Conan stood very still and hardly comfortable while Jelal took aim, adjusted, and carefully pressed the mustache in place. Oman’s nose twitched. Accepting the cloak from the other man, he swung it about him. He was acting on excitement, on adrenaline; now he remembered.
“My room! My property!”
The slender, now cloakless man shook his head. “Several of the khan’s men stayed behind, busked for combat. They sought you in your room at the inn. They will await your return—out of sight.”
Conan swore. Eyes narrowed, the mustache wriggling as he continued to mutter curses, he returned to the narrow window. He peered contemplatively across and down the street at the Royal Turan, and the buildings on either side the inn.
“How far must we go to reach Balad?” he asked, without turning.
“A way,” Jelal said.
“Don’t play the obscure oracle with me! I want to know how far!”
“A goodly walk. And we shall offer you hospitality there, as well. You now need a place to stay, Conan.”
Conan swung back from the window. Briefly the others saw that ugly animal snarl that would have sent a child screaming for its mother. “Let us be on our way, then. I have other plans for this evening!”
Nevertheless Jelal left first; a few minutes later the other two escorted the impatient Cimmerian. Even at night in this city strange to him, he took careful note of their course, and his hardly civilized instincts prevailed.
Dogs, he thought, clenching his teeth. They were leading him on a circuitous trek, and he knew they sought deliberately to disguise from him the way and the distance to Jelal’s. Though they twice asked, he was as devious; he would not tell them his “plans for this evening.”
A water clock might well have dripped away a full glass before they had left the close-set buildings and mounted One Ox Hill among the villas of Zamboula’s wealthy. Past two sprawling hillside estates they led the Cimmerian, who saw guards and lanterns. Dogs barked and challenges were called and answered. On up the hill they went, past a tree on which a sign hung by a crossbow quarrel; it advised that wayfarers would be considered thieves. They passed it, and fared upward, and stopped between two tall stone posts. Jelal had left them a shibboleth, which Turth now called out:
“Free Isparana!”
A whistle replied; the trio advanced. Pots atop broad, flat-topped poles set into the ground spouted flame and poured greasy smoke skyward. Conan and his guides were challenged again, this time by men who showed themselves. Lights bobbed in the night. These men bore crossbows. When their armored commander recognized Conan’s escorts, he nodded.. He studied the head and face rising above the cloak—which was hardly so long and encompassing on Conan as it had been on Jelal’s messenger.
“He is a big one,” the helmeted, steel-corseleted guard chief said.
“He also,” Conan said low, “does not like to be talked about as if he isn’t present.”
The fellow evidently deemed it wise to make no reply, or was shocked silent. They entered the porticoed villa, whose door was huge, and thick, and iron-bound.
“Cook has some good meat laid back for you, Jelal,” the estate guard said.
“Ah, good. I’ve had naught since noon.” That from the man who had acted as messenger and guide.
“Jelal?” the Cimmerian repeated, in demanding tone. “You are Jelal too?”
“Only I,” the slender man said, smiling.
“Then who—”
“I am Balad, Conan.”
At that voice Conan turned, to face the man he had first met as Jelal. He had come directly here, of course, and so arrived well before them; he had not changed clothing. “I am sorry. Plotters must of necessity lie, you understand.”
“Damn!” the Cimmerian said, hurling the true Jelal’s cloak angrily to the gleaming marble floor. “Had you told me that an hour and more ago rather than play this snake-walking game over half of Zamboula, we could have saved a lot of trouble for both of us!”
“I am a marked man,” Jelal-Balad said, “and such snake-walking games are as necessary as are the guards outside, and watchwords. You noted your route, did you?”
“I know when I have made three turns to my offhand, soon followed by four more to the weapon-side!”
Balad smiled; the chief plotter against the throne of Zamboula. “You are indeed a dangerous man, Conan of Cimmeria. We regret having caused you trouble. But —how could bringing you here direct have saved me trouble? Our design is to insure my security—our security.”
“Because now we just have to go all the way back into the city for the key to your success, Balad—a man named Hajimen.”
“Hajimen? The Shanki? We felt him out, of course, when we contemplated approaching you—”
“And I must either be guided,” Conan went on as if Balad had not spoken, “or find my own way back to the Royal Turan.”
