by Roland Green
This was no great matter to Conan. It there were no ways for soldiers to work around fumbling or foolish captains, he would have been dead 'half a dozen times over. Klarnides was at worst a louse in one’s breeches. Tharmis Rog might prove a wild boar.
Certainly he sounded like one now. He was bellowing curses to one slight youth, who looked even less fitted for soldiering than Klarnides.
“By Erlik’s brazen tool! Do I have to come up there and run my sword all the way up to your teeth before you climb?” And much more in like vein.
Conan strode back and forth across the slope with a tollman’s confidence, pointing out easy and hard ground whenever he could whisper, sometimes only using a gesture or his sword. His evident experience with soldiering had given him an under-captaincy with command over thirty men, but Rog did not care to see Conan dealing with anyone beyond that thirty.
Today, the Cimmerian would have gladly fed Rog and what he cared for to a Stygian temple serpent. The master-at-arms was using a loud voice in place of teaching a few simple tricks for climbing hills, tricks that Conan had known as soon as he could walk. Much more of this and men were going to be falling, rolling, and reaching the bottom of the hill in such condition that it would need a god, not a master-at-arms, to put them on their feet again.
As that thought passed through Conan’s mind, the slight youth finally lost his footing. He reeled backward, one foot waving in the air, hands clawing frantically at emptiness. His waving foot struck a boulder—and the boulder, lightly seated in the hard ground, came loose.
Conan plunged down the slope as if his feet had grown wings. With one hand he clutched the youth’s hand, as he slammed the other hard against the boulder. It was too heavy for even the Cimmerian’s giant strength to hold single-handed, but he delayed its fall long enough.
Only when the youth was safely out of the boulder’s path did Conan let it go. It thundered down the hill, striking sparks from other rocks as it flew, trailing a comet’s tail of dust and pebbles, crushing bushes as if they were blades of grass, and finally ending not a spear’s length from Tharmis Rog.
Rog’s bellow made all that had gone before it seem like a hush. “Sellus! Bring your arse down here at once, if you know what’s good for you!”
Conan looked about him, as if he thought the voice was coming from the ground or the sky. One man within easy hearing range whispered, “Best do it, Northerner. Rog’s a bad man to cross.”
“And my ears are bad, when people tell me what’s good for me,” Conan replied. Rog’s voice had the note of a man who has made up his mind to settle a matter for once and for all.
Then the Cimmerian began his descent. He started slowly, almost ambling until Rog let out another roar, this time laced with such splendid curses that Conan stopped to listen in admiration. He would have to remember some of those ripe Aquilonian phrases if he ever needed to drill Aquilonian street sweepings into soldiers.
For now, what he needed was to speak' to Rog before the man worked himself into such a rage that the fight would come at once, in front of all the men.
Discipline might survive a private battle. It would hardly survive Rog’s public humiliation.
Also, while Conan did not doubt for a moment the outcome of the fight, he doubted that he could win without word of it being noised about in Shamar. Then others might come seeking Ophirean gold, before the Thanza Rangers marched out of Shamar to some place where Conan could vanish from their ranks without anyone the wiser.
So Conan did not finish his descent at his earlier amble. He came down the rest of the way at a dead run, slanting back and forth across the slope to avoid building up too much speed, leaping over boulders, and reaching the level at a pace that would have done I credit to an antelope.
He dashed up to Rog, threw the man a mocking parody of the Aquilonian salute, and snapped:
“Sellus the Northerner reporting as ordered, Master-at-Arms!”
One of Rog’s white-knuckled hands was on the hilt of his sword. The other was balled into a fist. His eyes I told of his being ready to wield one weapon or the other against the Cimmerian if the other man so much as blinked.
Instead, he said, in a voice shaking with forced moderation:
“Was that boulder an accident?”
Conan replied, with a wintry smile, “Will anything I say matter to you?”
“Are you saying that I’m ready to start a fight?”
