The Conan Chronology

by J. R. Karlsson

  And yet from those wounds he slowly healed. He made himself heal. For her. Had he allowed himself to succumb to those wounds, he would never have been the man worthy of being her consort.

  As he rode inland, his thoughts turned away from things nautical and the memories associated with them. He searched his mind and heart for the true reason he was riding eastward, chasing a story spun by a fat man in the faint hopes of saving his life. He had spoken to Artus truly about wanting to finish Khalar Zym. He thought Artus almost believed him, too. Had he been riding with other men, he likely would not have thought any further about the matter, and would have convinced himself that concluding unfinished business was his only reason to pursue Khalar Zym.

  As comforting as that might have been, Conan could not let himself off so easily. He knew in his gut that revenge was not what he sought. Connacht’s lesson in futility had never left him. And stories of the continuous raids and counterraids that both Cimmeria and Aquilonia perpetrated on each other, or of the sorties that the Vanirmen undertook against the Cimmerians, or of blood feuds elsewhere lasting for generations; all of these reinforced his grandfather’s lesson. While killing Khalar Zym might settle accounts between them, it would doubtlessly leave another thinking he had to seek vengeance against Conan, and so the cycle would perpetuate itself. While Conan feared no man, he did not wish a life of watching for assassins or dueling with anyone who claimed even the faintest of kinship with Khalar Zym.

  He flashed on a memory of Khalar Zym’s daughter. What had been her name? Marca? He cursed himself for being unable to remember, then realised he’d not wanted to remember. She had been odd in ways he’d not seen before, and had seen since only in places where things ancient and remorseless slithered around with foul intent. His skin burned at the memory of her tongue’s rasp, then he laughed aloud.

  'You thought I would be troublesome. By Crom, I pray you are a prophet.'

  He remembered the sword she’d taken, the one he had made with his father. It had seemed huge then, suitable only for his father’s hands. Conan had so wanted to be full grown, so he could accept the blade and wield it to win his destiny.

  He frowned. No, he had wanted his father to grant him the sword. He had no doubt his father loved him and had been proud of him. Corin had looked to a future where Conan would be a great warrior. But he had insisted that his mother, that the both of his parents, had wanted more for him than a life of fire and blood. A life of peace, perhaps? A life much like Corin’s?

  The youth Conan had been would have rejected that idea, for his father, while known for his strength and skill at combat, was not the adventurer that Connacht had been. Conan had thrilled to his grandfather’s stories, and his father had none to match them. It was not that he had thought less of his father than of his grandfather, but it was obvious that they were very different kinds of men. They had chosen different paths, and Conan had equated his life of destiny with his grandfather’s adventuring.

  And yet my father had been entrusted with the secret of the mask.

  Suddenly Conan found himself reexamining his life and his memories of his father. Corin had not just wanted to raise a son who could be a great warrior. He had wanted to raise a son who was capable of accepting great responsibility. When Corin had said there was too much fire in him, he meant more than Conan’s immaturity and youthful enthusiasm. He meant that Conan could not yet be entrusted with a secret upon which the fate of the world might hinge.

  The day he had been ready, the day fire and ice mixed in him, the day he proved he had been tempered as had that sword, Corin would have granted it to him. His father would have shared the secret of the mask, a secret so powerful and terrible that it kept a great Cimmerian warrior from following his father’s footsteps. It would have kept Conan there, too, in the Cimmerian village. And my son and his son and so on.

  The tempering Conan had been denied in the mountains of Cimmeria he had gained through his adventures. When Khalar Zym had stolen the mask, Conan could not have understood the nature of the evil it represented. But he had seen things, like the sorcerer Yara, and the horrible excesses that were, for such people, nothing. And while Khalar Zym might have slain Corin simply because he was an impediment to his ambition, Corin had died in the hopes of preventing the deaths of others.

