Conan The Defender Part 2

"Trouble over a woman, I'll wager," Hordo chuckled, "knowing you."

Conan shrugged his ma.s.sive shoulders. He always had trouble over women, it seemed. But then, what man did not?

"And what woman chased you from Sultanapur, Hordo? When last we parted you sat in your own inn with a plump Turanian wife, swearing never again to smuggle so much as a sweetmeat, nor set foot outside Sultanapur until you were carried out to your funeral pyre."

"It was Karela." The one-eyed man's voice was low with embarra.s.sment.

He tugged at his thick beard. "I could not give up trying to find word of her, and my wife could not cease nagging me to stop. She said I made a spectacle of myself. People talked, she said, laughed behind my back, said I was strange in the head. She would not have it said she married a man lacking all his brains. She would not stop, and I could not, so I said goodbye one day and never looked back."

"You still look for Karela?"

"She is not dead. I'm sure she lives." He grabbed Conan's arm, a pathetic urgency in his eyes. "I've heard never a whisper, but I'd know if she was dead. I'd know. Have you heard anything? Anything at all?"

Hordo's voice carried anguish. Conan knew that the Red Hawk had indeed survived their expedition into the Kezankians. But to tell Hordo would entail telling how last he saw her-naked and chained in a slave coffle on her way to the auction block. He could explain that he had had but a few coppers in his pouch, not even close to the price of a round-breasted, green-eyed slave in Turan. He could even mention the oath she had made him swear, that he would never lift a hand to save her. She was a woman of pride, Karela was. Or had been. For if Hordo had found no sign of her, it was more than likely the strap had broken her, and that she now danced for the pleasure of a dark-eyed master.

And if he told the tale, he might well have to kill his old friend, the man who had always called himself Karela's faithful hound.

"The last I saw of her was in the Kezankians," he said truthfully, "but I'm sure she got out of the mountains alive. No pack of hillmen would have stood a chance against her with a sword in her hand."

Hordo nodded, sighing heavily.

People were venturing back into the street, staring at the bodies that still lay where they had been slain. Here and there a woman fell wailing across a dead husband or child.

Conan looked around for the sword the madman had been carrying. It lay before an open-fronted shop piled high with colorful bolts of cloth.

The proprietor was gone, one of the dead or one of those staring at them. The Cimmerian picked up the sword, wiping the congealing blood from the serpentine blade on a bolt of yellow damask.

He hefted the weapon, getting the balance of it. The quillons were worked in a silver filigree that spoke of antiquity, and the rica.s.so was scribed with calligraphy that formed no words he had ever seen before. But whoever had made the weapon, he was a master. It seemed to become an extension of his arm. Nay, an extension of his mind. Still he could not help thinking of those it had just killed. Men. Women.

Children. Struck from behind, or however they could be reached, as they fled. Slashed and hacked as they tried to crawl away. The images were vivid in his brain. He could almost smell their fear sweat and the blood.

He made a disgusted noise in his throat. A sword was a sword, no more.

Steel had no guilt. Still, he would not keep it. Take it, yes-a sword was too valuable to be left behind-it would fetch a few silver pieces for his too-light purse.

"You're not keeping that?" Hordo sounded surprised. "The blade's tainted. Women and children." He spat and made the sign to ward off evil.

"Not too tainted to sell," Conan replied. On impulse he swung his furtrimmed cloak from his shoulders and wrapped it around the sword.

Its archaic pattern made it easily recognizable. Perhaps it would not be smart to carry it openly so soon after the death it had brought to Belverus.

"Are you that short of coin, man? I can let you have a little silver, if you need it."

"I've enough." Conan weighed his purse again in his mind. Four days, if he stayed at an inn. Two weeks if he slept in stables. "But how is it you're rich to the point of handing out silver? Have you taken back to the bandit trade, or is it smuggling again?"

"Hsst!" Hordo stepped closer, casting his lone eye about to see if any had heard. "Speak softly of smuggling," he said in a voice meant for the big Cimmerian's ears alone. "The penalty now is slow impalement, and the crown pays a bounty for information that'd tempt your grandmother."

"Then why are you mixed in it?"

"I didn't say...." The one-eyed man threw up his gnarled hands.

"Hannuman's Stones! Yes, I'm in it. Have you no ear or eye that you don't know the prices in this city? The tariffs are more than the cost of the goods. A smuggler can make a fortune. If he lives."

"Maybe you need a partner?" Conan said suggestively.

Hordo hesitated. "'Tis not as it was in Sultanapur. Every cask of wine of length of silk that misses the King's Customs is brought in by one ring."

"For the whole of Nemedia?" Conan said incredulously.

"Aye. Been that way for more than two years, so I understand. I've only been here a year, myself. They're tight as a miser's fist about who they let in, and who they let know what. I get my orders from a man who gets his from somebody I've never seen, who likely gets his orders from somebody else." He shook his heavy head. "I'll try, but I make no promises."

"They can't be as tight as all that," Conan protested, "not if you're one of them after being here no more than a year."

Hordo chuckled and rubbed the side of his broad nose with a spatulate finger. "I'm a special case. I was in Koth, in a tavern in Khorshemish, because I'd heard a rumor... well, that's beside the point. Anyway, a fellow, Ha.s.san, who works the Kothian end of the ring heard me asking questions. He had heard of the Red Hawk, admired her no end. When he found out I'd ridden with her, he offered me a job here in Belverus. I was about to the point of boiling my belt for soup, so I took it. If Ha.s.san was here I could get you in in a fingersnap, but he stays in Koth."

