Corin’s eyes narrowed. “God or not, one day you will fall.”
The leader rolled his eyes, then with a wave of his hand summoned forth a robed figure from the shadows. The acolyte bore a mask that looked exactly like the crest on the invaders’ shields, save that it was missing a piece. The brown-gold of aged bone, covered in a scaly flesh, the mask appeared unspeakably ancient and evil. Conan stared at it, entranced and revolted at the same time.
The bandit leader glanced at the mask, then smiled at its reflection on the sword’s blade. “You know, of course, what this is. The Mask of Acheron. One piece is yet missing. You have it here.”
Corin’s face betrayed nothing to the outsiders, but Conan could read his expression well enough to know that the bandit spoke the truth. This sent a jolt through him, for he knew of no mask, knew of no secret. Perhaps it was something known only to warriors, and so his father had not yet told him. That had to be it; there could be no other explanation.
It is the responsibility of which he spoke.
The bandit chuckled. “I do have an appreciation for bravery, Cimmerian, but I have a great
need
for the last piece. You can give it to me now . . . or die, and I shall find it myself.”
Corin smiled, his expression coming as much with ease as it did with defiance. “I prefer death.”
The bandit leader nodded. “I thought you might. Lucius, to you goes this honor.”
The Aquilonian general drew his short sword and approached, raising it to behead the smiling Cimmerian.
CHAPTER 8
CONAN BURST FROM
the woodshed. The short sword came up in a sharp, vicious arc. It lopped Lucius’s nose off. The Aquilonian stumbled back, hand rising to stem the bleeding.
Before the nose could hit the ground, Conan twisted and drove straight at Khalar Zym. The bandit leader whirled. The great sword came up, deflecting Conan’s strike. Khalar Zym kicked the boy in the chest, sending him back into the arms of the bandit’s Kushite confederate. Corin took a step toward Zym, but the large man in chains smashed him to his knees with a forearm shiver across the shoulder blades.
Khalar Zym turned away, his left hand coming up to his right ear. His fingers came away bloody. His eyes widened with shock, then he smiled. “Is that your son? He must be your son. I
like
him.”
Conan snarled and almost pulled free. The tattooed man grabbed him as well.
“Much fire in that one, Cimmerian. You’re clearly proud of him, as any father should be of a dutiful child.”
Corin said nothing, and Conan followed his father’s example.
“Alas, a child can sometimes be as much a heartache as a delight. Or a weakness.”
Khalar Zym barked an order in a tongue Conan did not recognize, but that rasped like a file over his brain. The Aquilonian and the chained man wrestled Corin over to the forge and there bound him with chains. The larger man walked out into the village and returned with a bucket-size steel helmet, which he filled with scraps of iron. He looped chains around it and fastened another chain to Corin. He arced another chain over a rafter and prepared to hoist the helmet into air above Corin.
Khalar Zym waved the acolyte forward. The sorcerer reached out and traced a finger over a patch of helmet. A gold sigil writhed there for a moment, then died, but a glow grew from within the helmet itself. Conan watched aghast as with that simple gesture all the nightmare stories whispered around fires about magick became real.
The large bandit hoisted the helmet clumsily as the acolyte withdrew. A golden droplet of molten steel splashed down to burn Corin’s thigh. The smith grit his teeth. The flesh tightened around his eyes, but he did not struggle or shift from beneath the helmet.
Khalar Zym shrugged. “You can cry out. I shall think no less of you.”
Corin said nothing.
“As a smith, I thought you might appreciate what can be done with a whisper and magick. For you to make metal fluid, it would be hours with the bellows. For him, a caress. Just think of the power I would share with you when I become a god.”
Corin snorted. “Cimmerians have no use for sorcery.”
“Pity. You would profit by it.” Khalar Zym frowned and looked at his subordinates. “Well? Find it!”
Lucius bowed his head. “Exalted one, it is not like finding the other shards. There is no temple, no sanctuary.”
“Fool.” Khalar Zym pointed around him with the great sword. “Cimmerians do not pray. They have neither priests nor preachers. This, here, this place of fire and steel, this is what matters to them. This is their church. It will be here.”
