Conan the Victorious (Robert Jordan's Conan Novels 7)

CHAPTER IV

Despite the cloak Ghurran had given him, Conan kept close to the sides of the narrow, bustling streets, on the edges of the continuous flow of people. It was true that the dark-blue cloak would not bring a moment’s glance from a guardsman looking for one of white linen, and the hood did hide his face and damning blue eyes, but the sheer size of him was difficult to miss. Few men in Sultanapur came close to his height or breadth of shoulder, and certainly none of them

was among the crowds thronging the streets he traveled this day. The big Cimmerian stood out like a Remaira stallion among mules.

Five times after leaving the herbalist Conan was forced to turn aside for patrols of guardsmen, their precisely slanted spears glinting in the bright sun as though to give warning of their coming, but luck seemed at last to be with him. His progress toward the harbor was constant, if zig-zag. High-wheeled ox-carts began once more to be almost as numerous as people. The long stone shapes of warehouses rose about him, and the tall white towers of the city granaries. Men with the calloused hands and sweat-stained tunics of dockers and roustabouts outnumbered all but those with the rolling walk and forked queues of seafarers. Half the women were trulls in narrow girdles of jingling coin and thin silk or less, while most of the rest cast a sharp eye for a purse to cut or a bolt of silk or lace that could be snatched from a cart. Here, too, were people who knew him.

“An hour’s pleasure, big man?” cooed a buxom doxy with hennaed hair piled high on her head and gilded brass hoops in her ears. She moved closer and pressed nearly bare breasts against his arm, dropping her voice for his ear alone. “You fool, the City Guard has already taken up three dockers just for being tall. And they are questioning outlanders, so you’re doubly at risk. Now, put your arm around me, and we will go to my room. I can hide you till it all quiets. And I’ll charge you but—oh, Mitra, I’ll not charge you at all.”

Conan grinned despite himself. “A generous offer, Zara. But I must find Hordo.”

“I’ve not seen him, Conan. And you cannot risk looking. Come with me.”

“Another time,” he said, and she squealed as he pinched a plump buttock.

In short order a sailor in a tar-smeared tunic and a bearded warehouseman had repeated Zara’s warning. A slender wench with a virgin’s face and innocent eyes—and a cutpurse’s curved blade with which she constantly toyed—echoed both warning and offer. None knew where Hordo was to be found, however. Conan almost accepted the slender woman’s offer. The glass had been turned, he knew, and the sands were running out on him. Did he not find Hordo quickly, he must go to ground.

A short, wiry man, bent under the weight of a canvas sack on his shoulder, suddenly caught the Cimmerian’s eye. Conan snagged the man’s bony arm with one hand and hauled him out of the stream of people.

“What are you doing?” the Cimmerian’s captive whispered between teeth clenched in a wooden smile. His sunken eyes darted frantically above a pointed nose, giving him the image of a mouse searching for a hole. “Mitra, Cimmerian! I stole this not twenty paces from here, and they’ll see it’s gone in another moment. Let me go!”

“I am looking for Hordo, Tarek,” Conan said softy.

“Hordo? He’s at Kafar’s warehouse, I think.” Tarek stumbled a step as Conan released him, then rotated his shoulder in a broad gesture. “You should not grab a man so, Cimmerian. It could be dangerous. And don’t you know the City Guard—”

“—is seeking a big outlander,” Conan finished for him. “I know.”

A shout rose from the direction Tarek had come, and the little man darted away like the rodent he resembled. Conan went the other way, soon passing by a stall where a salt peddler in voluminous robes seemed to dance with his helpers, they jumping about to dodge while he tugged at his beard and kicked at them and shouted that the gods were unmerciful to send the same man blind apprentices and thieves as well. While the salt vendor leaped and screamed, two girls of no more than sixteen years hefted one of his canvas sacks between them and disappeared, unseen by him, into the throng.

Twice more the Cimmerian was forced to turn aside for a patrol of the City Guard, but Kafar’s warehouse was not far, and he reached it quickly. It was not one of the long stone structures owned by merchants, but rather a nondescript building of two stories, daubed in flaking white clay, that might once have held a tavern or a chandler’s shop. In truth it was a warehouse of sorts. A smugglers’ warehouse. Gold in the proper palms kept the guardsmen away, for the time at least. When the bribes failed, though, because higher authority decided an example must be made, or more likely because someone decided the reward for confiscated contraband outweighed the bribes, the smugglers of Sultanapur would not be slowed for an instant. Scores of such warehouses could be found near the harbor, and when Kafar’s was no more, two others would spring up in its place.

