The girl looked up at her. “Truly?”
“Of course.” Marique bowed her head. “Go now.” She turned and spitted Ukafa with a glance. “Do not molest her. She is free to go.”
The Kushite giant frowned, but did nothing as the girl raced past and down the steps.
Of course you don’t understand.
Subtlety had never been something her father’s subordinates appreciated. They had joined him because of simple things. Her father had been stronger than they, and had appealed to their personal vices. He’d promised Ukafa dominion over Stygia and the Black Kingdoms and ceded the western half of the world to the Brythnian archer, Cherin. Lucius he had tempted through gluttony and doubtless promised Remo to fashion him into a handsome man.
Marique doubted, even if her father gained the powers of a god, that such a transformation would be possible.
But she had learned that subtlety amplified power because it provided access in ways people did not suspect. Yes, the murder of one girl instilled fear—compounding the terror the slaughter below had already ignited. But letting the other girl go free inspired hope. In absence of hope, one might willingly die to defend a friend or a principle, but hope proved corrosive to such bonds when the life of one was to be weighed against the life of another.
Marique looked down the line of monks and caught something in the eye of another. Of the right age and acceptable coloring, the woman brought her head up as Marique approached. Terror retreated from her face almost entirely. She threw her shoulders back and, in profile, reminded Marique of Acheronian queens she’d seen commemorated on old coins.
“You. You are the one.”
The woman lifted her chin, her lower lip quivering just a little.
Marique stroked the monk’s throat, then tasted her blood. Her eyes closed as the flavor played on her tongue, for at first this one did seem right. Rich, vital, the blood carried strength. This woman had power and knew it. She had tapped into more arcane lore than her masters likely ever imagined she could. And her lineage traveled back along straight lines. She was perfect . . .
almost
.
The tiniest of sour notes ruined it. Subtle, yes, and almost trivial enough to ignore. Marique’s eyes opened and studied the woman’s face again. Yes, a daughter of Acheron, distantly, and related to the royal house, but not legitimate. Born in the shadows, not to the crown.
Marique spat in disgust. “You sought to fool me.”
“No, Mistress. I—”
Marique struck quickly, driving talons into the woman’s eyes. Before blood tears could roll down her cheeks, before the woman’s hands had risen halfway to her punctured eyes, the poison on the second and third talons had done its work. The woman collapsed, her flesh surrendering quickly to putrefaction, darkening in the sunlight and melting from bone.
Marique pointed at the others with a metal-sheathed finger. “Because I was merciful, do not believe I am simple or can be deceived. You will reveal to me the one I seek, one way or another. He demands it!”
She turned back to point to her father high above the courtyard, but he had abandoned his position. Instead he climbed the stairs behind her, his face set and grim. She turned, her skirt flaring, then sank to a knee. “Father, I—”
“Have you found her yet, Marique? You said she was here.”
“I am close, Father.”
Khalar Zym grabbed her jaw roughly and tipped her face up. “Your mother waits in a cold void that abrades her soul, Marique. She waits on you. I wait on you, and you tell me close?
Close?
I want her here, now!” He released her roughly, shoving her away, and raised a hand to strike her.
Marique lifted her left hand to ward off the blow, and found her right hand cocked and ready. Her father’s armor, which she had helped him don, was not without flaw.
A sword might not find purchase, but a talon?
At his mercy though she was, she picked out three gaps where she could strike and he would flow down the stairs as did the last monk.
And she would have struck had he hit her, but his hand never fell. From the west, a knot of men appeared, wrestling an old, bloodstained monk to the top of the stairs. They cast him to the ground. Their leader, head bowed, went to a knee. “Master, this one sought to prevent pursuit of a wagon that escaped through the west gate. Remo has taken men and ridden after it.”
Marique rose and withdrew a step. Though she had never seen the old monk before, she recognized his stink. His essence had been entwined with that of the one she sought from the very first.
He reeks of her even now.
She started forward, her right hand extended, but her father waved her off.
Khalar Zym crouched beside the old man. “Our paths cross again. I had thought you much younger, and hopefully wiser.”
