Conan: Road of Kings

by Karl Edward Wagner

  Santiddio, face livid and gagging for breath, rolled out from under the halbard shaft. Conan dragged him to his feet, held him there until his knees grew steady. A quick look told Conan that the prison yard was emptying. A company of guards was pushing its way across the square through the thinning press of the mob. About the scaffold, the small remnant of their guards were concerned only with staying alive until reinforcements could relieve them, while their rescuers showed a growing inclination to withdraw and lose themselves in the fleeing crowd.

  As the square began to clear, a small band of riders thundered their way against the flow of humanity. They led other mounts with saddles empty, and Conan saw that they were making for the gallows. Pounding hooves cleared a path through the dwindling crowd, as the mob had no thought save to take cover.

  “It’s Mordermi!” croaked Santiddio, still half-strangled. “Mitra! That’s Sandokazi riding with him! They’ve brought us mounts! We’re going to make it!”

  “If they reach us before the guard regroups,” Conan rumbled. He caught up the fallen halbard, shortened his grip on its shaft, and swung the blade between his legs with all his strength. The axe blade bit into the chain of his leg-irons. Striking with precision, Conan repeated the blow. The link parted, freeing his ankles.

  Conan grunted in satisfaction. Grounding the weapon, he braced its butt between his feet, then pierced the halbard spike through one of the weakened links of his wrist chains. Using leverage, Conan drew his arms back, twisting the chain link against the steel awl. For a moment it seemed that the spike would snap under the strain. Then the weld parted and the link twisted open.

  With a harsh laugh, Conan waved his freed wrists, brandished the halbard. “Bring on your new hangman, you yapping pack of jackals! I’ll hang him up by his own entrails!”

  None of the guards remained to answer his challenge.

  “Santiddio!”

  Conan started. It was a woman’s voice that hailed his comrade. Her hair a black banner beneath a red scarf, she rode at the head of the mounted band that plunged toward them, breaking past the fringes of the mob.

  “Sandokazi! You did it!” Santiddio exulted, as they drew rein before the gallows.

  “Hurry! The others will be on us in another moment! When the square clears, they’ll not hesitate to use archers!” This from the leader of the horsemen—Conan took him to be Mordermi from the descriptions he’d heard of the infamous rogue. Mordermi took in the five dangling corpses and swore. “Mitra! I cut it close, my friend!”

  “Come on, Conan!” Santiddio shouted. “We’ve a horse for you!”

  The new force of guards was only moments away. Conan needed no second to the invitation. Vaulting onto the proffered saddle, he joined the tumultous charge back across the Dancing Floor and into the twisting streets beyond.

  Two

  The Pit

  Although it had not been very many years since Conan had wandered southward from the savage hills of his native Cimmeria, he had experienced—and survived—more adventures than many a footloose rogue of twice his age. The barbarian youth had visited many of the great cities of the Hyborian kingdoms, and was no stranger to some of the most notorious slums and criminal warrens that were found there. He had been a thief in the Maul in Zamora, and there learned the skills that had afterward made him one of the most daring thieves in The Maze. But the Pit in Kordava was unique among the many infamous thieves’ dens that blighted the major Hyborian cities.

  In an earlier century, earthquake and fire had levelled much of Kordava, with a portion of its waterfront sinking beneath the sea. Preliminary tremors had caused most of the populace to flee before the ensuing devastation, so that many lives were spared. With tens of thousands left homeless and Kordava in ruins, a new city was hastily raised upon the broken body of the old one. Where destruction was greatest, sections of Kordava were simply left buried beneath the rubble—it being easier to fill over the devastation than to haul away the rubble—and new streets and buildings were erected upon the buried ruins.

  Desperate in their need for shelter, many of Kordava’s inhabitants had not waited for the new city to be built—instead had dug beneath the rubble, burrowing into the cellars and collapsed walls of the buried older city. The dangers of cave-in were balanced against the lure of free dwelling space and the prospect of recovering valuable loot from the buried debris. Tunnels were enlarged, the old streets uncovered and shored up, cellars and buildings dug out and vaulted over. As the years passed, and a new Kordava arose above the rubble, beneath its foundations the old city gnawed like a cancer—slowly being reborn as a subterranean warren for Kordava’s impoverished and social outcasts.

