Conan: The Road of Kings Read online

  PROLOGUE

  Frozen stillness, and diamond-bright steel.

  Two swords shimmered in the smoky light, ringed by a faceless circle of eyes no less pitiless and bright. A shiver of motion, and the blades clashed together-shattering the stillness with‘ the clangour of angry-steel. Then, explosive grunts and gusts of breath, wrenched from the sweaty throats of the two combatants. A hoarse rush of breath and subdued murmur from the circle of watchers; faceless eyes glinted with excitement. Then blade again confronted blade: death balanced on striking steel; patient, remorseless.

  The two men who fought here shared little in common other than the deadly skill with which each wielded his blade.

  One, who was increasingly on the aggressive, was clearly the older man, and his dexterous swordplay indicated that the long, straight Zingaran blade was no stranger to his fist. Bars of gray highlighted his smooth black hair and closely trimmed beard, even as his handsome face was streaked by a few straight dueling scars. The scars were thin and faded, for it had been many years since an opponent’s blade had touched this face. Burgundy trunk hose and velvet; doublet of finest quality set of a lean figure of compact muscle and confident poise. Emblazoned upon his right sleeve was a black eagle-the insignia of Korst’s Strikers, the elite regiment of the Zingaran army—and beneath that, the twin gold stars of a captain.

  The other was a younger man—probably of no more than half the captain’s forty-odd years. Withal, he parried his opponent’s sword with a studied skill that was more of the veteran swordsman than the freckless youth. He was somewhat taller than the older man’s six feet of height, and considerably heavier of build. Stripped to the waist, his powerful shoulders and broad chest showed a deep tan, its evenness flawed now and again by lines of scar—hallmarks of the battles and scrapes that had schooled his sword-arm. A sweaty mane of black hair whipped about his cleanshaven face as he fought; blue eyes smoldered angrily from his rough-hewn features. He wore the leather trousers of a northern barbarian, and his huge fist seemed better suited to a heavy broad-sword than to the thin, double-edged Zingaran hand-and-a-half sword.

  They stood within a circle of soldiers, tightly compressed to watch this duel. The majority of the onlookers wore the burgundy and gold colors of the Royal Zingaran Army, as well as the eagle insignia of Korst’s Strikers. Shouldered together with them were men of other regiments, along with a scattering of warriors in mismatched and nondescript gear—soldiers of Zingara’s mercenary companies, as was the youth. About them arose the shadowy enclosure of a military barracks-—cots and equipment shoved back against the walls to make room.

  Tense faces were strained upon the combatants; knowing eyes missed nothing of the swordplay. Earlier the barracks had resounded with cheers and shouts, with the frantic exchange of wagers and curses. But that was before the two duelists had unleashed a heart-stopping display of slash and thrust, parry and counterthrust. Now the excitement was too intense for vocal expression. Sharing the tension of the duel, the onlookers hung to each breath and waited—even as the two combatants drew upon their limits of endurance and watched for the other to make his one fatal mistake.

  Both of the bastard dueling swords had lately tasted blood. A shallow gash of no consequence leaked across the older man’s forearm, where the other‘s blade had glanced from his cross guard in a blow that all but tore the hilt from his grasp. But the youth bled from a pair of slashes along his left side, and a deeper wound below his shoulder seemed to have crippled his left arm—stigmata of three deadly thrusts that would have pierced his heart had his reflexes been a fraction of a second slower. Perhaps this leeching flow of blood prompted the thin smile and flared nostrils of the older man, as he pressed confidently for the The youth did not smile, and the wrath in his eyes blazed without hint of the pain and fatigue he must feel.

  Again their blades darted, engaged, broke apart. Not pausing in his attack, the captain struck again, even as their swords disengaged—letting the impetus of their exchange drive his blade down and around the other’s guard, stabbing deep into the thick muscles of his thigh.

  The youth grunted in agony, lunging backward from the blow. His leg buckled under him. He

  staggered, barely holding himself erect. His desperate counterthrust was clumsy and without strength.

