Conan: Road of Kings (9 page)

Conan spun from his own dying opponent, to split the man’s skull as he straightened from dealing Mordermi his mortal wound. To the Cimmerian’s astonishment, Mordermi only laughed and ran his blade through the thigh of his other assailant, killing him as he crumpled from the blow. Not blood and entrails, but great clods of padding were spilling from the bandit chieftain’s belly—the blade had only slashed through his burlesque guise of Rimanendo.

“Get down the rope, before more of them come!” Conan shouted.

“I’ll stand rearguard,” Mordermi told him. “Get going yourself.”

Conan’s retort was cut short, as Mordermi suddenly grunted and staggered backward from the edge of the cliff. His eyes widened in disbelief at the arrow that sprouted from his left shoulder.

Conan flung himself down, as a second shaft hissed past him. Cursing, Mordermi dropped beside him. Nearby, they could hear the main force of the guards closing in on them. Another arrow shattered against a rock beside their heads.

“Is it bad?” Conan asked, trying to look past Mordermi’s bloody fingers that clutched his wound.

“It missed my heart, if that’s what you mean,” Mordermi hissed through gritted teeth. “But it seems I must climb down the rope one-handed. Get going, will you! I’ll follow as fast as I can!”

“Crom! You’re a stubborn ass!” Conan swore. He was watching the line of trees behind them. Mordermi saw nothing, but as the next arrow stabbed into the earth beside them, Conan leaped up and hurled the heavy axe. A scream of death agony burst out for an instant and choked off.

“Only the one archer, I think,” Conan judged, hauling at Mordermi. “Quick, before the others catch up to us! We’ll take it together.”

In desperate haste, they dropped over the lip of the escarpment—Conan going first so that he might support Mordermi’s weight. It was awkward, but they managed to make scrambling progress—descending by pushing out from the near vertical face of broken rock with their feet and braking their slide by hanging to the rope.

They had almost reached the shoreline below, when the rope jerked spasmodically, then went slack. Mordermi clawed out as they started to fall—the beach was thirty feet or more below them, and rocks awaited their flesh.

Then Conan crushed the smaller man in against the face of the bluff. Clinging with one hand to a crack in the escarpment, Conan held Mordermi tightly in his other arm. The severed length of rope spilled past them in aimless coils. From below they heard cries of consternation.

“I felt the rope shiver as they hacked it apart,” Conan said. “The cliff is broken up enough here so that I found a handhold in time.”

“We’re trapped,” Mordermi cursed. “There’s no way down without a rope.”

Conan snorted. “In Cimmeria babes learn to scale mountain precipices before they can walk on flat ground. This is a garden path. Hang on to me, if you won’t climb down yourself.”

All but helpless. Mordermi clung to Conan and tried to support his dead weight as best he could with his crippled left arm. The cliff seemed sheer as a pane of glass, its face hidden by sea-mist that drowned even the starlight. The rocks were slick with spray from the surf below, and a slippery coating of moss and seaweed made their descent the more perilous with each foot they crawled.

Yet Conan clambered down the escarpment with the ease of an ape climbing out of a tree, seemingly heedless of Mordermi’s clinging weight. It was an interval that Mordermi would never forget, although it could not have been much more than a minute or so before Conan dropped the remaining distance to safety on the beach below.

“Did you decide to take a short cut?” Santiddio laughed uneasily. “We saw the rope come down, and wondered what was coming after.”

“Half of Rimanendo’s army, if we wait long enough,” Conan growled. “Mordermi’s already caught an arrow, and there’ll be more any second.”

“Cast off! Why are you waiting?” Mordermi yelled, his face ashen from lost blood. “Conan, I’ll not forget this.”

“You saved me from the gallows,” Conan told him as they waded into the surf to cast off. “I always pay my debts.”

Seven

Golden Light, Blue Light

Mordermi’s face bore an unnatural pallor, but there was nothing of infirmity in his smile as he held a lustrous necklace of matched pearls to the golden candlelight.

“Sandokazi, this is yours. Count it as having come out of my share. None of us could have danced well enough to gull those sheep into lining up so conveniently for the shearing.”

