Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza

by Roland Green

  The skeletons, however, were enemies that he had not only never faced but also not even imagined that he could face: The intentness with which they looked upon him was disquieting—if one could say that eye sockets without eyes “looked” at anything.

  He felt a chill down his spine that had nothing to do with the cold roughness of the stone against which he stood. He wondered, not altogether idly, how long his final combat would last, faced with opponents who might be impervious to the edge of his sword.

  The Cimmerian had known swords that could cut stone, and smiths capable of forging them. Even his father might have been able to conjure such a blade out of the charcoal and bog iron that were the smith’s raw materials in Cimmeria.

  Conan doubted, however, that his present blade was equal to the task of chopping through stone ribs, skulls, and limbs. It had not even survived unscathed its combat with the river dragon.

  He therefore left the blade sheathed. He saw no bows or throwing weapons among his opponents. They would have to close in on foot, and he could draw steel long before they came within reach.

  Meanwhile, not baring his steel first might be taken as a peaceful overture. He had fought side by side with one of these stone warriors. Through both his own blood and that of the dragon he had slain, he had been the instrument of bringing them back from—where they had been—to where they were now. (He would not use the words “death” and “life.” For not the first time, he was in a place where these ideas had small meaning.)

  All that he had wrought for them should be worth something. Whether it would be worth enough to make them forsake his blood, the blood they doubtless needed to revive their remaining comrades—

  Now the skeleton warriors were looking at one another. One whom Conan thought was his battle comrade stepped up to the half-circle around Conan, and put his skull close to that of one in the circle. The two leaders seemed to be discussing what to do next, even though they made no sound that Conan could hear nor opened lips that he could see moving.

  No lips moved, but in the next moment the skeletons did. The half-circle opened outward, like a blooming flower, to make a space in the middle, directly in front of Conan. The skeletons by the wall remained where they stood, some now standing straighter than others.

  Conan smiled. He would have laughed, except that a living sound seemed an intrusion here where only the click of stone on stone broke the silence.

  It was still irresistibly funny to see how the soldiers who had in life slumped in ranks and the ones who had held themselves like spears, still retained their stance aeons after their flesh had perished. Suddenly the leader caught sight of the slumpers, snatched a spear from the nearest skeleton in the circle, and slammed the butt on the rock.

  Echoes danced about the cave, almost drowning the Cimmerian’s gusty laughter. He could not help it. The more slovenly skeletons had suddenly snapped upright,, like newly-recruited Thanza Rangers when Tharmis Rog roared at them. He wondered how the master-at-arms was faring, commanding the encampment of cripples and he wondered also what Rog would have made of this underground encampment of the dead.

  Probably he ’d have them practising forming squares before the day was done, the Cimmerian decided. Rog was a soldier to his fingertips, even if there had once seemed to be more bone than brain between his ears.

  For a moment, the gap in the half-circle in front of Conan was large enough to allow his escape—if he could swerve fast enough to escape the leader and his companions, who stood just beyond the gap. The Cimmerian took the space of three heartbeats to consider that alternative, then forswore it.

  He did not know how fast the skeleton warriors could run, nor did he care to learn. Being pursued through the dark warren of caves below this mountain by living bones seeking one’s flesh with ancient steel was a death too gruesome and too lacking in dignity for the Cimmerian to contemplate without a shudder.

  What might come to him from these skeletons, he would face here and now.

  Instead of ordering an attack, the leader now held the same spear overhead in both hands, then raised and lowered it three times. The other skeletons—his “men,” Conan had begun to call them in his mind—quickly formed a broader half-circle, with only a single narrow gap in front of the leader.

  Then the leader stepped into the gap, knelt with some grace if not without the grating of stone on stone, and laid his spear on the rock at his feet.

  Conan nearly drew his sword at that unexpected gesture, until wisdom overcame instinct in time to prevent such folly. Just as well—for now all the skeleton warriors were laying down their weapons at their feet.

  Then they rose, all standing as straight as if Tharmis Rog’s eye was searching each of them for a twitching muscle or a strap out of place, and joined hands. Conan held back laughter with difficulty at the sight of these whitened bones imitating children at a festival. He half-expected them to start dancing or putting mushrooms in their ear holes instead of chaplets of flowers around their heads!

  Instead, he heard a faint droning. It quickly ceased to be faint, but never became loud. Instead, it began to waver. Conan knew several battle languages; he wondered if he was hearing one.

  Then the random wavering turned into a regular rhythm. The rhythm steadied, and Conan now heard sounds that with a little imagination might have been words.

  Then he no longer needed imagination. Joined together, the skeletons were speaking.

  Their first intelligible words were:

  “Are you an enemy to the Death Lord of Thanza?”Lysinka and Klarnides had agreed not to divide the men they were leading in search of Conan—or of any other secrets these mountains might hide.

  As for those secrets, Klarnides wanted to ferret them all out. Lysinka was more inclined to find Conan and go home, whether he wished to go there with her or not. Klarnides was thinking of his duty to Numedides. She was now hardly thinking beyond her duties to her band and to her comrade of battle and bed.

