Gurmun General of behemoths at Durrwangen bulge
Kiun Soldier in Leudast’s company
Kyot Swemmel’s deceased twin brother
Leudast* Sergeant in Sulingen
Merovec Major; Marshal Rathar’s adjutant
Munderic Irregular leader west of Herborn
Obilot Irregular fighter west of Herborn
Rathar* Marshal of Unkerlant traveling to Cottbus
Razalic Irregular in forest west of Herborn
Recared Lieutenant in Sulingen
Sadoc Irregular fighter west of Herborn; would-be mage
Swemmel King of Unkerlant
Tantris Soldier contacting irregulars in Grelz
Vatran General in southern Unkerlant
Werbel Soldier in Sulingen
Ysolt Cook in Durrwangen
VALMIERA
Amatu Noble returned from Valmiera
Bauska Krasta’s maidservant in Priekule
Gainibu King of Valmiera
GedominuSkarnu and Merkela’s son
Krasta* Marchioness in Priekule; Skarnu’s sister
Lauzdonu Noble returned from Valmiera
Merkela Underground fighter; Skarnu’s wife
Palasta Mage in Erzvilkas
Raunu Sergeant and irregular near Pavilosta
Skarnu* Marquis; fighter in Ventspils; Krasta’s brother
Terbatu Marquis in Priekule
Valnu Viscount in Priekule
Zarasai Underground fighter; a nom de guerre
YANINA
Iskakis Yaninan minister to Zuwayza
ZUWAYZA
Hajjaj* Foreign minister of Zuwayza
Ikhshid General in Bishah
Kolthoum Hajjaj’s senior wife
Qutuz Hajjaj’s secretary in Bishah
Shazli King of Zuwayza
Tewfik Hajjaj’s majordomo
Qutuz Hajjaj’s secretary in Bishah
TOR BOOKS BY HARRY TURTLEDOVE
The Two Georges (by Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove)
Household Gods (by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove)
Between the Rivers
Into the Darkness
Darkness Descending
Through the Darkness
Rulers of the Darkness
(As by H. N. Turteltaub)
Justinian
Over the Wine-Dark Sea
The Gryphon’s Skull
SORCERERS UNDER FIRE
Siuntio had the right of it: this time, the stolen life energy of those Kaunian captives was hurled straight at the blockhouse, a deadly dart of sorcerous force. The lamps flickered in a strange, rhythmic pattern. Then the walls started to shake in the same rhythm, and then the floor beneath Pekka’s feet. The air felt hot and thick in the lungs. It tasted of blood.
The paper on which her cantrip was written burst into flames. One of the secondary sorcerors screamed. Her hair had burst into flames, too. A comrade swaddled her head with a blanket, but the flames did not want to go out.
“No!” Siuntio shouted, a battle cry that might have burst from the throat of a man half his age. “By the powers above, no! You shall not have us! You shall not!” He began what had to be a counterspell. Pekka had never imagined such a thing—one determined mage, all alone, trying to withstand the massed might of many, a might magnified by murder.
Ilmarinen’s voice joined Siuntio’s a moment later. They were the finest sorcerors of their generation. For an instant, just for an instant, Pekka, marshaling in her mind what she could do to aid their magecraft, thought they might have fought the Algarvians to a standstill. But then the lamps went out altogether, plunging the blockhouse into darkness. With a shriek of bursting timbers, the roof fell in. Something hit Pekka in the side of the head. The dark went black, shot with scarlet.
Harry Turtledove, the master of
alternate history, turns his talents to
one of fantasy’s most beloved sagas:
Robert E. Howard’s Conan!
CONAN OF VENARIUM
The origin of the might barbarian—
available soon in hardcover
from Tor Books
Read on for a thrilling preview!
Chapter 1
The Coming of the Aquilonians
Iron belled on iron. Sparks flew. Mordec struck again, harder than ever. The blacksmith grunted in satisfaction and, hammer still clenched in his great right hand, lifted the red-hot sword blade from the anvil with the tongs in his left. Nodding, he watched the color slowly fade from the iron. “I’ll not need to thrust it back into the fire, Conan,” he said. “You can rest easy at the bellows.”