  That distinction opened Conan’s eyes to the things his grandfather had tried to teach him about the futility of revenge. 'Revenge is not part of a warrior’s heritage. It is an unworthy indulgence.' To be a warrior was to be more than a creature of emotion who struck out blindly and singlemindedly at that which irritated him. Conan could seek revenge, or he could be a warrior, but he could not do both.

  And only as a warrior can I be worthy of the heritage my father intended for me. The Cimmerian’s eyes tightened. Khalar Zym had destroyed his past, but that was not the same as destroying his future. Khalar Zym did not have that power. Only Conan could do that to himself, and only if he acted in a self-indulgent way that was truly beneath him.

  Conan brought his horse to the crest of the ridgeline and looked down toward the Red Wastes. A barren land in which twisted black trees sprouted like thorns from the earth, it had not earned its name from the colour of the soil. Men called it the Red Waste because of the blood it had drunk.

  Somewhere out there, Khalar Zym hunted.

  Conan would find him.

  He hoped the land was still thirsty.

  VI

  ALONE IN HER cabin aboard her father’s land ship, Marique knelt naked before a three-paneled mirror. The warm golden light of the swaying oil lamps that hung from the ceiling caressed her alabaster flesh. The woman staring back at her from the mirrors would be judged flawless by any who dared render judgement. Others would declare her perfect, and were she to truly study her reflection, she might agree.

  But those others used mirrors to reveal what was. In them Marique sought what would be. She never had a clear vision. Just as the voices that whispered to her never made their messages distinct or crisp, so the shadows reflected upon her by the future suggested instead of proclaiming, hinted and seduced instead of explaining, and coaxed instead of commanding. She watched, she took it all in, every nuance, letting pleasure and fear mingle within her breast, but never letting them overwhelm her.

  Some of what she saw pleased her. Ghost images matched the arcane tattoos which ran from shoulder to shoulder, up her neck, past her ears, and along her high hairline. She’d only seen bits and pieces of them before, but had tracked them down through endless researches in tomes long thought lost by those who should have known better. She’d drawn the images she wanted and showed a legion of tattooists where to place each individual design, then had her father’s men slay the tattooists so they could never re-create the designs again.

  As she transformed herself to match the spectral visions, her power grew. A smart woman, she realised that she was creating in her own flesh what Acheron’s long-dead priest-kings had done in order to create her father’s obsession. She did not do this out of greed or lust for power. She did not do it to harness the sorcery that would allow her to rival her father. No, she did it because Khalar Zym would need her if his own efforts failed. When she could do for him what the mask could do, he would not longer need it.

  He will need no one but me.

  She smiled at that thought, her nipples stiffening, but her smile did not carry to her further reflection. For a heartbeat a dark line drew itself between her breasts. Marique studied its strength and the way smaller, jagged lines shot out from it. She wondered that she felt no pain, and then reminded herself that the mirrors reflected what might be, not what would be.

  She traced a finger over the shadow and it vanished in the wake of her caress. This pleased her, and her smile did shine in the mirror. She forgot herself for a moment, allowing satisfaction to seize her. She reveled in it, throwing her head back in a silent laugh, then she caught sight of it and turned slowly like a snake coiling.

  The land ship rod
e on the backs of eight elephants and rocked gently as it was carried along. Most assumed that her father had ordered the titanic vehicle built as a gross display of his power. That he had was true, in part. He also did it to fulfil obscure prophecies―of which there were far more than there were stars in sky. She always thought of the elephants as the elephant upon which the world rested, according to countless faiths and creation stories. It meant her father would be the master of this world, and perhaps more.

  Silken curtains covered her cabin’s walls and one had slipped to reveal a prise she had almost forgotten. She’d taken it long ago in a Cimmerian village, from a smith and his half-witted, feral child. She’d not thought of the two in many years, and yet suddenly the taste of the child flooded back to her tongue, salty and sharp. The voices had warned her against it, but she’d licked him in defiance. It had been before she had learned that the voices were not just her mother’s postmortem mumblings.

