The Hour of the Dragon
and they cannot be defeated by the forces which might still be at your
command. You would be sacrificing your loyal subjects uselessly. In
sorrow I say it, but it is true: King Conan, you are a king without a
kingdom.'
Conan stared into the fire without replying. A smoldering log crashed
down among the flames without a bursting shower of sparks. It might have
been the crashing ruin of his kingdom.
Again Conan felt the presence of a grim reality behind the veil of
material illusion. He sensed again the inexorable drive of a ruthless
fate. A feeling of furious panic tugged at his soul, a sense of being
trapped, and a red rage that burned to destroy and kill.
'Where are the officials of my court?' he demanded at last.
'Pallantides was sorely wounded at Valkia, was ransomed by his family,
and now lies in his castle in Attalus. He will be fortunate if he ever
rides again. Publius, the chancellor, has fled the kingdom in disguise,
no man knows whither. The council has been disbanded. Some were
imprisoned, some banished. Many of your loyal subjects have been put to
death. Tonight, for instance, the Countess Albiona dies under the
headsman's ax.'
Conan started and stared at Servius with such anger smoldering in his
blue eyes that the patrician shrank back.
'Why?'
'Because she would not become the mistress of Valerius. Her lands are
forfeit, her henchmen sold into slavery, and at midnight, in the Iron
Tower, her head must fall. Be advised, my king--to me you will ever be
my king--and flee before you are discovered. In these days none is safe.
Spies and informers creep among us, betraying the slightest deed or word
of discontent as treason and rebellion. If you make yourself known to
your subjects it will only end in your capture and death.
'My horses and all the men that I can trust are at your disposal. Before
dawn we can be far from Tarantia, and well on our way toward the border.
If I cannot aid you to recover your kingdom, I can at least follow you
into exile.'
Conan shook his head. Servius glanced uneasily at him as he sat staring
into the fire, his chin propped on his mighty fist. The firelight
gleamed redly on his steel mail, on his baleful eyes. They burned in the
firelight like the eyes of a wolf. Servius was again aware, as in the
past, and now more strongly than ever, of something alien about the
king. That great frame under the mail mesh was too hard and supple for a
civilized man; the elemental fire of the primitive burned in those
smoldering eyes. Now the barbaric suggestion about the king was more
pronounced, as if in his extremity the outward aspects of civilization
were stripped away, to reveal the primordial core. Conan was reverting
to his pristine type. He did not act as a civilized man would act under
the same conditions, nor did his thoughts run in the same channels. He
was unpredictable. It was only a stride from the king of Aquilonia to
the skin-clad slayer of the Cimmerian hills.
'I'll ride to Poitain, if it may be,' Conan said at last. 'But I'll ride
alone. And I have one last duty to perform as king of Aquilonia.'
'What do you mean, your Majesty?' asked Servius, shaken by a
premonition.
'I'm going into Tarantia after Albiona tonight,' answered the king.
'I've failed all my other loyal subjects, it seems--if they take her
head, they can have mine too.'
'This is madness!' cried Servius, staggering up and clutching his
throat, as if he already felt the noose closing about it.
'There are secrets to the Tower which few know,' said Conan. 'Anyway,
I'd be a dog to leave Albiona to die because of her loyalty to me. I may
be a king without a kingdom, but I'm not a man without honor.'
'It will ruin us all!' whispered Servius.
'It will ruin no one but me if I fail. You've risked enough. I ride
alone tonight. This is all I want you to do: procure me a patch for my
eye, a staff for my hand, and garments such as travelers wear.'
9
'It is the King or His Ghost!'
Many men passed through the great arched gates of Tarantia between
sunset and midnight--belated travelers, merchants from afar with heavily
laden mules, free workmen from the surrounding farms and vineyards. Now
that Valerius was supreme in the central provinces, there was no rigid
scrutiny of the folk who flowed in a steady stream through the wide
gates. Discipline had been relaxed. The Nemedian soldiers who stood on
guard were half drunk, and much too busy watching for handsome peasant
girls and rich merchants who could be bullied to notice workmen or dusty
travelers, even one tall wayfarer whose worn cloak could not conceal the
hard lines of his powerful frame.
This man carried himself with an erect, aggressive bearing that was too
natural for him to realize it himself, much less dissemble it. A great
patch covered one eye, and his leather coif, drawn low over his brows,
shadowed his features. With a long thick staff in his muscular brown
hand, he strode leisurely through the arch where the torches flared and
guttered, and, ignored by the tipsy guardsmen, emerged upon the wide
streets of Tarantia.
Upon these well-lighted thoroughfares the usual throngs went about their
business, and shops and stalls stood open, with their wares displayed.
One thread ran a constant theme through the pattern. Nemedian soldiers,
singly or in clumps, swaggered through the throngs, shouldering their
way with studied arrogance. Women scurried from their path, and men
stepped aside with darkened brows and clenched fists. The Aquilonians
were a proud race, and these were their hereditary enemies.