  If a Death Lord of Thanza was dangerous to him or them, she would fight the lord, even at the cost of her own life. If a Death Lord would pass by her and hers, then he could do so, if not with her blessing, at least without her armed opposition.

  She said nothing of this to Klarnides, however. There was still enough of the prickly boy within the newly fledged warrior and man to make matters difficult if he began to mistrust her.

  They swung wide to the east of the mountain where Conan had vanished without seeing any signs of the flying serpents, the Cimmerian, or anything else they sought. (Or which might be seeking them, Lysinka reminded herself.)

  One thing she and several others with sharp eyes did see: an alternative route up to the summit of the mountain. It was broader, easier for those not hillborn, and allowed both advance and retreat elsewhere than the actual trail.

  Altogether, it seemed such a gift from the gods that Lysinka and Klarnides agreed that others must have seen it the same way.

  “If there are any others, about, besides Grolin’s men.”

  “Best be safe,” Klarnides suggested. “We know about the flying serpents. Perhaps they have gorged themselves into ten days’ slumber and perhaps not. With room to fight, we are fitter to stand against foes with fangs or hands.”

  The chieftain looked at Klarnides with new respect. Apart from his courage, he was now uttering words that might have come from far more seasoned warriors, even though his teachers were both absent.

  But then, much in fighting and war was merely good sense. She wondered if Klarnides was newly come to good sense, or had merely hidden it until good teachers and necessity (also a teacher, of sorts) brought it out.

  “Very well,” she said. “We rest and water here for... oh, half a candle. Then we go up.”

  And you be there in some other form than serpent-gnawed bones, my Cimmerian friend.

  Conan knew that he was in the presence of magic, ancient, potent, mysterious (but then most magic was such to him, and he was as glad to leave matters thus).


  He was not certain it was evil.

  Had he been certain, he would have shattered the skeletons or his own bones in a fight to the finish—he could not say “to the death” when his foes were already dead!

  But the magic that animated these warriors of bone-turned-stone had left with them something of the humanity they had possessed when they were flesh and blood. Perhaps they had enough of it left that he and they could find a common ground, one that did not leave either him or them in pieces on the cave floor.

  It might even be one that would help their still-inanimate comrades, and allow him to escape these caves and continue his search for Grolin and the Soul of Thanza.

  Certainly their first question had hinted of the right direction.

  “There is no living Death Lord of Thanza,” Conan said. He spoke slowly, trying to make every syllable ring like a blacksmith’s hammer. It was hard to read expressions on fleshless faces, but he thought he succeeded.

  He knew disappointment when he saw it, even in skeletons. Shoulders slumped and heads turned to look at one another.

  Conan sensed deep grief, that a long sleep should have ended in a purposeless waking. He grinned mirthlessly. This was the first time that his telling someone evil sorcery was abroad in their land would be called good news!

  “There is a man named Grolin, who seeks the Soul * of Thanza,” the Cimmerian said. “I think he has the aid of evil magic. Will this make him evil, if he finds the Soul of Thanza and becomes the Death Lord?”

  “All Death Lords are evil,” the skeletons said. “If they were not before they joined with the Soul, they become so afterward. We are vowed to destroy all Death Lords, until the power of the Soul is exhausted and there can be no more.”

  Conan forbore to point out that they might not be equal to the task or they would not have waited so long as bony skeletons instead of living men. Before he could choose words for a reply, the skeletons continued.

  “It also is possible that the sorcerer might become the Death Lord. If he is evil, he will become more so through the Soul. We must fight him as well as the man you call Grolin. Has the sorcerer a name?”

  Conan replied that he was tolerably sure of the sorcerer’s existence, but knew nothing else about him.

  “Then it is time and past time for us to march to end the menace of the Death Lords of Thanza,” the skeletons said. Or rather, intoned. Each time they spoke, they sounded more like a chorus of priests chanting the praises of some obscure god.

  “We need three things for the fight,” they went on.

  “One is a leader of flesh and blood. Will you be he?”

  “You might do better with someone else—” Conan began, with a wry twist to his mouth.

  “There is no one else,” the skeletons replied. “There has been no one else for all the time we have been here. There will be no one else in time to fight Grolin and the sorcerer. You will lead us.”

  Conan was tempted to reply to this command with one of the salutes he had learned. He decided against it. The skeletons might be a trifle lacking in humour.

  “The second thing we need is all our strength. As many more of us as you see here remain afar from the world. When we all move together, we are mighty. As we are now, we are not. The Death Lord will come again.”

  That made sense. No captain worth the price of his helmet straps went willingly into battle with less than his full strength. Books were filled with the names of those who had done otherwise—and Conan had seen too many battlefields littered with the bodies of their men.

  “The third thing we need is blood. Blood gives movement. Movement gives strength. Strength gives victory. Victory saves the world from the Death Lord of Thanza.”

  “Blood,” Conan mused. He remembered how he had put all this in motion when his scraped and bleeding flesh touched the first skeleton. Then the work had gone on, with the blood of the water dragon.

  “The water dragon’s blood has lost its power,” he said.