The old monk looked up, bleeding from a split lip, one of his eyes swollen almost closed. “You pursue a course of madness, Khalar Zym. A course of evil.”
“Evil? You speak to me of evil?” Marique’s father straightened up. “You have a convenient memory, Fassir. You know what evils have been visited upon me.”
The monk’s eyes hardened. “We live here in peace. We do not make war. We do not cause suffering. This is a sanctuary. We value life.”
“Ha!” Her father thrust a fist into the air, then brought his hand down, pointing at the women arrayed behind Marique. “You value life. Have you told your disciples how you value it? Have you told them what happened in the forests of Ophir?”
The monk shook his head.
“I thought not.” Her father snorted with disgust. “They should know, Fassir, they should know the truth of things, the full truth of them.”
Khalar Zym began pacing, his face tightened with fury but his eyes focused distantly. He began to spin for the monks a story—yet telling it more to himself. Marique had heard it many times, told many ways, with her father in moods that ranged from the depths of despair to the heights of triumph. He spun it as a great tragedy—the defining moment of his life. It was the reason he was born and the reason he continued to live.
And yet in every telling, he forgets that I was there.
Marique recalled clearly the baying of hounds and the tramp of heavy hooves as horsemen chased them through the forests. They had left her father’s domain, just the three of them, on a mission Maliva had devised. Through her reading of Acheronian tomes, she had come to believe that deep in the forests of Ophir lay a cavern, and within it a Well of Light. Were one to bathe in it, immortality would be bestowed.
Maliva had been too obvious in her pursuit of forbidden knowledge. Her efforts exposed her to enemies who happily fed her information.They invented the Well of Light to trap her, and Marique recalled well the day her mother had joyously discovered clues to its location in documents which Marique had been translating. Maliva had contributed to her own capture through her avarice—and it was only because the taint of Acheronian magick had not clung to Khalar Zym or Marique that they been allowed to live.
Better that we should have died.
When they finally captured Maliva, they lashed her to a massive oaken wheel—so large it might have served to transport the land ship. They secured her to the crossbeams, stretching her limbs until taut, then lit the wheel on fire. Flames sprang up with unnatural speed and supernatural ferocity. Their incendiary caresses darkening her mother’s white flesh.
Hair flowing in the heat, then igniting, her mother threw back her head. Marique, in chains, clutching at her father’s breast, had turned away, anticipating a scream. Instead, in a haunted voice, strong and free of pain, Maliva damned those who had pursued her.
“I curse you all. You can burn my flesh, but my soul you cannot touch. Husband, resurrect me! Bring me back and you shall be as a god!”
Marique’s father held her tighter and his tears wet her hair. Then the wheel collapsed in on itself. Sparks jetted high into the air until they mingled with the stars. Maliva’s murderers waited two days for the coals to cool and be raked before scattering the ashes, then set father and daughter free to wander the world as pathetic examples of the wages of infamy.
Khalar Zym’s mailed fist slammed against his breastplate. “All you did to destroy us was for naught, Fassir.”
“The monks here had no part in your wife’s punishment. They are innocent.”
“Her blood may not be on their hands, but there is other blood, isn’t there?” Khalar Zym again crouched. “Even as one set of enemies sought my wife, you and your fellow monks anticipated me. Was it a vision, or simple calculation, monk? For you acted even before my wife had died.”
“We did what was necessary.”
“We? You seek to shuffle blame onto your own master, a man long-since dead?” Khalar Zym rose again and addressed the monks. “Did he tell you what he did? That two decades ago he went into the world and stole a child?”
“A child your agents had taken, though you did not know what she truly was. I rescued her from your evil.”
“You did more than just
that
. In fact, I might have admired how you managed it. Incredible skill and stealth, qualities I admire.” Her father shook his head. “It was the other that dooms you, old man.”
“It was necessary.”
“Was it?” He opened his arms. “I seek a woman, pure of blood, descended from the last Acheronian priest-kings. I do not wish to slay her. I merely need some of her blood. A drop, a small vial, nothing she will notice gone, nothing from which she will not recover and be exalted for. For she who provides this would be as a daughter to me. And more.”
