Conan the Guardian Read online

  Prologue

  Argos lies next to Ophir, the oldest of all lands inhabited by men since the oceans swallowed Atlantis. Not so venerable, Argos is yet of respectable antiquity.

  In the days when the dark empire of Acheron seemed about to sweep all before it, men fleeing from Ophir reached a fine harbour on the shore of the Western Sea. Some continued their flight, taking ship beyond settled lands and indeed beyond human ken.

  Others vowed that they had fled far enough. Where swamps and hills made defence easy they built a fortress that commanded the harbour. Unless the hosts of black Acheron learned to swim, that harbour would let the fortress be supplied until time itself ended.

  Generations passed, and Acheron went down into the darkness that it had vowed for others. The fortress now stood above a town with its own walls and towers. It also bore a name of its own—Messantia. (Tales disagree whether the lady Messana was the daughter or the mistress of the first captain of the fortress.)

  After the passing of more generations, there was no more room on the shore. Men settled inland, found good land, forests rich in timber and game, lakes and rivers abounding in fish. Farms grew into villages, and the villages into towns. The whole land from Messantia as far inland as the Ophireans would allow came to bear the name Argos.

  Other realms took form around Argos—Zingara, Ne-media, Koth, and Shem all had common borders with it. None of these had so many merchants, skilled in finding how a craftsman of Asgakin in Shem might pay for ingots of copper dug from the hills of Bossonia.

  In time the merchants became the rulers of Argos. They ruled with a lighter, or at least a steadier, hand than the kings of neighbouring lands. So Argos was no easy prey when monarchs whose greed outstripped their wits sought to seize her.

  Her citizens learned the rudiments of arms from boyhood. Not formidable in the field, behind their own walls they could prevail against anyone except the mighty hosts of Aquilonia. In times of peace, the merchants also paid for the Guardians, men chosen by lot to serve in arms for a term of years. During those years they watched the borders, guarded against bandits in the country and thieves in the towns and cities, and if need be stood in the field against invaders while the citizens rallied.

  Five times Guardians paid with their blood to buy the time the citizens needed. Thrice they fought so well that the invaders did not wait for the rallying of the citizens, but fled with empty hands and bloody wounds alone to show for their efforts.

  When a boy named Conan was born to a blacksmith in distant, windswept Cimmeria, it had been the best part of a century since anyone sought to conquer Argos. No doubt captains in every land moved wooden pieces about on maps, showing how they might bring her down. Perhaps when they were drunk enough, they even believed in their plans.

  It was always the sober men who prevailed, and Argos was left in peace.

  No land grows as old as Argos, however, without secrets growing upon it like moss upon the stump of some ancient oak. And some of these secrets are matters that wise men speak of only in whispers, or not at all.

  When Conan of Cimmeria fled from Turan to become the captain of a Free Company, most of those secrets were known to only one man in Argos. He called himself Lord Skiron, although it was as certain as the sunrise that Skiron was not the name his mother had given him. It was almost as certain that he likewise bore a different face than the one given him by nature.

  Akimos of Peram shivered at the damp chill of the cave and drew his brocaded robe of Khitan silk more closely about his stout frame. It was padded, as was the tunic under it. Both together seemed as thin as a dancing girl’s veils against the damp chill of the cave.

  Skiron had certainly led him far underground, deep into the maze of tunnels that once served as the last refuge for the Messantians. Here no light had ever shone save the flickering glow of torches, fighting an unequal battle against the darkness. Here they might be under the moat, under Lake Hyrxa, under the River Khorotas, or even under the sea itself!

  The last thought made Akimos look uneasily upward, as if the rock ceiling might suddenly crumble and gush green water, crushing and choking him at once.

  A faint cough drew his eyes downward. Skiron stood by the bronze brazier, a faint smile on his thin lips. Beside him knelt the tongueless, deaf slave who bore his apparatus.

  Akimos flushed, as he realized Skiron knew of his employer’s unease. The merchant prince roughened his voice, lest he betray himself more,

  “Well, man, get on with it! Or do you have a spell for the rheumatism and lung fever I will surely carry away from here, if I wait much longer?”

