Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza (8 page)

“As long as he is master over whoever magicked the chest—”

Grolin stopped her with a hand to her lips. It seemed to Lysinka that he and his men must learn the rules of her band, about touching women, if there was to be peace tonight, let alone during a quest of days or weeks.

After a moment, Grolin let his hand fall. “Your pardon,” he said.

“Granted. But is this hedge-wizard likely to be strong enough?”

“I do not know. No sorcerer called the chest. It flew of its own will, called by the Mountain of the Skulls. That is the original resting place of what lies within the chest.”

“A treasure?” Lysinka frowned. Within, she was torn between eagerness to make her comrades rich and suspicion that Grolin would be deft in treachery to avoid sharing any gains.

“Some have called it so,” Grolin replied, so softly that Lysinka could barely hear him over the moan of the wind. “It is called the Soul of Thanza.”

In spite of herself, Lysinka felt the night wind as chill against her as if she had been unclothed. She shivered, but stepped aside as Grolin moved to embrace her.

“What does this Soul do?”

Grolin did not look at her as he replied. “It gives its possessor lordship over death.”

Conan expected his shout to bring Tharmis Rog to his feet and the big man’s sword out of its scabbard. Instead the master-at-arms only grunted like the sleepiest of boars and shifted his position slightly.

The Cimmerian had no time to marvel at this or ponder the reason for it. He snatched up a rock and flung it with all the strength of his arm at the archer. The rock took the man in the shoulder as he loosed his arrow. He roared with surprise more than pain, but his arrow flew wide.

In the next moment Conan leaped on the spear man just as his weapon flew. Its course was truer, but the archer’s cry had roused Rog more than the Cimmerian’s warning shout. He moved, just in time to take the spear across the mail shoulder pieces of his corselet. Sparks flew but no blood.

Meanwhile, Conan was trying to end the spear man’s fighting, keep the archer from shooting again, and fight the other men who were swarming out of the trees toward Tharmis Rog like dogs at a bear-baiting. Not for the first time, Conan would have given some years of his life for the power to be in two places at once.

His own strength and sheer good luck divided the work between him and Rog. The spear man had no more chance against Conan than a goat against a tiger. In moments he was limp.

Meanwhile, one of the running men darted squarely into the path of the archer’s second shaft. He reeled, clutching his throat, which had suddenly sprouted the arrow. Then he fell as the archer let out something between a wail and a curse. That was the last sound the archer made, as the Cimmerian closed with him and split his skull with the broadsword.

Meanwhile, the death of friend at the hand of friend had slowed the onrush of Mikros’s other hirelings. So had Tharmis Rog’s lurching to his feet and drawing his sword. He held it uncertainly, and Conan saw him rub his eyes with the back of his free hand. He might for now be no more use in a fight than an unschooled soy, but he was still a head taller than any of the men around him.

While some of those men were merely standing and gaping and others trying to form a circle around Rog, Conan struck them from behind. He had both sword and dagger in hand, and also used fists and feet, all with dreadful effectiveness.

He snapped one man’s spine with a kick, clove mother’s arm from its shoulder with the sword, hamming a third with a low slash from the dagger, then found himself surrounded. He tried to find an opening that would leave him with no one at his back, but his surviving enemies now seemed to use speed of foot against strength of arm and steel.

Conan kept whirling and striking, but half a dozen of his minor cuts oozed blood and he knew a serious wound was only moments away. At least Mikros would hardly have enough men left alive and hale to track down Brollya, after Conan fell—

A roar like storm-flung surf on rocks half-deafened the Cimmerian. Suddenly two men facing him were jerked aloft, as if by a hangman’s noose. Where they had been, stood Tharmis Rog, with one massive hand clamped around either neck.

This time, the master-at-arms had not allowed the Cimmerian to remain in danger longer than necessary.

Conan saw a man to Rog’s right raising a knife, leaped to meet the skulker, and knocked down another bravo in so doing. The uplifted dagger met Conan’s down-slicing sword and flew from the man’s hand as the hand also flew from the wrist. The man howled and ran; Conan idly wondered if he would reach a hiding place before loss of blood brought him down.

