Khalar Zym shouted back up the chimney. “Marique, find her. She cannot escape.” He then reached down and pressed his left hand to the wheel. His hand glowed, not the green emanating from the mask, but the dark violet glow that pulsed from deep within some of the ruins’ recesses. Purple witchfire spread over the wheel, consuming nothing. Instead it appeared to stabilize the platform.
Khalar Zym straightened, then stepped onto the wheel. “Come, Cimmerian. You shall be the first sacrificed to my glory. Forever shall be remembered your name.”
Conan joined him, contempt in the grin he wore. “I don’t want to be remembered—just to make certain you’re forgotten for all time.”
TAMARA RAN ALONG
the ledge and onto a broader avenue of soot-blackened ruins. To the right and downstream of the fiery river was the platform from which she’d fallen. She wasn’t certain she could get back out that way, and was positive that people would try to stop her. To the left, the avenue paralleled the river, and slowly curved off to the right before making a broader sweep back to the left and inland. Below and before her, ancient bridges crossed the burning flow.
She saw footprints in the dust near her feet, so she ran along left. Since everything at her right hand was on the coastal side of the ruin, she peered through doorways, hoping to see the night sky through a crack, or perhaps catch a hint of a breeze from the sea. She ran along quickly and then, toward the back of a long, dark space, she caught a flicker of light. Carrying the length of chain still bound to her right wrist, she made for it.
Halfway along, the room exploded with light. Tamara found herself in a forest of obscene statues—graven images that mocked and blasphemed. They’d been gathered together in tableaux which defied description and could only have amused a very sick mind.
And down through the aisle between them strode Marique, her head held proudly high. She spread her hands, Stygian talons bright on the right, a sharp poniard in the left. “Welcome to my realm. Do you like it?”
“Not in the least.” Tamara dropped the chain and slowly started looping it around her forearm. “Show me the way out of here.”
The witch smiled coldly. “If I do not?”
“I’m not drugged. I’m not in chains, and you don’t have a cadre of guards to restrain me.” Tamara’s eyes became slits. “You can’t stop me, and if I need to prove I’m not lying, you’ll pay the price in pain.”
THE TWO MEN
moved around the wheel, swords occasionally licking out like serpents’ tongues, to contest the space at the wheel’s heart. The blades rang together, the Cimmerian steel all the sweeter for its masterful construction. The peal and the echoes brought back memories of Conan’s father wielding that same blade, and a slow fury at Khalar Zym’s unworthiness to use it began to rise in Conan.
Conan came around the wheel, knees bent, shoulders forward, always keeping his weight even and his balance under control. He pushed forward, poking low with the long sword, then withdrawing the blade before Khalar Zym could parry. He blocked the man’s return cuts with ease.
Khalar Zym’s frustration grew. The mask writhed impatiently on his face. Conan did not wonder if the mask remembered the barbarians who had come to destroy it before. It would be enough that Khalar Zym did. It would get him thinking about insignificant things, about Conan being from Cimmeria and being the only man who’d drawn his blood in duels.
“Damn you, Cimmerian!” Khalar Zym’s face twisted in a demoniacal snarl. “You have troubled me too long. It is time for you to die.”
The man-god advanced quickly, stabbing low and coming high. Conan retreated before him, working his way back around the wheel. They’d come all the way around, Khalar Zym quickening his pace, when Conan stopped. The Nemedian lunged, but Conan leaned left. The Cimmerian great sword passed between Conan’s body and arm. He clamped down on Khalar Zym’s wrist, binding it tight to his side, then hit him twice with a fist, hammering that bleeding ear.
Khalar Zym pulled back. Conan stripped the sword from the man-god’s hand, letting his own long sword fall away, and reared back. He planted a front kick against Khalar Zym’s breastplate that slammed the man-god back against the ebon idol’s chest. Khalar Zym rebounded onto his knees and caught himself before he could pitch headlong into the abyss.
“Damn you, Cimmerian.” Khalar Zym raised a fist wreathed with arcane flames. “Damn you to
hell
!”
The man-god’s fist fell.
The wheel exploded.
