“Five days,” Conan insisted. “A moment less, and Tiridates will keep his pendants.”
Ankar’s eyes dimmed again. “Five days,” he said finally.
“Done.” Conan suppressed a grin. He meant to have those pendants in his hand that very night, but had he told this Ankar that, when he put the pendants in the man’s hands, Ankar would think it nothing out of the ordinary. By negotiating for ten days and settling for five as the absolute minimum, he would be thought a miracle worker when he produced the pendants on the next morn. He had seen each reaction from men before. “There was mention of ten thousand gold pieces, Ankar.”
The swarthy man produced a purse from beneath his robe and slid it halfway across the table. “Twenty now. A hundred more when you tell me your plan. The balance when you hand me the pendants.”
“A small part beforehand for a payment of ten thousand,” Conan grumbled, but inside he was not displeased at all. The twenty alone equalled his largest commission before this, and the rest would be in hand on the morrow.
He reached for the purse. Of a sudden Ankar’s hand darted to cover his atop the gold-filled pouch, and he started. The man’s hand was as cold as a corpse’s.
“Hear me, Conan of Cimmeria,” the dark man hissed. “If you betray me in this, you will pray long your head did in truth adorn a pike.”
Conan tore his hand free from the other’s bony grip. He had to restrain himself from working the hand, for those icy fingers had seemed to drain the warmth from his own. “I have agreed to do this thing,” he said hotly. “I am not so civilized as to break the honor of my word.”
For a moment he thought the hook-nosed man was going to sneer, and knew that if he did he would rip the man’s throat out. Ankar contented himself with a sniff and a nod, though. “See that you remember your honor, Cimmerian.” He rose and glided away before Conan could loose a retort.
Long after the dark man was gone the muscular youth sat scowling. It would serve the fool right if he kept the pendants, once they were in hand. But he had given his word. Still, the decision as to where to gain his wealth had been settled. He upended the pouch, spilling thick, milled-edge roundels of gold, stamped with Tiridates’ head, into his palm, and his black mood was whisked away.
“Abuletes!” he roared. “Wine for everyone!” There would be time eno
ugh for frugality when he had the ten thousand.
The man who called himself Ankar strode out of the Desert, trailed to the very end of the twisting, odoriforous streets by human jackals. They, sensing something of the true nature of the man, never screwed their courage tight enough to come near him. He, in turn, spared them not a glance, for he could bend men’s minds with his eye, drain the life from them with a touch of his hand. His true name was Imhep-Aton, and many who knew him shuddered when they said it.
At the house he had rented in Hafira, one of the better sections of Shadizar, the door was opened by a heavily muscled Shemite, as large as Conan, with a sword on his hip. A trader in rare gems—for as such he was known among the nobles of the city —needed a bodyguard. The Shemite cowered away from the bony necromancer, hastening to close and bolt the door behind him.
Imhep-Aton hurried into the house, then down, into the basement and the chambers beneath. He had chosen the house for those deep buried rooms. Some works were best done in the bowels of the earth, where no ray of sun ever found its way.
In the anteroom to his private chamber two lush young girls of sixteen summers fell on their knees at his entrance. They were naked but for golden chains at wrist and ankle, waist and neck, and their big, round eyes shone with lust and worshipful adoration. His will was theirs, the fulfillment of his slightest whim the greatest desire of their miserable lives. The spells that kept them so killed in a year or two, and that he found a pity, for it necessitated the constant acquisition of new subjects.
The girls groveled on their faces; he paused before passing into his inner chamber to lay his staff before the door. Instantly the wooden rod transmuted into a hooded viper that coiled and watched with cold, semi-intelligent eyes. Imhep-Aton had no fear of human intruders while his faithful myrmidion watched.
The inner room was barren for a mage’s workchamber—no piles of human bones to stoke unholy fires, no dessicated husks of mummies to be ground into noxious powders—but what little there was permeated the chamber with bone-chilling horror. At either end of a long table, thin, greasy plumes of smoke arose from two black candles, the tallow rendered from the body of a virgin strangled with her mother’s hair and made woman after death by her father. Between them lay a book bound in human skin, a grimoire filled with secrets darker than any outside of Stygia itself and a glass, fluid-filled simulation of a human womb, within which floated the misshapen form of one unborn.
Before the table Imhep-Aton made arcane gestures, muttered incantations known to but a handful human. The homunculus twitched within the pellucid womb. Agony twisted its deformed face as the pitiful jaws creaked painfully open.
“Who calls?”
Despite the gurgling distortion of that hollow cry, there was an imperiousness to it that told Imhep-Aton who spoke across the countless miles from ancient Khemi, in Stygia, through another such monstrosity. Thoth-Amon, master mage of the Black Ring.
“It is I, Imhep-Aton. All is in readiness. Soon Amanar will be cast into the outer dark.”
“Then Amanar still lives. And the One Whose Name May Not Be Spoken yet profanes the honor of Set. Remember your part, and your blame, and your fate, should you fail.”
Sweat dampened Imhep-Aton’s forehead. It had been he who brought Amanar into the Black Ring. He remembered once seeing a renegade priest given to Set in a dark chamber far beneath Khemi, and swallowed bile.
“I will not fail,” he muttered, then forced strength into his words so the homunculus could hear and transmit. “I will not fail. That which I came to secure will be in my hands in five days. Amanar and the One Whose Name May Not Be Spoken will be delivered into the power of Set.”
“That you are given this chance of redemption is not of my will. If you fail … .”
“There will be no failure. An ignorant barbarian thief who knows no more of reality than a gold coin will—”
The horrible, hollow voice from the twisted shape in the glass vessel cut him off. “I care naught for your methods. Set cares naught. Succeed, or pay.”
The grotesque mouth snapped shut, and the homunuculus curled tighter into a fetal ball. The communication was ended.
Imhep-Aton scrubbed damp palms down the front of his purple robe. Some measure of what had been sucked out of him these minutes past, he could regain at the expense of the two girls awaiting his desires. But they knew their place in the scheme of things, if not the brevity of that place. There was little to be gained from such. Not so the thief. The Cimmerian thought himself Imhep-Aton’s equal, if not, from some strange barbarian perspective, his superior. The mere fact that he was alive would remind the mage of this time when he stank with fear-sweat. Once the pendants were safely in hand this Conan would find not gold, but death, as his payment.