Conan The Hero (27 page)

Some distance from the table, standing calm amid the howls and taunts, two warriors conversed: General Abolhassan and the cavalry captain, Omar. The latter was unscathed by the rain of edibles; but the general, using a finely embroidered silk kerchief, carefully mopped pale green liquid from the lapel of his elegant black cape. His mustached lip was pursed in a fastidious, unpleasant expression.

“The vixen Irilya has gone far enough,” he observed icily. “A brilliant fiasco this, most destructive to the emperor’s order; but here ends her usefulness to our plan. The army is now on the brink of revolt and the court is far past caring, as this disgraceful scene shows.” He gestured around the banquet, which had rapidly assumed an orgiastic air of abandon, with some few pairs of drunken revelers rolling in combat or in open lust on the food-littered floor. “In the next stage, Irilya would only pose a danger. Pass the word to have her brought to me.”

Omar smiled understandingly. “You plan to interrogate her—and perhaps celebrate the eve of our coup? I would not mind putting such a lively maid to the question myself!” Abruptly, glancing up and seeing Abolhassan’s dark look, he grew prim-faced. “I will have her sent here as you command. And of course, I will deal with the barbarian.”

“Aye, slay him as publicly as possible. But first, humiliate him further.” Abolhassan’s scowl twisted into a grudging smile at the notion. “That should not be difficult for an expert wag and duellist such as yourself. If he does not show up for the fight, spread the news of his cowardice abroad and leave him to me. In either event it will end Yildiz’s laughable attempt to create a hero.” The general pivoted on Omar, who clicked his heels and nodded a salute. “To tomorrow, then, and mutiny!”

Down filigreed corridors, across jade floors and lapis-lazuli terraces, Conan pursued the fleet-footed Irilya. It had not taken long for her attempted departure to become a chase at full speed. The lower level of the palace’s spacious west wing was laid open for festivity that night, so the red-liveried guards posted along the halls stood stiffly immobile as the two darted past them.

The race was close and fast, with the female’s slender build and lithe, horsy legs challenging Conan’s hard-hewn fitness. The only true advantage he enjoyed was the pursuer’s age-old privilege of seeing the course unfold clearly before him, and of cutting corners to avoid the costly delay of uncertainty.

Yet it was not until both runners sped through a yawning archway, out into a moonlit garden of hedges and geometric ponds, that Conan drew near enough to hear the steady pant of Irilya’s breaths and smell her musky, overheated scent as she ran. His heart surged strong within his chest, and to his senses the night air tasted cool as wine; he knew he could keep up the pace.

He ran with the steady sureness of a leopard on the track of a supple, tender gazelle.

The mazelike garden might serve either as a refuge or a trap. Irilya, hearing her pursuer’s steps thudding near, sought to elude him by making a sudden, sidelong dash down an aisle between rectangular fountains. This created an opportunity Conan was quick to seize: veering swiftly as his prey, he launched himself into air above the corner of the nearer fountain. Completed, this leap cut the last few paces off Irilya’s lead, enabling Conan to catch her shoulder in his extended arm. Predictably, though, it left him little room to stop; so, skidding across the narrow tile apron between the fountains, he plunged into the farther one. His quarry was borne along with him, to fall atop him in a spraying flurry of tangled limbs.

Splashes and curses resounded for a few moments, drawing no particular attention in the deserted garden. The turmoil gradually subsided, giving way to a forlorn, steady dripping. Hunter and hunted faced each other knee-deep and motionless, separated by a single, curving length of steel: a dagger gripped in Irilya’s taut, wet hand.

“Enough, wench; back off!” Conan declared self-righteously. “If I wished to fence with you, why, I have a weapon of my own. But I am a forgiving sort!” The Cimmerian shook his now-turbanless head, sending drops of water scattering from his soggy mane like a wet mongrel shaking itself. “I consider that I have repaid your earlier affront with this dousing—which we both needed, in any case, to wash off the remains of this night’s banquet! Now take that pig-skewer out of my face!”

“I may, barbarian”—Irilya lowered her blade and prepared to give ground, or rather pond, to him—“if you will give more thought to whom you call wench!”