MARIQUE REGARDED THE
monk with new eyes. “Should I be amused by you, or angered?”
“If those are your only choices, you’re an idiot.” Tamara drifted forward more quickly than Maliva’s gown should have allowed. She let a foot or so of chain slip into her hand. Then she whipped it around, lashing out. Before Marique could move, the chain tore the dagger out of her hand. The blade ricocheted off into the darkness below the cruel gods. Then Tamara’s fist came around and Marique saw stars. She found herself flat on the ground with the monk heading out the side passage.
Marique tasted blood.
She struck me. She dared
strike
me!
She came up on all fours like a cat, then started after the monk.
You will pray that I let you die!
Marique bolted through a short passage, then down a flight of stairs that spread out into a small courtyard. Back when the sun shined on the city, it had been a garden, but the molten river had long since nibbled away the edge on this level and all those below. Opposite the courtyard, she’d arranged a half-dozen statues of horned gods, thinking eventually to consign them to the flames, but at the moment she was pleased to have them there to witness her victory.
Tamara turned, her back against the little garden’s wall.
Marique spat blood. “No one dares to strike me. No one.”
The monk smiled. “I’ll be happy to do it again.”
“You don’t understand, my dear.” Marique raised her right hand and, with her index finger, inscribed a burning sigil in the air. “You learned to fight. I taught myself to
kill.
”
At a whispered word, the Acheronian sigil flew directly at Tamara. The monk dodged, impressing Marique with both her speed and agility. Neither mattered, however, as the sigil hit her in hip and spun her around. She slammed into the wall and bounced off it, dropping to her hands and knees, her head down.
Marique marched over and grabbed a fistful of her hair. She yanked back, stretching the woman’s throat. She raised her right hand, the claw full of Stygian metal glinting gold in the hot river’s glow. “And kill you I shall.”
Tamara looked up. “But if you kill me, you kill your
mother!”
Marique laughed. “Who do you think it was who let my mother’s enemies take her in the first place?”
The monk gasped in horror.
Marique grinned.
Her hand rose high and descended . . .
. . . And the Cimmerian great sword took it off cleanly at the wrist.
Marique spun, staring at the blood spurting from the stump, and the barbarian crouched with his back to the gods. She started to say something, but then the monk was again on her feet. Tamara spun and caught Marique with a kick to the belly. The witch flew from the garden, plummeting toward the river, but a stone post one level down stopped her. It snapped her spine, crushing her heart against her breastbone, then burst up through her chest. Impaled, she slid down its glistening length and stared up into the darkness.
Conan and Tamara appeared above her, having descended to that level. They wore pitiless expressions. Marique would have smiled at that if she could. Then they vanished.
Then her father came into view, blood smeared on the side of his face, his sword in hand. The mask displayed shock when he saw her. He jogged over and sank to a knee. “Oh, Marique.”
She tried to smile.
You can resurrect me. You can make me whole. Please, Father.
Khalar Zym looked down. “I have loved you always, daughter mine. I would have loved you forever, but this proves that things were as I feared. Unlike your mother, you are simply too weak and, therefore, must be surrendered to Death’s embrace.”
CONAN FOLLOWED TAMARA
through the labyrinthine Acheronian ruins. They descended another level to get past a point of collapse, then worked their way up two more as the crevasse turned inland. And there, on the other side, he caught sight of what he took to be a sliver of night sky.
“We have to get across.”
Tamara pointed to a bridge. “There.”
Hope speeding them, they raced to the wooden bridge. It consisted of three spans, the middle resting on two columns that the river had not yet eroded. They darted across the first span, which, while a bit rickety, held them above the molten rock. Heat rose from it, but the wood had not charred. Odd sigils had been worked into the wood, and Conan wondered if it had been sorcery which had preserved it.
They had gingerly made their way over the second span when Khalar Zym appeared at the far end. Conan turned to Tamara. “Go. Get free. I’ll stop him.”
“No, Conan, come.” She grabbed his hand. “We can get away.” She pulled and her hand slipped from his as she stepped on the third span.
A board cracked and she fell.
