Conan: Road of Kings (11 page)

“Conan, look!” Sandokazi called out. “You can see people down there on the bottom!”

Callidios all but went over the side in his haste to see where she pointed. “Statues!” he snapped querulously. “Nothing but garden statuary. I’ll show you better than that.”

Conan rested his oars and looked over the side. As the morning sunlight penetrated the blue depths, the sunken ruins of old Kordava could be discerned some fathoms below them. Half-buried beneath a forest of seaweed, a cluster of broken statuary stood watch amidst the toppled columns and broken walls of a drowned villa. Schools of small fish shimmered like flights of silver birds about the encrusted stones and jumbles of corroded brick. Dimly, other reefs of ruined structures merged into the inverted horizon, where long streamers of seaweed waved in the current as if stirred by a morning breeze.

“I hadn’t realized so much of the old city had dropped beneath the sea during the earthquake,” Conan mused. “I thought only a section along the waterfront slid into the sea, but we must be close to a mile offshore here.”

“We’re beyond the walls of the old city here,” Callidios told him. “This was once a long peninsula that enclosed part of what was then Kordava’s harbor. The entire peninsula sank beneath the sea when the earthquake struck this coast. The wealthy had their villas here; we’re passing over the remains of one now.”

He squinted toward the open sea, where the running tide fretted across the submerged bar of land. “Good, we’re on course. Keep rowing along the shoal here. The tomb lies farther to sea, but we’ll have no trouble finding it at low tide.”

“Is it a tomb you’re leading us to, then?” Conan asked sarcastically. “I thought you were going to show us your army.”

“I’ll show you as much as you’ll care to see, Cimmerian.”

Conan spat into the sea and took up the oars. The Cimmerian had given little thought and less credence to Callidios’ boasts. He entertained a vague notion that the Stygian renegade might have some sort of cutthroat band under his command—possibly waiting offshore aboard ship, or lurking upon one of the small islands at the delta of the Black River where it emptied into the sea at Kordava.

“Whose tomb do we seek?” Sandokazi asked, to break the silence.

“That of King Kalenius.”

Sandokazi pursed her lips in thought. “King of lotus dreams, perhaps. I don’t recall the name ‘Kalenius’ amongst the kings of Zingara.”

Conan snorted, thinking that the water would be very deep once they were beyond this shoal.

“Kalenius was one of the greatest of the Thurian kings,” Callidios informed them loftily. “His was an age when Atlantis and Lemuria yet rose above the waves, and the kingdoms of this land were Verulia and Farsun and Valusia, and Zingara was a realm whose birth awaited another millennium.”

“Well, I’ve never heard of this Kalenius,” Sandokazi said petulantly. “Nor his kingdom, nor his tomb.”

“The kings and kingdoms of ancient Thuria are ghosts and dust, forgotten by the proud Hyborian civilization that has arisen above the bones of their greatness,” Callidios sneered. “I think there will come a day when our age, too, shall pass into dust, and the children who dance upon our bones shall remember our lands and our races only in their dreams.”

“What rot!” Sandokazi laughed. “Kings may die, but how can this land and its peoples pass away?”

“Look beneath our wake for your answer,” Callidios returned.

Conan forbore comment. If Sandokazi chose to bandy words with a madman, it was her amusement. A few lengths of anchor rope and a hundred fathoms would soon still Callidios’ tongue.

“In the centuries after Kull the Atlantean seized the throne of Valusia and plunged the Thurian kingdoms into an age of internecine warfare, it was Kalenius who finally brought the peace of conquest to the lands north and west of Grondar and the Lost Lands. Kalenius’ was an empire beyond the dreams of even the ambitious Prince Yezdigerd of Turan. The rulers and peoples of a continent bowed their necks to his will and his whim. Kalenius declared that his empire should last a thousand years and his fame throughout eternity.

“But Kalenius grew old and died; his empire shattered into civil wars even as the king was laid within his tomb. Finally the Cataclysm drew a veil of darkness over the kingdoms of Thuria, and the fame of Kalenius is remembered only by those few who seek out the lost knowledge of a lost age.”

Callidios broke off his monologue with an abrupt shift of stance, and shouted wildly: “Hold your oars, Conan! We are here!”

In another instant, the Stygian had thrown over the anchor. His crooked grin met Conan’s eyes, and Conan cursed silently.

