“I hate the beasts. I own no less than four horses. No camels. Why don’t you carry this keg a while?”
“No, thanks.”
Reluctantly Conan set the thing down, then turned it over. He separated Ferhad’s jeweled dagger, which he stuck into his belt. Three good raps with a Watchman’s sword on the pommel of Ferhad’s ruined a good blade and placed into the Cimmerian’s hand a nice lion’s head of silver. He tossed and caught it, smiling.
“This look like a camel to you?”
“Probably only silver plate,” Khassek said.
Conan frowned. “That bastard! Just my luck if the jewels in this dagger aren’t real! What about you, by the way—have you no horse, no camels? You came a long way.”
“I have some nice clothing,” Khassek said with a mournful sigh, “several changes; and a handsome ring, and two horses—I came up here with a caravan, most of the way. And, also in my room at the inn—
the Red Lion
, remember—twenty gold coins of Zamboula.”
“Twenty!” The Cimmerian stared, and his mouth and eyes vied with each other for achieving wideness. “Mitra, Crom and Bel, man—why didn’t you whip up and fetch them ere we left?”
Khassek looked even sadder. “I seem to have forgot. I fear they are now forfeit to the crown of Zamora.”
“Ishtar’s eyeballs,” Conan mourned, “twenty pieces of gold!”
“Look at it this way, Conan: I saved you from durance vile and doubtless a lot worse.”
“Both of which still loom,” Conan said in a low growl, “if we don’t get ourselves out of this city—and this kingdom!”
The two men stood alone on a darkened street, at their feet an overturned keg and a jumbled assortment of weaponry. The dark eyes of Khassek gazed into the sullen blue ones of the barbarian. Khassek said, “We?”
Conan turned and began walking; Khassek swung along at his side.
“Damn,” Conan said quietly, thoughtfully. “Ajhindar was a good man, one I liked at once. He was devoted to his khan and his mission, to the point of risking his life: he tried to slay me even after he had seen my skill and strength! Also after I had just saved his skin. A bit treacherous, but all for his ruler. Now you too have risked your life to aid me, Khassek of Iranistan… because, of course, you don’t know where that amulet is. All for your khan! I think that I would meet a khan who has such loyalty from two such good men.”
“He will be interested in meeting you too, my friend with hands the size of hams! Good, then. Two such men as we can get out of Shadizar, surely, even though all three gates will be watched. Let us to it.”
They walked deeper into Shadizar’s Desert.
“Oh—Conan. Do you have the amulet?”
Conan chuckled. “I know where it is. I buried it between here and Zamboula, on the desert.”
“Damn,” Khassek said, and took his hand off his dagger.
Hours later, the three men in charge of Shadizar’s Gate of the Black Throne watched the approach of a mounted pair. Astride two handsome horses, the woman and her young son led two others, well laden. She reined in to stare down at the uniformed man beside the wheel; it turned the cable and heavy chain that raised the enormous bar across the two gates.
“Well, open up. No use guarding on this side; I want out, not in.”
“My dear,” a voice said, and she looked up at another uniform. Its owner peered down at her from the arched, narrow doorway of the watchtower. “I am a man of feeling and sensibilities, and would not sleep well did I not warn you against leaving the city at this hour.”
“Thank you. You are a good man. We are going. It is a holy mission.”
“A pilgrimage?”
“Aye. My son and I serve the temple of Holy Khosatra Khel Rehabilitated and Twice Established, Lord of All, the Father of Mitra, Ishtar, and Bel.”
“A busy and doubtless venerable god, my dear, but… surely the sensible person waits until dawn, at least. Mayhap then you could join other such dedicated pilgrims, peradventure even a caravan, the ultimate protection. Here you are in the bosom of the capital of mighty Zamora.
Out there
…” He trailed off with a gesture to indicate that naught but peril and travail lay outside the Gate of the Black Throne of Erlik, in Shadizar.
The cloaked woman, who was hardly ill-formed, spoke up stoutly. “I fear the world outside, even the desert, far less than I do this city of thieves and woman-beaters and wicked wicked cults dedicated to gods no one ever heard of or wants to! Let us through, please. We depart.”
“Would that I had the power to prevent your taking so peril-fraught a step,” the gate commander said.
“Well, I appreciate it. But you have not, and I am going and my son with me, and my neck is getting stiff looking up at you. If you are not going to open the gate, would you please tell me where I go to complain?”
