Conan the Defender Read online

  Then the torrent of people thinned and was gone, and Conan saw that the street they had fled was littered with bodies, few moving. Some had been trampled; others, further away, were lacking arms or heads. And striding down the center of the street was a man in a richly embroidered blue tunic, holding a sword with an odd, wavy blade that was encarmined for its entire length. A rope of spittle drooled from the corner of his mouth.

  Conan put his hand to his sword, then firmly took it away. For gold, he reminded himself, not to avenge strangers on a madman. He turned to move deeper into the shadows.

  At that instant a child broke from a shop directly in front of the madman, a girl no more than eight years old, wailing as she ran on flashing feet. With a roar the madman raised his sword and started after her.

  “Erlik’s Bowels and Bladder!” Conan swore. His broadsword came smoothly from its worn shagreen sheath as he stepped back into the intersection.

  The child ran screaming past without slowing. The madman halted. Up close, despite his rich garb, thinning hair and pouches beneath his eyes gave him the look of a clerk. But those muddy brown eyes were glazed with madness, and the sounds he made were formless grunts. Flies buzzed about the fruit the bravos had scattered.

  At least, Conan thought, the man had some reason left, enough not to run onto another’s blade. “Hold there,” he said. “I’m no running babe or shopkeeper to be hacked down from behind. Why don’t you—”

  Conan thought he heard a hungry, metallic whine. An animal scream broke from the man’s throat, and he rushed forward, sword raised.

  The Cimmerian brought his own blade up to parry, and with stunning speed the wavy sword changed direction. Conan leaped back; the tip of the other’s steel slashed across his belly, slicing tunic and the light chain mail he wore beneath alike as if they were parchment. He moved back another step to gain room for his own attack, but the madman followed swiftly, bloody blade slashing and stabbing with a ferocity beyond belief. Slowly the muscular youth gave ground.

  To his shock he came to him that he was fighting a defensive battle against the slight, almost nondescript man. His every move was to block some thrust instead of to attack. All of his speed and cunning were going into merely staying alive, and already he was bleeding from half a dozen minor wounds. It came to him that he might well die on that spot.

  “By the Lord of the Mound, no!” he shouted. “Crom and steel!” But with the clash of the blades ringing in his ears he was forced back.

  Abruptly Conan’s foot came down on a half-eaten plum, and with a crash he went down, flat on his back, silver-flecked spots dancing before his eyes. Fighting for breath he watched the madman’s wavy blade go back for the thrust that would end his life. But he would not die easily. From his depths he found the strength to roll aside as the other lunged. The bloody blade struck sparks from the paving stones where he had been. Frantically he continued to roll, coming to his feet with his back against a wall. The madman whirled to follow.

  The air was filled with a whir as of angry hornets, and the madman suddenly resembled a feathered pincushion. Conan blinked. The City Guard had arrived at last, a black-cloaked score of archers. They stayed well back, drawing again, for transfixed though he was, the madman still stood. His mouth was a gash emitting a wordless howl of bloodlust, and he hurled his sword at the big Cimmerian.

  Conan’s blade had no more than a hand’s span to travel to deflect the strange blade to clatter in the street. The Guardsmen loosed their arrows once more. Pierced through and through the madman toppled. For a brief moment as he fell, the look of madness faded to be replaced by one of unutterable horror. He hit the pavement dead. Slowly, weapons at the ready, the soldiers closed in on the corpse.

  The big Cimmerian slammed his blade home in its sheath with a disgusted grunt. It was unnecessary even to wipe a speck of blood from it. The only blood shed had been his, and every one of those cuts, insignificant as each was, ached with the shame of it. The one attack he had managed to meet cleanly, the thrown sword, could have been met by a ten years’ girl.

  A Guardsman grabbed the dead man’s shoulder and heaved him over onto his back, splintering half a dozen arrows on the stones of the street.

  “Easy, Tulio,” another growled. “Like as not our pay will be docked for those shafts. Why—”

  “Black Erlik’s Throne!” Tulio gasped. “It’s Lord Melius!”

  The knot of mailed men stepped back, leaving Tulio standing alone over the corpse. It was not well to be too near a dead noble, most especially if you had had a hand in killing him, and no matter what he had done. The King’s Justice could take strange twists where nobles were concerned.