  From its earliest days, this district had been known as the Pit. The name was as suitable as it was inevitable. To the Pit settled the dregs of Kordava’s populace: the poor and the misfit, the broken and the degenerate, those who preyed upon the mighty and the miserable. Criminals of all classes stalked the eternally shadowed streets brazenly; the city guard dared not enter the Pit, no more than could they have ferreted out their man in the labyrinthine ways of the buried city. Sailors on liberty and soldiers with their pay swaggered into the Pit in search of any sort of entertainment or vice their tastes might demand, for on the whole of the Western Ocean there were no waterfront dives with a notoriety more lurid than those of the Pit. It was said that in no pantheon was there a Hell peopled by demons and damned more depraved than those who dwelt within the Pit. Zingaran humor typically found a more scurrilous pun, equally appropriate. Conan had visited the Pit once during his brief career in the Zingaran army. That he had returned with no worse than a bad hangover and a purse depleted by his own free spending was no shoddy tribute.

  Today Conan returned to the Pit boldly and upon a lathered horse, descending with his new companions along one of the numerous tunnels that led down to the buried streets of the old city. A hard ride from the area of the Dancing Floor had outdistanced any pursuit, and there were none in the crowded streets of market day to dispute their passage. Once returned to the Pit, a thousand of the guard might storm after Mordermi—and have less chance of taking him than of seizing laughter on the wind.

  It was midmorning, so that wan pools of daylight filtered through skylights and airshafts overhead to augment the infrequent smears of streetlights. At this hour, the streets within the Pit were largely deserted, in contrast to those of the city above. For the Pit was a realm of night, just as its denizens were creatures of the night.

  A few wine shops and brothels remained open; tired-faced whores loitered in their doorways, alert for any marketday rubes who might come early to sample the forbidden pleasures of the city. Streetlights, left burning in the perpetual gloom, shed their yellow light on only dirty pavement. Opium dens and gambling dives were boarded over upon the dreams of their addicts. Behind shuttered windows of the brothels, their inmates used their pallets for sleeping. Within clandestine little rooms, thieves and assassins slumbered with such pangs of conscience as they might feel. Outside the barred doorway of the vice den where Conan had seen her perform on stage with a Kushite dwarf, a six-year-old wearily poured slops into the gutter.

  Architecturally—although such considerations were of little moment to Conan—the Pit was a living museum. An antiquarian would have noted with great enthusiasm the stuccoed façades and elaborate iron grillwork of another age, the ornate windows of stained glass and lozenge-paned streetlights that here and there had escaped destruction. Conan saw only filthy desolation and shabby efforts to patch together ruined structures that were better left to moulder. Skylights leaked barely enough daylight to break the gloom into varying depths of shadow. Airshafts did little to dispel the noxious miasma of smoke and decay and human misery.

  A story or more overhead, the omnipresent ceiling loomed like a sooty and starless firmament, shored up and vaulted over to support the world of daylight that moved unthinkingly above. Oddly truncated, the partially restored buildings of the old city were oblit
erated against the floor of the new city overhead. A subtle metastasis, some of these renovated structures opened into the cellars of the buildings of the new city; certain others masked cellars of their own that pierced to secret depths beneath the old. Foundation pilings from structures aboveground thrust downward in massive columns—like roots questing across the passage of a buried tomb. Indeed, the Pit was a catacomb, it seemed to Conan—a catacomb for the living.

  Conan had spoken little with his companions throughout their ride. There had been no time for words during the wild gallop through Kordava’s twisting streets and alleyways. Santiddio had vouched for him, after which Mordermi and the half-dozen of his men who rode with him had accepted Conan’s presence without comment. Santiddio himself was too busy chattering with Sandokazi and Mordermi to spare Conan a thought. For the moment, Conan was content to put distance between himself and the slaughter upon the Dancing Floor. Clearly Santiddio was among friends here. The alliance of a high-minded intellectual and Kordava’s most notorious outlaw was a puzzle that concerned Conan less than the matter of securing passage on the next vessel to sail for friendlier shores.