“It lacks only a bit more than two glasses until dawn…”
The woman burst out, “What do I have to do or say to get
out of here
?”
The man in the tower sighed. “Open the gate.”
A man grunted, chain rattled, and the bar rose. The gate creaked. A strong-willed woman, her silent son, and four horses passed out of Shadizar. She never kicked her mount or so much as jiggled the reins. The horses only plodded, steadily away into the dark. The gate commander leaned on the narrow sill of his tower’s watch-window and watched until she had become one with the dark night at moonset. At last he straightened, gave his head a shake, and turned. He called down.
“They are not coming back. Close the gate.”
Neither he nor his men had any notion that well away from their gate, meanwhile, two men dropped outside the city’s eastern wall, which they had scaled. They hurried into the night.
A few hours later, just after dawn, the same woman and her son returned to Shadizar. Though they were unscathed, they were forlornly bereft of horses and packs; even the woman’s cloak was gone. The name she gave turned out to be false, and later no one was interested in scouring The Desert for her. Nor did the head-shaking gatemen who passed her within know that she was the fast friend of a certain huge northern hillman now assiduously sought throughout the city, and that she was considerably wealthier today than she had been on yester day.
Away from Shadizar, riding and leading those same four horses, wended Conan the Cimmerian and Khassek of Iranistan.
“A nicely worked out ruse and tryst, Conan,” Khassek said.
“Ah, Hafiza is a good woman and a good friend, Khassek. Once you added that nice little bag of pearls to Ferhad’s silver pommel, she was doubly glad to help.”
“Trebly,” Khassek said. “She emerged well ahead.”
“Aye, and took a risk to earn her profit. Your employer sent you well supplied with wherewithal, Khassek. All that coin you’ve been spending, and twenty of
gold
you left in the Red Lion, and those pearls… are we still wealthy?”
“
We
are not, my friend. I have been up here well over a month, seeking you in both Arenjun and Shadizar, and we will be poor men or worse by the time we reach Iranistan. But, once there—”
“Umm. Once there,” Conan grunted. “Aye.”
And what am I doing
, he mused,
heading off this way on a trip of months? Ah well… why not? It’s a big world, and as I told Khashtris in Khauran… I’ve a lot of it to see before I think about settling
!
“Your sword is ready, my lord.”
The khan smiled at his wizard, but only after bending his gaze on the sword rather in the manner of a merchant into whose stall has just wended a bumpkin with a fat purse, or of a peasant child looking at the banquet-laden board of a king.
“Ready,” he murmured, that satrap of the Empire of Turan who ruled Zamboula in the name of mighty Yildiz upon his carven throne. He feared for his life, this khan of Zamboula, and for his succession through his son Jungir, and he had reason. That men plotted, he was sure. That somewhere was the Eye of Erlik, he had no doubt.
“Aye,” Zafra said. “Save only that as I have said, it must be blooded to complete the spell.”
He glanced downward, for neither man had given thought to the fact that ruler and mage were alone on the gloomy half-gallery that brooded over the doubly gloomy dungeon. “One regrets that we did not…
save
one of the Iranistani spies.”
With his head slightly to one side, the khan looked at the slimmer, younger man around the great bony ridge of his accipital nose. The corners of his mouth twitched; it was a sensuous mouth. Abruptly he gave his head a swift downward jerk of decision.
“Aye,” he muttered, to himself only, and his red-purfled, gold-broidered house cloak of gossamery silk swirled and fluttered susurrantly as he turned quickly to the door.
On this side, the prisoner’s side, the door was a massive sheet of iron thick as a maiden’s finger and heavy enough to stagger an elephant from the nighted Southern lands. Nor was its dark surface relieved by a sign of handle or lock. Folding his left hand into a mallet, Zamboula’s ruler struck the slab, and stepped aside. The door had given out a dull boom and yielded not at all and Akter Khan flexed his left hand several times.
The door swung inward. The older of his two guards looked questioningly at him.
“The girl those Shanki gave me a fortnight ago, Farouz: fetch her here.”
“My lord.” Yet Farouz hesitated.
“You know the maid I mean, Farouz?”
“Aye, my lord. Am… am I to fetch her as a prisoner, my lord?”
“Oh
no
, Farouz! Tell her that her lord and master has a gift for her. But fetch her here,
now
.”