  A livid scar across his broad nose visible beneath the nasal of his helmet, the Guardsmen’s grizzled sergeant spat near the corpse. “There’s naught to be done for it now. Tulio!” That Guardsman suddenly realized he was alone by the body and jumped, his eyes darting frantically. “Put your cloak over the … the noble lord,” the sergeant went on. “Move, man!” Reluctantly Tulio complied. The sergeant told off more men. “Abydius, Crato, Jocor, Naso. Grab his arms and legs. Jump! Or do you want to stay here till the flies eat him?”

  The four men shuffled forward, muttering as they lifted the body. The sergeant started up the street, and the bearers followed as quickly as they were able, the rest of the troop falling in behind. None gave a second look to Conan.

  “Are you slowing that much, Cimmerian?” a gruff voice called.

  Conan spun, his angry retort dying on his lips as he saw the bearded man leaning against a shop front. “I’m still faster than you, Hordo, you old robber of dogs.”

  Nearly as tall as Conan and broader, the bearded man straightened. A rough leather patch covered his left eye, and a scar running from beneath the leather down his cheek pulled that side of his mouth into a permanent sneer, though now the rest of it was bent to a grin. A heavy gold hoop swung from each ear, but if they tempted thieves the well-worn broadsword and dagger at his belt dissuaded them.

  “Mayhap you are, Conan,” he said. “But what are you doing in Nemedia, aside from taking a lesson on bladesmanship from a middle-aged noble? The last I saw of you, you were on your way to Aghrapur to soldier for King Yildiz.”

  Hordo was a friend, but he had not always been so. The first time they met, the one-eyed man and a pack of bandits had pegged Conan out on the Zamoran plains at the orders of Karela, a red-haired woman bandit known as the Red Hawk. Later they had ridden together to the Kezankian Mountains to try for treasure stolen by the sorcerer Amanar. From that they had escaped with naught but their lives. Twice more they had met, each time making a try at wealth, each time failing to gain more than enough for one grand carouse in the nearest fleshpots. Conan had to wonder if once again they would have a chance at gold.

  “I did,” Conan replied, “but I left the service of Turan a year gone and more.”

  “Trouble over a woman, I’ll wager,” Hordo chuckled, “knowing you.”

  Conan shrugged his massive shoulders. He always had trouble over women, it seemed. But then, what man did not?

  “And what woman chased you from Sultanapur, Hordo? When last we parted you sat in your own inn with a plump Turanian wife, swearing never again to smuggle so much as a sweetmeat, nor set foot outside Sultanapur until you were carried out to your funeral pyre.”

  “It was Karela.” The one-eyed man’s voice was low with embarrassment. He tugged at his thick beard. “I could not give up trying to find word of her, and my wife could not cease nagging me to stop. She said I made a spectacle of myself. People talked, she said, laughed behind my back, said I was strange in the head. She would not have it said she married a man lacking all his brains. She would not stop, and I could not, so I said goodbye one day and never looked back.”

  “You still look for Karela?”

  “She is not dead. I’m sure she lives.” He grabbed Conan’s arm, a pathetic urgency in his eyes. “I’ve heard never a whisper, but I’d know if
she was dead. I’d know. Have you heard anything? Anything at all?”

  Hordo’s voice carried anguish. Conan knew that the Red Hawk had indeed survived their expedition into the Kezankians. But to tell Hordo would entail telling how last he saw her —naked and chained in a slave coffle on her way to the auction block. He could explain that he had had but a few coppers in his pouch, not even close to the price of a round-breasted, green-eyed slave in Turan. He could even mention the oath she had made him swear, that he would never lift a hand to save her. She was a woman of pride, Karela was. Or had been. For if Hordo had found no sign of her, it was more than likely the strap had broken her, and that she now danced for the pleasure of a dark-eyed master. And if he told the tale, he might well have to kill his old friend, the man who had always called himself Karela’s faithful hound.

  “The last I saw of her was in the Kezankians,” he said truthfully, “but I’m sure she got out of the mountains alive. No pack of hillmen would have stood a chance against her with a sword in her hand.”