  It was the final moment of the long duel. The circle of eyes burned with breathless concentration. Savouring the split-second of their absolute attention, the officer chose to dispatch his crippled opponent with the blinding thrust to the heart that was his trademark.

  The youth had no thought of good form. From his half-crouch, he slashed upward—gripping the long hilt with the fingers of his wounded left arm for added strength. The end of the blade caught the older man in his crotch and continued upward. Poised to deliver his coup de maitre, the captain was flung back in a welter of spilling entrails and burst lung.

  A long gasp of disbelief, then a confused outburst of exclamations.

  A man with glazing eyes stared up at them from the barracks floor. A youth with smoldering eyes, glared back at them, as he slumped from the weight of his wounds.

  For a heartbeat the tableau held.

  Then the man on the floor shuddered in a final spasm—his death rattle drowned out in a sudden tumult of excited shouts and curses, rumble of jostled bodies and clink of coins. The youth put the bloody point of his sword to the floor, leaning hard against its hilt. Bright blood gushed from his thigh, but he made no outcry other than a hoarse gulping for breath.

  He swayed on his feet; knuckles white upon swordhilt—as his strength drained from him. A pair of fellow mercenaries—almoners bursting with the coins they had just won—rushed forward to give him their shoulders. The youth’s eyes blazed wildly—the battle-lust was still in his heart—then subsided as he recognized his comrades. He sagged against them, as a third soldier produced a strip of cloth bandage and worked to staunch the flow of blood from his thigh.

  The uproar abruptly shivered to a hush. Soldiers hastily settled their wagers, anxiously sidled toward the doorways. A low murmur passed through the barracks:

  “General Korst!”

  The youth lifted his head and glowered truculently as the circle broke apart.

  Followed by a number of his officers, the supreme commander of the Royal Zingaran Army, General Korst himself, swept into the barracks. A short, stocky man, Korst’s blue-black hair and swarthy complexion betokened the admixture of Shemite blood with that of his Zingaran father. That the son of a camp whore and an unknown Zingaran soldier should rise to generalship of class-conscious Zingara’s army was a significant tribute to Korst’s abilities.

  The general’s eyes widened, then narrowed, as he studied the disemboweled corpse. He stroked his carefully trimmed beard thoughtfully.

  “Ah, Captain Rinnoval Then did you at last cross steel with one who was more than your match? His was a stroke to the heart, it is true, but you’re dead enough for all its crudeness.”

  He looked toward the wounded youth. Under the general’s impassive gaze, those who held him

  sought to draw back. The youth swayed on his feet, as his friends melted away, but he managed to hold himself erect and to return the stare.

  “Yours was the blade that gutted Captain Rinnova?”

  “I killed him, true enough,” the other growled in answer. “And in a fair fight. Ask any man here.”

  ’General Korst nodded. “It is hard to believe that any man could cross blades with Captain Rinnova and live to boast of it—let alone some barbarian mercenary. But the evidence is plain for all to see, as you have said. What is your name?”

  “Conan.”

  “From the lands of the northern barbarians, I judge?�
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  “I am a Cimmerian.”

  “How are his wounds?” This to Conan’s comrades, who were nervously seeking to slip into the

  background.

  “Those cuts on his ribs ares hallow; his arm is cleanly pierced. He’s lost much blood from the wound in his thigh, but the blade missed the great artery there.”

  “Good.” General Korst nodded to his men. “Then he’ll live to hang. Whatever your quarrel, Conan of Cimmeria, a mercenary soldier is not permitted to butcher an officer of the Royal Zingaran Army.”

  Conan roared, staggered toward Korst—as his Strikers leaped between.

  He managed to kill two of them—before the pack closed over him, clubbed him to unconsciousness.

  “A waste of a good man,” Korst pronounced, as they dragged Conan away. “But these barbarians must be taught discipline.”

  I

  THE DANCING FLOOR

  The morning sun was bright--too bright for eyes that had looked upon no light save the torches of the prison guards for days unnumbered. A gray morning would have been kinder, but this was not a morning for kindness. The line of condemned prisoners pressed their eyes shut against the painful glare, stumbled blindly forward to the waiting scaffold. By the time they had crossed the prison yard, they were able to see the dangling nooses and the exuberant mob of onlookers.