“The Royal Turan! Do you not understand that you
cannot
go back there? Akter Khan’s soldiers await you!”
“I’ll not be staying long,” Conan said.
Balad shook his head. “You will not be going back
there
this night, Conan!”
Conan stared at the other big man. “Balad: I am. And it must be alone. Don’t try to prevent me.”
For a long while Balad stared at his presumed new recruit, a giant foreigner who glared balefully back with surely the strangest eyes in Zamboula.
“Conan:
Why
?”
Conan’s false mustache twitched in the merest intimation of a smile. “You know about my ability with weapons,” he said. “There is also another trade I am good at.”
A long dun-colored cloak formed a crumpled wad at the base of the building next the Royal Turan inn. Beneath it was a pair of buskins, large. And on the nigh-flat roof of that building, a barefoot man crouch-walked. His sword was strapped on his back; a thong snubbed the hilt tightly to the hitch-ring near the sheath’s mouth. He was a big man. At the apex of the roofs gentle slope, he paused to wind around his waist the rope with which he’d scaled the building. He gazed across five feet of space to the inn’s roof. It was flat, and at nearly the same level as the ridge whereon he stood. The light of a lowering moon caught the flash of his teeth; his smile was wolfish.
The rope secured around him, he crouch-walked back down the roof’s slope, as if louting.
His calves bulged when he came to pause and levered himself up and down with the fluid suppleness of a stalking cat. Then, though he was tall and unusually broad of shoulder and powerful of build, he ran up the roof and kicked himself off its apex. His legs did not chum in air and drew up only a little while he soared through space and onto the roof of the adjacent building. Both legs doubled up when he alit, so that his bare heels punched into his buttocks. The thump of his landing was incredibly faint for one of his size.
The Royal Turan’s roof provided no means for anchoring his rope. He knew which window he wanted; the only way he could devise to reach it and its upper sill was to hang from the roofs edge by his knees, with his back to the building. He did.
Thus, hours past midnight, did Conan gain entry to his own room in the Royal Turan.
The chamber was dark and empty, as it should have been. He unslung his sword, attached it to his belt, and loosed the hilt of its restraining thong. Next he secured his rope to a beam and paid it out the window until it nearly brushed the ground. By feel, he found his long vest of clinking chainmail. He unstrapped his sword but stood it against the wall so that he could snatch its hilt in an instant. Heedless of the dark, too-tight tunic loaned him by Balad, Conan shrugged and wriggled into the mailvest. He buckled on the sword again.
The excellent cloak that had been a gift of Akter Khan was where he had left it, folded on the unusually comfortable bed. Spreading it, he began collecting his treasures; coins and the gold cup—which rolled off cloak and bed and rang onto the floor.
“Damn!”
Heedless now of stealth, Conan squatted to snatch it up and drop it amid the things spread on the cloak, which he swiftly folded in to form a bag. As he turned with it to the window, the door opened from the hall, and the flickery light of a glim flared yellow and bright in the darkness.
Conan’s sword was in his hand by the time the brand and one of its bearer’s feet were in the chamber.
“Who’s in here?”
The man entered; a helmeted soldier. He squinted into the darkness and lifted high his brand. Its yellow light wrought eeriness on his face—and found Conan. The Cimmerian stood in a half-crouch, makeshift bag in left hand, sword in right, bareheaded, armored though bare of arm. And he stared with an awful balefulness.
“Ha! A thief, is it? Caught y—it’s THAT CONAN!”
“Loudmouth,” Conan snarled, and his sword came around and up as he pounced.
Out in the corridor other voices rose, and feet pounded heavily up steps. More soldiers reached the doorway. The first stumbled over his fallen companion who had been so misfortunate as to discover the Cimmerian and call out before clearing his sword arm of the door, which opened into the room. The second and third got themselves alacritously out of the way of the roaring fireball that rushed at them, streaming flame. It whooshed through the doorway to slam into the wall across the corridor. Both men, and now a third, scrambled again when it bounced and endangered their feet. One snatched it up; it was the torch formerly borne by the man keeping vigil outside the foreigner’s door. Holding it high, he led his fellows into the room.
The first soldier lay ungroaning in his blood; the second was at the window, peering out and down. A taut-stretched rope ran from a beam behind him, past his shoulder, and over the sill. He turned.