Khalar Zym’s subordinates, save for the Kushite who knelt on Conan to restrain him, searched the smithy. Though not terribly active in their search, they checked all the places where one could expect to find something that, if Conan figured correctly, could have fit easily inside his clenched fist.
Father hid it well. They will never find it, and he will never reveal its location.
Father and son looked at each other in that moment, in silent agreement. They were Cimmerians. No matter the pain, no matter the torture, they would say nothing. Khalar Zym would never let them live, and a life granted because of surrender to a tyrant would not have been worth living. Conan could not give the secret up, and with a nod he let his father know he would happily die beside him to protect it.
The tattooed man sank on bended knee before Khalar Zym. “The bone shard is not here.”
“Can you do nothing right?” Khalar Zym inspected his ear again. The bleeding had stopped and he nodded. He turned to Corin. “Your son has courage and talent. He is so like my daughter.”
The bandit looked toward the smithy’s corner. “Marique, I have need of you.”
A small slender girl in a long, shimmering purple cloak of fine fabric emerged from the shadowed corner where she had waited, silent and unseen. Because her father had likened them one to the other, Conan stared at her. A shiver ran down his spine. Though she appeared to be only a year or two older than he, her eyes stared off into the distance as if she were remembering, or seeing, an entirely different scene than the one that was happening around her. Her hair had been gathered into a mass of dark braids, save for bangs that barely hid her forehead. Her flesh had a corpselike pallor. It surprised Conan that she did not stink of the grave.
“Yes, Father?”
Khalar Zym smiled. “These fools tell me the shard is not here.”
“They just don’t know
how
to look.”
Her father smiled. “Will you find it for me, Marique?”
The girl bowed her head obediently. “As you desire.”
One hand emerged from beneath her scaly purple cloak. Silver talons sheathed her fingers. She waved them through the air as if plucking the strings of an invisible lyre. Something thrummed through Conan’s chest. The Kushite’s weight shifted, not enough to free him, but enough to let the boy know that the black giant had felt it as well.
The others drew back as the girl began to circle the smithy. Her path spiraled outward, her dark cloak swirling about her. Although she did not move swiftly, her movements were quite deliberate. She cocked her head as if she were listening for something. She must have heard it because the pattern of her movements shifted, narrowing, leading her to a shadowed corner.
“There, Father, I have it.”
She gestured casually and a wooden plank peeled back as if a leather flap. She reached down into the dark recess and removed a golden box. Bearing it in both hands, she approached her father. On bended knee, with her head bowed, she raised the box to him.
Khalar Zym set his great sword down and reached for the box with trembling hands. He removed the lid and stared. His eyes glistened. His mouth hung open for a heartbeat. He grasped the thing in the box and raised it up with the gentle reverence of a father holding his child for the first time.
“You have served me well, daughter. Your mother would be proud.”
The girl’s head remained bowed, but she smiled most contentedly.
Khalar Zym rubbed a thumb over the fragment of bone lovingly, then his eyes narrowed and his visage became cruel. “Oh, Cimmerian, you could have saved me much trouble. As I would have given you glory, so shall I now give you pain. But how? Oh, yes, yes . . .”
He gazed at his daughter. “Marique, would you like a brother? We can take this Cimmerian, bend him to our will.”
The girl shot Conan a venomous glance, then smiled up at her father. “As you wish.”
“My lord, you cannot.” Lucius shook his head, a bloody cloth held to his face.
“ ‘Cannot,’ Lucius? Did you say I
cannot
do something?”
The large man blanched. “No, my lord, I meant . . .” The Aquilonian drew his short sword. “I meant that I hoped you would give me the honor of dispatching this barbarian.”
“While that might give you satisfaction, Lucius, it will do nothing to give my Cimmerian friend pain.” Khalar Zym tapped the bit of mask against his chin. “No, I know what we shall do. Remo, Akhoun, more chains. The rest of you, gather the men, fire the rest of the village.”