They rode at anchor perhaps a league from shore. At low tide, the shoal here lay but a fathom beneath their skiff. Choppy waves foamed the surface above the sunken peninsula, and Conan guessed the currents would be treacherous with the turning of the tide. No other vessels were within hailing distance—their masters keeping to the deeper waters.

“Below us,” gestured Callidios, “the tomb of King Kalenius.”

Conan and Sandokazi peered dutifully. The sea was clear, but the wave-flecked shallows made it difficult to see below the surface. Gulls wheeled and cried overhead; the wind and sea grated together. Conan sensed that the bottom had risen here at the terminus of the shoal, indicating a sunken knoll of considerable expanse.

“What tomb?” Conan asked, glancing significantly at Sandokazi.

“Beneath the sea and beneath the sand,” Callidios replied. “A thousand years ago, and you might have discerned the ruins of some of the larger funereal monuments of the mausoleum upon which Kalenius lavished thirty years’ construction. What the Cataclysm spared, the founding fathers of Kordava hauled away for building stone. Only the barrow yet stood, and at last the sea swallowed up even that. We’re anchored atop all that remains of that barrow.”

“Fascinating,” lied Sandokazi.

“Thirty years Kalenius devoted to the building of his tomb. A hundred thousand skilled laborers, ten thousand master artisans, the riches of an empire—directed by the will of the absolute ruler of the Thurian continent to build for him a tomb that would be the wonder of the world, a tomb that would outlast the ages.”

“I’m sure there’s a lesson here for us all,” Sandokazi yawned. The sun was growing hot, and the morning’s adventure had worn thin.

“There’s
nothing
here,” Conan corrected her, feeling cheated after the Stygian’s grandiose speech.

Callidios was tugging off his boots. “There is, if you know where to look. Marble temples and golden fountains may have outlasted the ages no more than a wreath of flowers tossed upon a grave, but the paramount wonders of King Kalenius’ tomb were hidden beneath the earth.”

Callidios laid his boots beside his rapier, spread his doublet atop the pile, and began to wriggle out of trunk hose. “Of course,” he looked up at the Cimmerian, “you’ll have to swim a bit, if you want to see for yourself.”

Conan shrugged, and kicked off his boots. He was already stripped to the waist, and in a moment he had dragged his legs free of trousers. About his naked waist he belted his dagger, taking care that it was snug in its sheath.

Sandokazi smiled at him boldly, then began to unlace her bodice. Stepping out of her skirts, she drew her blouse over her head and faced him wearing only her thin cotton shift.

“You’re coming along?” Conan half objected.

“Why not? It’s a fine morning for a swim, and Callidios has promised to show us ‘paramount wonders.’”

“We won’t be long at this,” Callidios said, adjusting the anchor rope so that they floated across the edge of the submerged knoll. Stripped, the Stygian seemed a mismatched assortment of knobby joints and angular limbs. Beside Conan’s sun-bronzed, broadly muscled frame, Callidios resembled an undernourished alley cat that had just crawled out of a puddle.

“What are we supposed to see?” Conan demanded.

“Just follow me,” Callidios evaded, and tumbled into the sea.

Laughing gaily, Sandokazi dived into the sea after him. Frowning, Conan followed.

Three heads bobbed above the open sea. Behind them, the empty skiff rode its anchor in the morning breeze. Callidios, his tow-colored locks plastered muddily against his domelike skull, dog-paddled out to where the bottom fell suddenly away. Treading water, he awaited the other two swimmers.

“The thousand-columned mausoleum with its ceiling panes of lapis lazuli across which a golden sun traversed by day and a platina moon by night, and its paving tiles of serpentine through which rivers of quicksilver coursed, was meant to be no more than a gaudy display for generations of mourning subjects. The flesh of King Kalemius, preserved through the arcana of his sorcerers, was laid to rest beneath the earth, in a secret tomb whose marvels surpassed those of his mausoleum even as the edifice overawed a pauper’s grave. From the level plain, Kalenius commanded his subjects to bring forth a mountain. Two hundred thousand slaves toiled for three decades, carrying earth to raise for Kalenius a mountain where no mountain had stood before.

“It was a barrow worthy to enshrine a dead god. Two hundred feet above the plain it rose, a circular tumulus a thousand feet in breadth. Upon its height were raised the temples and funerary monuments to daze the imagination of his subjects. But within its depths was buried a palace more lavish than that from which King Kalenius ruled a continent, wherein the king’s mortal remains were placed upon a golden throne to rule in the afterworld for eternity.”