  “It is prudent to address me as Skiron,” the sorcerer said. “If you can shape your lips to the word ‘Lord’ as well, so much the better.”

  He made a swift pass with both hands over the brazier. The thin red smoke curling up from it writhed, thickened, and took form. Akimos saw his own face in the smoke. First it bore a coronet, in no style he recognized but heavy with rubies and emeralds cut in the Vendhyan manner.

  Next he saw himself bare-headed. Then his face took on a look of the most dreadful agony. His mouth was open, and the silent screams of the illusion seemed to echo within the living man’s skull.

  At last Akimos beheld his severed head, picked eyeless by the birds and rotting on the spike thrust up through it from neck to crown.

  He swallowed. “I think—”

  “You thought you might allow yourself impatience, Lord Akimos. I thought it best to show you where that impatience might lead you.”

  “I am grateful for the lesson, Lord Skiron,” Akimos said. He decided that he would gladly call the man King of the Sun and the Moon if it sped today’s work onward!

  But Skiron was passing on to other matters. A peremptory gesture, and the slave handed him two vials of powder the colour of dried blood. Another gesture brought forth more charcoal for the brazier.

  Skiron cast the charcoal onto the coals already glowing in the brazier. Heat rose in waves almost at once. Sweat dripped from Akimos and the slave, but Skiron seemed unaffected, for all that he was the closest to the heat.

  A final gesture by the sorcerer, and the slave brought forth a simple brass box, such as a woman of no great rank might use to hold lip salve and face powder. To see an object so commonplace here amid shadows and sorceries made Akimos want to laugh. The desire passed at once, as Skiron’s ancient eyes turned toward him.

  Could the man read another’s thoughts? There were tales of sorcerers in other lands who could do so, Akimos knew. But all with such powers had been cast out of Argos three generations ago, in the Archonship of Hipparos the Great. And Skiron was an Argossean born—

  The sorcerer’s hands moved with the speed of striking adders. The two vials of crimson powder seemed to leap into the braziers. Akimos held his breath, anticipating vast bellowing clouds of smoke to follow on the heels of the heat.

  Instead, even the thin grey smoke of the charcoal vanished, as if sucked into a huge mouth. Akimos gaped in surprise. Even the smell of the smoke was gone. In its place was a pungency, like half a score of herbs and spices, mingled together, well rotted, then set afire.

  Akimos hastily closed his mouth, and fought the urge to clap his hand over his face.

  Again Skiron’s hands darted toward the brazier. This time they cast the brass box toward the coals. Instead of falling among them, it floated gently downward, like a soap bubble. A hand’s-breadth above the coals, it stopped.

  “For a street entertainment, well and good, Lord Skiron,” Akimos said. He spoke as much to the fear coiling in his bowels as to the sorcerer standing by the brazier, feet apart and long-fingered hands now clasped behind his back.

  Something that was both smile and sneer crossed Skiron
's thin face. He raised both hands over his head, brought them sharply downward, then shouted a single word in no tongue Akimos knew or wished to learn.

  The box changed. First it grew, trebling its size in an eye-blink and going on, until it was the size of a shepherd’s hut. It changed colour, from the yellow-brown of plain brass to crimson, then aquamarine, then an eye-searing emerald hue that seemed to glow, then a midnight blackness that made the cave seem as bright as noonday—

  Akimos tried to look into the blackness, felt both his vision and his soul being drawn out of his body into the box, and squeezed his eyes shut. The nightmare sense of being sucked dry vanished.

  The merchant prince licked dry lips and opened his eyes. The box had returned to its normal colour, but not to its normal size. It still loomed man-high over the brazier, and now strange signs and stranger figures writhed serpent-like across its surface. Akimos fought fear by seeking to put a name to the signs and figures, with indifferent success.

  It took more than recognizing a curse in Old Kothian to ease his fear of what Skiron had unleashed here. What Skiron had unleashed at his bidding....