All at once an arc of water sprayed up as Conan’s foot swung wide, sweeping his adversary’s legs from beneath her. Both figures went down in a new flurry of splashes, resolved forcibly this time in a tight clinch. Then a wet impact sounded, and the combatants broke apart. Steel shone once again, making a gleaming hyphen to their sundering.

“Off me, you raping, murdering brigand! Next time the damage will be permanent!” Irilya’s blade flickered meaningfully at waist level.

“All right, by Crom! I only sought a kiss, as honest recompense!” Conan’s voice sounded slightly impaired, and his step faltered a little as he squared off against the maiden. “Methought you were enjoying it too, until you struck me a foul blow!”

“I enjoyed the blow more,” she said, turning away. Unhurriedly she waded to the edge of the pond and climbed out. “I save my kisses for real men, not for the marching, slaughtering minions of General Abolhassan!” Sheathing her dagger and taking her pale hair in handfuls, she wrung and twisted it, letting its moon-silvered brightness pour in long rivulets down to the rippled surface of the pond.

“Abolhassan? I am no friend of his.” Conan bent to splash his tunic with water and slough away the last traces of pudding and chowder. “I have reason to question his loyalty to the realm.”

“Loyalty!” Irilya’s laugh was clear and bell-like. “What is loyalty in Aghrapur? Mere self-promotion! Doubtless you envy Abolhassan, and mean to take his place and become a worse tyrant! I have pled causes before the emperor often enough to know that there is no real difference between power-seeking males… or power-seeking eunuchs, for that matter!”

“When I plead my case, Yildiz will listen.” Conan, having finished his ablutions, was now wringing his shirttails into the fountain. “He would be a fool to ignore a general who appropriates military stores to his own secret uses, and who stages false assassinations in the capital.”

Irilya laughed again. “Tell Yildiz what you will, at your own peril; he and Abolhassan are thick as thieves. But do not pretend for my sake that you are some high-minded reformer!”

Though scornful, the maid could not help being beautiful as she bent to press water out of her skirt with a knife-edged hand. She continued speaking without looking directly at Conan. “You dance to the emperor’s tune, and promote his pet wars; you are part and parcel of a corrupt order soon to be overturned. Your safest chance would be to leave our city—but why do I even bother to tell you this? Good riddance!” Straightening, looking only vaguely disheveled in the crescent moon’s radiance, she strode off along the causeway in the direction of the palace’s soft-lit arches.

“Wait, do not leave!” Conan called, wading after her to the pond’s margin. “I need to hear more about your cause, and of the situation here in Aghrapur.”

“Oh, really?” Irilya did not slow her determined pace. “And why should I pour out secrets to you, my political enemy? Why waste time with you at all?”

“Why?” Conan followed her along the fountain’s edge. “Perhaps because worse enemies wait in the offing.”

“What—you mean, those?” Turning the corner of the fountain walkway, Irilya paused to regard three shadowy figures moving toward them from the direction of the palace. “Why, they are only banquet guests made curious by our struggles—or my friends from court, come to see to my welfare!” She drew breath for a shout. “Hello, sisters, is it you?”

Her cry echoed starkly in the silent courtyard, unanswered. The three dim, turbaned shapes seemed to be moving in concert, having fanned out to cover a wide area of the garden. More menacingly, when Irilya strode boldly across the central plaza toward an empty path skirting more ponds, all three hurried sideward to cut off her route of escape.

“‘Twould seem they are the agents of some enemy of yours,” warned Conan, who had hauled his dripping bulk out of the pool behind her. “But go, confront them if you want; I will back you.”

Whether Irilya had greater mistrust of the three shapes slouching ahead of her or the one hulking behind, she strode forward, staying well clear of Conan. Her aspect was one of boldness, her hand visibly clutching the dagger stuck in the waistband of her skirt. “Here, you three, identify yourselves! And give a lady some protection against this rogue who pursues me.”

Her words were disregarded, coaxing forth no reply; and there was nothing friendly in the way the three mufti-clad men converged on her, two of them reaching to take hold of her arms, the third turning to head off the approaching Cimmerian. “Stay clear,” he murmured gruffly. “This is no business of yours.”

His face wore a surprised look as Conan’s hand shot out and grasped his neck. When, an instant later, the northerner’s other hand rapped a dagger-hilt against his temple, his expression slackened from one of strangulation to one of oblivion, and he dropped senseless to earth.

