Conan The Hero (3 page)
There crouched two women, young and athletic-looking, facing each other in bizarre combat. One was armed with twin pairs of broad-tipped pincers, the other with blunt horn-hooks grasped in either hand. Though barefoot, both women wore blouses and pantaloons of thin, gossamer-like fabric, flimsy at best and now badly rent and ribboned by their exertions. Each, it appeared, was trying to strip the clothing away from her opponent.
As the acolyte watched wide-eyed, the raven-haired girl lashed out with her tongs, snatching away a streamer of fabric to lay bare a shapely expanse of her red-headed rival’s thigh. But the Circassian was quick to retaliate, hooking the neck of the other’s blouse and shredding it down the front, so that half its cloth streamed in tatters from the wearer’s supple shoulder. At this triumph, a patter of faint, polite applause passed around the circle of watchers.
Abruptly the combat halted. Azhar, following the obedient gaze of watchers and contestants alike, looked to the emperor, who had snapped his fingers sharply at his elite guard’s approach. The two women, bobbing their heads obediently, jogged and jiggled to the side of the arena where they sat together on the bottom step.
Emperor Yildiz the Resplendent, whom the acolyte had never been privileged to view so closely, was a small, chubby, olive-skinned man. Azhar, as the guard led him forward, searched in vain for some sign of imperial distinction: certainly his silken robe and pointed-toed slippers were of the rarest quality, his nails and his fringe of hair well-trimmed. But his olive-skinned face, and indeed his whole bearing, had a tame look about them, an air of intense ordinariness quite at odds with the grandeur Azhar had expected.
“Well, messenger?” The emperor turned his small, dark, bored eyes from the kneeling guard to the stricken-faced acolyte. “What news does the Court of Seers offer me now? Sorcerous warning of some new disaster in the southern campaign? Or just another incomprehensible wrinkle of my astrological destiny?” Yildiz examined Azhar’s expressionless face with the faintest hint of annoyance.
“Oh, Resplendent One!” Lightheaded with awe and penitence for his first, blasphemous thoughts, and smitten by the great ruler’s mild voice like a reed before a mighty gale, Azhar found himself collapsing to the floor to grovel on knees and elbows before the emperor’s padded couch. “Great Lord, forgive this interruption!” His fingers scrabbled numbly on the patterned tile, venturing almost to touch the upcurled toes of the ruby-crusted imperial slippers. “My arcane masters bade me bring word of this morning’s event… but I scarcely dare trouble you, Sire…” His voice quivered to silence, a last tremor of dread animating his hunched shoulders.
“Yes, yes, I know. And what is the news? You may rise.” Yildiz gestured impatiently to the attending guard. “Help him up, will you?”
“Oh, Your Resplendency!” Struggling with his own unruly limbs and feeble voice, Azhar felt himself hauled upright by a strong hand at the scruff of his neck. “My master Ibn Uluthan is in audience with Your Splendor’s military liason before the Crystal Window.” He choked out the words through the constricted collar of his caftan, still not daring to meet the Great One’s eyes. “Emperor, they told me to ask… they beg your divine presence, O Lord of all Turan!”
“Is that so?” Yildiz arose energetically to his feet. “Then they may be making some progress at last, Tarim willing! If they are, I shall be happy to see it.” A golden-haired male servant came forward from the wall to place a massive, bejeweled turban on the emperor’s head, which added considerably to his height and grandeur. Then he flicked a finger at Azhar and the guard officer. “Come, boy, we shall take the inner way. Meanwhile, let the combat continue for the edification of my guests.”
As the warrior-girls arose to face one another again, Yildiz led Azhar forth from the room. A diminishing series of archways and double-guarded doors brought the three at last into a long, angling hallway. Window-less it was, lit by oil lamps suspended from the ceiling at the junctions of cross-corridors. Azhar knew of this nominally secret inner passage reserved for the emperor’s private use, but he had not guessed its extent. It seemed to run the whole length of the vast palace, with stairways and branchings penetrating to the building’s remotest wings.
Taking down a lamp from a hook to light their way, the guard led them up a long spiral stairway to a brassbound door. Here Yildiz produced from his silken garments a many-pronged key, which he plied in a concealed aperture. With a faint click, the door swung open on the broad atrium of the Court of Seers.
The high, domed chamber echoed with the shadowy, musty silence elder sages require for their meditations. The octagonal room’s corners, lined with shelves of dusty fetishes and scrolls, cowered well back from the light; but its center was bright with dusty sunrays streaming down through glazed slits in the vaulted dome, within which a wooden mezzanine had been installed for stargazing.
