The young mage mounted the steps. As he approached the landing that broadened rightward into the semi-gallery, he saw the girl appear in the door. The entirety of Farouz’s unhandsome, helmet-surmounted face was visible behind her, even from Zafra’s lack of vantage; so short was this beautiful maiden of twelve.
Akter Khan turned at the sound of her gasp.
“Ah,” he said, “my lovely desert flower! Come you in, pretty Derketari, and see what I have for you.” He reached for her hand.
Beauties at twelve and raging beauties at thirteen, it was said of the daughters of the sands; and mothers at fifteen and raging hags at five-and-twenty. And this girl was twelve.
Zafra was unable not to stare at her. He took in her mass of shining black hair, laced with pearls so that it was as the night sky besprent with stars; her sweet oval face with its cavalry archer’s bow of a mouth, stained crimson and shining; the great round beauty of her eyes that were like staring down into a well by night a moment after moonrise. And at least they had got those voluminous Shanki garments of scarlet off her!
Her breastplates were of gold, and from each cup the tiniest golden chains dangled so that pendent gems danced before her and gently thumped her tiny belly with her slightest movement. Well below her navel, her girdle consisted only of three strands of cloth-of-gold braided into a cord no thicker than her smallest finger. From it shimmered down an arm’s length of snowy gauze sewn to white silk with pale blue thread; this pretense of a skirt was in width but the length of her hand. The strip of cloth was hemmed between her ankles, and the strip behind was only a little shorter. Cloth-of-gold straps climbed her lovely legs, criss-crossing, from soft little ankle boots of red felt sewn with pearls. The gaiters were tied off just at the lovely child’s knees.
She might, Zafra mused, have been one of those tender young virgins with whose blood incantations had been writ on a sort of parchment made of serpents’ skin; incantations Zafra had read, and committed to memory without his mentor’s knowledge.
The twelve-year-old gift of the Shanki wore only two decorations: a garnet-set tribal rite-ring of camel’s hair braided with one strand of her own tresses, and the little silver-and-opal pendant with which she had come to the satrap. On a silver chain of passing delicacy, the pendant hung in the center of the slight swell of her breast.
She stared, huge-eyed, past Zafra at the two bodies below. She seemed unaware that her lord had taken her hand in his hairy one.
Reaching the landing, Zafra pressed his own sword into the hand of Farouz, that it might be outside the dungeon. Zafra stood back and seemed to blend into the wall at the head of the stair.
“M… my lord! To such a place—? Those
men
!” The Shanki maiden’s voice quavered with her trembling.
“Rejoice!” the khan bade her. “They are Iranistani, spies sent against us by a king whose mind is set on conquest! Yet one was a seer, and he made the happy prophecy that of you anon shall be born a beautiful boy who will grow up to rule not only Zamboula, but all the magnificent empire of Turan!”
She looked at him from black eyes surrounded by black cosmetic. Her hand remained in his, and she wondered, seeming enchanted by his words, in their thrall. Behind her, Farouz quietly closed the great door, paneled with wood on its outside.
“Below stood my very own sword, symbol of my rule. So overjoyed was I that I removed my own medallion of gold and pearl and topaz and the pigeon’s egg from my mother’s bosom, and hung it there. It was then that the spies made at me, and had to be slain by my loyal guards who fetched you here. For I set my hand on the pommel and made vow: She who retrieves this Gem of Zamboula shall by first among the women of Zamboula and all the land round about, that the way may be prepared for the ascension of the fruit of her loins.”
The stare of those great dark maiden’s eyes had left the khan’s face while he broidered thus, and was now fixed on the winking pendant that swung like a victor’s waiting prize from the gem-hilted sword below.
“M-mer… my lord… I… I cannot go down
there
!”
“Why Derketari… Lotus of the sun-kissed desert… you must! Shall the prophecy of a dead man come to naught? Shall the proud tent-dwelling Shanki not then be elevated above all others and receive the favors of a great ruler-to-be—of Shanki blood?”
The child stared down at the dangling medallion. She looked again at the hawk-nosed man beside her. Now he held his honeyed tongue. She looked again upon the two corpses, and again at the pendant. It dangled, beckoned silently in flashes of gemmy fire through the flicker of smoky dungeon torches. Her tongue appeared to trace over her full lower lip.