“If you’re ready to call me a liar, and in front of the men, are you not?”
The phrase “in front of the men” seemed to reach through Rog’s fury to touch his soldierly good sense. “We’d best meet tonight quietly, to see who is lying,” he said, in a voice that no longer shook with rage.
“I can meet at your pleasure,” Conan said. “That little stretch of meadow north of the oak grove?”
“Fair enough,” Rog said, and started to turn away. Then he stopped, and without facing the Cimmerian, said, “Oh, and I hadn’t planned on killing you.”
“Accidents can happen, but I take your meaning. I thought much the same.”
Like two wolves who have given and accepted a challenge, the two big men turned away from each other and walked off to rejoin their soldiers.
* * *
Lysinka knew when it reached her that the message spoke the truth about human tracks. Scouting for the band were the twins known only as the Village Brothers. They might have many reasons for not wishing their names known in the band, but they had also given Lysinka any number of reasons for being glad to have them.
They hardly ever missed the track of humans or the spoor of any natural beast. When commanded to conceal Lysinka’s trail, they used equal skill to remove the slightest trace of the band’s passage. If they said humans had passed this way, Lysinka knew her band was no longer alone in the pines at the foot of a crag-studded hill with no name.
Hand signals brought her comrades to alertness, and they needed no further orders to array themselves to meet an attack from any direction. Any human attack, at least—Lysinka had thrice rejected the services of those who claimed mastery of magic, for she distrusted all such. Yet for two days this forest had held the smell of a place where there might lurk dangers against which steel would contend in vain.
The rain covered even the slight noise the woods-wise bandits made in arraying themselves. When a little while had passed and no one had come against them, Lysinka made another signal. The band was to move on, with more scouts thrown out to the flanks, and all weapons ready.
Lysinka’s band stalked forward through the dripping forest with the silent intent of wolves on the hunt. Little rain fell on them through the canopy of interwoven branches. From time to time thunder rolled above the treetops, echoing off the cliffs, which they had only glimpsed briefly through the trees.
After a further while spent in this stalking, muscles cramped and necks stiffened with the constant struggle to look in all directions at once. Lysinka felt an urge to sneeze, and saw Fergis nearly strangle himself in a desperate effort to silence a cough.
The last thing the chieftain had expected was to find a clearing flanking the trail. In that clearing stood a black-clad man, arms folded across his broad chest.
“Welcome to my lordship of Thanza, Lysinka of Mertyos.”
Lysinka was so flustered by the warmth and formality of the greeting that she replied in a much less amiable tone.
“If Thanza was ever a lordship, its lords have been extinct for more centuries than you could count without taking off your boots. Who are you to claim it?”
“One who could claim much more, but is content with Thanza.” Then he raised one hand, palm outward.
“The tree to her left. The big knothole.”
Wsssshttt. The shaft from a Bossonian longbow quivered in a fir tree an arm’s length to Lysinka’s left. It had split a reddish-brown knothole at about the height of her breasts.
The message was plain. My archers hold your life in their hands.
&nb
sp; Lysinka did not know if her own gesture would be her last. She was certain that such a threat could not go unanswered.
She coughed loudly—and an arrow sprouted from the turf just to the right of the man. Instead of a knothole, this shaft split a round, pale-yellow mushroom.
The man’s eyebrows rose. They were bushy and more grey than black. Then he smiled. Lysinka had once seen an otter baring its teeth just so, before it bit a crayfish in half.
“Well spoken,” he said. Then he threw the hood back from his head and shook out his beard. His beard was thick and more black than grey, while his hair was so scant that it was hard to judge its colour. He spoke and stood, however, like a man still in full vigour.
All this told Lysinka nothing whatever about what business he might have with her, and whether she would live to see another sunrise. She forced down her anger. She felt as though she were being dangled over an abyss like a doll in the hand of a petulant child.