“All right, Father.” Conan was not sorry to step back from the forge. Sweat ran down his bare chest. Though the day was not warm—few days in Cimmeria were warm—hard work by the forge made a man or a boy forget the weather outside. At twelve, the blacksmith’s son stood on the border of manhood. He was already as tall as some of the men in the village of Duthil, and his own labor at Mordec’s side had given him thews some of those men might envy.
Yet next to his father, Conan’s beardless cheeks were not all that marked him as a stripling. For Mordec was a giant of a man, well over six feet, but so thick through the shoulders and chest that he did not seem so tall. A square-cut mane of thick black hair, now streaked with gray, almost covered the blacksmith’s volcanic blue eyes. Mordec’s close-trimmed beard was also beginning to go gray, and had one long white streak marking the continuation of a scar that showed on his cheek. His voice was a deep bass rumble, which made Conan’s unbroken treble all the shriller by comparison.
From the back of the smithy, from the rooms where the blacksmith and his family lived, a woman called, “Mordec! Come here. I need you.”
Mordec’s face twisted with a pain he never would have shown if wounded by sword or spear or arrow. “Go tend to your mother, son,” he said roughly. “It’s really you Verina wants to see, anyhow.”
“But she called you,” said Conan.
“Go, I said.” Mordec set down the blacksmith’s hammer and folded his hand into a fist. “Go, or you’ll be sorry.”
Conan hurried away. A buffet from his father might stretch him senseless on the rammed-earth floor of the smithy, for Mordec did not always know his own strength. And Conan dimly understood that his father did not want to see his mother in her present state; Verina was slowly and lingeringly dying of some ailment of the lungs that neither healers nor wizards had been able to reverse. But Mordec, lost in his own torment, did not grasp how watching Conan’s mother fail by inches flayed the boy.
As usual, Verina lay in bed, covered and warmed by the cured hides of panthers and wolves Mordec had slain on hunting trips. “Oh,” she said. “Conan.” She smiled, though her lips had a faint bluish cast that had been absent even a few weeks before.
“What do you need, Mother?” he asked.
“Some water, please,” said Verina. “I didn’t want to trouble you.” Her voice held the last word an instant longer than it might have.
Conan did not notice, though Mordec surely would have. “I’ll get it for you,” he said, and hurried to the pitcher on the rough-hewn cedar table near the hearth. He poured an earthenware cup full and brought it back to the bedchamber.
“Thank you. You’re a good—” Verina broke off to cough. The racking spasm went on and on. Her thin shoulders shook with it. A little pink-tinged froth appeared at the comer of her mouth. At last, she managed to whisper, “The water.”
“Here.” Conan wiped her mouth and helped her sit up. He held the cup to her lips.
She took a few swallows—fewer than he would have wanted to see. But when she spoke again, her voice was stronger: “That is better. I wish I could—” She broke off again, this time in surprise. “What’s that?”
Running feet pounded along the dirt track that served Duthil for a main street. “The Aquilonians!” a hoarse voice bawled. “The Aquilonians have crossed into Cimmeria!”
“Th
e Aquilonians!” Conan’s voice, though still unbroken, crackled with ferocity and raw blood lust. “By Crom, they’ll pay for this! We’ll make them pay for this!” He eased Verina down to the pillow once more. “I’m sorry, Mother. I have to go.” He dashed away to hear the news.
“Conan—” she called after him, her voice fading. He did not hear her. Even if she had screamed, he would not have heard her. The electrifying news drew him as a lodestone draws iron.
Mordec had already hurried out of the smithy. Conan joined his father in the street. Other Cimmerians came spilling from their homes and shops: big men, most of them, dark-haired, with eyes of gray or blue that crackled like blazing ice at the news. As one, they rounded on the newcomer, crying, “Tell us more.”