She heard; she heard every word. Khan and mage knew she had thought of her poor desert-bound people, sun-wrinkled of face and hand ere they were twoscore years in age; of her father’s pride and hopes—and doubtless his shame unto rage, did he learn she had robbed him and his people and incidentally herself of great glory and high honor because of a childish trepidation; merely a dungeon. Merely two dead men, and new-dead at that. None among the people of the desert but saw corpses long ere they were twelve. Most saw them at least once at their most hideous; sun-bloated, fly-bedecked and vulture-pecked.
“Hmp,” the child whose name was not Derketari muttered to herself, “I have seen corpses afore. Hmp!”
And Akter, smiling, looked down at her over the bridge of his vulture’s nose. He released her hand at the moment he felt the beginning of a tug. He wiped the hand on his multi-hued robe, for her palm was sweating.
In a gesture almost queenly, she bent her knees just a little to gather in one hand both ends of her “skirt,” drawing the strip of white behind in between her legs. She descended, slowly. Her steeling herself was visible every step of her way downward.
Across the head of the steps, khan’s eyes met those of mage. The khan spoke, quietly.
“You have a spell that wants completing, have you not?”
The maiden continued her descent without glancing back. The stair numbered five-and-twenty slabs of stone; she set her felt-shod foot on the nineteenth.
“Aye, my lord.”
Akter glanced down at the gift of the Shanki. She set her left foot on the twenty-first step.
“Complete it, then, wizard, and doubly happier will by my life, whilst for you… would you entertain a very tigress this night, Zafra? A Tigress, of Argos, whose claws are sheathed in silk?”
Below: the twenty-fourth step bore both the girl’s feet, for she hesitated there, seeking a way around, rather than across, the naked corpse of a man she did not know had been one of nigh incredible bravery and daring.
“Aye, my good lord,” Zafra said, and his eyes seemed to glitter when he looked down at the girl’s back, and then at the pendant-strung sword standing from the dungeon floor like a monument to two violent deaths.
Three
, Zafra thought, and he said very quietly, his lips hardly moving, “
Slay him
.”
Earth and water, fire and air had anointed the sword while the ancient words were said over it. Gold rang off steel as the sword of Akter Khan drew itself from the earthen floor. Without hesitation, it turned itself in air and rushed, like an arrow loosed by a strong-thewed archer of great skill, at the little daughter of the desert.
She had naturally glanced at it when she heard the
ting
of metal on metal—as Akter Khan had glanced at Zafra when he heard the pronoun the mage used. Her throat was frozen in awe and terror; the khan’s was not.
“
Him
?” he demanded.
“Even a sword of sorcery knows no gender, my lord. Too, any against whom my lord presently employs it are almost sure to be men.”
Below, the girl’s nascent cry broke off in a horrid indrawn gasp as the ensorcled blade proved it had no knowledge of gender or pronouns. Between and just beneath her golden breastplates it plunged, and just left of center.
The khan drew a deep long breath through his nostrils. He expelled it from his mouth in a windy sigh.
“Ah, and to think she died a virgin,” he said, as though making paean at graveside, “and to such a great cause! Nor will her people know this, for not for a month will we sadly send word that she died of a fever that also nigh took the life of her beloved lord—” the khan coughed— “and was buried with honor and mourning in the Cemetery of Kings, doubtless bearing within her a royal son and taking him with her…
to Hell
!”
Even Zafra swallowed.
So recently wizard’s apprentice; votary of abominable sorceries gained from the ancient Book of Skelos and the evil-reeking tomes of Sabatea of the golden peacock and envenomed ink; caller upon Set and dark Erlik and even those Pictish Children of Jhil of which those savages knew less than he… and recent slayer of his late master; all and each of these was Zafra, and yet more, for he dreamed of rule, and broad sway in future with kahns subject to him while he said “my lord” to no man… and yet he swallowed at the sheer evil and toxin-laden words of his employer, if not at the murder of innocent beauty.
Villain
! Zafra thought.
So men will call me in times to come
—
and none will know that once I served the greatest villain since Thugra Khotan died in Khorshemish three thousand years agone
!
Akter Khan, having vindicated his manhood, droned on in the same deadly voice. “That sword will hang in new brackets of gold on the wall, behind my throne, Zafra, and I shall steel myself not to test it now and again. And you, O genius, are henceforth Wizard of Zamboula, advisor to the Khan, quartered in the second apartment of the palace, served by him of your choice from among mine own and a girl chosen by my very self. And… this night… visited by a Tigress!”
