Winds of the Wild Sea

by Jeff Mariotte

  Alanya just lounged in Cheveray’s house all day, mourning and moping. Donial tried to stay close by, in case she needed him. But he had taken the opportunity to go visit a few close friends in the city. At Alanya’s insistence, he had sworn them to secrecy. She didn’t want people to know they were back in Tarantia until they had settled the matter of their father’s estate. She said that if others were planning to lay claim to the place, it would be better if their presence here was a surprise, just in case. Donial suspected that embarrassment was part of it. Alanya just didn’t want her friends to know her unsettled state. She was still despondent over their father’s death, Kral’s disappearance, and the uncertainty over their house.

  He had been talking things over with friends this morning, though. When he found Alanya in the room she used at Cheveray’s house, he had a suggestion.

  “We need a champion,” he announced eagerly.

  “A champion?” Her blue eyes were only half-open, and Donial suspected he had awakened her when he charged in. “For what?”

  “We are making no progress, Cheveray’s way,” he said. “He’s a wonderful man, but his methods are slow. Bureaucratic. We need a man of action. Someone who will take our side and battle on our behalf to win the fights we cannot win ourselves. Someone like Conan, who has never been bested in combat.”

  “Is that really true?” Alanya asked.

  “If he has been, I have never heard of it,” Donial hedged.

  “Do you know of anyone else like that?” Alanya pressed. “It seems anyone with a distinguished record like that would be well-known. Why would such a warrior choose to be our champion?”

  “I was talking to Tan and Ellin, and they both had heard of a Cimmerian who is in Tarantia. A huge mountain of a man, they say. Good with a sword and quick with his fists. You know how seldom Cimmerians emerge from their own land. But this one, according to them, wanted to see a civilized place where a Cimmerian could be king. Now he finds himself stuck here with little money and few friends. Tan says he might be open to an offer of gainful employment.”

  “And how does Tan know all this?” Alanya asked him. Her eyes were wider now, with their usually bright sparkle.

  “His father is at home with a broken arm and a shattered jaw,” Donial explained. “From having encountered this Cimmerian in a tavern, three nights back.”

  “You think this Cimmerian can be found in that same tavern tonight?” Alanya wondered.

  “It’s worth a try,” Donial said. “What do we have to lose?”

  ALANYA WAS HESITANT to go inside the Pig and Barley Tavern. From the outside, it sounded like a rowdy place, full of men boozing and brawling. If there were any women at all in there, they probably weren’t the kind she had ever been acquainted with. She could hear raucous laughter and booming voices.

  But she wasn’t letting Donial enter alone, that much was certain. At fourteen, he was not old enough to get himself out of trouble in a place like that and just young enough to get into it. She would stay close beside him, believing that her additional year gave her an edge.

  “Are we going in?” Donial asked urgently. He looked as grown-up as a boy with a baby face and long, dark curls could. He wore a simple blue tunic, belted at the waist, with a long dirk suspended from a gold chain. Tight breeches and leather sandals completed his outfit. Alanya had worn a shift that covered most of her but was loose enough to let her run if need be.

  “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Donial flashed her a wicked smile and pushed through the door. The noise inside seemed to increase almost unbearably, and Alanya followed her brother in, as if forcing her way through a solid wall of sound.

  Inside, a few lamps burned, casting illumination into the main chamber but leaving the corners awash in shadow. The place stank of ale and sweat and lamp oil. She had been correct; the tavern was mostly full of men, with a few barely dressed women plying questionable trades off in the shadowed areas. Many of the men were big and muscular, but even in that company, there was no mistaking which one was the Cimmerian.

