I have no taste for the games and subterfuges of the court. I had trusted that there would be no such doings among the Hyrkanians. I find that I was wrong."

"So you were," she said, coming so close to him that he could feel the animal heat from her body. "Wherever kings play for power, there will be those who do the king's bidding and seek a share in the power. Those servants keep their knives ever sharpened for each other. A wise man learns which of these vassals will rise in the ruler's service and sides with them."

"I am not interested," Conan said. "Let the Kagan value my service by my deeds on the field of battle."

"Yes," she said, "you are not one who manipulates the power of another. You are like one of the great tigers of the eastern forest, strong and solitary. I am much like you, Conan, but I use different weapons." Abruptly she wound her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him.

Conan was stunned. She had succeeded in arousing his passions, but even further had she aroused his caution. It could be death to be found thus with the Kagan's woman. Her right hand went beneath his heavy hair and he felt a pricking at the back of his neck. With her other hand she snapped the thin chain that held her breast cups together in front. As they fell away, she ripped her skirt from its jewelled belt, laughing.

"Vendhyan slut!" Conan thrust her from him to sprawl upon the divan. "What do you—" He began to lurch toward her, but he was struck by a wave of dizziness. He remembered the pricking at the back of his neck. The woman had poisoned him! He fumbled for his sword hilt, but found that he could not get a proper grip.

"My lord!" the woman screamed. "Save me!"

Conan turned to see the Kagan standing in the door-

way of the tent. Next to him was Danaqan. The old man chortled in obscene glee. "See, Kagan! It is as we foretold. The foreigner has brought evil among us. Now, in his drunken lust, he seeks to have your woman!"

"Kagan," Conan said, his tongue barely answering his bidding. "I do not—" But a blow from Bartatua's fist struck him sprawling upon the carpet. Inwardly he cursed his unwariness. He saw the Kagan draw his dagger and raise it high, but then the shaman gripped Bartatua's wrist.

"Nay, my lord, nay! Do not slay him yet. I have a use for him!"

"What manner of use, shaman?" asked the Kagan, his face still twisted with fury. He re-sheathed the dagger.

The shaman squatted beside the inert Cimmerian. He took the black-haired head in his hands and stroked it lovingly. "I have certain rites to perform, rites that require a strong victim, one who will not die easily. This foreigner should last far longer than any of your other prisoners."

"Give him to the shaman, my lord!" hissed the Vendhyan woman.

In a display of false modesty, she had wrapped herself in a cloth-of-gold hanging. "He is a treacherous beast who betrayed your trust, after you raised him from slavery to high rank and showered him with favours. He deserves the most degraded of deaths."

"Very well, Lakhme," said the Kagan. "Take him, shaman. I wish never to lay eyes upon him again."

Danaqan gave a high-pitched call and two of his minions came in. Between them they carried a yoke of thick wood. They placed the yoke behind the Cimmerian's muscular neck and stretched out his arms upon the wooden limbs. His wrists were made fast to its ends with iron manacles, and a heavy wooden U was fastened in place to encircle his neck.

Conan began to regain use of his legs, but his tongue was still paralysed. The shaman's henchmen grasped the yoke and hauled him to his feet. Bartatua thrust his face within a few inches of Conan's own.

"I would have made you a great general, Conan," he said. "In time, when I came into my empire, I might have made you a king under me. Now I see that I was foolish in trusting a man of alien blood. I should have left you a slave. Better for you as well had you remained a slave. You might have lived longer that way, and your death surely would have been more pleasant."

Conan sought to speak, to tell Bartatua of the treachery of his shaman and his concubine. All he could manage was an inarticulate growl.

"Take him from my sight!" shouted the Kagan in disgust.

The group of shamans grasped the yoke by both ends and half-dragged Conan from the tent. Warriors looked up curiously as the Cimmerian was driven through the camp, helped along by lashes from Danaqan's riding whip. His mind still reeled with confusion under the influence of Lakhme's drug. Rage and hatred surged through him at each new indignity.

A final shove from Danaqan sent Conan to his knees. He knew that they were no longer within the camp. He managed to raise his head slightly within the confines of the yoke. Before him was a rough stake set into the ground, and somewhere near a great fire was burning.

"Enjoy these hours of oblivion," said Danaqan. "I want you fully aware for your death. When the moon is past its zenith, we begin our ritual. Never has even the strongest of my victims kept his sanity until death!"

Conan fell forward and the black wings of unconsciousness closed over him.

He awoke to vicious pain in his shoulders and wrists. There was fiendish music playing somewhere. He opened his eyes and saw bizarre forms whirling about a fire that burned with unnatural colours. They moved so swiftly and with such lizard-like suppleness that he could not quite make out what they were doing.

He saw Danaqan, and the youth in women's clothing. He also saw Lakhme. The Vendhyan woman was nude, and she seemed to be the focus of the hellish rite. He was not certain whether it was the after-effects of the drug affecting his vision, but some of the things she was doing were not only obscene, but looked to be physically impossible.

At last the music slowed and the frenzied participants began to encircle Conan. The Cimmerian hung by his wrists from the crossbar of his yoke. Its neck piece had been removed and the bar hauled to the top of the stake, and Conan dangled by his wrists from his manacles. He tried to close his fingers but found that his hands were numb.

From the circle around him, Danaqan stepped forth, and beside him was Lakhme. The shaman's wrinkled hide and the Vendhyan woman's alabaster skin were glossy with unguents and sweat. Both were streaked with blood, but Conan could not guess its origin, nor did he wish to.

