“Conan is dead as well, Great Lord.”
Jhandar nodded slowly, feeling a strange relief. This Conan had been but a straw in the wind after all, catching the eye as it flashed by, yet unimportant. Suitai’s smile had faded at the mention of the barbarian, no doubt because Che Fan had actually slain the fellow. At times he thought that Suitai’s thirst for blood would eventually prove a liability. Now he had no time for such petty worries.
“The crew of the galley was disposed of as I commanded, Suitai? I wish no links between myself and Hyrkania.” Not until he was able to control that region the shamans had blasted, thus containing whatever might be of danger to him within. Not until his power was secure in Turan.
The tall Khitan hesitated. “The galley was damaged, Great Lord, and could not pu
t to sea. I left its crew waiting for me. Without doubt the coastal tribes have attended to them by now. Instead I hired the vessel the barbarian used, and came ashore well north of the city.”
“And the crew of this ship?”
“Dead, Great Lord. I slew them, and guided the ship to the beach myself.” An unreadable expression flickered across the assassin’s normally impassive face, and Jhandar eyed him sharply. Suitai shifted uneasily beneath that gaze, then went on slowly. “The captain, Great Lord, a fat man called Muktar, leaped into the sea, surely to drown. I have no doubt of it.”
“You have no doubt of a great many things, Suitai.” Jhandar’s voice was silky, yet dripped venom like a scorpion’s tail.
Sweat appeared on Suitai’s brow. The mage had a deadly lack of patience with those who did not perform exactly as he commanded. Hurriedly the Khitan bent to the large sack at his feet.
“I brought you this gift, Great Lord.” The lashings of the sack came loose, and he spilled a girl out onto the mosaicked floor, wrists bound to elbows behind her back, legs doubled tightly against her breasts, the thin cords that held her cutting deeply into her naked flesh. She grunted angrily into her gag as she tumbled onto the floor, and attempted to fight her bonds, but only her toes and fingers wriggled. “The girl the barbarian stole from the compound, Great Lord,” Suitai announced with satisfaction.
Jhandar snorted. “Don’t think to make up for your shortcomings. What is one girl more or less to—”
“Why, it’s Esmira,” Davinia broke in.
The necromancer scowled irritably. He had forgotten that she had followed him. “That’s not her name. She is called … .” It took a moment, though he did remember marking the wench for his bed, long ago it seemed. “ …Yasbet. That’s it. Now return to the garden, Davinia. I have matters to discuss here that do not concern you.”
Instead the lithe blonde squatted on her heels by the bound girl, using both hands to twist the struggling wench’s gagged face around for a better look. “I tell you this is the Princess Esmira, Prince Roshmanli’s daughter.”
Jhandar’s mouth was suddenly dry. “Are you certain? The rumors say the princess if cloistered.”
She gave him a withering look that would have elicited instant and painful punishment for anyone else. From her, at this moment, he ignored it. The prince was Yildiz’s closest advisor among the Attendants, of the nine, a man who seduced no woman with a husband and gambled only with his own gold. Yet it was said his daughter was his weakness, that he would do anything to shelter her from the world. For the safety of his Esmira, would Roshmanli send Turan to war? He had had men slain for casting their eyes upon her. If handled carefully, it could be done.
Then his eyes fell on Davinia, smiling smugly as he examined the bound girl, and a new thought came to him.
He pulled the blonde to her feet. “You say you want only to serve me. Do you speak the truth?”
“To you,” she replied slowly, “I speak only truth.”
“Then this night there will be a ceremony. In that ceremony you will plunge a dagger into the heart of this girl.” He gazed deeply into her eyes, searching for hesitation, for vacillation. There was none.
“As my Great Lord commands me,” Davinia said smoothly.
Jhandar felt the urge to throw back his head and laugh wildly. She had taken the first step. Once she had wielded the knife, she would be bound to him more firmly than with iron chains. And by the same stroke he would gain the ninth voice among the King’s Attendants. All of his dreams were taking shape. Empire and the woman. He would have it all.
XXIV
Dark seas rolled beneath the galley’s ram, phosphorescence dancing on her bow wave, as the measured sweep of three score oars drew it on. Ahead in the night the darker mass of the Turanian coast was marked by white-breaking waves glinting beneath the pale, cloud-chased moon.
Echoes of those crashing breakers rolled across the waters to Conan. He stood in the stern of the galley, where he could keep close watch on both captain and steersman. Already they had attempted to take the ship other than as he directed—perhaps into the harbor at Aghrapur, so that he and the rest could be seized as pirates—and only the scanty knowledge he had gained with the smugglers had thus far thwarted them. The rest of the vessel’s crew, sullen and disarmed, worked under the watchful eyes of Akeba, Tamur, and the nomads. Sharak clung to the lines that supported the foremast, and gazed on the heavens, seeking the configurations that would tell their fates that night.
Conan cared not what the stars foretold. Their destinies would be as they would be, for he would not alter what he intended by so much as a hair. “There,” he said, pointing ahead. “Beach there.”
“There’s nothing there,” the captain protested.
“There,” Conan repeated. “’Tis close enough to where we’re going. I’d think you would be glad to see our backs, wherever we wanted to be put ashore.”
Grumbling, the slab-cheeked captain spoke to his steersman, and the galley shifted a point to larboard, toward the stretch of land at which the big Cimmerian had pointed.
With scanty information had Conan made his choice. The distant glow of lamps from Aghrapur to the south. A glimpse at the stars. Instinct. Perhaps, he thought, that last had played the most important part. He knew that on that shore stood the compound of the Cult of Doom, Yasbet’s place of imprisonment, and Jhandar, the man he must kill even if he died himself.