The man now thrust his hand into the pouch at his belt. Lysinka forced her own hand away from the hilt of her throwing knife. It would be in the man’s throat before he could complete any treachery, even if she died in the next moment.
Instead, the man drew out a piece of iron. Lysinka looked, then stared. It was unmistakably a piece of iron strapping from the flying chest. She recognized some of the runes, even though the iron now seemed grey and brittle, as if it had been fiercely heated, then swiftly and rudely quenched.
“Ah, I see you recognize this,” the man said.
Lysinka chided herself for being so transparent. She thought she had retained more of the self-command of her younger days, when she had been adept in the intrigues among the concubines.
“Perhaps I do,” she said, inclining her head gracefully. “But I am as a guest to your host. I would not insult you by asking more about it than you are willing to tell, nor accuse you of dark plots merely because you possess something tainted with magic.”
“It has been said that you have the manners of a great lady—when you choose,” the man said with a grin. “Now hear me, Lysinka of Mertyos. I am willing to tell you a great deal about this chest. We both seek it, and neither of us has much hope of finding it without the other’s aid.
“However, I do not propose to tell you here in the presence of your men, in the wild and wet forest. Come with me to my seat”—he jerked a thumb toward the cliff, invisible behind the trees—“and hear of a rare quest.”
“I will come well-guarded,” Lysinka said, testing the man.
“Come with all your band,” was the reply. “I do not fear treachery.”
“Nor do I, but I would be a poor guest if I brought that many. Have you a palace atop the cliff?”
“Perhaps it once deserved the name. Certainly it keeps me and mine warm and dry. If you do not wish to bring all your folk, may I at least send down guest gifts to them?”
Lysinka saw that Fergis was now in sight, but standing so that she could converse with him without the black-clad man seeing her face. The “conversation” was swift, a matter of raising eyebrows, touching fingers to mouth and nose, pulling at cheeks, hair, or beards, and so on.
“Very well,” Lysinka said. “I will come with ten of my men. You will send down ten of yours with the guest gifts.”
“You ask hostages?” the man said, unable to hide surprise and even indignation.
Her self-command had returned. She said, with a bland smile, “It is only just that I offer hospitality in return for hospitality. My men are as honourable as yours.”
This left much unsaid, but the man seemed prepared to accept it. Lysinka made one final gesture to Fergis—and smiled as his face fell.
He would not be among those going up the cliff. The band would give less offence to the hostages if he commanded below—and more surely avenge their chieftain, if it came to that.
IV
Conan left camp as soon as he had seen to food, wine, salves, and bandages for his men. All needed the first two, which rather to the Cimmerian’s surprise were both abundant and good. The Rangers’ noble patron had to be dipping generously into his coffers, if only out of fear of his soldiers turning bandit.
Many needed the salves and bandages. Blisters from climbing in poorly fitting boots or gripping sun-heated rocks, thorn punctures, cuts, bruises, too much sun and too little water—a day’s training like this was likely to lay men out with everything save perhaps snakebite and broken bones.
It was two-legged serpents who were in the Cimmerian’s thoughts as he left the camp well before he needed to merely to reach the meeting with Rog on time. Indeed, they weighed heavily.
He did not fear treachery from Tharmis Rog, who would have small need to risk dishonour against the Cimmerian. Rog was older than Conan and perhaps a trifle slower, but as large, as strong, and doubtless as cunning a fighter. It would be as well to end the fight before both men had hammered each other past the fitness needed for campaigning.
Nor did Conan fear Rog sending men to do what he would not stoop to do himself. A wolf did not send jackals to pull down a rival.
But there were men in the camp who hated Tharmis Rog or regretted the oath they had taken. Some had been so foolish as to speak openly in Conan’s hearing, seemingly taking him for a bluff, blunt-witted northerner with few loyalties and less of the Aquilonian tongue.