“I will,” he said, “and gladly.” He was older than Mordec, for his hair and beard were white. He must have run a long way, but was not breathing unduly hard. He carried a staff with a crook on the end, and wore a herder’s sheepskin coat that reached halfway down his thighs. “I’m Fidach, of Aedan’s clan. With my brother, I tend sheep on one of the valleys below the tree line.”
Nods came from the men of Duthil. Aedan’s clan dwelt hard by the border with Aquilonia—and, now and again, sneaked across it for sheep or cattle or the red joy of slaughtering men of foreign blood. “Go on,” said Mordec. “You were tending your sheep, you say, and then—”
“And then the snout end of the greatest army I’ve ever seen thrust itself into the valley,” said Fidach. “Aquilonian knights, and archers from the Bossonian Marches, and those damned stubborn spearmen out of Gunderland who like retreat hardly better than we do. A whole great swarm of them, I tell you. This is no raid. They’re come to stay, unless we drive them forth.”
A low growl rose from the men of Duthil: the growl that might have come from a panther’s throat when it sighted prey. “We’ll drive them forth, all right,” said someone, and in a heartbeat every man in the village had taken up the cry.
“Hold,” said Mordec, and Conan saw with pride how his father needed only the one word to make every head turn his way. The blacksmith went on, “We will not drive out the invaders by ourselves, not if they have come with an army. We will need to gather men from several clans, from several villages.” He looked around at his comrades. “Eogannan! Glemmis! Can you leave your work here for a few days?”
“With Aquilonians loose in Cimmeria, we can,” declared Glemmis. Eogannan, a man nearly of Mordec’s size, was sparing of speech, but he nodded.
“Stout fellows,” said Mordec. “Glemmis, go to Uist. Eogannan, you head for Nairn. Neither one of those places is more than a couple of days from here. Let the folk there know we’ve been invaded, if they’ve not already heard. Tell them to spread the word to other villages beyond them. When we strike the foe, we must strike him with all our strength.”
Eogannan simply nodded again and strode off down the road toward Nairn, trusting to luck and to his own intimate knowledge of the countryside for food along the way. Glemmis briefly ducked back into his home before setting out. He left Duthil with a leather sack slung over one shoulder: Conan supposed it would hold oatcakes or a loaf of rye bread and smoked meat to sustain him on the journey.
“This is well done,” said Fidach. “And if you have sent men to Uist and Nairn, I will go on to Lochnagar, off to the northwest. My wife’s father’s family springs from those parts. I will have no trouble finding kinsfolk to guest with when I get there. We shall meet again, and blood our swords in the Aquilonians’ throats.” With that for a farewell, he trotted away, his feet pounding in a steady pace that would eat up the miles.
The men of Duthil stayed in the street. Some looked after Fidach, others toward the south, toward the border with Aquilonia, the border their southern neighbors had crossed. A sudden grim purpose informed the Cimmerians. Until the invaders were expelled from their land, none of them would rest easy.
“Bring your swords and spears and axes to the smithy,” said Mordec. “I’ll sharpen them for you, and I’ll ask nothing for it. What we can do to drive out the Aquilonians, let each man do, and count not the cost. For whatever it may be, it is less than the cost of slavery.”
“Mordec speaks like a clan chief.” That was Balarg the weaver, whose home stood only a few doors down from Mordec’s. The words were respectful; the tone was biting. Mordec and Balarg were the two leading men of Duthil, with neither willing to admit the other might be the leading man in the village.
“I speak like a man with a notion of what needs doing,” rumbled Mordec. “And how I might speak otherwise—” He broke off and shook his big head. “However that might be, I will not speak so now, not with the word the shepherd brought”
“Speak as you please,” said Balarg. He was younger than Mordec, and handsomer, and surely smoother. “I will answer—you may rely on it.”
“No.” Mordec shook his head again. “The war needs both of us. Our own feuds can wait.”
“Let it be so, then.” Again, Balarg sounded agreeable. But even as he spoke, he turned away from the blacksmith.
Conan burned to avenge the insult to his father. He burned to, but made himself hold back. For one thing, Mordec only shrugged—and, if the fight against the invaders meant his feud with Balarg could wait, it surely meant Conan’s newly discovered feud with the weaver could wait as well. And, for another, Balarg’s daughter, Tarla, was just about Conan’s age—and, the past few months, the blacksmith’s son had begun to look at her in a way different from the way he had looked at any girl when he was smaller.