  Ahead of them the street passed between a narrow corridor of shopfronts—from the boarded over windows and doorways, their aspect was one of long abandonment—and made a dead end against a brick wall. Mordermi and his men rode toward the barrier as if it were no more than a shadow across their path, so that Conan showed no surprise when a section of the wall slid downward into the earth to form an opening for their passage. As they rode past, the wall quickly rose back into place. Conan heard the faint grating of gears and counterweights as the hidden machinery functioned.

  The wall, Conan decided, must once have enclosed the garden and ground of a wealthy estate. Beneath their horses’ hooves, the tile mosaics showed dull visions of cavorting sea nymphs and dolphins through a patina of filth. Slabs of rubble paved the packed mud of flower beds, and a garden fountain was drowned beneath refuse. Brick supporting columns crowded in a forest of dank tree trunks to the vaulted ceiling where soot and nitre replaced clouds and stars. From somewhere close at hand came the iodine breath of the sea.

  Beyond squatted the remains of what had been one of the old city’s proudest mansions. Its massive walls reached two storeys or more to merge with the roof overhead; crude brickwork extended above the original stucco, and Conan guessed that this structure was one of those that arose innocently from the streets of the new city above. Lights shone from its diamond-paned windows, and cressets flared to disclose a great confusion of barrels, bales and mounds of stolen goods heaped about its walls and outbuildings.

  A score of men, all heavily armed, lounged about the enclosure. More of their sort swaggered out of the mansion, shouting raucous greetings. Children came running from behind the brick pillars and broken statuary, yelling their excitement. A few slatterns leaned from the windows and hooted. Returning the applause, Mordermi and his men dismounted, turned the horses over to their fellows.

  Conan followed suit, feeling the scrutiny of suspicious eyes.

  Mordermi raised his arms in a grand gesture, shouting above the babble of questions.

  “Your attention, gentle sirs! Your attention, please! As you know, I set out this bright morning to steal a gallows bird from King Rimanendo. Well, then. King Rimanendo was generous today—he’s given me two gallows birds from his royal cages. Not only has he returned to us our learned brother, Santiddio, the very prince of polemicists…”

  Here jeers and catcalls drowned him out. Santiddio made a sweeping bow.

  “Not only Santiddio,” Mordermi continued, “But our grateful king has presented us with the illustrious duellist and mutineer, Conan of Cimmeria, lately of Zingara’s mercenary companies, and slaughterer of the unlamented Captain Rinnova!”

  A heartbeat of silence as they absorbed Mordermi’s grandiloquence—then boisterous cheers and applause. Men shouted congratulations, studied Conan with interest; a few came forward to pummel his shoulder and take his hand. Conan accepted their horseplay goodnaturedly; these were men of a breed he knew and liked.

  A lithe rush of movement, and Sandokazi pressed against him. Her kiss was as warm as it was unexpected. Quickly again, she stepped away from him.

  “I saw what you did there,” Sandokazi told Conan. “Santiddio is my brother. I won’t forget.”

  Then Mordermi was stepping between them. “Well now, Conan.” His tone was light, but his smile was a little thin. “If you’re through kissing my lady, why don’t we see about knocking off all that iron jewellery you’re carrying around.”

  Three

  The White Rose

  A cloud of steam arose as the girl poured another kettle of boiling water into the bath water. Conan, wedged into the wooden tub and unable to evade the scalding water, cursed with his mouth full of wine and swatted at the wench with the chicken carcass he held in his other hand. The girl—Conan had already forgotten her name—laughed coarsely, and knelt to scrub his back with a sponge and the sulfurous-smelling soap that Santiddio swore would kill the prison lice. Her thin cotton shift, wet and clinging to her body, outlined a substantial physique. Conan, a tankard of wine in one fist and a carcass of half-cooked chicken in the other, suffered her ministrations with aplomb.

  One of Mordermi’s men had struck off the Cimmerian chains. Now, in an oak-paneled chamber within Mordermi’s lair, Conan and Santiddio tried to wash away the accumulated filth of their prison ordeal. Grinning whores attended them, and the steam-filled room took on the aspect of a public baths. Conan, impatient to fill his rumbling belly, saw no reason to delay his meal any further.