  Marique rose fluidly and crossed to where the sword hung. Even as her hand approached, before she actually caressed the cool metal, she sensed something. It was almost as if nettles had stung her fingertips. She peered at them to see if her eyes would confirm that explanation. They did not, and when she reached out for the sword again, she encountered no resistance or discomfort.

  She was not so foolishly indulgent as to play a finger along the edge. Crude and savage though the Cimmerians might have been, they took pride in their steel and its manufacture. Though she had not cared for the blade at all, it showed no sign of tarnish or rust. She might have plucked it from the village ruins a day ago, or ripped it newly born, directly from the hands of the swordsmith himself.

  She did not ask herself why she had taken the sword. Her father―if he noticed at all―had not questioned her about it. He hadn’t noticed, of course, since in Cimmeria he had found the piece that completed the Mask of Acheron. At the time she stole the sword, he was basking in the glory of his greatest triumph.

  A triumph that had tarnished quickly, unlike the sword.

  Reconstruction of the mask had been the goal upon which her father had focused for two reasons. First, it had been an obsession he had shared with Maliva, his wife and Marique’s mother. Maliva had brought him knowledge of it through her studies of Acheronian lore. She promised him that the mask, once reconstructed, would provide power beyond imagining, allowing him to raise long-dead legions that would again establish the reign of Acheron upon the earth.

  But barbarians akin to those who had created the sword had shattered Acheron and its mask. They had caused the name Acheron to be struck from every monument, for Acheronian cities to be buried and their libraries burned. Barbarians who had no use for sorcery did their utmost to make certain no one else could use it. Had they pursued that course for another year or decade, perhaps they would have succeeded.

  Maliva had collected many volumes of Acheronian lore, copies of which travelled in the land ship’s hold, while the originals resided at Khor Kalba. Had her mother been less of a dreamer and more diligent a student, she would have understood that gathering the pieces of the mask were not enough. If she did know that, she never communicated it to Khalar Zym because, after Maliva had been burned as an Acheronian witch, her husband had vowed to complete the mask and raise her from the dead.

  Marique still recalled the depths of her father’s depression when fitting the last piece into the mask had failed to activate it. She had already begun to study the books her mother had so treasured, and was the first to confirm the necessity of a blood infusion to waken the magick, not just, as her mother had believed, enhance it. She’d told her father, and villages were drained dry in the hopes that bathing the mask in gallons of blood would revivify it. He preferentially sought those of Acheronian blood, promising to raise them when he was a god, but it was to no avail.

  When that effort failed, her father sat slumped in his throne, holding the mask in both hands, staring at it, asking why it mocked him. Marique, who watched from the shadows, first heard the whispers then. She furthered her studies, an innocent drinking in knowledge so foul it had soured souls which were already as black as night, and driven mad those who had only heard rumours of such things. She pursued clues found in scrolls and by fitting together shattered tablets. And finally she uncovered the truth.

  Yes, blood would reactivate the mask, but it had to be specifically from the line of the last priest-king to wear the mask and wield its fearsome power. This knowledge seemed to have little effect on her father at first, but over the weeks he returned to himself. He dismissed his armies, promising to recall them when the portents were propitious, and began his long search for the scion of the last Acheronian priest-king.

  'Marique. I need you! They have failed me again!'

  The urgency in her father’s voice sped her heart. She’d have run immediately to him, naked though she was, but it would not do for her to appear so before subordinates. She sat and drew on scarlet boots that covered her to her knees. Then she selected a hooded cloak and closed the clasp at her throat. Its silk lining felt cool against her flesh, while the scarlet wool wrapped her in heavy warmth.

  She tucked a short dagger into the top of the right boot and prepared to leave her cabin. She glanced again in the mirror and admired herself, then caught a distorted reflection in the Cimmerian blade. She took it from the wall, holding it as she might a short staff, and made her way onto the land ship’s main deck.