  Conan squinted toward the gibbet, a black line against the climbing sun, seven coils of hemp trailing like sooty cobweb from the span overhead. To his nostrils came the acrid sweetness of carrion-wafted from the rotting corpses of last week’s condemned criminals, left to swing above the scaffold until seven new partners were brought to dance with death. It melded with the sweaty stench of the crowd’s anticipation.

  A halbard spike dug into his back. “Get on there, raven-bait!” growled one of the prison guards.

  Conan snarled an obscenity and shuffled forward. Unkempt and unshaven, hobbled by the heavy chains that shackled his wrists and ankles, the Cimmerian nonetheless walked without a limp. A month in Kordava’s dungeons had seen his wounds slowly heal, although that was due far more to his savage vitality than to any ministrations of his warders. That same vitality had brought him through the degradation of his captivity with spirit unbroken, head unbowed.

  Like a captured wild thing, Conan had licked his wounds and awaited his chance to break free of his cage. Stealthily, so that the rasp should not alert his guards, he had crouched throughout the night hours rubbing the links of his fetters one against the other, scraping them against the stone, striving to break free of the heavy chains that shackled hand and foot. Once free of his chains, there remained the iron bars of his cell, the vigilant guards beyond—these must be dealt with in their time. Conan only asked for a chance to win free, to avenge himself upon his captors-any chance, however slim. That chance had never come. Now, even as he and his fellow prisoners walked to the gibbet, the Cimmerian’s angry gaze studied the crowded square, while his brain searched desperately for some last instant means to cheat the hangman.

  The prison yard—the Dancing Floor, they called it here in Kordava—was rank with jostling humanity on this, the morning of market day. Each week they streamed into Zingara’s capital city from the outlying towns and villages, to fill the marketplace with their wares and their cries: produce from the inland farms, merchandise from the city guilds, fish and exotic goods from the Western Ocean. What better way to add zest to a day of bargaining than the free spectacle of an execution on the Dancing Floor?

  An undulating sea of massed bodies, peering faces-all eyes turned upon the seven doomed men who trudged through their press and toward the scaffold. Seven men, seemingly no different from the hundreds of their fellows who had come to enjoy their final moments. Seven to dance for them. The crowd was not hostile, but neither was it sympathetic. Its mood was one of expectancy, of impatience for the show to begin. The beast would not lift its thousand arms to wrest the condemned from their fate; if at all, it would howl in anger should its anticipated enjoyment be denied it.

  Moving throughout the milling throng, peddlers and mountebanks hawked their wares. Less open in their larceny, thieves and cutpurses prowled like wary jackals. Portable braziers spat fumes from grilling skewers of meat and vegetables-reminding Conan that he had not eaten since the day before.

  “We don’t waste good food on gallowsbait!” a warder had sneered, as they came to his cell this

  morning. It had cost the guard a broken tooth when they unshackled Conan from the wall.

  Halbard butts had quickly drubbed the Cimmerian to unconsciousness. “For that,” promised the

  warder, spitting bloody froth into Conan’s battered face, “you get to wait to the last! You’ll watch these other rats kick on their strings, and then we’ll hoist you nice and easy, so you can show us all the new steps you’ll have learned from your fellows.”

  It was, withal, a certain victory for the Cimmerian. The other prisoners had their manacles removed, their wrists pulled behind their backs and tied with rope. Wary of the powerful barbarian’s berserk frenzy, the guards were loath to risk removing his prison shackles, so that Conan walked to the gallows in chains.

  With a barbarian’s stoicism, Conan resigned himself to die with dignity—if die he must. He would march to the scaffold, if the alternative was to be dragged. That his belly growled from hunger pains as he walked to his death was but one final insult after many before it, and the Cimmerian swore vengeance in that hour when most men would be begging their gods for forgiveness and mercy.