Marique shivered.
Khalar Zym thrust an accusing finger at Fassir. “To thwart me, this one went and stole a child from my people. He brought her here. But then . . . then he did the unforgivable—that for which there is no redemption. Once he had placed her here, he sought out her parents. He slew them, and her brothers and her sisters, and her grandparents and her cousins. How many were there, Fassir? How many died to lock my wife away in hell? A dozen? Two? Did you ever count? Can you even remember?”
Fassir drew himself up to his knees and Marique sensed in him a purpose. “Every single one, Khalar Zym, from babes suckled at their mothers’ breasts to a crone so old and in so much pain that she begged for release.”
Marique’s father folded his arms over his chest. “Where is the one I seek? Is she in the coach my men are chasing?”
Fassir said nothing.
“Of course she is.” Khalar Zym shook his head. “And you’re sending her to Hyrkania, aren’t you? Don’t lie. I see it in your eyes. You didn’t think I knew of the monastery there. I’ve not found it,
yet
, but the road between here and Hyrkania is long. I have many agents watching. You have failed, Fassir. Let that knowledge fill you with regret.”
The old man looked up. “My only regret, Khalar Zym, is that I was
not
there to watch your witch burn.”
Fury pouring from him in an inarticulate scream, Khalar Zym kicked the monk in the stomach. As Fassir bent forward around his middle, Khalar Zym grabbed the monk’s head. He smashed it again and again into the stone, dashing Fassir’s brains out. Then, chest heaving, he took two steps down and let the blood drip from his hands.
Finally he raised his eyes. “Slaughter them all, man and beast. Raze this place. No stone shall stand upon stone, no well shall be unpoisoned. Fire what will burn, save bodies that you pile to rot, and salt the earth so that for generations to come, this place will stand as a warning against defying the god-king Khalar Zym.”
CHAPTER 20
THE CLOUD OF
dust raised by pursued and pursuer alerted Conan to their presence long before he heard hoofbeats or the rattle of the closed carriage. He rode toward them, paralleling their course as nearly as he could, seeking a pass through the hills that would allow him to study them before he made any decision to intervene. Finally he came over a low rise as they streamed out of a narrow cut and along a serpentine road running around the shore of a long-sincedried lake.
The carriage came in the lead, with a man whipping lathered horses into a frenzied gallop. A half dozen similarly attired men, all wearing hooded tunics of rust and homespun pants of gray, rode behind. Their pursuers, a full dozen men in black leather armor, with bows and spears, swords and shields, poured from the cut and lofted arrows toward the wagon. Dust stained their armor, emphasizing the tentacled mask crest on their breasts, but Conan did not need that sign to know they were enemies.
Their leader, a twisted man riding low in the saddle, had not changed since Conan had last seen him at the forge—save for perhaps having become even more ugly. He urged his men on with savage curses. As they split up to engage the carriage’s defenders, he cut to the right, intent on catching the wagon himself.
One of the lofted arrows descended, more by dint of luck than any skill, and caught the wagon’s driver in the back. He spun, clutching at it, but his legs collapsed. He fell from his seat and the wagon bumped over him. The wagon careened onward, outstripping its defenders, the team of four horses racing white-eyed from pursuit.
Conan set heels to his horse’s flanks and the beast leaped forward. The two cut down the hill, picking up speed, and came onto the flat scant yards behind the wagon. The Cimmerian urged his mount on, rising in the stirrups, then leaped into the empty seat and scooped up the reins.
He laughed at himself as arrows whizzed past. Even with his great strength, hauling back on the reins to slow the horses would be difficult. If he slowed them, Khalar Zym’s men would catch up. He might be able to control the horses, thereby preventing the wagon from being wrecked, but hitting a rock or hole at that speed, having a horse break a leg or fall to an arrow, would bring the wild ride to an end quickly, and still leave Khalar Zym’s warriors to deal with.
A small viewport snapped open and a woman looked out. “Who are you?”