“He has gone out the window!”
One of his fellows was sufficiently nimble of mind to strike the rope with his sword. The rope merely sagged; it was slack.
“I’ll get him,” the man at the window said, and swung out.
“No! Zakum, wait! I cut—”
Zakum was already swinging heroically out, clutching the rope partially cut by the other man’s blade. As Zakum’s booted feet struck the side of the building with a jolt, the weakened rope gave up. It parted and leaped away out the window like a striking snake. Zakum’s cry was followed by the crash of his impact with the alley’s hard-packed earth.
“Hamunan’s devils!” With those words, another man peered out and down.
Zakum was writhing, twisting, holding one leg with both hands. “My leg, my leg…”
“That brainless rectum has broken his leg! Out of here and down the steps, men. It is liable to be worse than our legs if we let that foreigner escape—the khan
wants
him!”
They rushed from the room. Down the steps they stormed like a rumbling crash of summer thunder, and across the main room and outside. Seeing no sign of Conan, they separated to seek him on every street roundabout.
A half-hour later, a disgruntled soldier was just approaching a doorway up the street and across from the inn, on his way back without the quarry. An apparition emerged from the gloom of the hall beyond the doorway. The soldier half cried out and his sword came up before he saw that it was a man; a big, bent hunchback in a drab cloak of dun, with a ragged strip of cloth over his head in a makeshift kaffia. A large but quivery hand came out of the cloak.
“A coin, Captain?”
“I’m no captain, damn you, and you know it! Go snivel someplace else, damned beggar!” The soldier half-bent to squint at the hunchback’s face, which was deeply shadowed by his “kaffia.” “Set’s black devils! And get someone to trim that ridiculous mustache for you, fellow!”
Emptyhanded, the soldier returned to the Royal Turan. Conan, with his bag on his back beneath Jelal’s cloak and a strip ripped from Balad’s gift tunic over his head, went the other way, grinning. The soldier was fortunate to be slow of thought and dull of wit; Conan’s other hand, under Jelal’s cloak, was fisted about the hilt of his drawn dagger.
Hunched, he headed for One Ox Hill.
Balad had backing. Balad was organized, with followers; Balad felt himself ready (“I and the people of Zamboula!” as he put it) to move against Akter Khan. He needed only a key; an incident or trick that had not yet occurred to him or presented itself.
A large body of soldiers was quartered in the barracks on the east side of Zamboula. A broad thoroughfare provided a speedy route across the city to the palace. There, in the royal house itself and in the inn-like barracks adjacent, were another two hundred soldiers. Some called them the Chosen; they had been dubbed officially the Khan-Khilayim or Khan’s Thorns. They were presumed to be loyal to Akter, no matter his offenses or the mood of some or even most people. The Thorns were well-paid, -housed, and -fed. They were kept adequately supplied with salt, beer of an excellent quality, and feminine companionship. Any palace was a fort, the defensible home of the ruler and his people’s ultimate refuge and keep, and the palace of Zamboula was no exception. The chosen two hundred could prevail against a long siege by a far, far superior force. Too, mounted reinforcements from the barracks across town could mobilize, arm, mount, and reach the scene within an hour; this fact was now and again proven by mock alarms and practice mobilizations. Thus did the khan keep watch against attacks from without the city’s wall—and guard himself against the uprisings against which no ruler was proof. While spies in the palace could and would open doors to Balad’s force, they must get past the Thorns—as must the attackers.
Thus Balad, with no army or exterior allies and no magic to equal that of the khan’s wizard, needed the trick or incident he called The Key. Something was needed to occupy the barracks troops, the army—and perhaps suck from the palace some of the Khan-Khilayim, as well.
The blue-eyed foreigner from the far north saw that he could provide that key. .
Conan would never have joined Balad. Zamboula was hardly his city and these were hardly his people. He was of no mind to aid or hinder their, doings. They had naught to do with Conan. Had he been given employment in Akter Khan’s Thorns, he would have been loyal, and surely put brains and skills to use against Balad and company. Instead, Akter Khan had him to dinner, wined and rewarded him, praised him, heard his story, and then proved treacherous to a man who had provided a most valuable service; who thought him friend and good enough ruler, given what he knew and assumed of rulers in general.