Conan remembered those men. He intended to make them remember him, if he could find a time and place where it would not weaken the Thanza Rangers. Meanwhile, such men might well be laying plots to bring Tharmis Rog down, then make it seem that Conan had slain the master-at-arms.
Such men might also have taken the course of telling Mikros where one Sellus the Northerner was to be found. Conan did not imagine for a moment that he had crippled or frightened enough of Mikros’s bullies to leave the panderer impotent. He would likely enough meet the man’s hirelings again before he left Aquilonia.
And if he met none of these, there could still be bounty hunters from Ophir, Argos, or in time even distant Turan. King Yezdigerd ruled a realm that had no fear of the wrath of Aquilonia, and it was yet another realm where a certain wandering Cimmerian warrior had a price on his head.
Altogether, there were more than enough chances for uninvited guests at this private feast, to make it prudent to approach the feasting hall by a long and winding route.
From many years’ travelling and fighting, Conan had gained the art of learning his way around a stretch of countryside or a quarter of a city within days of his arrival. Already there were parts of the land around the camp he could have crossed unerringly in the depths of night, and this evening the light was slow to fade.
Conan travelled even faster than he had expected, and could have searched all around the meadow had he not feared being seen. So instead he hid himself within the oak grove, under a cluster of bushes that offered further concealment. Perfectly hidden, he even felt it safe to lie down and sleep, for all that he removed neither clothing nor weapons.
After all, if he did not wake in time, Tharmis Rog would surely make enough noise over not finding his opponent ready, to wake not merely the sleeping but the dead.
The ruined castle high on the crags had at last begun to grow closer. For some while, Lysinka had begun to think that she and her chosen ten comrades were doomed to spend the rest of eternity on this stony, winding path up the cliffs.
It helped that the rain had stopped, a rising wind had hurled the clouds away to eastward, and an angry yellow moon shed a trifle of light below. It did not help enough, when the wind moaned and whined around the rocks like the distant murmuring of lost souls, and the cries of night birds and bats had no natural ring to them.
Lysinka told herself to rein in her fancies and trust he who called himself the lord of Thanza until he betrayed that trust. No wise chief would willingly sacrifice ten of his men for a merely equal number of foes. His own men would fling him from the cliffs if he did.
Except that Lysinka would be one of the dead. She w
as not one to swell with vainglory, but she knew that her band would be maimed past repairing by her death.
Well, if it came to that, she would do her best to take his lordship with her. Then two headless bands might draw off, the one from the other, and her comrades live to mourn her. They would never find her body, not in this wilderness of stone that had driven the trees to retreat like a pack of mangy dogs.
A new note in the wind struck shrill and harsh. It rose until Lysinka wanted to plug her ears with her hood, until the lost souls seemed to be shrieking in rage rather than whispering in loneliness.
She stiffened as invisible fingers seemed to touch her. They plucked and caressed her brow, her ears, her throat, and more intimate places. She found herself breathless yet wanting to scream in rage and terror.
She barely heard a shout from up ahead. To save her own soul she could not have said who shouted. She needed no hearing to see the fate of the man just ahead of her.
In one moment he was bracing himself, one hand on a heavy staff with its butt jammed into a crevice, the other groping for a handhold. In the next moment the staff snapped like a twig. The man reeled, overbalanced, clawed his other hand bloody trying to keep his handhold, then lurched over the edge of the path.
Lysinka tried to shut out the fading sound of his scream and the sight of his blood on the rock. She drew a shuddering breath and found that she was gripping her staff with both hands, as if ready to wield it against an opponent. If anything, visible or invisible, touched her again...
The Thanzans ahead of her were making every rite of aversion she had seen in the borderland and a few she did not recognize. She licked her lips several times and at last found her voice.
“What—was that the wind?”
“Aye, lady,” one man said. He kept his face averted from her, and the wind piped about them so that most of his words were lost. But she heard enough to learn of something called the Spider Wind, which plucked men from where it would, when it would, as if it were a living thing with an appetite sated only by human flesh.