  Hordo nodded, sighing heavily.

  People were venturing back into the street, staring at the bodies that still lay where they had been slain. Here and there a woman fell wailing across a dead husband or child.

  Conan looked around for the sword the madman had been carrying. It lay before an open-fronted shop piled high with colorful bolts of cloth. The proprietor was gone, one of the dead or one of those staring at them. The Cimmerian picked up the sword, wiping the congealing blood from the serpentine blade on a bolt of yellow damask.

  He hefted the weapon, getting the balance of it. The quillons were worked in a silver filigree that spoke of antiquity, and the ricasso was scribed with calligraphy that formed no words he had ever seen before. But whoever had made the weapon, he was a master. It seemed to become an extension of his arm. Nay, an extension of his mind. Still he could not help thinking of those it had just killed. Men. Women. Children. Struck from behind, or however they could be reached, as they fled. Slashed and hacked as they tried to crawl away. The images were vivid in his brain. He could almost smell their fear sweat and the blood.

  He made a disgusted noise in his throat. A sword was a sword, no more. Steel had no guilt. Still, he would not keep it. Take it, yes—a sword was too valuable to be left behind—it would fetch a few silver pieces for his too-light purse.

  “You’re not keeping that?” Hordo sounded surprised. “The blade’s tainted. Women and children.” He spat and made the sign to ward off evil.

  “Not too tainted to sell,” Conan replied. On impulse he swung his fur-trimmed cloak from his shoulders and wrapped it around the sword. Its archaic pattern made it easily recognizable. Perhaps it would not be smart to carry it openly so soon after the death it had brought to Belverus.

  “Are you that short of coin, man? I can let you have a little silver, an you need it.”

  “I’ve enough.” Conan weighed his purse again in his mind. Four days, if he stayed at an inn. Two weeks if he slept in stables. “But how is it you’re rich to the point of handing out silver? Have you taken back to the bandit trade, or is it smuggling again?”

  “Hsst!” Hordo stepped closer, casting his lone eye about to see if any had heard. “Speak softly of smuggling,” he said in a voice meant for the big Cimmerian’s ears alone. “The penalty now is slow impalement, and the crown pays a bounty for information that’d tempt your grandmother.”

  “Then why are you mixed in it?”

  “I didn’t say … .” The one-eyed man threw up his gnarled hands. “Hannuman’s Stones! Yes, I’m in it. Have you no ear or eye that you don’t know the prices in this city? The tariffs are more than the cost of the goods. A smuggler can make a fortune. If he lives.”

  “Maybe you need a partner?” Conan said suggestively.

  Hordo hesitated. “’Tis not as it was in Sultanapur. Every cask of wine or length of silk that misses the King’s Customs is brought in by one ring.”

  “For the whole of Nemedia?” Conan said incredulously.

  “Aye. Been that way for more than two years, so I understand. I’ve only been here a year, myself. They’re tight as a miser’s fist about who they let in, and who they let know what. I get my orders from a man who gets his from somebody I’ve never seen, who likely gets his orders from somebody else.” He shook his heavy head. “I’ll try, but I make no promises.”

  “They can’t be as tight as all that,” Conan protested, “not if you’re one of them after being here no more than a year.”

  Hordo chuckled and rubbed the side of his broad nose with a spatulate finger. “I’m a special case. I was in Koth, in a tavern in Khorshemish, because I’d heard a rumor … well, that’s beside the point. Anyway, a fellow, Hassan, who works the Kothian end of the ring heard me asking questions. He had heard of the Red Hawk, admired her no end. When he found out I’d ridden with her, he offered me a job here in Belverus. I was about to the point of boiling my belt for soup, so I took it. If Hassan was here I could get you in in a fingersnap, but he stays in Koth.”

  “Strange,” Conan mused, “that he wouldn’t keep you there, too, since he admires the Red Hawk so. No matter. You do what you can. I’ll make out.”

  “I’ll try,” Hordo said. He squinted at the sun, already well past its height, and shifted awkwardly. “Listen, there’s something I have to do. The ring, you understand. I’d ask you along so we could swap lies, but they do not look kindly on people they don’t know.”

  “We’ve plenty of time.”

