Conan: Road of Kings (15 page)

The holocaust that had driven Korst’s soldiers back from their attack along Water Street (so called because an occasional spring tide flooded it) threatened to raze this squalid section of Kordava’s waterfront. There were some few who scurried desperately about the edges of the blaze, seeking to salvage whatever they might from the conflagration. These were the first to look upon the coming of the Final Guard. They fled.

Their reaction was understandable. The fire had leaped across two decrepit storehouses that shouldered the street that led down to the quay. Portions of wall had toppled into the street, and explosive gouts of intense flame rolled like molten thunderheads between the two blazing structures. Through this firestorm marched the first hundred of the Final Guard, as heedless as if they strode past blowing leaves.

Beyond the flames, the army’s cordon still maintained a patient watch for fugitives from below—a circle of cats waiting to pounce. At the sound of frightened shouts, they turned to see the century of warriors impassively advancing through a wall of fire. Some fled. The others died.

With the breakthrough along Eel Street imminent, Korst had brought up the main body of his troops to this sector. Despite earlier setbacks and heavy losses from the unexpected resistance, the action promised to conclude to the general’s satisfaction. He had drawn the rebels to pitched battle, and now he would crush them in one decisive engagement. Some might flee—to be hunted down in the aftermath—but the abortive revolution would be smashed, annihilated root and branch. Rimanendo would be generous with the general whose victory avenged the king’s honor and by the same stroke destroyed those who threatened his rule.

Their weapons crimson now with bright blood, the Final Guard advanced upon Eel Street.

Their brief, deadly skirmish with the cordon had already alerted the main body of Korst’s soldiers to the presence of the Final Guard. A few survivors had blurted out garbled reports too fantastic to be regarded as anything more than panic-stricken delusion. Expecting no more than a desperate sortie by the beleaguered rebels, the Royal Zingaran Army marched quickly to contain their counterattack. In the gathering darkness beyond the flames, they may not immediately have remarked upon the unnatural appearance of their foe—perhaps assuming that the rebels had smeared themselves with some black pigment as a stratagem for night combat.

A shower of arrows greeted the silent warriors as they emerged through the smoke-filled gloom. They neither sought cover, nor did their line falter. Korst’s archers passed it off to poor light and good armor, and stepped back to let the infantry deal with the rebel sortie.

Their battle cries strangely shrill without an answering roar from their impassive foemen, the Zingaran soldiers hurled themselves upon the Final Guard. It was as if an immense wave had thundered against a basalt cliff. The wave broke apart in a surging explosion of spray. This spray was red.

Weapons of steel shattered against adamantine flesh. Blades that shimmered like black diamond ripped through mail and flesh and bone as if it were one. Korst’s soldiers were literally torn apart. War cries became death shrieks, blunted by the sickening soft chopping sound of sundered flesh, the pattering plash of blood, the dull fall of dismembered limbs.

Elder sorcery had transmuted human warriors into indestructible killing machines. Creatures of living stone, the Final Guard moved with all the speed and reflexes of the master warriors they once had been. But now their invulnerable bodies were driven by muscles of supernatural strength. Diamond-hard weapons ripped and smashed through armor and flesh; obsidian fists closed upon human limbs, tearing muscle and sinew from crushed bone.

The horror was so intense that those who witnessed it seemed momentarily paralyzed. Then, as the front ranks were butchered without mercy, their comrades who followed them shook off the numbness of shock and turned in panic. The soldiers to the rear, still unaware of the doom that marched toward them, heard the cries and—assuming only that the front ranks had met unexpected rebel resistance—came forward in double time to aid them. They collided with those who sought to flee. Officers shouted orders; panic-stricken soldiers yelled incoherently, gibbered mindless answers to questions. Confined by the narrow street, front and rear ranks locked together in a tangled mass of immobility.

Into the milling chaos, the Final Guard marched forward—swinging their blood-drenched weapons with all the tireless precision of harvestmen reaping with scythes. It was a red harvest. The street ran with human gore; crushed bodies buried the pavement. Creatures of stone, the Final Guard bore the ponderous mass of living statues. As they had earlier marched across the bottom of the sea, so now they waded into a human sea. Their tread struck the paving with the heavy impact of a draft horse’s hooves. Those who stumbled in the press were crushed beneath their feet; others, unable to flee, were smashed against the wall by the relentless advance of the Final Guard.

