Conan the Triumphant (Robert Jordan's Conan Novels 4)

A gold for the head was good—he had hoped for no more than coppers at best—but he had expected two for each of the manuscripts. “But, my lady,” he whined, “I can but bring you what I find. I cannot read such script, or know if you already possess it. You know not what difficulties I face, what expenses, in your service. Five of my men slain. Coin to be paid for thefts. Men to be—”

“Five men dead?” Her voice was a whipcrack across his back, though she had not raised it.

He squirmed beneath her gaze; sweat rolled down his face. This cold woman had little tolerance for failure, he knew, and less for men who drew attention to themselves, as by leaving corpses strewn in the streets. He had Baraca as example for that. The Kothian had been found hanging by his feet with his skin neatly removed, yet still alive. For a few agonized hours of screaming.

“What have you been into, Galbro,” she continued, her low words stabbing like daggers, “to lose five men?”

“Naught, my lady. A private matter. I should not have mentioned it, my lady. Forgive me, please.”

“Fool! Your lies are transparent. Know that the god I serve, and whom you serve through me, gives me the power of pain.” She spoke words that his brain did not want to comprehend; her hand traced a figure in the air between them.

Blinding light flashed behind his eyes, and agony filled him, every muscle in his body writhing and knotting. Helpless, he fell, quivering in every limb, bending into a backbreaking arch till only his head and drumming heels touched the floor. He tried to shriek, but shrieks could not pass the frozen cords of his throat, nor even breath. Blackness veiled his eyes, and he found a core within him that cried out for death, for anything to escape the all-consuming pain.

Abruptly the torment melted away, and he collapsed in a sobbing heap.

“Not even death can save you,” she whispered, “for death is one of the realms of my master. Behold!” Again she spoke words that seared his mind.

He peered up at her pleadingly, tried to beg, but the words stuck in his throat. The eagles moved. He knew they were dead; he had touched them. But they moved, wings unfolding. One uttered a piercing scream. The other swooped from its perch to the table, great talons gripping the wood as it tilted its head to regard him as it might a rabbit. Tears rolled uncontrollably down his thin cheeks.

“They would tear you to pieces at my command,” the veiled woman told him. “Now speak. Tell me all.”

Galbro began to babble. Words spilled from his mouth like water from a fountain. The bronze figure, described in minute detail. How he learned of it, and the attempts to secure it. Yet even in his terror he held back the true description of the giant northlander. Some tiny portion of him wanted to be part of killing this man who had endangered him; a larger part wanted whatever the veiled woman might pay for the piece. Did she know how to obtain it without him she might decide his usefulness was at an end. He knew she had others like him who served her, and Baraca reminded him of the deadliness of her wrath. When his torrent of speech ended, he lay waiting in dread.

“I dislike those who keep things from me,” she said at last, and he shivered at the thought of her dislike. “Secure this bronze, Galbro. Obey me implicitly, and I will forgive your lies. Fail … .”

She did not have to voice the threat. His whirling mind provided a score of them, each worse than the last. “I will obey, my lady,” he sobbed, scrubbing his face in the dust of the floor. “I will obey. I will obey.”

Not until her footsteps had faded from the room could he bring himself to stop the litany. Raising his head he stared wildly about the room, filled with joyous relief that he was alone and still alive. The eagles caught his eye, and he moaned. They were still again, but one leaned forward with wings half raised as if ready to swoop at him from its perch. The other still clung to the table, head swiveled to pierce him with its amber gaze.

He wanted to flee, yet he knew with a sinking feeling that he could not run far enough or fast enough to escape her. That accursed northlander was responsible for this. If not for him everything could have gone on as before. Rage built in him, comforting rage that overlaid his terror. He would make the northlander pay for everything that had happened to him. That big man would pay.