Now the two big men stood side by side, facing no more than four opponents; Conan no longer counted the two men Rog was holding. The master-at-arms lifted these, briskly cracked their heads together, then flung them away as if they had been offal that soiled his hands and offended his nostrils. Flying through the air, they brought down two of their comrades.

The two bravos left on their feet did not stand their ground. They fled into the trees, screaming as if being burned alive. One of the men thrown down by Rog regained his senses and lurched off after them.

Rog looked down at the other. “I suppose we’d best wake up this fellow and ask him who sent him out to spoil an honest fight.”

“Never mind that,” Conan said. “Pardon, I did not mean to give you an order. But I know who sent them.” He described the scarred man.

“Ha!” Rog said. “I had begun to suspect the same. As well to be certain.” He looked Conan up and down. “Do you still want to fight?”

The Cimmerian replied with a level gaze and voice. “Do you still think that boulder was aimed at you?” The night birds had begun to sound again after the fight. Rog’s bellow of laughter silenced them once more. “After you risked your life to save me, I should go on believing you seek my blood? If I do that, call me a witling and give me to my daughter’s care, for I’m past soldiering!”

“Well, then,” Conan said, “it seems we have no more quarrel.”

“Rightly enough,” Rog said, shaking his head. “But we’ve some talking to do. Shall we do it over some better wine than the camp holds?”

“If I refuse that offer, you may call me a witling,” Conan replied, with a grin that bared the white teeth in his blood-spattered face. “I don’t know where you’d send me, though, for I’ve no daughters or sons either—that I know of.”

If the mountain wind had seemed cold before, Lysinka now felt rather as if she were embedded naked n a block of ice. She swayed and would have fallen if Grolin had not held her upright. She did not notice whether his hands strayed and for some moments hardly cared.

Once again, the need to prove she was no witling drove her tongue into movement.

“Does this mean the possessor of the Soul is immortal, free from death? Or does it mean that he can command death for others, at will?”

“Yes, I think,” Grolin said.

“Both? Or do you not know?”

“The legend says both, and legend is all there is about the power of the Soul, when it is in the Mountain of the Skulls. One should not be surprised, when the legends also say that the Soul comes from the time of Acheron.”

Lysinka jerked herself out of Grolin’s arms. “That musty tale to frighten children! Every time someone meets magic they do not understand, they blame it on Acheron.” She knew she said this to lessen her own doubts.

“Sometimes, they do so justly,” Grolin said, once again speaking as if he were afraid the wind or the rocks might overhear him. “Acheron rose, wrought mighty magic, and fell. Though it disappeared, all its evil did not. That lingers yet in odd comers of the world.”

“Mitra knows this is odd enough,” Lysinka said, with forced heartiness. “So are its people. So, even, are the bargains they offer.”

“Is it too odd for you to accept?” Grolin asked. She heard greed in his voice but no treachery and, indeed, some gentleness, as though he understood how much he was asking.

“Not that I can say, tonight,” Lysinka said. “But the decision is not mine alone. I must put it before my people.” She hesitated, then added, “Have you friends in either realm who send you aid?”

“I see your shrewdness was no rumour,” Grolin said, a trifle sourly. “Call them enemies of my enemies and you will be right. But they would ask the swine’s share of anything we won through the Soul. Nor are they as fair as you.”

The flattery was open, but the desire in Grolin’s voice likewise sincere. Plainly he expected that the bargain be sealed in the oldest way between a man and a woman.

Just as plainly, she had to come to her decision tonight.

“Grolin, I must go below and my ten with me. In such a matter, my band must meet and speak together.”

He looked as if he wished to kiss her or at least pat her shoulder, but he withheld his hand. “Then go, and speak so that they will do the wise thing and join the quest for the Soul of Thanza.”

“It was something in my food that had me sleeping there like a drunkard,” Rog said. He was hardly sober now, but he and Conan were at a snug country inn, the White Raven, not facing armed bravos.

“Any notion who might have put it there?” Conan said. He had drunk less than Rog because he feared the master-at-arms might need further protection. He hoped this would not extend to putting the man to bed. The Cimmerian had expected to win the fight, but he had less hope of moving the man’s dead weight if he drank himself senseless.