Writhing back upon itself like the coils of a wounded python, the Royal Zingaran Army halted its advance, turned about in a broken rout. It left a trail of crushed red things behind it, and, marching upon the trail as if on parade, century after century of the Final Guard, marching out of the sea and out of the abyss of time.

Twelve

To Follow the Road of Kings

At the third barricade, Conan fought on with the ferocity of a wounded lion. The scales of battle had tipped against the rebels; defeat was certain, escape improbable. The soldiers had driven past the barricade in a human avalanche, forcing the rebels back to their last line of defense. Sifino had gone down somewhere in their retreat; Carico, his wounded thigh bleeding again, swung his great axe with faltering strength. Most of the defenders were slain; some few had fought clear of the melee and fled. Leading those who remained in a final stand, Conan fought savagely to throw back the Zingaran advance—dealing death all about him without a thought for his own hide. They might kill him, but Conan vowed they would not again make him a prisoner. When he fell, those who saw would know by the dead piled about him that a Cimmerian did not sell his life cheaply.

Flung up in a frantic effort, the third barricade was too flimsy to withstand their rush for long. Already Korst’s soldiers hurtled through ragged gaps in the bulwark. If anything, their very numbers held them back as much as the failing rebel defense—so many attackers had swarmed into Eel Street that by now they were too crowded together to fight as effectively. But the fighting would soon be over.

At the uproar behind him, Conan at first thought Korst’s soldiers had again outflanked their line of defense and had come upon the rebels from behind. But as cheers and glad shouts echoed from the rear, Conan risked a glance to learn the cause.

Mordermi, rapier brandished gallantly in his good hand, left shoulder impressively bandaged, rode at the head of his men. Fresh defenders rushed to relieve the exhausted handful who still held the barricade. The outlaw leader had committed his reserve—and to judge from the excited mob who surged behind him, Mordermi must have rallied those who had manned the barricades elsewhere.

Letting other bodies take his place in the thick of the fighting, Conan greeted his friend with a bloody handclasp. “You’re as pretty as a king’s victory monument,” Conan grinned wearily. “But you may have waited too late. Korst has too many men; he’s cut into us too far.”

“Mitra, you northern barbarians are a gloomy lot!” Mordermi laughed, sheathing his sword to embrace the Cimmerian’s shoulders. “Korst is in a trap, not us. The cat has crept too far into the rathole! In a moment you’ll see.”

Conan remembered Carico’s specious talk of the city taking arms for the rebel cause. “Then Santiddio…?”

“Not Santiddio,” Mordermi informed him. “Callidios.”

“What can that lotus-dreamer…!”

“You saw,” Mordermi said in a tone of reproof. “Sandokazi verified his words. The Final Guard.”

“Stone devils that guard their king’s bones at the bottom of the sea!”

“Not any longer. Callidios has summoned them forth.”

“How can that Stygian renegade command such demons!”

“Well, Conan,” said Mordermi, “if I knew that, then I wouldn’t need Callidios, would I?”

“You mean you’ve let yourself get sucked in by that madman’s lies!”

“Look,” Mordermi pointed.

Conan stared.

It was difficult to discern much of what was taking place beyond the barricade. Thick smoke obscured what little light there was, and the barricade itself blocked out most of the street beyond. It was the sudden shift in the spirit of the attackers that Conan felt. A moment ago their cries had been imbued with the jubilation of impending triumph. Now there was a distinct note of fear. The arrival of Mordermi’s reinforcements could not have inspired this abrupt sense of terror.

For a macabre interval of time, the battle shuddered to a halt. Both sides sensed the chill breath of alien horror. Men in the fury of combat virtually froze in midstride; weapons that were slashing for an enemy’s flesh drifted to a halt as if the air had turned to glass and imprisoned them. Conan, who had seen men locked in combat roll from atop a city wall and never pause in their struggle until they smashed to the earth, could not credit his eyes now. Truly sorcery had cast its foul shadow upon this field of battle, and although its spell might have swung the scythe of defeat from his comrades to their enemy, Conan suddenly knew in his heart that he should never have returned to Kordava with Callidios undrowned.

The screams began.