Irilya was fending off one of the other two men with her dagger; the third, shifting his attention from her to Conan, stiffened before a stroke of the Cimmerian’s malleted fist and toppled over backward. His body splashed into a fountain, where he drifted motionless.

By then, Irilya had the third attacker whimpering from a dagger-slash to his arm; nursing it, he turned and scuttled off toward the palace. Conan started after him—until, looking back, he realized that Irilya was pelting away in the other direction. Cursing, he abandoned the one pursuit and took up the other.

“What, no thanks for me?” he called, drawing near her jouncing shanks and damp, flapping garments. “Where are you bound now?”

“Leave me alone, will you?” she tossed back over her shoulder. When he continued to gain on her, she added, “If you keep company with me, I want no more of your vile attentions. I warn you—try anything, and one of us will die!” Rounding a hedge onto a broad walkway leading to the outer wall, she slowed her pace to swift walk.

“Whatever you may think of Imperial troopers, I am not a wholesale ravisher of women and killer of babes.” Conan drew up beside her, keeping a decorous distance. “Who were those men?”

“I recognized them as palace agents,” she breathed heavily. “I have seen them watching me before, but now things must have come to a more desperate pass. They want me silenced, it seems, and my husband’s rank will no longer protect me.”

“Your husband?” Conan blurted out, his mind suddenly overwhelmed by imponderable complications.

“Nay, he is far from here, with no great concern over me and no lack of foreign women to occupy him.” She patted her damp skirt as she walked, straightening it where it clung to her striding thighs. “But I…! I am now an outlaw, unsafe even in my own manor house, I would venture. Yet I do not care; I welcome it, if it means that the crisis is finally at hand!”

She cut off her speech as they neared the outer gate. Its portals stood wide, flanked by two frozen-faced pairs of guards; these let the couple pass without question. Outside, in the cobbled city street, beggars and indigents loitered; they eyed the departing pair but did not crowd forward to beseech them, whether because of their wet, bedraggled looks or because of Conan’s dangerous size and more dangerous scowl.

When once again they drew clear of listening ears, he spoke. “I seem to have come to the capital at a time of political upheaval.”

Irilya laughed bitterly. “Aye! If this rotten, despised regime lasts another day, ‘twill be by special dispensation of all-seeing Tarim himself. Or herself!” She turned aside, forcing Conan to follow her along a cobbled residential lane that trended uphill, away from the lights of the palace.

“You do not fear the horrors of civil war, then?” Conan pressed her.

“Can it be worse than the horror of civil tyranny? When sharife and satraps impress our young into foreign wars and kidnap innocent subjects off the streets?” Irilya spoke in a practiced way, speeding her steps to keep slightly ahead of Conan. “Noble rank has allowed me and my few friends at court to be the sole voices of protest—until now. Now at last I say, down with the established order! Any change will surely be a change for the better.”

“But you have never seen true anarchy.” Conan gestured to the blank-walled dwellings on either side, lit by moonglow dimly suffused across the hazy sky. “These houses all burned, their tenants beggared or slain, the cry of havoc loose in the town…”

“Nay, Sergeant, we need never fear real anarchy here, except perhaps from such as yourself! Turan is a civilized land, the will of her people alloyed together as one.” Irilya shook her gradually drying hair, spreading it across her shoulders like a mantle of silver threads. “The citizens crave only wise, peaceable rule; their hearts will tell them what to do when the time comes.

“Most of the city garrison is already on our side, so any violence and turmoil will be but temporary, toward a nobler end. Understand: Things must get worse before they can get better!”

“Hmm, I know nothing of that.” Conan shook his head doubtfully, his natural skepticism softened by satisfaction at having drawn this splendid creature into earnest conversation. “Remember, girl, players like Abolhassan do not wager their high-ranking necks for nothing! I would guess that he plans to gain much from any reshuffling, perhaps a throne!”

“But do you not see, the general is discredited, as is Yildiz himself! They cannot win the support of the people—any more than they can win their puny war in Venjipur, which drags on year after year. Their best hope there, the sorcerous power of the Court of Seers, has been thwarted and stalemated; that is open knowledge! Even with the aid of mighty heroes like you”—here her voice skipped on the rough edge of laughter—“they are powerless, and the court and the people know it!”