“Notions only, but enough to let me know where to start asking questions.”

“Best not punish anyone without Klarnides’s approval,” Conan said. “If he does have the ear of the count—”

Rog spat into the bark chips that covered the floor. The tavern-keeper looked daggers at the two big men but prudently refrained from more.

“That for Klarnides and the other lapdogs coming to join him.”

Conan’s look framed a question.

“You haven’t heard?” Rog explained. He went on to describe two new captains said to be on their way to the Thanza Rangers. If half what he said was the truth, the two newcomers made Klarnides seem a more seasoned warrior than Conan.

“Well, we’ve settled our quarrel,” Conan said. “So come good captains or bad, we can stand together against them and for our men.”

Rog’s reply to that was to lay his head on his arms and begin to snore. Conan laid out enough brass coins to pay for the last jug of wine and wrapped himself in his cloak.

“Huh,”' the tavern-keeper said. “Either pay for a room or take yourself and your friend—”

An empty wine cup neatly parted the man’s hair— or would have, if he had not been entirely bald. It smashed to powder against the wall behind him.

“We’re staying here,” Conan said. “We’ve drunk our fill and paid for it.”

The innkeeper wrung his hands. “But those who come in the morning—”

“—will have the place to themselves, if you give us. something to break our fast when you want us to leave. A few loaves of bread, a plate or two of sausages, any odd fowl you may have ready roasted—” The innkeeper promised a bountiful breakfast so quickly that his tongue kept tripping over itself, and Conan hardly understood what he and Rog had been promised. Nor, for the moment, did he particularly care.

Tomorrow they could return to the camp and begin working together to make the Thanza Rangers worthy of the name of soldier.

* * *

“Countess?”

The voice was Fergis’s. Lysinka rolled over and sat up to contemplate her comrade, who was squatting beside her sleeping cocoon. It was close enough to dawn that she could recognize his face as well as his voice.

“Have our folk voted?”

“Aye.”

“How did they vote?”

“We will follow you to join with Grolin.”

“That is as well. He will go questing for it, whether we join or not. Together, we will be more than twice as strong as either band. We may win further allies too.”

“Aye, and if those levies they are supposed to be raising in Shamar come calling, we’ll be better prepared to meet them.”

Fergis looked at his chieftain, and for the first time in years she was conscious that she was naked before him. She would not make matters worse by covering herself, however.

“Eh, Countess. Does he want to bed you?”

“You think it proves him a man of poor judgement if he does?”

“Proves him—?” Fergis began indignantly, then gave a short bark of laughter. “Countess, it is between him and you. I have not lost my senses.”

Nor, Lysinka suspected, the desire for her that glowed gently within him. This made his loyalty all the more perfect, so that she felt ashamed of baiting him.

“I have not lost mine either,” she said. “The Soul of Thanza is said to fight against death. It does not fight against common sense.”

V

Conan awoke in the blackness of the nighted forest with a toe prodding him in the ribs. He had reached for his sword when he saw that the toe belonged to Tharmis Rog.

“Is it time for me to relieve you?” he asked the master-at-arms.

“Not yet, but I hear movement in the mule lines.” “Not our people?”

“Too quiet to be any of our drunkards.”

“A deserter?”

“I think all such fools have already left. My wager is on bandits.”

“Then why haven’t you gone down to the lines to deal with them?” The Cimmerian had been sleeping in his clothes. To join Rog, all he had to do was grip his sword and stand up.

Rog chuckled. “Because I want to see if the lads on sentry duty remember aught of what we told them, back in Shamar. Then I’ll help them.”

“We’ll be in sorry shape if bandits take the mules.”

“Sellus—if that’s your name—they may not have mules in those benighted northern lands you hail from. Around here, a farm boy grows up ignorant of mules only if he’s a halfwit. I was a farm lad, and I joined the army as a mule driver.

“Between bandits and those pack mules, my money would be on the mules—”

Before Rog could finish or Conan reply, one of the sentries proved that he remembered at least part of his training.

“Help! Help! Somebody’s trying to steal the mules! Help!”