  He sat alone at a table near the center of the tavern. Lined up in front of him were a dozen empty tankards, and there was another mug in his giant fist. His hair was as black as night, crudely cut as if with a dull knife. His eyes were as gray as Alanya believed the skies of his distant homeland must be. He wore a shirt of some rough fabric, with a leather sword belt at his waist and a tanned leather skirt below that. Sandals were strapped up his ankles. On the table, crowded by his empties, were a broadsword and a dented helmet. His neck was massive, as big around as Alanya’s thigh, or bigger. She wasn’t sure she had ever seen arms so corded with steely sinew. He wasn’t striking, as Conan had been, but there was a definite sense of strength and power about him. Maybe, Alanya thought, Donial was right. The man looked as if he could accomplish just about anything.

  Donial reached him first. “Is your name Conor, of Cimmeria?” he asked.

  The barbarian’s head turned from side to side as if he were searching for something. After a moment, he lowered his gaze and rested it on Donial. “It might be,” he said in accented Aquilonian. “Does he owe you any money?”

  “I have never met him before,” Donial replied, “else I would not be asking you if you are he.”

  The big man drained his tankard and slammed the empty down on the table. “Another, barkeep!” he shouted. Then he looked at Donial again. “What you say makes sense, boy.”

  It was obvious now that he had emptied all those tankards himself. He swayed a little bit as he regarded Donial, then his eyes widened as he noticed Alanya standing behind him. “Is you with her?” he asked. “I mean, is she with you?”

  “I am with him,” Alanya said. She had intended to be discreet, but almost had to shout just to make herself heard over the general din. “I am his sister. If you are indeed Conor, as we believe, we would like to hire you to do a job for us.”

  Conor started to lift a tankard to his mouth but realized his hand was empty and pressed his palm flat against the table instead. “What kind of a job?”

  “More than one, actually,” Donial answered. “We need someone to help us take back our father’s house, which others have moved into. Also, we have a friend who’s missing. We need him found and returned to us, wherever he might be. And finally, there is an object that’s been stolen from him, which we need found and brought back to us.”

  “Would there be fighting involved in this?” the barbarian asked eagerly. “Killing, maybe?”

  “There could be,” Alanya said.

  “And you will pay me?”

  “In gold,” Donial replied.

  Conor smiled. “Then I am your man.”

  “We thought as much,” Alanya said.

  “But not tonight.”

  “Not tonight?” Alanya echoed.

  “I am much too busy tonight,” Conor explained.

  He didn’t look terribly busy to Alanya. “Busy doing what?”

  Conor eyed her as if she were insane. “Drinking.” He looked again at his hand, apparently surprised that it remained empty. “Barkeep!” he shouted.

  The overwrought barkeep rushed another tankard into his outstretched hand.

  “And I think I’ll get into a fight later,” Conor added.

  “Well, then,” Alanya said, “it’s easy to see why you cannot start anything new tonight.”

  “Exactly!” the Cimmerian shouted. “I am glad you understand.” He squinted his eyes and stared at Alanya. “Do you know that back in Taern I am not only considered the best fighter, but also the best lover? Women wait for weeks for a turn with me, and men keep their distance lest I decide to knock them around just to see them fall.”

  “How wonderful for you,” Alanya said. “I am surprised you ever left.”

  “Wanted to see where Conan got to,” Conor said. “He’s the King here, you know.”

  “So I have heard,” Alanya said. Donial just stood to the side now, watching his sister throug
h eyes wide with amazement. “Conor, we need help, and we are willing to pay for it. If this interests you, tomorrow when you have sobered up you can come and talk to us.” She told him where Cheveray’s house was. “If you can find it, you have the job.”

  She turned on her heel and stalked away. Donial followed. When they were outside and not surrounded by that infernal racket, she heard Donial laughing. “What?” she demanded.

  “The way you talked to him. He could have torn your head off with his little finger.”

  “He would have had to figure out which of my three heads to go after,” she said. “I’m sure he saw at least that many.”

  “Do you think he will find us tomorrow?”

  “I know not how much he will remember about tonight,” Alanya said. “Hard to say if he will know how to find us, even if he does have some vague memory that we spoke.”

  “Maybe we should have written the address down.”

  “You believe he can read?” Alanya asked. “You give him far more credit than I.”

  Donial considered for a moment. “No, I suppose not, though someone might have read it to him. I hope he can find us, though.”