The knuckles of the tall traveler knotted on his staff, but, like the
others, he stepped aside to let the men in armor have the way. Among the
motley and varied crowd he did not attract much attention in his drab,
dusty garments. But once, as he passed a sword-seller's stall and the
light that streamed from its wide door fell full upon him, he thought
he felt an intense stare upon him, and turning quickly, saw a man in the
brown jerkin of a free workman regarding him fixedly. This man turned
away with undue haste, and vanished in the shifting throng. But Conan
turned into a narrow by-street and quickened his pace. It might have
been mere idle curiosity; but he could take no chances.
The grim Iron Tower stood apart from the citadel, amid a maze of narrow
streets and crowding houses where the meaner structures, appropriating a
space from which the more fastidious shrank, had invaded a portion of
the city ordinarily alien to them. The Tower was in reality a castle, an
ancient, formidable pile of heavy stone and black iron, which had itself
served as the citadel in an earlier, ruder century.
Not a long distance from it, lost in a tangle of partly deserted
tenements and warehouses, stood an ancient watchtower, so old and
forgotten that it did not appear on the maps of the city for a hundred
years back. Its original purpose had been forgotten, and nobody, of such
as saw it at all, noticed that the apparently ancient lock which kept it
from being appropriated as sleeping-quarters by beggars and thieves, was
in reality comparatively new and extremely powerful, cunningly disguised
into an appearance of rusty antiquity. Not half a dozen men in the
kingdom had ever known the secret of that tower.
No keyhole showed in the massive, green-crusted lock. But Conan's
practised fingers, stealing over it, pressed here and there knobs
invisible to the casual eye. The door silently opened inward and he
entered solid blackness, pushing the door shut behind him. A light would
have showed the tower empty, a bare, cylindrical shaft of massive stone.
Groping in a corner with the sureness of familiarity, he found the
projections for which he was feeling on a slab of the stone that
composed the floor. Quickly he lifted it, and without hesitation lowered
himself into the aperture beneath. His feet felt stone steps leading
downward into what he knew was a narrow tunnel that ran straight toward
the foundations of the Iron Tower, three streets away.
The bell on the citadel, which tolled only at the midnight hour or for
the death of a king, boomed suddenly. In a dimly lighted chamber in the
Iron Tower a door opened and a form emerged into a corridor. The
interior of the Tower was as forbidding as its external appearance. Its
massive stone walls were rough, unadorned. The flags of the floor were
worn deep by generations of faltering feet, and the vault of the ceiling
was gloomy in the dim light of torches set in niches.
The man who trudged down that grim corridor was in appearance in keeping
with his surroundings. He was a tall, powerfully built man, clad in
close-fitting black silk. Over his head was drawn a black hood which
fell about his shoulders, having two holes for his eyes. From his
shoulders hung a loose black cloak, and over one shoulder he bore a
heavy ax, the shape of which was that of neither tool nor weapon.
As he went down the corridor, a figure came hobbling up it, a bent,
surly old man, stooping under the weight of his pike and a lantern he
bore in one hand.
'You are not as prompt as your predecessor, master headsman,' he
grumbled. 'Midnight has just struck, and masked men have gone to
milady's cell. They await you.'
'The tones of the bell still echo among the towers,' answered the
executioner. 'If I am not so quick to leap and run at the beck of
Aquilonians as was the dog who held this office before me, they shall
find my arm no less ready. Get you to your duties, old watchman, and
leave me to mine. I think mine is the sweeter trade, by Mitra, for you
tramp cold corridors and peer at rusty dungeon doors, while I lop off
the fairest head in Tarantia this night.'
The watchman limped on down the corridor, still grumbling, and the
headsman resumed his leisurely way. A few strides carried him around a
turn in the corridor, and he absently noted that at his left a door
stood partly open. If he had thought, he would have known that that door
had been opened since the watchman passed; but thinking was not his
trade. He was passing the unlocked door before he realized that aught
was amiss, and then it was too late.
A soft tigerish step and the rustle of a cloak warned him, but before he
could turn, a heavy arm hooked about his throat from behind, crushing
the cry before it could reach his lips. In the brief instant that was
allowed him he realized with a surge of panic the strength of his
attacker, against which his own brawny thews were helpless. He sensed
without seeing the poised dagger.
'Nemedian dog!' muttered a voice thick with passion in his ear. 'You've
cut off your last Aquilonian head!'
And that was the last thing he ever heard.
* * * * *
In a dank dungeon, lighted only by a guttering torch, three men stood
about a young woman who knelt on the rush-strewn flags staring wildly up
at them. She was clad only in a scanty shift; her golden hair fell in
lustrous ripples about her white shoulders, and her wrists were bound
behind her. Even in the uncertain torchlight, and in spite of her
disheveled condition and pallor of fear, her beauty was striking. She
knelt mutely, staring with wide eyes up at her tormenters. The men were
closely masked and cloaked. Such a deed as this needed masks, even in a
conquered land. She knew them all nevertheless; but what she knew would
harm no one--after that night.
'Our merciful sovereign offers you one more chance, Countess,' said the
tallest of the three, and he spoke Aquilonian without an accent. 'He
bids me say that if you soften your proud, rebellious spirit, he will
still open his arms to you. If not--' he gestured toward a grim wooden
block in the center of the cell. It was blackly stained, and showed many