The splintery wooden door from the street let into a windowless room dimly lit by rush torches in crude iron sconces. Two of the torches had guttered out, but no one seemed to notice. A small knot of men, dressed in mismatched garb from a dozen countries, squatted in a semicircle, casting dice against a wall. Others sat on casks at a table of boards laid on sawhorses, engrossed in whispered talk over clay mugs of wine. A Kothian in a red-striped tunic sat off by himself on a three-legged stool near a door at the back of the room, idly flipping a dagger to stick up in the rough-hewn planks of the floor. The air in the room was hot and close, not only because of the torches, but because few of the half-score men there ever made acquaintance with water and most thought soap a fine gift for a woman, if nicely perfumed, but not a thing to be used.

Only the Kothian looked up at Conan’s entrance. “Do you not know—” he began.

“I know, Kafar,” Conan said curtly. “Is Hordo here?”

The Kothian jerked his head at the door behind him and returned to flipping his dagger. “The cellar,” he said as the blade quivered in the floor once more.

It was the custom in such places to store the goods of each smuggler in a separate room, for no man among them trusted those not of his band to the point of letting him know what kind of “fish” he carried or to where. Closed doors, iron-bound and held shut with massive iron locks, lined the corridor in the rear of the building. At the end of the corridor, beside a wide door leading to the alley behind the warehouse, were stone stairs leading down.

As the Cimmerian started down the stairs, Hordo opened the door at the bottom. “Where in Zandru’s Nine Hells have you been?” the one-eyed smuggler roared. “And what in Mitra’s name have you been doing?” He was nearly as big as Conan, though his muscles were overlaid with fat and the years had weathered his face. Large gold hoops hung from his ears and a jagged scar ran from under his eye-patch of rough leather down into the thick black thatch of his beard, pulling the left side of his mouth into a permanent sneer. “I leave word with Tasha and the next thing I hear…. Well, get on down here before the Guard seizes you right in front of me. If that fool wench failed to tell you I needed you, I’ll have her hide.”

Conan winced ruefully. So Tasha had been speaking the truth. If he had not thought she was lying from jealousy, he would have left the Golden Crescent before the captain arrived, and the City Guard would not be seeking his head. Well, it was far from the first time he had gotten into trouble from misreading a woman. And in any case, a man who used pain to frighten a woman to his bed deserved killing.

“It was not her fault, Hordo,” he said, pushing past the bearded man into the cellar. “I had a trifle of trouble with—” He cut off at the sight of a stranger in the room, a tall, skinny man in a turban who stood beside a score of small wooden chests, like the tin-lined chests in which tea was shipped, stacked on the dirt floor against a dusty stone wall. Here, too, light came from rush torches. “Who is he?” the Cimmerian demanded.

“He’s called Hasan,” the one-eyed man replied impatiently. “A new ‘fisherman.’ Now! Is there any truth to these rumors, Cimmerian? I do not care if you’ve killed Tureg Amal; that old fool is no loss to the world. But if you have, you must get out of Sultanapur, perhaps out of Turan, and quickly. Even if you killed no one, you had best remain out of sight until they catch who did.”

“The High Admiral?” Conan exclaimed. “I heard it was a general, though now that I think of it, someone did say a prince. Hordo, why would I kill the High Admiral of Turan?”

The lanky man spoke up suddenly. “The rumors say it was hired done. For enough gold I suppose a man might kill anyone.”

Conan’s face became stony. “You seem to be calling me liar,” he said in a deadly quiet tone.

“Easy, Cimmerian,” Hordo said, and added to the other man, “Are you trying to get yourself killed, Hasan? Offer this man coin for a killing, and ’twill be luck if you escape with no more than broken bones. And if he says he killed no one, then he killed no one.”

“I did not say that exactly,” Conan said uncomfortably. “There was a Guard captain, and two or three guardsmen.” He glared at the turbaned man who had made a sound in his throat. “You have a comment about that as well?”