Men began going back into their houses. Women began exclaiming when their husbands and brothers gave them the news Fidach had brought. The exclamations were of rage, not of dismay; Cimmerian women, no strangers to war, loved freedom no less than their menfolk.
Mordec set a large hand on Conan’s shoulder, saying, “Come back to the smithy, son. Until the warriors march against the Aquilonians, we will be busier than we ever have.”
“Yes, Father.” Conan nodded. “Swords and spears and axes, the way you said, and helms, and mailshirts—”
“Helms, aye,” said Mordec. “A helm can be forged of two pieces of iron and riveted up the center. But a byrnie is a different business. Making any mail is slow, and making good mail is slower. Each ring must be shaped, and joined to its neighbors, and riveted so it cannot slip its place. In the time I would need to finish one coat of mail, I cold do so many other things, making the armor would not be worth my while. Would it were otherwise, but—” The blacksmith shrugged.
When they walked into the smithy, they found Conan’s mother standing by the forge. Conan exclaimed in surprise; she seldom left her bed these days. Mordec might have been rooted in the doorway. Conan started toward Verina to help her back to the bedchamber. She held up a bony hand. “Wait,” she said. “Tell me more of the Aquilonians. I heard the shouting in the street, but I could not make out the words.”
“They have come into our country,” said Mordec.
Verina’s mouth narrowed. So did her eyes. “You will fight them.” It was no question; she might have been stating a law of nature.
“We will all fight them: everyone from Duthil, everyone from the surrounding villages, everyone who hears the news and can come against them with a weapon to hand,” said Mordec. Conan nodded, but his father paid him no heed.
His mother’s long illness might have stolen her bodily vigor, but not that of her spirit. Her eyes flamed hotter than the fire inside the forge. “Good,” she said. “Slay them all, save for one you let live to flee back over the border to bring his folk word of their kinsmen’s ruin.”
Conan smacked a fist into the callused palm of his other hand. “By Crom, we will!”
Mordec chuckled grimly. “The rooks and ravens will feast soon enough, Verina. You would have watched them glut themselves on another field twelve years gone by, were you not busy birthing this one here.” He pointed to Conan.
“Women fight their battles, too, tho
ugh men know it not,” said Verina. Then she began to cough again; she had been fighting that battle for years, and would not win it. But she mastered the fit, even though, while it went on, she swayed on her feet.
“Here, Mother, go back and rest,” said Conan. “The battle ahead is one for men.”
He helped Verina to the bedchamber and helped her ease herself down into the bed. “Thank you, my son,” she whispered. “You are a good boy.”
Conan, just then, was not thinking of being a good boy. Visions of blood and slaughter filled his head, of clashing swords and cloven flesh and spouting blood, of foes in flight before him, of black birds fluttering down to feast on bloated bodies, of battles and of heroes, and of men uncounted crying out his name.
Granth son of Biemur swung an axe—not at some foeman’s neck but at the trunk of a spruce. The blade bit. A chunk of pale wood came free when he pulled out the axehead. He paused in the work for a moment, leaning on the longhandled axe and scowling down at his blistered palms. “If I’d wanted to be a carpenter, I could have gone to work for my uncle,” he grumbled.
His cousin Vulth was attacking a pine not far away. “You go in for the soldier’s trade, you learn a bit of all the others with it,” he said. He gave the pine a couple of more strokes. It groaned and tottered and fell—in the open space between Vulth and Granth, just where he had planned it. He walked along the length of the trunk, trimming off the big branches with the axe.
And Granth got to work again, too, for he had spied Sergeant Nopel coming their way. Looking busy when the sergeant was around was something all soldiers learned in a hurry—or, if they did not, they soon learned to be sorry. As Vulth’s pine had a moment before, the spruce dropped neatly to the ground. Granth started trimming branches. The spicy scent of spruce sap filled his nostrils.
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