Conan lunged and caught the chain as it unspooled from her forearm. The chain jerked tight, grinding his shoulder socket. He felt her strike the stone column twice. He pulled back and looped a length of chain around his wrist, but the slat he was using for leverage began to splinter.
“Tamara.”
“I’m here, Conan. My shoulder. I can’t pull myself up.”
“I have you.”
“But for how long, Cimmerian?” Khalar Zym sheathed his swords and approached with arms wide. “Beside me, none are equal. Beneath me, all must submit. Before me, all are sacrifices to my glory!” He closed his eyes, basking in the sound of his own voice as it echoed through the ruins. “Maliva, I summon you here!”
Tamara jerked at the end of the chain. An ill wind rose off the lava, lifting clouds of bright embers to swirl like stars through the air. They fell on Conan’s hands and face, singed his hair, and sizzled against his flesh. “Tamara?”
“He’s summoned her, Conan. I can feel her entering me.”
Khalar Zym chuckled and the mask glowed a malevolent green. “Once again, a Cimmerian boy is caught holding a chain.”
“Let me go, Conan. Drop me. I cannot fight her.”
“No!” Conan, on one knee, stabbed the great sword into the railing at the base of the second span. It sank through the wood, splitting a sigil, and struck stone, anchoring him. Muscles bunched and quivered. Pain shot through his shoulders. “His evil kills no more.”
“You’re on one knee already, Cimmerian.” The man-god pressed his hands together. “I offer you what I offered your father. Kneel before me and you shall live.”
“Conan, I can feel her. She’s mad. Worse than the daughter. Drop me!”
“What will it be, Cimmerian?”
Conan, chest heaving, looked at Khalar Zym through sweaty locks of black hair. “Do you want to know why I could beat you when you wielded my father’s sword?”
Khalar Zym’s eyes tightened. “Tell me.”
“He did not make this sword for a boy . . . or a god. He made it for a man.” Conan tightened his hand on the hilt. “A Cimmerian, born to war, who would someday
slay a god
!”
Conan jammed the blade toward the far side of the bridge. As his father had done when levering ice to cool off a hotheaded son, so Conan levered an aged span of bridge off a tall pillar, and spilled a god toward a hell from which he would never escape. Yet even before Khalar Zym could fall, the realization of doom trapped in his horror-filled eyes, that same blade came up and around in a silver blur. It caught Khalar Zym one last time over the right ear and passed fully through his skull. It shattered the Mask of Acheron as it went, consigning master and device to the molten stone below.
The sword stroke released more magickal energy, which shook the ruins to their heart. Lava splashed below, overrunning what had been the river’s banks. Stones fell. Terraces collapsed. A huge boulder tumbled down and smashed the bridge’s first span to flinders.
Conan stood and hauled Tamara up from the hole. He held tightly for a moment, then retrieved his father’s sword. Together, they tested the planking on the remaining span, but soon gave this up as pointless since falling rocks posed more of a threat to the bridge than breaking boards did to them. At the far side they had to cut back toward the platform as collapsing terraces cut them off from the opening they’d seen.
They burst from the cavern mouth and Conan immediately moved Tamara behind him for cover. While most of Khalar Zym’s troops were fleeing back toward Khor Kalba, two companies had remained. The man-god’s elite guard stood poised with swords drawn to oppose Conan, while fresh recruits huddled in their shadows much as Tamara sheltered in Conan’s.
Conan shook his head. “Your master is dead. His dreams are lost. How many of you wish to die for promises that will never be kept?”
The elite guards’ captain took a step forward. “Some of us fight for duty and honor, not plunder or power.”
A soldier who had lurked behind him stepped halfway around, then pressed a dagger to the throat of Khalar Zym’s man. “And some of us, Captain, fight for our friends.” Behind him, the other recruits similarly threatened Khalar Zym’s last company.
Conan roared with laughter. “Artus! What are you doing here? You were supposed to be warning the world about Khalar Zym.”
“I whispered in the ear of one Shemite merchant, so the rumor is halfway round the world by now.” The Zingaran shrugged. “We actually hadn’t intended on fighting, you see . . . We just wanted to let you know we sail for Hyrkania with the tide, and didn’t want you to be late.”