“My lord!” The soldier gave his head the military jerk of acknowledgment, backed the minimal requirement of two steps, and whirled to hurry off along the brightly tiled, well-lit corridor that disguised the entrance to the second ugliest area of the khan’s accursed domain; the squalid Squatter’s Alley being the ugliest —a disgrace even to accursed Zamboula, built by Stygians and peopled by varicolored hybrids ruled by Hyrkanians.
Akter Khan turned back to Zafra, and almost he smiled; at least he looked pleased with himself.
“Little bitch! That bustling dog Akhimen ‘Khan’ of those grease-headed desert nomads brought me her as a gift and tribute, a lovely child of twelve, all virginal and formed like Stygia’s sensual Derketo Herself!”
Zafra nodded. He had seen the maiden whose name his khan had instantly disregarded, to call her instead Derketari, after the pleasure-loving goddess of old Stygia. Her form and great dark eyes were enough to arouse lust in a statue, by Hanuman… by Derketo!
“And she acted as if she feared and hated all men, the dissemblingly formed, accursed little viper! Cower she did, and shriek when brought to my privy chamber—that very night! What an honor for a stupid uncompleted little daughter of the dunes whose mother doubtless had a mustache by the time she was eighteen! She…”
The khan went no further.
He would not tell Zafra the young mage or anyone else how, in the face of her cowering, her whimpering and pleading and crying out, he who was used to willing women, even actively participating ones proud and honored to be called by the khan himself, had disgraced himself and failed his manhood. Akter Khan had wanted to beat her, to put his two hands on her lovely throat and strangle her!
Instead, he had but sent her weeping from him and her too stupid to be disgraced. He called for his Argossean, Chia. Her he called Tigress, and with her he had proven himself man and khan. On the morrow he had bade his Tigress prepare and train the maiden of the Shanki—stupid child! And for a week of days she had seemed happy and was beautiful, beautiful. Lithe as a boneless serpent, she excelled at the dances those doubly damned nomads commenced teaching their girl-children when they were but three years in age. She was temptation itself, and wore the man-pleasing clothing provided her as though born to it, as if in love with it, flaunting her hips; all as if pleasing a man was her only desire. Yet Akter Khan had forced himself to wait for a full week, and then a day longer the more to sharpen his appetite. He treated her then to the honor of sharing a most private supper with him, and was kind and gentle. Solicitous even, he remembered now with embarrassment. And then… once he rose, his eyes told her of his emotions and wholly normal intent—she was again the cowering, whining, pleading, even screaming child.
Even so he had not sent her back to her father, in disgrace. But by Tarim and the very Lord of the Black Throne… how much could a man bear?
A man? A khan, by Hanuman’s stones!
Khan and mage waited in silence, each occupied with his thoughts and only one wondering at the thoughts of the other. Between them lay the sword; Akter Khan’s sword of the jeweled hilt and, though invisible, rune-scribed tang. Below sprawled the two Iranistani, stiffening in death. Zafra’s sword stood from the one, nor did it quiver but stood above him like a sentinel of death.
With both hands Akter Khan drew over his head the silver chain that held the large pearl-bordered wheel on his chest; it was set with a sizable ruby of many facets, which was surrounded, in a six-pointed star, by twelve bright yellow topazes.
“Take you this below, and my sword,” he bade the mage so recently an apprentice, and him not yet thirty years of age. “Thrust the sword into the floor. That will not affect the spell?”
“No, my lord.”
“Hang this then,” Akter said with a brief nod, “from its guard, and fetch up the other sword.”
Without question Zafra took sword and pendant. Hitching up the left hem of his robe while he descended, stepping across the corpse of the second Iranistani slain, he paced to within a step of the other dead man. His first thrust failed to anchor the satrap’s blade in the floor of hard-packed black earth, so long cemented by human blood. He used both hands on his second attempt, and the sword was fixed. He hung his ruler’s chain and pendant over the guard, prettily draped and glinting as it swung in air, tinging gently against the blade, yellow gold on silvery steel.
Both his hands and some exertion were required to force the other sword from the body of its victim, so deeply had the fell weapon imbedded itself. Zafra paused to stoop and wipe the blade, with care, in the dead man’s long black hair. It was dirty, but removed blood and incidentally oiled the blade. A servant would give it proper attention, later.