  “As do I, Donial,” Alanya said at last. “Mitra knows we need some kind of help.”

  GORIAN HAD NEVER shied away from violence. It could be a useful tool sometimes, and when his master required that it be committed, he was happy to do so.

  Tonight, apparently, it was required.

  On the orders of Kanilla Rey, who had magically traced the barbaric crown that Gorian and his comrades had failed to find a few nights earlier, he had taken a different crew of men to the shabby apartment of a skinny, not terribly successful thief named Tremont. The place smelled like spoiled meat.

  In this case, Tremont had been at least partially successful. He still had the crown. Or most of it, at any rate. It sat on a small, rough-hewn table in Tremont’s pit of an apartment.

  Not all of it, though. He had taken some of the big teeth out of it, and had already sold them. Which was a problem for Kanilla Rey, who wanted the whole thing. Complete and intact.

  And Tremont would not, or could not, tell Gorian to whom he had sold the missing teeth.

  Hence the violence. A short but absurdly muscular Shemite held Tremont’s arms behind his back. Two more helpers, both Aquilonians, stood by waiting their turns at the thief. As usual, Gorian had met none of them before.

  Gorian tilted the thief’s chin toward him, eyed the blood that ran in a line from his mouth. “Tremont,” he said gently, “are you sure you don’t remember yet?”

  Tremont dazedly shook his head. “He was a man on a street. I showed him the teeth. He bought a couple.”

  Gorian had heard this same sentence, or a variation on it, several times in the past few minutes. He drew his fist back, held it a minute, taking careful aim, and then drove it hard into the man’s flat stomach. Tremont bent over under the blow. It was all the Shemite could do to hold him upright. Tremont’s long, fine hair, wet with sweat, swung as his head flew forward and then back.

  “What man?” Gorian demanded. “What street?”

  Tremont breathed through his mouth for a moment before answering. “I remember not.”

  The sad part was, Gorian had begun to believe he was telling the truth.

  But he had to be sure. He wasn’t yet. Not completely. He didn’t think Tremont could stand up to this sort of battering for very long, but maybe a little while longer.

  He was about to strike again when the door to Tremont’s apartment swung open behind him. He turned to look, and what he saw made his blood run cold.

  Three Stygians in black robes, their hems dragging along the floor, stood in the doorway. They were slight men, dusky-skinned, and holding no weapons.

  But Gorian had never felt such menace in his life.

  4

  ONE OF THE Stygians extended a bony hand. “We will have the crown,” he said. His voice was as creaky as an old mast in a windstorm.

  A sword scraped from its scabbard, and Gorian saw that one of his Aquilonian allies held it. “You can just turn around and go back where you came from,” the man said. “The crown is ours.”

  The Stygian who had spoken barely glanced at the swordsman. He waved his right hand, wiggling his fingers as he did, almost as if dismissing a useless servant.

  The Aquilonian—a burly man, at least twice the scrawny Stygian’s weight—dropped to the ground instantly. His muscles might as well have turned to liquid beneath his skin.

  Gorian’s blood ran cold. The Stygian hadn’t touched the man, merely gestured toward him. At the same time, he knew that if he let the crown get away from him again, Kanilla Rey would not be any more forgiving.

  Instead of confronting the Stygians, he jerked a thumb toward the battered and bleeding Tremont. “He has it.”

  The Stygian turned to Tremont, who regarded him from bruised, swollen eyes. “We will have the crown,” the man said again.

  “You might as well take it,” Tremont managed to utter. “You or them, it doesn’t matter to me.”

  The Shemite released him and locked eyes with Gorian. Gorian knew the big man wanted to fight the Stygians for the prize. He had more faith in his strength than Gorian did. Gorian recognized that whatever magic the Stygians possessed was more powerful than any normal man, and quite possibly stronger than Kanilla Rey’s as well.

  Slowly, breaking eye contact with the Shemite but keeping the Stygians in his sights, he backed away from them. If it came to more trouble, he wanted a solid wall at his back, and nothing else.