  The last signs and figures writhed off the box, hung in the air for a moment, then vanished. As they did, Skiron cried out again, this time uttering no words but only a hideous mewling sound like a cat in mortal agony.

  Before Akimos’ eyes, the box flew open and the lid grew teeth. Teeth that would have dwarfed a lion’s, teeth half as long as Skiron’s arm.

  One of those arms gestured. The box leaped into the air, plunged on to the slave, and clamped those nightmare teeth shut on his neck.

  In the cave was utter silence, the silence of the world beyond the grave. The slave could make no sound, for all that blood trickled from his neck, and Akimos dared make none.

  Skiron waited until Akimos could not even hear his own breathing. Then as if he had been calling a watch dog off a visitor, he walked over to the box and slapped it with the flat of both hands.

  It sprang open, releasing the slave, who collapsed at his master’s feet. Then between one breath and the next the box shrank to its former size, and fell to the slimy floor with a clang.

  Skiron passed both hands over the brazier, drawing forth a cloud of bluish smoke the size of a baby’s head. Holding it as if it were an eggshell, he carried it to the prostrate slave and let it fall on his bloody neck.

  The gashes from the box’s teeth and even the blood on the slave’s skin vanished. The slave opened his eyes, felt his neck, and seemed about to fall senseless again.

  “Up, you fool!” Skiron said. “If I must carry my apparatus myself, the next time I may let you bleed awhile.” As he spoke the words for Akimos’s ears, he also signalled the same message with swift-moving hands.

  The slave leaped to his feet, to douse the brazier and gather the rest of his master’s apparatus into the leather sack on his back. Skiron came to stand before Akimos. In one hand he carried the box.

  ‘ ‘Better illusions than I have ever seen in the street, certainly,” the merchant prince said.

  Skiron’s smile was that of cat to mouse. “Illusion, you who would be greater than any in Argos? Look at this box, as you would at one of your clerk’s ledgers.”

  Akimos looked—and of their own will, his hands began making gestures of aversion. The box still had teeth, and the tip of each tooth gleamed with fresh blood.

  “When do you wish me to begin my work, Akimos?” the sorcerer asked. “And in which House?”

  “Lady Livia first,” Akimos said. “It is a house of girls and old men, weak of spirit or limb or both.”

  “I have not heard that said of Lady Livia,” Skiron said.

  “You earn your gold as a sorcerer, not a counsellor!” Akimos snapped. “I will grant you that Lady Livia is no fool. But what can one girl do when her household is in a panic? What can the wise do, surrounded by fools?”

  Skiron looked to see that his slave was ready to depart, then looked back to the merchant.

  “Akimos, I think you had best hope you will never learn the answer to that question.”

  He turned and strode off after the slave, before Alamos recovered his wits, let alone his tongue.

  Skiron did not give way to laughter until he was far on the way down the tunnels toward his house by Menephranos's Gate. Then he sat down on the damp stone and laughed until his ribs ached as if a mule had kicked him.

  The folly of Akimos, doubting his powers! The horror of the merchant prince, when he saw those powers displayed! And the fate that lay in store for the man, when Skiron no longer needed him.

  That would not be for some time, however. The thought of how much time sobered Skiron. Time for Akimos to subdue half a dozen of his rivals, to become the greatest merchant of Argos. Time for him to have the Archons and the Guardians eating from his hand. Time for him to endow the school for sorcerers that Skiron sought to found. And time for all those promising lads—yes, and lasses—who would come forward, to learn what Skiron would gladly teach.

  Then Skiron and his pupils would bring sorcery back to Argos. Men whose only art was clinking coins together would give way before them. And the sorcerers of Koth who had told Skiron to “go and teach yourself what you can” would be bound to admit that he had done their bidding, and not without effect.

  They would all be dead by then, those men whose dismissal had left scars yet unhealed on Skiron’s soul. But from the shades they would watch him rule Argos, and they would know that they had been wrong.