Callidios paused for breath. Conan cast a wary glance toward the skiff, saw that its anchor held, and thought that the Stygian might have offered this grandiloquent speech before jumping overboard.

“At the time when the earth shook and destroyed old Kordava,” Callidios continued, “Kalenius was a name forgotten, and his barrow was no more than an inconsequential knoll. Then the sea swallowed up all that remained of one of the greatest works of the Pre-Cataclysmic Age, and the mountain that a king had raised was reduced to a nameless shoal. Riven by Cataclysm and earthquake, the hidden tomb of Kalenius sank beneath the sea, where now the tides and storms of more than a century have relentlessly stripped away the final barrier to his subterranean palace. If you’ll see proof of my words, then follow me.”

Conan grew suddenly interested in spite of his skepticism. The prospect of a royal tomb for the looting made his thoughts race with the possibilities. King Kalenius’ gold, if not his fame, would have outlasted the ages.

“This tomb…” Conan began.

But Callidios had already doubled over and vanished beneath the waves.

Conan sucked in his breath with a curse and twisted in a surface dive to follow the Stygian into the depths.

The salt water stung his eyes at first, but once the blur left his vision, he could see quite well. Close beside him, Conan caught sight of Sandokazi—her white shift translucent as it pressed and swirled about her lithe figure. Ahead of them, Callidios was swimming out past the edge of the sunken knoll, diving deeper still. The pressure began to lancinate his skull, but Conan set his teeth and swam after the sorcerer.

The bottom fell away quickly, once they were past the shoal. Writhing tangles of seaweed shrouded the submarine slope, making its exact contours impossible to define. Conan caught vague outlines of huge slabs of stone, skewed out from the sea bottom in irregular order. Looking closer, he thought he could make out the cylindrical outcroppings of broken columns.

Conan’s chest was tight, his skull compressed with pain, when Callidios hovered above a sudden patch of blackness against the sunken slope. The Stygian gestured frenziedly downward, then shot toward the surface. Using the last of his breath, Conan swam closer to where Callidios had pointed.

Festooned by waving strands of weed, a fissure gaped darkly from the face of the sunken knoll. A talus of stone slabs and truncated columns spilled away from the fissure and downward along the slope into the murky depths of the former shoreline. As he swam past the opening, Conan saw that it penetrated the tumulus beyond the limits of his vision. Half-blocked with muck and debris, the mouth of the tunnel was flanked by a row of stone figures, vaguely glimpsed against the blackness within.

His lungs thirsting for air, Conan turned quickly for the surface. Protruding from the wall of sunlight above, he could see Callidios’ bony legs treading the water, and next to him Sandokazi’s shapely limbs—temptingly displayed as her shift floated upward. Conan surfaced beside them, sucking in a huge breath of air.

“Well?” Callidios demanded. “Did you see?”

“I saw stone ruins and a cave in the side of the bar,” Conan rumbled, wiping at his eyes. The skiff bobbed in the waves not far from where they now swam.

“Just as I told you,” the Stygian exulted. “Sea and earthquake have at last broken open the barrow, and the passage into King Kalenius’ tomb is laid bare. I spent long days out here in search of this passage, seeking proof that it was indeed his tomb—and have I not found it? Did you not see? Was I not right?”

“You claimed to know of some mysterious army that you could summon to help us overthrow Rimanendo,” Conan reminded him. “We came out here to see proof of that boast, and instead you show us drowned ruins and a sunken barrow. It comes to me that your promise to aid us is an empty boast, and what you really want is our help in seeking questionable loot in an underwater tomb.”

“Did you think I would have shared this knowledge with you and your cutthroat friends if I didn’t need your help?” Callidios chided. “The tomb holds riches beyond your dreams, Cimmerian—or I’d never have fled Stygia to seek it out. But I said I’d show you proof of the powers I can command for you. Think again. What else did you see down below?”

“Nothing but a hole in the mud and broken columns,” Conan repeated. “And some statues, like those we passed earlier.”

“Statues?” Callidios laughed. “You saw them then? Examine them more closely this time, Cimmerian.”

Without wait for argument, Callidios again made a surface dive and plunged into the depths. Wondering what mad jest the Stygian played, Conan followed suit.