At first the soldiers who paused before the barricade sought to turn from the attack to discover what manner of disaster had struck those to the rear. Panic claimed the attackers, as they struggled to retreat along Eel Street. Then they knew what terror had engendered such cries from veteran warriors—and with that came the knowledge that retreat was impossible.

The Final Guard marched into Eel Street.

In another moment, the soldiers were fleeing back toward the barricade, seeking only to escape the inhuman warriors who stalked them. They rushed the barricade in blind panic. Fear made them heedless of the defenders there. They almost carried the barricade now in their panic, for even the bravest warrior has the instinct of self-preservation in combat, and does not witlessly fling himself upon the blades of his foemen, as these soldiers did now.

Conan, who had looked upon massacre from both sides, turned away from the slaughter in disgust. To kill an enemy who has lost his will to defend himself was not the way Cimmerians made war.

“Stop them!” he growled to Mordermi.

“Don’t worry,” Mordermi misread his meaning. “Callidios can control them.”

“I mean, stop this butchery! Let Korst’s men surrender.”

“My people need a victory,” Mordermi shrugged. “And we’ve suffered much from Rimanendo’s dogs.”

Conan swore, but by now the issue was past. No more of the soldiers struggled across the barricade. Along Eel Street resounded the heavy stamp of marching feet, muffled suggestively to the barely audible snap of crushed bone. Out of the darkness, the ebony ranks of the Final Guard lumbered into view.

They halted before the barricade—at attention, awaiting further commands. The rebels paused in the flush of their victory to gape anxiously upon their demonic allies. Jubilant shouts died into whispers of fear.

Mordermi took charge of the situation.

“Look upon them, my friends!” he shouted, riding forward unafraid. “These are the allies who have been summoned to bring victory to our cause. With the assistance of my valued friend and counselor, the noted wizard Callidios, I have brought forth from the age of legends an army of indestructible warriors. You have seen for yourselves how such warriors can aid us. Salute them now, my friends—our allies in our war of liberation, the Final Guard!”

The cheers were ragged at first. Then, perhaps in reaction to earlier fear, swelled into a deafening ovation.

Mordermi let it build to a pitch, then raised his arm for silence.

“General Korst has fled with his pack of killers to the kennel of his master. Even now Rimanendo quakes in his ermine robes as he learns of our victory, and he prays that his soldiers and his palace walls may protect him from the wrath of the people he has misruled. But tell me, my friends. Can his soldiers and his walls protect the tyrant from the justice of the people!”

Mordermi waited as the chorus of
NO!
reached a crescendo.

“Then take arms now, my friends! With our invincible allies before us, we march to depose a depraved tyrant and his corrupt court! The hour of our liberation is at hand!”

The wild march through the streets of Kordava that followed upon Mordermi’s harangue, for all the heady emotion and excitement of the moment, never quite lost the quality of a nightmare to Conan.

They streamed up out of the Pit, the despised and down-trodden citizens of the shadow world—their numbers swelling with each step of the way. Carico, too lame to walk, yielded to his pride and Conan’s urging and rode astride a horse—after making Conan promise to ride beside him to catch him if he fell off. As they moved through the city, Santiddio actually led a crowd of several thousand, marching behind the banner of the White Rose. Conan wondered how many had rallied to Santiddio’s people’s army before news of the Pit’s victory spread throughout Kordava. Santiddio greeted them boisterously—out of character for him—and he and Carico consoled one another that Avvinti was not here to share the hour. Mordermi—accompanied by Sandokazi until her brother joined them—rode on ahead of the steadily growing procession.

Of Callidios there was no sign, but his presence was felt beyond doubt. The Final Guard, one thousand silent demons of death, marched before the rebel throng.

They moved through Kordava at will, meeting no resistance. Men and women either ran out to join their ranks, or remained discreetly behind locked doors as the banner of the White Rose streamed past. General Korst, disengaging from the impossible combat with the Final Guard, had fled the massacre of the Pit with as many men as he could save. Behind the fortress walls of Rimanendo’s palace Korst sought to regroup his men for a stand against the rebels and their inhuman allies. But the disaster at the Pit had been too demoralizing for the king’s army. Fugitives from the massacre had carried tales of their comrades that all too convincingly relayed the horror of that slaughter. To stand against a human opponent was one matter; to face the unstoppable forces of black sorcery quite another. The Royal Zingaran Army deserted in entire companies of officers and men.