"Are you awake now, foreigner?" Danaqan demanded, cackling lewdly.

"He is conscious," said the concubine. "He is ready to play his part hi our rite." Her smile belonged on the face of nothing in human guise.

Conan took stock of himself. He had as yet suffered no severe damage. His armour and other clothing had been removed, and he wore only his loincloth. He calculated that a perfectly timed kick of his feet would

snap the neck of both woman and shaman, only to find that his ankles were bound to the stake.

"Let us begin, then," said the shaman in high glee. "The gods are waiting."

An acolyte handed the old man a curved knife with a hideously serrated edge and he reached high with it, waving the blade suggestively before Conan's eyes as the woman hooked her fingers into his loincloth. Then the hellish scene before the Cimmerian halted suddenly, as if a spell of paralysis had been laid upon all present.

Conan saw that instead of a right eye, the shaman now wore the hawk-feathered fletching of a Hyrkanian arrow. At the back of his skull protruded the red-stained head and shaft of the arrow, studded for most of its length with bits of brain and scalp and tiny white bits of bone. Silently the old fiend collapsed in a heap. A panicked screeching arose as the woman-clothed youth threw himself upon the corpse, wailing in crazed grief.

Another shaman spun and fell in a rattling heap, an arrow in his chest. The youth in women's dress looked up at Conan with a glare of maniacal ferocity and snatched up the knife from the shaman's relaxing fingers. He sprang at Conan with the weapon raised high, foam flecking the corners of his screaming mouth, but before he could strike, something described a glittering silver arc across his throat. The youth's eyes went wide as his hand flew to his neck, but he could not prevent the flow of blood that fountained for two yards, splashing the corpses that were beginning to fill the area illuminated by the fire.

The youth staggered away and collapsed as a horse brushed the stake and its rider shook the blood from his curved sword. "Always in the midst of trouble eh, Conan?" said Rustuf. The Kozak sheathed his blade and cut Conan's ankle bonds with a dagger. The Cimmerian

saw Fawd, mounted on a fleet mare, thrust his lance between the shoulders of a fleeing shaman.

"Did you get the Vendhyan woman?" Conan managed to choke out.

"Be still," said Rustuf. He took a heavy hatchet from his saddle and chopped through the chain that bound one of the Cimmerian's wrists. "We are still in great danger, Conan. No, I did not slay her, and it is very bloody-minded of you to be thinking solely of vengeance in your position." He chopped through the other chain and caught Conan before he could fall.

"Of course," the Kozak went on, "had she been about to do to me what she was going to do to you, I might want to hack her pretty form in twain as well. But no, she slipped away, supple as a serpent."

Fawd came back, leading a large stallion that Conan recognized as his favourite horse. The two helped him to mount, and Rustuf tied his reins around his wrist. His hands were still too numb to grasp them.

"We must ride like the wind now," Rustuf said. "If we are swift enough, we might gain sufficient distance on the Kagan's pursuit to get away. We go north-west."

"Why north-west.?" Conan asked, the words painful

in his throat.

"Because the sky was red and black in that direction this evening," answered the Kozak. "I know the signs. There is the very grandfather of dust storms brewing there. If it does not kill us, the storm might hide us and wipe out our tracks."

Fawd rode up to them, a string of remounts at his left hand. Conan ignored the agony in his arms and kicked his mount to a gallop. "I will not forget this, my friends. Now, let's ride!"

XI

Ishkala brooded in her tent. Two nights earlier they had arrived at their destination in the featureless Steppe of Famine. The mixed column of horsemen, now some two thousand strong, had been following a tiny stream, one barely adequate to water the mounts each evening. The land was so flat, so utterly without points of reference, that the mind reeled and grew disoriented. Only the sun, moon and stars provided any sense of direction.

Blindly, they had followed the directions of the Turanian mage, Khondemir, and unerringly he had guided them to this place, the City of Mounds. This was the sacred burial ground of the Ashkuz, where the clan chiefs and Kagans had their funeral mounds. The sides of her tent were rolled up for the sake of ventilation, and she studied the eerie scene around her with dread. This was an uncanny place.

A high, earthen rampart enclosed a burial ground many acres in extent. The entire area was filled with the mounds. Some were as tall as a man, but many were three or four times that height. A few were immense, towering to crests eighty or more feet above the level of the steppe.

Atop many of the mounds were standards bearing the skulls of beasts and men and varying numbers and colours of horses' tails. From many depended banners of bright silk, most of them ancient and rotted. These standards were not fashioned of wood, such as those carried by the nomads on their migrations, but of imperishable bronze. Everywhere were the skeletons of men and horses. In some places skeletal warriors, still helmed and armoured, sat upon equally skeletal steeds, ready for some ghostly battle, bound to stakes or frameworks to keep the semblance of life.

"Awesome, is it not?" said a voice near her side. She looked up to see the wizard, Khondemir.

"It is an evil place," she said. "Raised by live savages to the memory of dead savages. I would be away from here."

"Ah, but our work here is not yet finished." The day before she had seen the mage walking about the City of Mounds, making some sort of sketch. That evening he had released two more of his messenger birds. "Now is a time of waiting, while I prepare my spells that shall save our beautiful city of Sogaria."

"I wish you well, then," she said. "I would be away from here as soon as possible." She looked at the huge mound before her tent. "Did the savages truly build this place?"