  The stench of carrion was heavier now. Stiffly sprawled before the scaffold, seven corpses stared heavenward through eyeless sockets. Rooks had feasted well upon their features, obliterating recognition. Their week-long sentence as object lesson to fellow miscreants now fulfilled, the dead had been lowered from their nooses, laid out for a last farewell to the crowd. Laborers dragged them one by one to a small anvil, where the leg shackles of the dead were struck off. They had no further need for them, and there were others whose steps wanted confining.

  By royal concession, mountebauks peddled charms and souvenirs from the hanged men. A pack of children struggled and giggled about the scaffold, pressing closer for a better look.

  “Lock of dead man’s hair for you, lasses?” teased a hawker, yanking a tuft loose and dangling it

  before them. “It’ll keep the lads following after you, if you pin it over your heart!”

  With shrill laughter the children dashed away, began to play a darting game of tag beneath the

  scaffold timbers.

  “Dead man’s hand! Who?ll be first to buy?” A stroke of the axe, and the trophy came free. “Hand of a hanged murderer!” the mountebank shouted, holding the decaying fist on high. “Corpse-fat for candles! Do you seek hidden treasure? Here’s the charm you’ll need! Who will pay me silver to find gold?”

  “Seed of a dead man!” cried another, brandishing a small phial. “The death-spend of Vulosis, the famous murderer-rapist! Men! The vitality of a young stallion is yours! Ladies! Restore your man to the ardour of a young bull! Hanged man’s seed! Who will buy?”

  Through it all, the key players of the morning’s spectacle slowly made their way.

  Before the halbards of the guards, the mob broke apart to let them pass. A thousand faces craned and peered, examining the seven players in their costumes of rags and chains.

  Parents lifted children to their shoulders for a better view. Shoulders, elbows and knees propelled latecomers through the press. They fed on skewers of . meat and lumps of bread and fists of fruit. Their arms hugged their bundles and purses and baskets to their bodies. As the condemned men reached the scaffold, the frolicking band of children yelled and danced about them. Peddlers lost interest in their frenetic hawking, turned to watch the sordid drama they had seen performed so many times before.

  Execution Charms and Souvenirs

  Climbing the steps to the scaffold was no easy task with leg-irons, but the guards plied t
heir halbards with a will to urge them upward. The man in front of Conan stumbled—unable to catch himself with his hands tied behind his back. A halbard spike goaded him as he struggled to rise. Conan, his hands manacled before him, reached out to the limit of the chain that connected wrist and leg-irons, caught the back of his jerkin and hauled the smaller man to his feet. Ignoring the abuse of the guards and the laughter of the crowd, they took their places beneath the gallows.

  “Thanks,” muttered his companion automatically. He seemed no more than Conan’s age—a slender youth with aristocratic features and feverish dark eyes.

  “Little cause for thanks,” the Cimmerian pointed out.

  “One likes to do these things with a certain dignity,” returned the other, echoing Conan’s thoughts. He nodded distastefully toward some of those near the head of their line: one man had fainted and had to be supported by the guards; another was pleading tearfully for mercy to the jeering mob.

  “Let those who will continue our battle see that we do not tremble to give our life to our cause,” he concluded. Conan wondered to whom these brave words were directed, decided the youth was but speaking to himself.

  They stood upon a long scaffold, the faces of the crowd on a level below their feet. Massive uprights at either end supported a huge overhead beam—more than sturdy enough to bear the weight of seven men. There was no trap to the scaffold. Instead, each waiting noose was passed through an overhead iron hook, with the other end of the rope secured to a windlass and rachet apparatus. No sudden drop and quick death from a broken neck here. This was the Dancing Floor, where the recipients of Zingaran Justice were slowly hoisted from the scaffold and left to writhe and kick until strangled.

  Passing along the row of the condemned, a warder solemnly hung a placard about the neck of each man. Pausing before Conan, he took care to stand clear of the Cimmerian’s manacled hands.

  Conan scowled down at the placard that lay upon his broad chest. He tried to spell out the inverted letters, but his ability to read Zingaran was dubious under any circumstances. “What does it say?” he asked his companion.