The floor level of the room contained several arched entrances, but only one window. Before this stood two men, a senior seer and a military officer, who turned solicitously toward the open door. As Yildiz walked forward, flanked by the bashful Azhar, the high-ranking men offered deep, lingering bows.
“O Gracious One, welcome!” The speaker, Ibn Uluthan, was a tall man wearing the dark burnoose of a court sage, with the hood thrown back from his gray-tousled head. “We requested your presence, my Lord, because of great matters in the offing. Now Your Excellency can see our spells at work.”
“Indeed, O Emperor; Uluthan and his fellow magicians have not misled us this time, it would seem.” The black-clad officer, General Abolhassan, nodded a grudging smile at the wizard, his strong yellow teeth gleaming in a hawk-nosed, dark-mustached face. “It appears that we finally have intelligence from the southern campaign.” Military cordons and insignia winked from the black mound of his turban as he wheeled toward the bright window.
The object of his attention stood out strikingly, since its light was a blue-green glare, strangely out of keeping with the pale golden rays pouring from the window slits overhead. Outlined by its eerie radiance, the newcomers moved closer with an air of fascination. The prospect it looked out on they found even more surprising: not the hazy cityscape Azhar had recently witnessed from the terrace, but a jungle profusion of trees and brush simmering beneath a hazy tropic sky, with mounds and spires of ancient, crumbling architecture looming in its midst, and human figures fleeing in its depths.
However vast the imperial palace, it was clearly impossible for such an immensity to be enclosed within its walls. Even the stoic guardsman, swallowing a silent oath, knew that he was witnessing formidable sorcery. The window itself was nothing more than a sturdy black-tiled ceramic casement set in a south-facing wall, and glazed over with marvelously smooth crystal. Yet its view opened, not on some lavish indoor garden, but on an alien place far removed from this teeming northern city.
“Fascinating, indeed! Good work, Ibn Uluthan.” The emperor, moving closer to the casement, nodded at the smiling wizard. “I have but glimpsed the power of your spell before; never was it so satisfactory as this!” He pointed down to the human figures visible in the jungle depths. “The trackless jungles of Venjipur! And those, I take it, are our expeditionary troops carrying out a military operation?”
The beaming sorcerer nodded. “Yes, Your Resplendency. To achieve this effect, we simply intensified the projections of astral force we have been making for months now. As you know, we were plagued with false images caused by the enemy’s mystic emanations. But this morning, for reasons that are not entirely clear to us, the Venji spell began to weaken. By following its emanations back to their fading source, we were able to pinpoint this activity.”
“You don’t know why the resistance stopped?”
“No, Emperor; we hope it means the death of the arch-wizard Mojurna. Without his powers, the Venji rebels can never again resist our sorceries.”
As Ibn Uluthan spoke, the view from the window swept breathtakingly forward and down, making the watchers reel and clutch at the sill for support. The light wavered and dimmed, tree-fronds melting into the casement as it magically pushed through the forest. But the sense of motion was only an illusion; from Ibn Uluthan’s subtle motions, it became clear that the sorcerer was varying the angle and direction of the window’s view by swirling his fingers in a small bowl of black oil on a podium before him.
General Abolhassan moved close beside Yildiz, pointing down at the moving figures who were now nearer and clearer in the prospect. “Those men are Turanians, one of our elite jungle patrols. A fortnight ago I sent orders southward designating Mojurna as a target of priority; these troopers may just now have slain the old scoundrel and cleared the way for us. If this kind of contact with the Venjipur front can be maintained, as Ibn Uluthan says it can, it will relieve our command problems, quicken our responses, make possible an almost limitless expansion of our empire…”
“Indeed, I could direct such a war myself, with little need for your intercession, General!” Sparing but a brief glance for Abolhassan, Yildiz gazed down intently on the supernatural vista before him—which, under the wizard’s deft manipulation, was following the Turanian band swiftly through jungle depths. Nearest to their aerial vantage loped the last trooper, a large, tigerish man who seemed to be purposefully lagging behind the rest, scanning the jungle for signs of pursuit.
“That giant is a northern barbarian, is he not?” Yildiz asked of no one in particular. “A Vanir, by his looks. They make such splendid figures in uniform; I wish I could recruit more of them!”