Mordermi’s left shoulder was rebandaged, and he was still bare above the waist. They had cut the arrow out of his flesh before that dawn, after returning to the Pit without incident through one of the tunnels that connected the underground warren with the waterfront. The arrow had been deflected by bone, and had lodged in the thick muscle of Mordermi’s shoulder—inflicting no grievous hurt once the bleeding was stopped. Sleep had restored much of his strength, and the prospect of the raid’s fantastic plunder further revitalized him.

They sat at ease within Mordermi’s headquarters: Conan, breaking his fast over a rind of cheese and loaf of coarse break; Santiddio, dishevelled and sleepless from excitement; Sandokazi, smiling as she tried the pearls about her throat; Mordermi, eyes aglow as he contemplated the results of a theft that would make his name a legend within the brotherhood of thieves.

In the center of the panelled chamber, a massive mahogany banquet table sagged under the weight of the gold and silver that was stacked upon its boards. The sheer mass of the jewellery alone represented a fortune beyond their powers to comprehend. A sidereal moraine of rings and necklaces, pendants and tiaras, earrings and brooches—it was as if all the stars in the firmament had been heaped upon the table. Beside this dazzling mound of precious stones, the sprawling mountains of gold and silver plate seemed tawdry and insignificant.

“Do you know?” Mordermi sighed contentedly. “Dividing all of this into shares is going to be a more difficult task than was the stealing of it.”

“But a more pleasant one, I think,” Santiddio purred.

Conan washed down a mouthful of dark bread with a swallow of wine from a golden chalice. “You may find the task is no less dangerous. These baubles are pretty to look at, but I’d prefer a chest of coins any day. We can’t just open up a stall on market day and sell this stuff off to whoever walks by.”

“No problem,” Mordermi assured him easily. “We’ll handle this as if it were any ordinary theft. I have the organization, after all. We’ll melt down the gold and silver plate into bullion—that can’t be traced—and dispose of the jewels through my connections in Aquilonia. Even with a cut here and a cut there, there’s enough wealth here to buy all of Zingara and hire Rimanendo to clean sponges in the public baths.”

“It’s too much money,” Conan persisted. “That’s the danger.” He sipped his wine and declined to express himself further.

“And half of it goes to the White Rose,” Santiddio exulted, ignoring Conan’s misgivings—the Cimmerian was ever a man of sombre mood.

“And well earned,” Mordermi agreed. “I’ll confess now that I had my doubts as to whether your people could carry out their end of things.”

“I, too, have my organization,” Santiddio told him smugly.

“That will be your organization now,” Sandokazi said sarcastically, as there came a knocking at the chamber door.

One of Mordermi’s men—the bandit’s headquarters was like an armed camp following the raid—opened the door to admit Avvinti and Carico. Their arrival was so punctual that they could only have come early and waited without until the appointed time. Avvinti bowed with precise formality as he entered; Carico shouted a boisterous greeting and shook hands. The faces of both men registered awe at the sight of the plunder.

The two men—Santiddio’s chief rivals for leadership of the White Rose—were not friends for all of Santiddio’s rhetoric of a common cause. Avvinti, tall and poised, physically resembled Santiddio with his aristocratic features and wellborn manner. The fourth son of a noble house and excessively educated, his likeness to Santiddio was a source of jealousy rather than a common bond. Conan despised him. Carico was of a different mold—uncouth, sweaty, coarse-featured and barrel-chested. He had the massive shoulders and sooty complexion of a blacksmith, which trade he pursued—when not breaking up the secret meetings of the White Rose by propounding some new bit of radical thought. For although without formal education, Carico was a great thinker—a quality his followers extolled. Conan, whose father had been a blacksmith, thought Carico a good drinking companion and better at arm-wrestling than speechmaking.

Santiddio’s politics fell somewhere in between Avvinti’s doctrine of benevolent dictatorship through an intellectual elite and Carico’s classless utopia that would be achieved through an alliance of agrarian peasant and urban laborer. As such, while both factions denounced him, he drew majority support from those who were alienated by either extreme. As a consequence, it was Santiddio’s leadership that held the White Rose together.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” remarked Santiddio, as the two newcomers continued to gape speechlessly.

“There’s gold enough here to feed all of Zingara’s poor for a year!” Carico exclaimed.

“Enough for the White Rose to establish the organizational power base that we must have,” Avvinti said sententiously, “if our movement is to emerge as a force to be reckoned with in Zingaran politics.”