  Skiron laughed again, softly, and beckoned to his slave. Together they ascended the last fifty paces of the tunnel, to a crack in the rock. The slave passed within the crack, while Skiron turned, raised one clenched fist, and spoke three short words.

  Around the footprints on the floor, the dust danced and swirled. In a moment there was no trace that men had ever passed this way. Darkness swallowed the tunnel, as Skiron vanished into the crack, lantern in hand.

  I

  “Captain! Armed men on the road!”

  Helgios, Captain of the Guardians of House Ossertes, took both his helmet and his feet off the guardroom table. Clapping the gilded helmet onto his balding head, he ventured to the window.

  The sentry had spoken the truth. A motley crowd of men was ambling down the hill toward his end of the Great Khorotas Bridge. They seemed of every race, having in common only ragged clothes, unkempt hair, and steel ready to hand.

  One man stood out from among them, and not only because he was the tallest by half a head. He was broad in proportion across the shoulders, but he moved with the lithe grace of a great cat. Long black hair brushed shoulders clad in a short coat of mail, and a well-used broadsword swung in a leather scabbard at his waist. Helgios’s conviction that he faced bandits wavered.

  That man did not look like a bandit chieftain. But then, neither did the flame-haired wench Karela, and all Ophir had been abuzz with her deeds not long since. A band of free lances, perhaps?

  “Posts!” Helgios shouted.

  He heard the cry pass across the bridge and to either side. The gates at both ends swung down. Archers scrambled up ladders to perches on top of the guardhouses, cursing as splinters tore flesh and clothing. In the shadows below the bridge, a half score of men hastened with oil and tinder, ready to set fire to the wooden midspan of the bridge.

  Helgios had not grown old enough to gain his paunch and lose his hair without some care for his duty. Though all the hosts of Aquilonia might be marching up to the bridge, they would not find Helgios son of Arthrades unfit to defend the Great Bridge.

  It had been no part of Conan of Cimmeria’s plans to approach the borders of Argos in the company of two score men. He was a seasoned soldier, for all that he had yet to see his twenty-fourth year, and no fool as well. It had not escaped his knowledge, that Argos had scant use for bands of free lancers.

  One man, seasoned to arms and also an experienced captain, might have a better chance. With a place in some merchant’s house, he could p
rovide for those of his old company who might come by.

  Some would, he knew. The new rulers of Ophir were cleansing their land of free lances with a ruthless hand. He would see again some of those he had left, that dawn on the slopes of smoking Tor Al’Kiir, where an evil god had gone to his last rest. When Conan saw those men, Conan’s Company would march again, under new colours and doubtless with a share of new faces, but once again a force to be reckoned with.

  Instead, Conan had marched less than two leagues from that grim battleground before he found himself no longer alone. Twin brothers, hardly more than boys, who had served in Blezuis’s Company, joined him. In their eyes Conan saw hunger, fear, and the memory of seeing too many comrades who had survived the civil wars impaled by the command of Iskandrian the Eagle.

  He could not have sent those lads back to face the stake in their bowels any more than he could have struck a woman. Using well-learned and well-remembered skills, he stole a chicken from a farm and gave them their first decent meal in some days. At cock-crow the next morning, they were on the road together, the three of them.

  Four days later, Conan’s Company had seventeen men. Four days after that, it had a score and a half. Two days further on, Conan glowered at them as they devoured venison poached from a royal forest and roasted on a fire of royal trees.

  “Crom! I’d thought to slip away to Argos unseen. Now I’ll stand out like a beard on a eunuch!”

  The men laughed, but sobered quickly as the Cimmerian continued.

  “Now, we’re not three days’ march from the Argossean border. The Eagle’s like as not to have the borderlands swarming with men like fleas on a jackal. So we’ll go on as an oath-bound band of free lances, or not at all. Swear to follow my orders and guard your comrades as you want them to guard you. Swear that, by whatever you believe in, or don’t let me find you here at dawn.”

  It took every god that Conan knew of and a few he did not to finish the oath-binding. But it was done, and only two men were gone when Conan’s Company began its march to the border.