Synelle waited until she was in her palanquin—unadorned for anonymity—with the pale gray curtains safely drawn before lowering her veil. The bearers carried her from the courtyard of the small house where she had met Galbro without a word needed from her. Tongueless, so they could not speak of where they had borne her, they knew the need to serve her perfectly as well as did the sly-faced thief.

It was well she always went to these meetings prepared. A cloth on which Galbro had wiped his sweat, obtained by another of her minions, a few feathers plucked from the eagles, these had given her the means to quell the thief. She could rest at her ease knowing the man’s soul was seared with the need for absolute obedience. And yet for once the gentle swaying of the platform did not lull her as she lolled on silken cushions.

Something about the sly little man’s description of the bronze produced an irriating tickle in the back of her mind. She had encountered many representations of Al’Kiir’s head, many med

alions and amulets embossed with his head or the symbol of the horns, but never before a complete figure. It sounded so detailed, perhaps an exact duplicate of the actual body of the god. Her face went blank with astonishment. In one of the manuscript fragments she had gathered there was … something. She was sure of it.

She parted the forward curtains a slit. “Faster!” she commanded. “Erlik blast your souls, faster!”

The bearers increased their pace to a run, forcing their way through the crowds, careless of the curses that followed them. Synelle would do more than curse if they failed to obey. Within, she pounded a small fist against her thigh in frustration at the time it took to cross the city.

As soon as the palanquin entered the courtyard of her mansion, before the bearers could lower it to the slate tiles, Synelle leaped out. Even in her haste hate flickered through her at the sight of the house. As large as any palace in the city, it still was not a palace. The white stuccoed walls and red-tiled roof were suitable for the dwelling of a merchant. Or a woman. By ancient law no woman, not even a princess, could maintain a palace within the walls of Ianthe. But she would change that. By the gods, if what she thought were true she would change it within the month. Why wait for Valdric to die? Not even the army could stand against her. Iskandrian, the White Eagle of Ophir, would kneel at her feet along with the great lords of Ophir.

Dropping her cloak for a serving maid to tend to, she raised her robes to her hips and ran, heedless of servants who stared at bare, flashing limbs. To the top floor of the mansion she ran, to a windowless room where only one other but herself was allowed, and that one with her mind ensorceled to forget what lay within, to die did anyone attempt to force the awful knowledge from her.

Golden sconces on the walls held pale, perfumed candles, yet all their light could not thrust back an air of darkness, the feel of a shrine to evil. Shrine it was, in a way, though there was no idol, no place for votive offerings. Three long tables, polished till they gleamed, were all the furnishings the room contained. On one were flasks of liquids that bubbled in their sealed containers or glowed with eery lights, vials of powders noxious and obscene, the tools of her painfully learned craft. The second was covered with amulets and talismans; some held awesome powers she could detect but not yet wield. Al’Kiir would give them to her.

It was to the third table she hurried, for there were the fragments of scroll, the tattered pages of parchment and vellum that she had slowly and carefully gathered over the years. There was the dark knowledge of sorceries the world had attempted to forget, sorceries that would give her power. Hastily she pawed through them, for once careless of flakes that dropped from ancient pages. She found what she sought, and easily read in a language dead a thousand years. She was perhaps the last person in the world capable of reading that extinct tongue, for the scholar who had taught her she had had strangled with his own beard, his wife and children smothered in their beds to be doubly sure. Death guarded secrets far better than gold.

An eager gleam lit her dark eyes, and she read again the passage she had found.

Lo, call to the great god, entreating him, and set before the image, the succedaneum, the bridge between worlds, as a beacon to glorify the way of the god to thee.

She had thought this spoke of the priestess as bridge and beacon, placing herself before the image of Al’Kiir, but that which lay beneath the mountain was not an image. It was material body of the god. It must be the image that was to be placed before the priestess during the rites. The image. The bronze figure. It had to be. A thrill of triumph coursed through her as she swept from the room.

In the corridor a serving girl busily lighting silver lamps hung from the walls awkwardly made obeisence clutching her coal-pot and tongs.