At Khalar Zym’s instruction, his henchmen attached another chain to the helmet and looped it over a rafter. This they placed in Conan’s hands in the middle of the forge floor, while they hung a counterbalance above his father’s head. The boy hung on tightly. The first quiver of his arms had sent a droplet of burning metal sizzling into his father’s shoulder.
Khalar Zym crouched beside Corin. “This is the only way which I may punish you, Cimmerian. You do not cry out with pain. You fear no insult to honor. The worst I can do to you is to let you watch your son die trying to save you. And we both know, you and I, as fathers, that is precisely what shall happen.”
Zym stood and led his men from the forge. Torches thrown on the roof and laid against the walls from outside started fires that greedily consumed the building. Marique lingered, studying the great sword. She smiled at her reflection in its blade, then picked it up. She hesitated, and in the reflection her eyes met Conan’s.
She spun, watching him warily. “It is a good thing you die here, Cimmerian. Were you to live, you would prove troublesome.” She gazed after her father, then strode quickly to Conan’s side and licked sweat and blood from his cheek. Her voice became a whisper. “Not that this might prove wholly unwelcome, but we shall never know.”
In a swirl of cape she departed. From outside, men cheered their great victory, but the rising crackle of flames swallowed all sound of their retreat.
Corin met his son’s gaze. Though collared and chained to the helmet, begrimed, bloody, and exhausted, he did not look defeated. “Conan, you cannot save me. Save yourself.”
Already the chain had begun to get hot, but the boy shook his head. “A Cimmerian warrior does not fear death.”
“Nor does he rush foolishly to embrace it.” Corin raised a hand to the chain on his collar. “Let go of the chain, boy.”
“I’m not afraid to die.” A fiery coal fell from the ceiling, burning Conan’s cheek. It smarted fiercely, but to brush it away would be to doom his father. Conan snarled against the pain, but held on.
“Conan,
look at me
.”
The boy looked up into his father’s eyes. “Your mother . . . she wanted more for you in this life than fire and blood. As do I.” Corin’s grip tightened on his chain. “I love you, son.”
Corin yanked and his body fell. The chain ripped free of Conan’s grasp. Molten metal poured down over the smith, outlining his features in red-gold as the forge’s light had often done, then liquified them.
Conan darted toward his father, but the blast of heat from the metal drove him back. A rafter cracked, cutting him off. The heat forced him to the doorway. The boy stumbled through, expecting a spear thrust or an arrow. He tumbled into a snowbank, burying his face and hands. The snow cooled his seared flesh but could do nothing to erase the image of his father’s death.
The boy rolled over and looked at his blistered hands. Each link had left its mark on his flesh. He tried to remember his father’s hands, so big, so callused, and yet so gentle when circumstance required. Already that memory had begun to fade within the liquid metal pool that had consumed his father. Conan pressed his hands into the snow again and waited for numbness to swallow the pain.
He had no idea how long he lay there. Though he did not fear death, in that moment he was not so certain that he was fond of living. He knew that if Crom meant him to live, he would live—the courage and strength to do so would have been born in him. But there, with the forge burning and the stink of roasting flesh filling the gray smoke, Conan saw little reason to move.
Then he heard something. Not a random sound like fire’s crackle or the hiss of bubbling water. A voice. A voice free from pain and full of joy. In this place, at this time, that could herald only one thing.
Conan rolled to his feet and looked about warily. There, through a swirl of smoke, he saw two things. A raider, one of the heavy cavalry, kneeling over the body of a woman. He grabbed a double handful of her hair and pulled back, stretching her throat and opening her mouth in a silent scream. Then he pressed the edge of his sword to her hairline and, in one swift stroke, harvested her scalp.
And, halfway between the raider and Conan, a Cimmerian sword had been stabbed into a snowbank, forgotten.
Swiftly and silently, fluidly, the last Cimmerian warrior ran forward. He grasped the sword’s hilt with his left hand, mindless of the pain of bursting blisters. He splashed through a puddle of snowmelt that he could have run around, because he wanted the raider to know he was coming.
The man heard the sound and half turned toward it. His right hand came up to ward off the sword, but Conan’s first cut separated wrist from arm. Before the raider could scream, a second blow dented his helmet. He sagged to the side, dazed, and stared up.