The lurking man’s expectations of pursuit were soon rewarded: out of the leafy shadows flitted three dim shapes, near-naked warriors racing to encircle him. The lone trooper’s blade flicked once, twice in the dimness, causing half-seen thrashings on the jungle floor; then the yataghan swept in a glinting circle, sending the third and last of the pursuers sprawling back across the writhing bodies of the other two. Scarcely pausing, the lone skirmisher turned to follow his band.
“There, you can see,” Abolhassan proclaimed to the others, “these Hwong rebels are poor fighters. Our imperial troops vanquish them easily, with or without sorcerous aid! Spells like this are diverting, true—but even this window is of little use, lacking a swift means to communicate with the battlefront.” He glanced at the wizard, whose eyes gleamed green in sorcerous daylight as he guided the moving window through the forest. “Carrier pigeons have served us so far; they will continue to be the best means, unless some better magic is devised.”
Yildiz gave no indication whether he heard the general. He gazed intently on the jungle scene, his eyes reflecting some of the satisfaction they had shown during the entertainment in his private arena. “How wondrous it is, Ibn Uluthan, to have a direct view of the action! It strikes me that we can use this magic to involve more of our own priests and nobles in our frontier campaigns, and promote more warlike zeal at court. We need something dramatic like this to get the people’s fighting spirit up!” He smiled at the others, then shrugged complacently. “Of course, we shall assert our territorial rights in Venjipur in any case; it is of no great consequence. But having this link to our successes there could help to rally the court behind us.”
“Indeed, your Resplendency, an excellent idea,” said General Abolhassan, sounding unconvinced. He nudged Ibn Uluthan. “Now, Mage, since this jungle detachment has done its work—and in any case, the fate of such a small unit hardly matters—can you possibly conjure us a view of the gate at Venjipur City proper, to check the trim of the imperial sentries there? Believe me, nothing reveals the morale of a fighting force better… but say, what is this?”
All five men turned to stare at the glowing window, as from the edges of the casement wisps of pale mist intruded on the jungle greenery. Spreading rapidly, the fog not only obscured the scene, but seemed actively to eat away and dissolve the slowing images of branches and drooping jungle vines. Before their eyes, the entire view soon melted to a formless void of white shot through diagonally with indistinct, sleeting droplets.
In the misty center of this limbo something small and gray appeared. Clarifying and growing swiftly, it seemed to hurtle toward them.
Just as the acolyte Azhar scuttled back, and the others gathered themselves to spring away, the projectile halted. It now filled most of the window: a brightly ornamented skull, cast or plated in purest silver and lavishly inlaid with crystals and precious stone. Its teeth were chisel-pointed diamonds and its sinister eye-sparks smoldering rubies, while green jade and yellow topaz framed the hard, fleshless planes of its face.
“Bismillah!” The wizard Ibn Uluthan, giving vent to the oath, left off fumbling in his mortar of black liquid. “That skull is Mojurna’s emblem, his personal fetish, may Tarim wither him! Emperor Yildiz, my deepest apologies!”
“Hmm… does that mean our enemy is back in control of the sorcerous aether, Mage? And so soon?” Yildiz glanced from window to wizard with an air of mild disappointment.
The sorcerer hesitated, watching Yildiz. All present knew that the emperor’s disappointment, though understated, could easily prove fatal in one commanding such vast power.
Azhar the acolyte, who had been yearning to speak, finally dared to anticipate his master. “It is a strong spell, Your Resplendency, cast either by Mojurna or some very formidable apprentice of his, I would say.”
“Probably the warlock himself,” Ibn Uluthan added, “since he is known to be jealous and unsharing of his powers. The general’s detachment must have failed to kill him.”
“Damn your insinuations, wizard!” Abolhassan, by contrast with the emperor’s mildness, lashed out suddenly. “There is no reason to assume that my troops failed; anyway, is your power so feeble that a toothless old witch-man scattering parched herbs and moth-wings can overmaster you anytime it doesn’t happen to slip his doddering mind?”
“You speak too hastily, General!” Ibn Uluthan, still standing by his podium, glanced apologetically over his shoulder at the garish skullface. “Remember, the Gulf of Tarqheba is far, far south of Aghrapur. Our mystical powers are rooted here, in our people’s faith in the god Tarim, the holy temples and imperial relics we worship, even in the sacred stones of this palace. Those powers are vast, but not absolute. Each mile further from Turan, across the Colchian Mountains and into the southern jungles, our own power weakens and our enemy’s grows stronger!”
