Conan the Defender (Robert Jordan's Conan Novels 2)

Hordo shook his head sadly. “You know me, Cimmerian. I like women, drink and dice too much for gold to stay long with me.”

“Thief!” someone shouted. “We’ve caught a thief!”

Conan looked around to see the innocent-faced blonde struggling between a bulky, bearded man in a greasy blue tunic and a tall fellow with a weaselly look to his close-set eyes.

“Caught her with her hand in my purse!” the bearded man shouted.

Obscene comments rose amid the tavern’s laughter.

“I told her her luck was gone,” Conan muttered.

The blonde screamed as the bearded man ripped the strip of silk from her breasts, then tossed her up to the skinny man, who had climbed onto a table. Despite her struggles, he quickly tore away the rest of her flimsy garb and displayed her naked to the tavern.

The bearded man shook a dice cup over his head. “Who’ll toss for a chance?” Men crowded round him.

“Let us go,” Conan said. “I don’t want to watch this.” He gathered up the cloak-wrapped sword and started for the street.

Hordo took one regretful look at the barely touched pitcher of wine, then followed.

At the door Conan caught the eye of the young woman in the plain cotton dress once more. She was staring at him again, but this time her face bore disapproval. What had he done, he wondered. Not that it mattered. He had more important concerns on his mind than women. Followed by Hordo, he ducked through the doorway.

III

Full dark was on the Street of Regrets, and the frenzy of its denizens had grown as if by motion they could warm themselves against the chill of night. Whores no longer strutted sensuously, but rather half-ran from potential patron to potential patron. Acrobats twisted and tumbled in defiance of gravity and broken bones as though for King Garian himself, receiving hollow, drunken laughter in payment, yet tumbling on.

Conan paused to watch a fire-juggler, his six blazing brands describing slow arcs above his bald head. A small ever-changing knot of people stood watching as well. Three came and two left even as the Cimmerian stopped. There were better shows that night on the street than a juggler. Conan fingered a copper out of his pouch and tossed it into the cap the quick-handed man had laid on the ground. There were only two in the cap to precede it. To Conan’s surprise the juggler suddenly turned toward him, half-bowing as he kept the brands aloft, as if acknowledging a generous patron. As he straightened, he began to caper, legs kicking high, fiery batons spinning now so that it seemed his feet were always in the midst of the circles they described.

Hordo pulled at Conan’s arm, drawing the muscular youth away down the street. “For a copper,” the one-eyed man muttered disgustedly. “Time was, it’d have taken a silver piece to get that out of one of them. Maybe more.”

“This city is gone mad,” Conan said. “Never have I seen so many beggars this side of the Vilayet Sea. The poor are poorer, and more in number, than in any three other cities. Peddlers charge prices that would choke a Guild Merchant in Sultanapur, and wear faces like they were going bankrupt. More than half a silver queenshead for a pitcher of wine, but a juggler does his best trick for a copper. I haven’t seen a soul who looks to care if tomorrow comes or no. What happens here?”

“What am I, Cimmerian? A scholar? A priest? ’Tis said the throne is cursed, that Garian is cursed by the gods.”

Conan involuntarily made the sign against evil. Curses were nothing to fool with. Several people noticed and shied away from the big man. They had evil enough in their lives without being touched by the evil that troubled him.

“This curse,” the big Cimmerian said after a time, “is it real? I mean, have the priests and astrologers spoken of it? Confirmed it?”

“I’ve heard nothing of that,” Hordo admitted. “But it’s spoken on every street corner. Everyone knows it.”

“Hannuman’s Stones,” Conan snorted. “You know as well as I do that anything everyone knows is usually a lie. Is there any proof at all of a curse?”

“That there is, Cimmerian,” Hordo said, poking a blunt finger at Conan for emphasis. “On the very day Garian ascended the Dragon Throne—the very day, mind you—a monster ran loose in the streets of Belverus. Killed better than a score of people. Looked like a man, if you made a man out of clay, then half melted him. Thing is, a lot of people who saw it said it looked something like Garian, too.”

“A man made out of clay,” Conan said softly, thinking of the blind man’s prophecy.

“Pay no attention to that blind old fool,” Hordo counseled. “Besides, the monster’s dead. Wasn’t those stay-in-the-barrack

s City Guards who did it, though. An old woman, frightened half out of her wits, threw an oil lamp at it. Covered it with burning oil. Left nothing but a pile of ash. The City Guard was going to take the old woman in, for ‘questioning’ they said, till her neighbors chased them off. Pelted them with chamber pots.”

“Come,” Conan said, turning down a narrow street.

Hordo hesitated. “You realize we’re going into Hellgate?”

“We’re being followed. Ever since the Gored Ox,” Conan said. “I want to find out who. This way.”

The street narrowed and twisted, and the laughter and the light of the Street of Regrets were quickly lost. The stench of offal and urine thickened. There was no paving here. The grate of their boots on gravel and the sounds of their own breathing where the loudest things to be heard. They moved through darkness, broken only occasionally by a pool of light from a window high enough for its owner to feel some safety.

“Talk,” Conan said. “Anything. What kind of king is Garian?”