  “There is strong blood here,” the skeletons replied. “It will give our comrades movement. Movement will give strength. Strength will give...”

  Conan was not listening. He was looking at the skeletons. All of them were looking back, in a way that left him in no doubt whose “strong blood” they wanted to revive their comrades.

  He had stepped away from the wall while he was talking to the skeletons. Now he withdrew three paces, until once again his shoulders were against the stone.

  Then he drew his sword.

  In the wounded camp, Tharmis Rog had just hobbled back from the burying ground when Sergeant Julilius accosted him.

  “We finally made that deserter from Grolin’s band fit to talk,” he said. “I doubt me he’ll last out the day, but he’s said enough to earn himself a peaceful end.”

  Rog sat down on a stump. He could walk with a stick now, but running or marching with a heavy pack would be well beyond him for days. A small voice whispered at the back of his mind, hinting that his soldiering days were over for good.

  As often as the voice whispered, he told it to be silent. At this moment, he felt like doing the same to the sergeant. Rog was just back from seeing to the burial of another Ranger, the fourth to die of his wounds since the company divided.

  Lysinka’s healer was a hard-bitten, hard-handed, but soft-hearted woman, without whose help there might have been twice as many dead. But she was only a skilled healer, not a worker of miracles. After the inward festering began in Lopetas’s belly, he was doomed, and now another boy who had never been a man was gone.

  Rog considered whether he had seen this too often in his many years of war. By Mitra, he’d been a soldier longer than the Cimmerian had lived, and Conan was no green youth! If the voice started whispering that he did not want to see any more boys die, maybe he would listen to it.

  Meanwhile, he would listen to Julilius.

  “So what did the man say?”

  It seemed that Grolin was now obsessed with something called the Mountain of the Skull, where the Soul of Thanza was supposed to reside. A sorcerer might or might not be helping him turn that obsessive dream into stark reality.

  Meanwhile, Conan, Lysinka, and Klarnides held Grolin’s old citadel with a firm grip. They too seemed to be in search of the Mountain of the Skull. How far either side had gone on their quest, the man did not know.

  He was quite sure that he wanted to be far away when either of them found what they sought. Unfortunately, while he had begun his escape in good time, an ill-tempered bear had delayed him, and perhaps ended his journeys in this world.

  “Hard way to go, even for a bad man,” Rog said finally. “See that the healer gives him a good stiff dose of her green draught tonight.”

  “She’s making up the red draught now,” Julilius said. “Threatened to dose Cartos with it the next time he patted her bottom.”

  “He must be healing faster than we thought,” Rog said. “I’ll remind him that worse than a red-draught flux will afflict him if he does that again.” The healer’s red draught was a potent purgative.

  Both men looked at the sky to the north, as if they hoped to see what the deserter had not said written in the clouds. The clouds being blank as always, they turned away after a moment.

  “No,” Conan said.

  The skeletons continued to stare at him. He found the eyeless stares more uncanny with each passing moment. Perhaps the skeleton warriors’ dead stares had some power over the minds of the living?

  Or perhaps they were just confused? Conan suspected that he would be too, if he had slept as long as these men and then wakened with only bones and weapons to hold his spirit, if he had one.

  Best do more to end the confusion.

  “No, you may not have my blood, however strong it is,” he said.

  “It is very strong blood,” the leader replied. “Never had we dreamed of such strong blood. Blood gives movement. Movement gives—”

  Conan raised his sword. “The next one of you who
chants that again, I will chop to pieces. Then I will pick up his fallen bones and use them to smash his comrades until I collapse.

  “Maybe you can take my blood then. But it won’t be as strong. There won’t be as many of you. And I might just throw myself into the pool before I die, so that none of you or your friends will have anything from me except being killed all over again.

  “I can be a. fair bit more dangerous than any Death Lord, if you cross me.”

  Conan’s anger had been said to terrify demons. While no one could say that the skeleton warriors were frightened, certainly they now looked more at one another than at Conan, and they neither picked up their weapons nor advanced.

  At last the leader stepped forward, crossing his arms over his ribs with a marvellously human gesture. It hinted of a man who had been brave and shrewd when he had flesh and blood on his bones.

  “It seems that we need of you two things, Cimmerian, and you can give us one or the other. We need you to lead us. We also need strong blood, that all of us may be prepared to lead. Do you swear by all that you hold sacred, you cannot give us both?

  Conan ran through the names of all the gods he knew, except Crom. Some of these he had never held sacred, or even accorded much respect, but the names seemed to impress the skeletons. As living men, they had doubtless come from many lands and worshipped many gods.

  “It’s not that I would refuse to do what you’re asking if I could,” Conan finished. “A good leader is always ready to shed his blood for the men he leads. But if you need a leader, you need him with all his blood intact and all his strength. Strong blood makes movement, in living men as well as in bony ones.”

  “I thought we were not going to chant that again,” the leader said. It was impossible to doubt that had he been a living man, he would have smiled.

  Conan felt a strong urge to do something to lead these warriors out of their dilemma. No good soldier liked to leave comrades out of a battle, any more than a good leader liked to be weakened.