“What’s this of Leucas?” Graecus said, ambling into the courtyard. “Have you seen him? Or heard where he is?”
“No,” Ariane snapped, her face coloring. “And what call have you to skulk about like some spry?”
Graecus seemed to hear nothing beyond her denial. “He’s not been seen since last night. Nor Stephano, either. When I heard his name mentioned … .” He laughed weakly. “Perhaps we could stand to lose a philosopher or three, but if they’re taking sculptors this time as well … .” He laughed again, but his face was a sickly green.
Ariane was suddenly soothing. “They will return.” She laid a concerned hand on the stocky man’s shoulder. “Why, like as not they wasted the night in drink. Conan, here, did the same.”
“Why should they not return?” Conan asked.
Ariane shot him a dagger look, but Graecus answered shakily. “Some months past some of our friends disappeared. Painters and sketchers, they were. But two were never seen again, their bodies found in a refuse heap beyond the city walls, where Golden Leopards had been seen to bury them. We think Garian wishes to frighten us into silence.”
“It sounds not like the way of a king,” Conan said, frowning. “They frighten with public executions and the like.”
Graecus suddenly looked ready to vomit.
Arian scowled at Conan. “Should you not be making ready to meet Taras?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned to Graecus, uttering soothing sounds and stroking his brow.
Disgruntled, Conan tugged on his padded under-tunic and jazeraint hauberk, muttering to himself on the peculiarities of Ariane. As he buckled his sword belt about him, she spoke again.
“Do you need to go so, as if armed for war?” Her tone was biting, her annoyance at him still high. “You’ll not have to fight him.”
“I have my reasons,” Conan muttered.
Not for a sack of gold as big as a cask would he have told her that someone in the city was trying to kill him. In her present mood, she would think he was trying to shift her sympathy from Graecus to himself. Erlik take all women, he thought.
Setting his spiked helm on his head, he said coldly, “Give me your directions for finding this Taras.” Her face as she gave them was just as cold.
The Street of the Smiths, whence Ariane’s directions took him, was lined not only with the shops of swordsmiths and ironworkers, but also of smiths in gold, silver, copper, brass, tin and bronze. A cacophony of hammering blended with the cries of sellers to make the street a solid sheet of noise, reverberating from end to end. The Guilds made sure that a man who worked one metal did not work another, but so too did they hire the guards that patrolled the street. No bravos lurked on the Street of the Smiths, and shoppers strolled with an ease seen nowhere else in the city.
As he came closer to the place of the meeting —rooms reached by entering a narrow hall next to a coppersmith’s shop and climbing the stairs at its end—the less he wished to enter it unprepared. He had no reason to foresee trouble, but too many times of late someone had tried to put a blade into him.
Short of the coppersmith’s he began to dawdle, pausing here to heft a gleaming sword, there to finger a silver bowl hammered in an intricate pattern of leaves. But all the while he observed the building that housed the coppersmith with an eye honed by years as a thief.
A pair of Guild guards had stopped to watch him, where he stood before a silversmith’s open-fronted shop. He raised the bowl he held to his ear and thumped it.
“Too much tin,” he said, shaking his head and tossing the bowl back on the merchant’s table. He strolled off pursued by the silversmith’s frenzied imprecations, but the guards paid him no more mind.
Just beyond the coppersmith’s was an alley, smelling as much of mold and old urine as any other in the city. Into this he slipped, hurrying down its narrow length. As he had hoped, damp air and mold had flaked away most of the mud plastered over the stones of the building.
A quick glance showed that no one was looking down the alley from the street. His fingers sought cracks amid the poorly dressed and poorly mortared stone. Another might have found such a climb impossible, most especially in heavy hauberk and boots, but to one of the Cimmerian mountains the wide chinks in the stone were as good as a highway. He scrambled up the side of the building so quickly that someone who had seen him standing on the ground and looked away for a moment might well have thought he had simply disappeared.
As he heaved himself onto the red clay tiles of the roof, a smile lit his face. Set in the roof was a skylight, a frame stretched with panes of fishskin. It was, he was certain, situated above the room he sought.
Carefully, so as not to dislodge loose tiles—and perhaps send himself hurtling to the street below—he made his way to the skylight. The panes were clear enough to allow some light through, but not for seeing. It was the work of a moment with his belt dagger to make a slit, to which he put his eye.
The room below was narrow, and ill lit even with the skylight and two brass lamps on a table. In it four men stood, two with cocked crossbows in hands, watching the door through which he was supposed to walk.
The big Cimmerian shook his head, in anger and wonder at the same time. It was one thing to be wary of trouble where none was expected, another to find it waiting there.
“Is he coming, or not?” one of the men without a crossbow asked irritably. He had a deep scar across the top of his head, where someone had caught him a blow that should have killed him.
“He’ll come,” the other man with no crossbow replied. “The girl said she’d send him right to this room.”
Conan froze. Ariane. Could she have sent him here to die?
“What will you tell her?” the horribly scarred man asked. “She has influence enough to cause trouble, Taras.”
“That I hired him,” Taras laughed, “and sent him out of the city to join the others she thinks I’ve hired. That should keep her quiet.”