“My lord,” Zafra said with sudden oleaginousness, “is exceeding generous.”
The khan looked at him, and above his eagle’s beak his eyes were eagle-bright.
“Not passing generous, Zafra, Wizard of Zamboula. Not so long as you serve me.”
Zafra executed one of his abbreviated bows. “I am your liege-man, Khan of Zamboula!”
“Good. Now fetch me my magnificent new sword! Next, go out into the city, and employ two ruffians for a piece of gold and the promise of three more—each— for an hour’s work. That baggage below is to be stripped, mutilated, and carried from here in leathern bags—several. The bags are to be left in Squatter’s Alley. That done, the two are to return to you, here, for their additional three pieces of gold.” A moment the khan stared at him, and added, “Your new apartment will adjoin the throneroom, Zafra.”
Stripped, mutilated so as to be unrecognizable— and then butchered like so much meat! Zafra was only just able to avoid another sickened swallow, for now the khan gazed upon him. “My lord: I understand. And their reward is to be steel, rather than gold?”
“Perhaps a celebratory cup of wine, well spiced.”
“I understand, my lord. I possess such spices.”
“None but I and you will know what has happed here, Wizard of Zamboula, for as I leave now I take my two guards with me. Do you follow after an interval; they will be let know that you are escorting back to her quarters that bitch I insulted with the name of thrice-sensuous Derketo! Then, mage, get you to your old apartment whilst the new is being prepared for you, and see you bring me word of the Eye of Erlik ere I sup!”
Zafra nodded, and descended to wrest the sorcery-laden blade from the maiden’s heart.
Conan and Khassek had ridden due east, to cross the Zamoran border as swiftly as possible. They had discussed continuing in that direction, thus crossing the steppes and the narrow strip of land that was Turan proper; that way they could reach the coast and take ship down the Vilayet. They decided, wisely or no, against that. The overland journey south would be long and not easy. Even so it was a bit more certain than a voyage asea.
Once they were out of Zamora, then, they sun-sighted and made their way south. They avoided the eastern border of Zamora’s little southern neighbor, Khauran, and paced their mounts southward, through the steppes. Their gazes roved, for this land held nomads, and among those were raiders who felt most territorial about their rolling steppes.
“Conan…” Khassek began, rocking a little in the saddle of the big roan horse he had named Ironhead. “One night Ajhindar went to rob the home of Hisarr Zul, and you must unfortunately have chosen that same night. Ajhindar never emerged. Not alive, I mean; his corpse was found a few days later in a wadi outside Arenjun. He had indeed died of snakebite. Only I assumed that he had not been bitten so while wandering in that wadi. At about the same time one Conan, a Cimmerian, disappeared from Arenjun. Now, nearly two months later, I have found you in Shadizar. And as for Hisarr Zul… a few weeks ago his home burned. Was that your work?”
“I will tell you the story,” Conan said. “I was a thief in Arenjun. I knew nothing of Hisarr Zul. I had had a couple of successes, thieving, and was in an inn uptown—where I did not belong. How long ago that seems! So much has happened, since that night it began; how young
that
Conan seems! The girl I was plying in that inn of Arenjun turned out to have a lover who was a Watch prefect—a sub-prefect really, and he was the jealous type. He entered the inn with his men, and I assure you that he worked hard to provoke me. One Kagul. At last I heard the scrape of his sword—I was ignoring him—and I moved. There were four of them. Kagul got himself hurt a little, and so did a couple of others. It was then another man I didn’t know slew one, and helped me escape, for he heard more men of the Watch coming. That was Ajhindar. I went out the window and onto the roofs; we Cimmerians are climbers.”
“Were you wounded?”
“Not scratched.”
“You Cimmerians are more than climbers!”
“Umm. It was thus, by accident, that I heard two agents talking in an upstairs inn room; agents of Zamboula’s khan. Karamek and Isparana—a woman; what a woman!—were planning to rob a certain wizard. Hisarr Zul. Hearing them speak of the great value of something called the Eye of Erlik to Zamboula’s Akter Khan, and that this Hisarr Zul had it, I tarried to listen. Once I heard them say that they would break into the mage’s house two nights thence, I departed that roof— vowing to gain entry on the following night and beat them to the prize!