  “Surely. Look you. Meet me at the Sign of the Gored Ox, on the Street of Regrets, just above Hellgate, half a glass or so after sunset.” He laughed and clapped Conan on the shoulder. “We’ll drink our way from one side of this city to the other.”

  “From top to bottom,” Conan agreed.

  As the one-eyed man left, Conan turned, the cloak-wrapped sword beneath his arm, and stopped. An ornate litter, scarlet-curtained, its frame and poles black and gold, stood a little way up the street, the crowd and even the toughs respectful enough to leave a cleared space about it. It was not the litter that arrested him—he had seen others in the streets, carrying fat merchants or sleek noblewomen—but as he had turned the curtain had twitched shut, leaving him with the bare impression of a woman swathed in gray veils till naught but her eyes showed. And he would have sworn, for all the briefness of that glimpse, that those eyes had been looking directly at him. Nay, not looking. Glaring.

  Abruptly the front curtain of the litter moved, and apparently an order was passed, for the bearers set off swiftly up the street, away from the big Cimmerian.

  Conan shook his head as he watched the litter disappear into the throng. ’Twas not a good way to begin in Belverus, imagining things. Aside from Hordo he knew no one. Taking a firmer grip on his cloak-wrapped bundle, he set out to wile away the time until his meeting with Hordo. He would learn what he could of this city wherein he hoped to forge some future for himself.

  II

  The Street of Regrets was the last street above Hellgate. It was the street where people hung on by their fingernails to keep from sliding down into the cauldron of the slum, people who knew despairingly that even if they managed to stay that one street above for their lives, their children would sink into the morass. A few had crawled there from Hellgate, stopping once they were safe above Crop-ear Alley, afraid to go further into a city they did not understand, ignoring the stench that told them how little distance they had come whenever the wind blew from the south. Those who truly escaped Hellgate did not stop on the Street of Regrets, not even for a day or an hour. But they were fewest of the few.

  On such a street all folk desire to forget what lies ahead at the next turning, the next dawning, what lies behind on a thousand nights past. The Street of Regrets was a frantic, frenetic carnival. Corner musicians with lutes and zithers and flutes sent out frenzied music to compete with the laughter that filled the air, laughter raucous, drunken, hysterical, forced. Jugglers with balls and rin
gs, clubs and flashing knives worked their art for the strumpets that strolled the street, half naked in brief silks, burnished brass bangles and stilted sandals, flaunting their wares for whoever had a coin. Their most lascivious wriggles and flagrant self-caresses, however, were offered to those well-dressed oglers from the Upper Town, standing out in the motley crowd as if they bore signs, come to witness what they thought was the depths of Hellgate depravity. And over it all floated the laughter.

  The Sign of the Gored Ox was what Conan expected on such a street. At one end of a common room that reeked of stale wine was a small platform where three plumply rounded women in sheer yellow silk gyrated their hips and breasts to the sybaritic flutes. They were largely ignored by the men at the crowded tables, intent on drink or cards or dice. A brassy-haired trull, one strip of dark blue silk wrapped around and around her body in such a way as to leave much plump flesh bare, maintained a fixed smile as a fat Corinthian in striped robes stroked her as if attempting to calculate her price by the pound.

  Another prostitute, her hair an impossible red, eyed the breadth of Conan’s shoulders and adjusted the gilded halter that supported her large round breasts. She swayed toward him, wetting her full lips suggestively, then stopped with a disappointed frown when he shook his head. He could see Hordo nowhere in the drunken mass; there would be time to find women when they were together.

  There was one woman in the tavern who stood out from the rest. Seated alone against the wall, her winecup untouched in front of her, she seemed to be the only one there watching the dancers. Long black hair swirled below her shoulders, and large, hazel eyes and bee-stung lips gave her a beauty that outshone any of the doxies by far. Yet she was not of the sisterhood of the night. That much was certain from the simple robe of white cotton that covered her from neck to ankles. It was as out of place as she, that robe, not gaudy or revealing enough for a denizen of the Street of Regrets, lacking the ornate embroideries and rich fabrics of the women of the Upper Town who came to sample wickedness by sweating beneath one who might be a murderer or worse.