  Santiddio, in the tub beside him, seemed neither hungry nor thirsty. Scrubbing briskly at his bony sides, he maintained an incessant stream of chatter, detailing the outrages of his arrest and imprisonment—evidently there had never been a trial—and of the struggle beneath the gallows. Mordermi listened politely, occasionally interjecting a question. Sandokazi, amusement in her dark eyes, paid more attention to Conan.

  Seen beside her brother, the sibling resemblance was apparent. There were facial similarities in the angular chin, high-bridged nose, sensuous mouth, and glowing, almost over-large eyes. Sandokazi had the characteristic dark complexion of Zingarans, as well as heavy coils of lustrous black hair, haphazardly bound in a red scarf. She was as tall as her brother, slender and long-limbed. A well-developed figure was set off by her off-the-shoulder blouse of unbleached muslin, tight leather bodice, and wide, calf-length skirt of embroidered material. She was close enough to Santiddio’s age that Conan could not decide which was the elder.

  Mordermi was younger than Conan had expected—probably not more than a few years his senior. He was a head shorter than the hulking Cimmerian as well, despite the high-heeled boots he chose to wear. The prince of Kordava’s thieves had the reputation of being a dangerous opponent either in single combat or in a brawl, and Conan recognized the pantherish deadliness in the man’s compactly muscled frame. He had a square jaw, and a nose that seemed to have been broken at least once. His face was alert; his dark eyes were piercing when he looked at you, veiled when you looked back.

  Again, the dark Zingaran complexion, and an oily mass of black curls that he tied out of his eyes with a scarf that matched Sandokazi’s. Conan considered the thin mustache and gold earrings a bit foppish, but then the fashions of Zingara were not to a Cimmerian’s taste. In trunk hose and filigreed doublet of dark velvet, Mordermi might well be a prince of the blood, instead of prince of rogues. There was nothing effeminate about the double-edged rapier and quillon dagger belted at Mordermi’s trim waist.

  Conan drained the tankard, and his buxom attendant made haste to refill it. The chicken was tough and poorly cooked, but Conan was too hungry to care. Luxuriating in the warm water, he gnawed with gusto at the stringy carcass, spitting the larger bones onto the floor. There were deep gouges along his wrists and ankles where the shackles had been struck away. Conan scowled at the marks and made a
mental note to keep the sores covered until well healed—they were the telltale brand of a fugitive.

  Mordermi’s question indicated he had followed the Cimmerian’s eyes and train of thought: “What will you do now, Conan?”

  “Get out of Kordava,” Conan answered. Beyond that much, he hadn’t really given the matter thought. “Take passage on some ship, or maybe slip past the walls and into the hinterland, make for Aquilonia or Argos.”

  Mordermi shook his head. “No good. That’s what they’ll figure. They’ll be watching the waterfront. Double guards along the city wall, and word will be speeding to the frontier. After that exercise on the Dancing Floor, Rimanendo will order Korst to recapture you two at any cost. Korst is no fool, and you’re about as inconspicuous as a Vendhyan elephant in a dove’s cage.”

  “All the more reason to get clear of Zingara,” Conan agreed. “The Pictish Wilderness lies close beyond the Black River here, and chances are that Korst won’t be watching that frontier too closely.”

  “With good reason,” Mordermi agreed. “No white man has ever crossed the Pictish Wilderness.”

  “Do you want to tell a Cimmerian about Picts?” Conan wondered caustically.

  Mordermi grinned at the gibe. “Why not stay here? You’re as safe in the Pit as anywhere. Mitra, half of my men would be dancers if they strolled past the magistrates’ hall. Korst knows their faces and knows where to find them—but he dares not seek them in the Pit.”

  “After today?” Santiddio suggested. “We’ve ruined Rimanendo’s digestion, be certain. I’ve often wondered whether he might move in force against the Pit if there were sufficient provocation.”

  “Well then, let him move against us. They can seal off a thousand exits; we can leave by a thousand more. Let them search through a thousand cellars; we’ll laugh at them from a thousand undreamed of coverts. If I know Korst, he’ll hire assassins to seek you out, and consider his responsibility in the matter to be delegated. Assassins we can deal with. Are you worried about assassins, Conan?”