Conan the Destroyer (Robert Jordan's Conan Novels 6)

As he rounded the corner, Akiro saw the others ahead, with Conan far in the lead. Sword in hand, the Cimmerian darted through a doorway at the end of the corridor, and in the same instant a door slid down with a clang, sealing the passage behind him. Bombatta and Zula rushed forward to pound on the door, he with his sword hilt, she with her staff.

Cursing under his breath Akiro ran to help, but for moments after reaching them he could only stare. The door was as transparent as glass—clearly they could see Conan, looking warily about a mirrored chamber, his broadsword at the ready—yet the blows of Bombatta and Zula rebounded as if from an iron-bound castle gate. As if to add to the hollow booming, all began to shout at once.

“Can he not hear us?” Malak cried. “Conan! Ogun’s Toenails! Conan!”

Zula dropped to her knees, feeling along the bottom of the door. “If we can lift … there is no crack! None!”

“Stand back,” Bombatta roared, taking a two-handed grip on his sword. “I’ll break it if it can be broken.”

“All of you

stand back,” Akiro shouted over them. “And be quiet,” he added. He rummaged in his pouch, sighing as he tossed aside powders ruined by the wet, yet continued to speak hastily the while. “This is no tavern brawl, to be settled with brute might. This Stygian is a sorcerer of puissance. Treat him as such, or we will all … ah, here it is.” Smiling in satisfaction, he brought out a small vial covered entirely with purest beeswax and marked with a seal of power.

“I do not see Jehnna,” Bombatta said suddenly. “The thief must be left to his fate. Jehnna must be found.”

“She is here,” Akiro said, not looking up from the task of peeling away the wax. The peeling must be done properly, or the contents would be useless. “Can you not sense … of course you cannot. The nexus is here, the center of all the powers of this palace.”

The last of the wax fell away, revealing a darkly shimmering compound that seemed at once grease and smoke. To this he touched the tip of the smallest finger of his left hand, and scribed a rune on the right-hand side of the transparent door. With the smallest finger of his right hand he drew the same symbol on the left-hand side of the door.

Akiro frowned as the runes began to hiss, as if boiling, but there was nothing to be done for it. Quickly he began to chant in silence. There were powers invoked with words spoken aloud, but he had found those dangerous, unreliable or foul, and often all three. Pressure built; he could feel it inside his head. They were spirits he summoned, spirits concerned with opening things that could not be opened, spirits concerned with lifting what could not be lifted. The pressure grew, and he knew they obeyed the calling. The pressure grew, and sweat beaded on his forehead. The pressure grew, and grew, and … .

With a gasp, he slumped and would have fallen had he not caught himself against the door.

“Well?” Bombatta demanded.

Shaking, Akiro stared at the door in wonder. The pressure was still there, enough to burst the gate of a castle, and to no effect. “A wizard most puissant,” he whispered, then added as he peered into the mirrored chamber, “If you believe in gods, then pray.”

xiii

Slowly Conan moved around the mirrored chamber, broadsword held ready for any attack. The huge mirrors cast back his stalking form, multiplied ten thousand times as reflections of reflections were in turn reflected, and that of the glowing crimson gem that stood on a slim crystalline spire in the center of the room. Without break was the wall of grim images, and he realized that he was no longer certain which had fallen to hide the door through which he had entered.

He had avoided the gem before. The glow and its color told him all he needed of its nature. Never had he seen anything so scarlet; the hue alone made him want to squint. Such items of sorcerous power were dangerous when not understood—as he had learned in hard lessons—and scarcely less so when comprehension was complete. Still, it was the only thing in the chamber other than himself. Slowly he approached the narrow plinth, and stretched forth a hand.

“You provide little sport, barbarian.”

Spinning, the big Cimmerian searched for the source of the words, and when he found it he was hardly less surprised than at hearing them in the first place.

One tall mirror no longer depicted him, but rather a man in hooded, blood-red robes. At least, he assumed it was a man from the voice and the size. The deep hood hid the face in shadow, while the robe hung in vermilion folds to the floor and even the hands were covered by long sleeves that depended to points.

“I will provide no sport at all for you, Stygian,” Conan said. “Release the girl, or—”

“You become tiresome.” A score of voices behind him spoke the words, and all were the Stygian’s voice. Suspecting some form of trick to divert him, Conan risked a glance back. And stared. Twenty mirrors now held the hooded form.

“I will keep the girl, and you can do nothing.”

“She is the One, and the One is mine.”

“Muscles and steel avail you naught against my power.”

Conan felt as if his head were whirling. Each time there were more scarlet-robed images in the mirrors, chorusing the words, until he was surrounded by the mage, multiplied more than a hundred times. Hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stirred, and his teeth bared in a snarl. Yet many times had he met fear, and that stealer of will and strength was as familiar to him as the dark form of death. If the latter would one day surely conquer him, the former had no power he had not defeated a thousand times before.

“You think to frighten me, sorcerer? I spit on your power, for you hide behind it like a cowering dog. You have not the courage to face me like a man.”

“Brave words,” the multitudinous reflections murmured in oily tones. “Perhaps I shall face you.” Abruptly two of the images split in twain. From each of those mirrors one shape streaked in a blur of scarlet; the two blurs struck, merged, and the shape of the mage stood at one end of the chamber as well as in the mirrors. “Perhaps you will give some small sport, after all. You will not like it, barbar. I will kill you slowly, and you will scream for death long before it comes. Your strength will be as that of a child against me.”

With every word more of the mirrored forms divided, more flashes of crimson blazed across the chamber to sink into the hooded figure, and with each the figure grew slightly larger.

Twice, as blood-red streaks passed close to him, Conan struck at them with his sword. The steel whistled through them as through the air, with only a tingling along his arms to tell him the blade had met anything. The Cimmerian stood then, waiting rather than waste his effort in futility, until at last each mirror had given up its portion of the red-robed form that faced him. Taller than he by a head, it was, and twice as broad.