“We can discuss how our share of the loot is to be distributed at our next meeting,” Santiddio interrupted their nascent quarrel. “Mordermi will need time to fence all of this discreetly.”

“How much time?” demanded Avvinti suspiciously.

“All that depends on General Korst,” Mordermi snapped back at him. “We’ll move as quickly as we dare—only a fool would risk getting caught with loot that can be identified so readily. I’m counting on the fact that our escape by sea will lead him to concentrate his first efforts against ships lying off the harbor. But this is no ordinary theft, and Korst knows that his position hangs on placating Rimanendo’s wrath. We must use extreme caution.”

“Why not divide up just the coins now, then?” Carico suggested. “We both have immediate expenses to satisfy, after all. I for one fully trust Mordermi to fence the rest of this treasure as fairly and as speedily as possible.”

“I’ll go with that, of course,” Santiddio seconded. “Avvinti?”

“We could divide the entire mass of gold and jewels right now,” Avvinti argued. “I’m sure we could dispose of our half of the loot through the White Rose—just as efficiently and with less chance of being cheated.”

Mordermi smiled thinly. “Cheated?” Cold light flickered behind his veiled eyes. His swordarm was uninjured, and his hand rested negligently upon his rapier hilt.

“By middlemen,” Avvinti hastily explained.

“How many fences do you know?” Carico wondered caustically.

“And we will need an expert’s eye to appraise this hoard,” Santiddio sneered. “Shall we permit a Shemite jewel merchant to give us full value for each piece, or shall we just hack every ring and necklace into halves?”

“I only want whatever is best for the White Rose,” Avvinti said coldly. “You’ll forgive me if I may have had less experience than some in matters relating to the dispersal of stolen property.”

Conan, who had seen this sort of dispute arise too often before, remained silent. Mordermi did not miss the fact that Conan ate with only his left hand, while his right hand hung close to the hilt of his broadsword.

Avvinti was not so obtuse as to fail to realize how matters stood. “If this is the will of the majority, then of course I must agree,” he conceded with ill grace. “Shall we get on with dividing just the money, then?”

“Good,” Mordermi concluded. “Then we’ll count out the coins into two shares. I have scales, if you wish—or shall we just assume that our worthy masters wouldn’t stoop to give us fraudulent coinage?”

The mood lightened in that moment of anticipation, as Sandokazi leaned across the table to drag the heavy purses of gold and silver and copper coins toward Mordermi. Faces leaned forward intently, as the bright glitter of coinage spilled a trail across the stained mahogany boards.

They were so intent, that only Conan noticed that the candle flames suddenly burned with a blue nimbus. The Cimmerian rubbed his eyes. The yellow flames seemed to dwindle beneath a veil of blue. Conan started to speak.

The door opened. Suddenly, silently, without announcement. Touched by the bluish glow of the candles, a stranger stood upon the threshold. Unbidden, he entered their chamber. The door swung shut of its own, but not before Conan saw the motionless figures of Mordermi’s men standing indifferently at their posts.

It happened so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that time seemed to hang suspended before anyone moved.

Mordermi was the first to speak “Who are you—and how did you get in here?”

“My name is Callidios,” the newcomer replied in a tone of irony. “I walked in here.”

“I’d left orders not to be disturbed,” Mordermi growled, angered over the interruption and the breach of security.

“No one told me,” the stranger rejoined.

“Well then, why are you here?”

“I’ve come to make you a king.”

Conan’s fist closed about his swordhilt, but Mordermi only laughed—as did the others after a nervous pause. This calm assertion, uttered within this den of rogues and killers, was surely a pointless jest. But Conan did not join in their laughter, for he felt the chill breath of sorcery in this, and the stranger’s accent was of Stygia.

Callidios was not a presence to radiate menace. He was young—apparently no older than any of those here—and his figure was thin and loose-limbed beneath doublet and trunk hose that wanted mending. A loose cloak of gray stuff was slung haphazardly about his narrow shoulders, and he slouched crookedly from one hip to the other, so that he seemed about to trip over the long rapier he wore too low from his hips. He had the dusky complexion and hawk-nosed features of a high caste Stygian, but the lank straw-colored hair and gray-green eyes evidenced his mongrel bloodline. Between the limp hair and shadowed eyes was an impressive expanse of brow, although the aura of great intellect was marred by the thin lips that twitched aimlessly and the too-lustrous eyes that hinted of lotus dreams.