"Strange," Conan mused, "that he wouldn't keep you there, too, since he admires the Red Hawk so. No matter. You do what you can. I'll make out."

"I'll try," Hordo said. He squinted at the sun, already well past its height, and s.h.i.+fted awkwardly. "Listen, there's something I have to do.

The ring, you understand. I'd ask you along so we could swap lies, but they do not look kindly on people they don't know."

"We've plenty of time."

"Surely. Look you. Meet me at the Sign of the Gored Ox, on the Street of Regrets, just above h.e.l.lgate, half a gla.s.s or so after sunset." He laughed and clapped Conan on the shoulder. "We'll drink our way from one side of this city to the other."

"From top to bottom," Conan agreed.

As the one-eyed man left, Conan turned, the cloak-wrapped sword beneath his arm, and stopped. An ornate litter, scarlet-curtained, its frame and poles black and gold, stood a little way up the street, the crowd and even the toughs respectful enough to leave a cleared s.p.a.ce about it. It was not the litter that arrested him-he had seen others in the streets, carrying fat merchants or sleek n.o.blewomen-but as he had turned the curtain had twitched shut, leaving him with the bare impression of a woman swathed in gray veils till naught but her eyes showed. And he would have sworn, for all the briefness of that glimpse, that those eyes had been looking directly at him. Nay, not looking.

Glaring.

Abruptly the front curtain of the litter moved, and apparently an order was pa.s.sed, for the bearers set off swiftly up the street, away from the big Cimmerian.

Conan shook his head as he watched the litter disappear into the throng. 'Twas not a good way to begin in Belverus, imagining things.

Aside from Hordo he knew no one. Taking a firmer grip on his cloak-wrapped bundle, he set out to wile away the time until his meeting with Hordo. He would learn what he could of this city wherein he hoped to forge some future for himself.

Chapter II.

The Street of Regrets was the last street above h.e.l.lgate. It was the street where people hung on by their fingernails to keep from sliding down into the cauldron of the slum, people who knew despairingly that even if they managed to stay that one street above for their lives, their children would sink into the mora.s.s. A few had crawled there from h.e.l.lgate, stopping once they were safe above Crop-ear Alley, afraid to go further into a city they did not understand, ignoring the stench that told them how little distance they had come whenever the wind blew from the south. Those who truly escaped h.e.l.lgate did not stop on the Street of Regrets, not even for a day or an hour. But they were fewest of the few.

On such a street all folk desire to forget what lies ahead at the next turning, the next dawning, what lies behind on a thousand nights past.

The Street of Regrets was a frantic, frenetic carnival. Corner musicians with lutes and zithers and flutes sent out frenzied music to compete with the laughter that filled the air, laughter raucous, drunken, hysterical, forced. Jugglers with b.a.l.l.s and rings, clubs and flas.h.i.+ng knives worked their art for the strumpets that strolled the street, half naked in brief silks, burnished bra.s.s bangles and stilted sandals, flaunting their wares for whoever had a coin. Their most lascivious wriggles and flagrant self-caresses, however, were offered to those well-dressed oglers from the Upper Town, standing out in the motley crowd as if they bore signs, come to witness what they thought was the depths of h.e.l.lgate depravity. And over it all floated the laughter.

The Sign of the Gored Ox was what Conan expected on such a street. At one end of a common room that reeked of stale wine was a small platform where three plumply rounded women in sheer yellow silk gyrated their hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s to the sybaritic flutes. They were largely ignored by the men at the crowded tables, intent on drink or cards or dice. A bra.s.sy-haired trull, one strip of dark blue silk wrapped around and around her body in such a way as to leave much plump flesh bare, maintained a fixed smile as a fat Corinthian in striped robes stroked her as if attempting to calculate her price by the pound.

Another prost.i.tute, her hair an impossible red, eyed the breadth of Conan's shoulders and adjusted the gilded halter that supported her large round b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She swayed toward him, wetting her full lips suggestively, then stopped with a disappointed frown when he shook his head. He could see Hordo nowhere in the drunken ma.s.s; there would be time to find women when they were together.

There was one woman in the tavern who stood out from the rest. Seated alone against the wall, her winecup untouched in front of her, she seemed to be the only one there watching the dancers. Long black hair swirled below her shoulders, and large, hazel eyes and bee-stung lips gave her a beauty that outshone any of the doxies by far. Yet she was not of the sisterhood of the night. That much was certain from the simple robe of white cotton that covered her from neck to ankles. It was as out of place as she, that robe, not gaudy or revealing enough for a denizen of the Street of Regrets, lacking the ornate embroideries and rich fabrics of the women of the Upper Town who came to sample wickedness by sweating beneath one who might be a murderer or worse.

Women came later, he reminded himself. s.h.i.+fting the cloak-wrapped sword beneath his arm, he looked about for an empty table.

From what seemed rather a bundle of rags than a man, a bony hand reached out to pluck at his tunic. A thin, rasping voice emerged from a toothless mouth. "Ho, Cimmerian, where go you with that strange blade of murder?"

Conan felt the hair stir on the nape of his neck. The old man, too emaciated to be wrinkled, had a filthy rag tied across where his eyes should be. But even had he had eyes, how could he have known that Conan was from Cimmeria?

"What do you know of me, old man?" Conan asked. "And how do you know it, without sight?"