  Her father, tall and terrible, towered over two half-naked men who groveled before him. Bloodstains marked where they had clawed at the deck, and a pale rivulet of urine betrayed the true depth of one’s terror.

  Khalar Zym turned toward his daughter, his dark eyes flashing. 'They say they cannot find her. They claimed to be the best, but they fail me.'

  Marique moved to her father’s side and slipped a hand from within the cloak to lay it on his sword arm. If any glimpsed her nakedness within the shadows, none gave sign, not even the mishappen wretch Remo, who had watched her for years when he believed he was unwatched.

  'It is not their fault, Father.' She smiled carefully. 'We know the trail is cold, two decades cold.'

  'But they have come this far.'

  'And now there are elements which work against them.' She turned and made for the gangway. 'Remo, bring them.'

  Her father’s subordinate grumbled, but did as he was bidden. Guards hastened down the gangway ahead of Marique and the elephant trainers calmed beasts as heavy, booted feet thundered down the wooden planking. Marique made certain to step lightly and to move carefully so it could seem as if all she did was float. Her father, stern and strong, trailed behind her but stopped halfway down, where the gangway twisted back. Arms folded tight to his chest, he would watch from there, so Marique made certain to position herself to great advantage.

  Even before she reached the ground, she could feel the magick. She had long since learned all her mother had known, and had studied it all far more carefully than Maliva had been capable of doing. She knew that was a harsh assessment, but she had read her mother’s journals and seen her errors in translation and transcription. Had her mother not been so careless, she would have found other ways to grant Khalar Zym the power he sought, but instead her mistakes had doomed his quest.

  Marique stabbed the Cimmerian sword into the earth and rested a hand on it. It would anchor her. Though she sensed no immediate malice in the enchantments blanketing the Red Wastes, many were the sorcerers who concealed the lethal in the benign, and many more were the foolish who died because they failed to take precautions. The Cimmerian steel would not ward her per se, but could supply an element to her magick which she doubted another sorcerer would have anticipated.

  She crouched, allowing the cloak to puddle around her. Cool air rushed in, exciting her flesh. She slowly reached out with her right hand, fingers splayed, then tucked them in toward her palm as if plucking the warp and weft of some arcane weaving. She felt vibrations, and the voices began to whisper in her head. />
  As always, they remained annoyingly vague, but none hissed a warning about immediate danger. Marique did not take this as a sign that she was safe, but more as a sign of the enchantment’s beguiling nature. That it could fool the voices was proof of its strength, and that others failed to notice it revealed its subtlety.

  She clutched the sword’s pommel with her left hand. 'She has protectors, Father, powerful patrons who deny her to you.'

  'I am not to be defied, Marique.' Khalar Zym raised his face to the heavens. 'Your mother has waited too long for her resurrection. We can afford no further delays.'

  'And you shall have none, Father.'

  Again Marique played her fingers through the air and encountered more strands of eldritch energy. Some swirled and eddied, like currents in a stream that trapped debris in stagnating pools. These numbered in the dozens, and were the most powerful. She found them rather attractive. They beckoned her on like a melody, to spin her about and out and away, without her ever realizing she had not gone in the direction she desired.

  But there were other strands, tiny strands, more fragile than a whisper, as fleeting as a dream upon wakening, and she found them, too. They shied away from her, recoiled, became dead at her touch. The sharp scent of decay filled her head.

  Only her grip on the sword prevented her from falling over, nauseous and dizzy. She steadied herself, then smiled. If this is the game you wish to play. 'We have them, Father.'

  'Yes, child?'

  'These patrons, they are fools. They help the one you seek, and they help others. Had they barred the way to all, we should have been reduced to a pack of curs howling beyond their walls.' Marique reached down and gathered a handful of dust. 'Because they allow others to seek them, we may find them.'

  She straightened up and spat into her hand. She mixed the dust and spittle into a muddy paste, then shot a glance at Remo. 'Bring the scouts.'