  Suddenly, it was clear that more trouble was on the way. The Shemite lunged for the crown, scooping it off the table. Ducking his head, he tried to charge right through the Stygians blocking the doorway.

  There was no contest. One of the Stygians waved his hand and whispered a phrase that Gorian couldn’t hear. The Shemite stopped short, as if he had run into an impenetrable barrier. He staggered back a couple of steps, and his fingers relaxed. The crown slipped from them.

  With one powerful exhalation, the Shemite slumped to the floor, obviously dead.

  But the crown hovered in the air a moment—long enough for the nearest of the Stygians to grab it.

  Gorian knew that resistance would only get him killed. Intent on surviving the encounter, he pretended to faint. He let his eyes swivel up in his skull and fell against the wall, then slid to the floor.

  With his eyes closed, he heard the rasp of fabric, the soft murmur of hushed voices speaking in a tongue he didn’t understand. Then nothing. Minutes passed. Finally, he dared to open his eyes a slit.

  Two bodies lay on the ground where he expected them to be. The other Aquilonian still stood where he had been, petrified with fear. His eyes were wide and liquid. Tremont had sagged to the floor, visibly trembling like a leaf in a high wind.

  The Stygians were gone.

  With the crown that Kanilla Rey wanted.

  “We will have to tell him we failed,” Gorian said quietly. “He won’t be happy.”

  It took a minute, but eventually the Aquilonian managed to turn his head and look at Gorian. He didn’t speak, just slowly nodded his understanding.

  Gorian didn’t look forward to that part, not at all.

  But even if Kanilla Rey chose to kill him, at least the deed would not be done by strangers, in that foul-smelling place.

  He could take some comfort in that. Maybe not much, but after such an encounter, even a little would do.

  CONOR MANAGED TO find Cheveray’s house the next day, much to Alanya’s surprise. His skin was ashen, his eyes bloodshot and bleary. She had heard that Cimmerians could hold their liquor, but this one definitely seemed to be suffering the consequences of his consumption the night before.

  “You,” he said when she opened the door at his knock. “You are the girl . . . from last night.”

  “Yes,” Alanya confirmed. “I am. Have you thought about our offer?”

  “Thought about it,”
Conor said. “I cannot exactly remember all of it. There were many parts, as I recall. But I remembered how to find you.”

  “You did, at that. Come in.” She backed away from the door and let the big man enter. “Let me fetch my brother.”

  She left Conor standing in Cheveray’s front room while she dashed to get Donial. They had argued, on the way back from the tavern the night before, about how they would actually pay Conor if he did accept their offer. Neither had any source of income, or much of value beyond her mirror.

  “We will just have to make it clear to him that he needs to be successful,” Donial had insisted. “If we get Father’s house restored to us, there is a certain amount of wealth that comes with it, right?”

  “We think so,” Alanya said. “But we do not know that for sure.”

  “Well, if we’re wrong, then he can have some of the more valuable items there, and he can sell them himself,” Donial suggested. “That seems fair.”

  Alanya had been willing to grant the point last night. Now, in the light of day, with a gigantic armed barbarian standing by the front door, she wasn’t so sure.

  It was a little late to change course, though. She burst through the door of Donial’s room and found him dozing. “Donial!” she said, shaking him awake. “He’s here!”

  “Who?” Donial mumbled.

  “The Cimmerian, from last night. Conor. He waits in the front room, to talk to us about our offer.”

  Donial’s eyes snapped wide open. “Conor is here?”

  He was alert instantly, and together they returned to find the big man standing right where Alanya had left him, staring into space.

  “Conor?” Alanya said.

  He focused on them, stifling a yawn. He had not bathed since the night before, and the stink of dried sweat mixed with alcohol came off him in waves. “Yes, I remember you, too,” he said, nodding toward Donial. “Must not have had as much fun as I thought.”

  “I see no new bruises,” Donial said. “Maybe you failed to find that fight after all.”