Conan the Liberator

DEATH IN THE DARK

For many days, the presence of the army of Amuhus Procas on the far side of the Alimane deterred the rebels from attempts to ford the river. Although Procas himself, injured and unable to walk or ride, remained secluded in his tent, his seasoned officers kept a vigilant eye alert for any movement of the rebel forces. Conan’s men marched daily up and down the river’s southern shore, feinting at crossing one or another ford; but Procas’s scouts remarked every move, and naught occurred to give pleasure to the Cimmerian or his cohorts.

“Stalemate!” groaned the restive Prospero. “I feared that it might come to this!”

“What we require for our success,” suggested Dexitheus, “is a diversion of some kind, but on a colossal scale—some sudden intervention of the gods, perchance.”

“In a lifetime devoted to the arts of war,” responded the Count of Poitain, “I have learned to rely less upon the deities than on my own poor wits. Excuse me. Your Reverence, but methinks if any diversion were to deter Amulius Procas, it would be one of our own making. And I believe I know what that diversion well may be; for our spies report that the pot of my native county is coming to the boil.”

That night, with the approval of the general, a man clad all in black swam the deeper reaches of the Alimane, crept dripping into the underbrush, and vanished. The night was heavily overcast, dark and moonless; and a clammy drizzle herded the royalist sentries beneath the cover of the trees and shut out the small night sounds that might otherwise have alarmed them.

The swimmer in dark raiment was a Poitanian, a yeoman of Count Trocero's desmesne. He bore against his breast an envelope of oiled silk, carefully folded, in which lay a letter penned in the count’s own hand and addressed to the leaders of the simmering Poitanian revolt

Amulius Procas did not sleep that night. The rain, sluiced against the fabric of his tent, depressed his fallen spirits and inflamed his aching wound. Growling barbarous oaths recalled from years spent as a junior officer along the frontiers of Aquilonia, the old general sipped hot spiced wine to ward off chills and fever and distracted his melancholy with a board game played against one of his aides, a sergeant. His wounded leg, swathed in bandages, rested uneasily on a rude footstool.

The grumble of thunder caused the army veteran to lift his grizzled head.

“ ‘TIS only thunder, sir,” said the sergeant "The night’s a stormy one.”

“A perfect night for Conan’s rebels to attempt a crossing of the fords,” said Procas. “I trust the sentries have received instruction to walk their rounds, instead of lurking under trees?”

"They have been so instructed, sir,” the sergeant assured him. "Your play, sir; observe that my queen has you in check.”

“So she has; so she has,” muttered Procas, frowning at the board. Uneasily he wondered why a cold chill pierced his heart at hearing those harmless words, "my queen has you in check.” Then he scoffed at these womanish night fears and downed a swallow of wine. It was not for old soldiers like Amulius Procas to flinch from frivolous omens! But still, would that he had been in better personally to inspect the sentries, who inevitably grew slack in the absence of a vigilant commander.…

The tent flap twitched aside, revealing a tall soldier.

“What is it, man?" asked Procas. “Do the rebels stir?”

"Nay, General; but you have a visitor.”

"A visitor, you say?” repeated Procas in perplexity. "Well, send him in; send him in!”

"It’s 'her'," sir, not 'him,'” said the soldier. As Procas gestured for the entry of the unknown visitor, his partner at the board game rose, saluted, and left the tent.

Presently the soldier ushered in a girl attired in the vestments of a page. She had boldly approached the sentries, claiming to be an agent of King Numedides' ministers. None asked how she had traveled thither, being impressed by her icy air of calm authority and by the strange light that burned in her wide-set emerald eyes.

Procas studied her dubiously. The sigil that she showed meant little to him; such baubles can be forged or stolen. Neither gave he much credence to the documents she bore. But when she claimed to carry a message from Thulandra Thuu, his curiosity was aroused. He knew and feared the lean, dark sorcerer, whose hold over Numedides he had long envied, distrusted, and tried to counteract.

"Well," growled Amulius Procas at length, “say on.”

Aleina glanced at the two sentries standing at her elbows, with hands on sword hilts. "It is for your ears only, my general,” she said gently.

Procas thought a moment, then nodded to the sentries: "Very well, men; wait outside!"

“But, sir!" said the elder of the two, “we ought not to leave you alone with this woman. Who knows what tricks that son of evil, Conan, may be up to—”

“ConanI” cried Aleina. “But he’s dead! No sooner had she uttered those impetuous words than she would have gladly bitten off her tongue could she have thus recalled them.

The older sentry smiled. “Nay, lass; the barbarian has more lives than a cat. They say he suffered a wasting illness in the rebel camp for a while; but when we crossed the river, there he was behind us on his horse, shouting to his archers to make hedgehogs of us.”

Amulius Procas rumbled: “The young woman evidently thinks that Conan perished; and I am fain to learn the reason for her view. Leave us, men; I am not yet such a drooling dotard that I need fear a wisp of a girl!”

When the sentries had saluted and withdrawn, Amulius Procas said to Alcina with a chuckle: “My lads seize every opportunity to stay in out of the rain. And now repeat to me the message from Thulandra Thuu. Then we shall investigate the other matters.”

Rain pounded on the tent, and thunder rolled as Alcina fumbled at the fastenings of the silken shirt she wore beneath her rain-soaked page’s tunic. Presently she said:

"The message from my master, sir, is …”

A bolt of lightning and a crash of thunder drowned her following words. At the same time, she dropped her voice to just above a whisper. Procas leaned forward, thrusting his graying head to within a hand’s breadth of her face in an effort to hear. She continued in that same sweet murmur:

"—that the time—has come— "

With the speed of a striking serpent, she drove her slender dagger into Amulius Procas’s chest, aiming for the heart.

"—for you to die!” she finished, leaping back to escape the flailing sweep of the wounded general’s arms.

True though her thrust had been, it encountered a check. Beneath his tunic, Procas wore a shirt of fine mesh-maiL Although the point of the dagger pierced one of the links and drove between the general’s ribs, as the blade widened, it became wedged within the link and so penetrated less than a fingers breadth. And, in her frantic struggle to wrench it free, Alcina snapped off the blade’s tip, which remained lodged in the general’s breast.

With a hoarse cry, the old soldier rose to his feet despite his injury and lunged, spreading his arms to seize the girl. Alcina backed away and, upsetting the taboret on which the candle stood, snuffed out the flame and plunged the tent into darkness deeper than the tomb.

Amulius Procas limped about in the ebony dark, until his strong hands chanced to grasp a handful of silken raiment. For a fleeting instant Alcina thought that she was doomed to die choking beneath the general’s thick, gnarled fingers; but as the fabric ripped, the old soldier gasped and staggered. His injured leg gave way, and death rattled in his throat as he fell full-length across the carpet The venom on Alcina’s blade had done its work.

Alcina hastened to the entrance and looked out through a crack in the tent flap. A flash of lightning lighted the two sentries, huddled in their sodden cloaks, standing like statues to the left and right. She perceived with satisfaction that the rumble of the storm had masked the sounds of struggle within the general’s tent.

Fumbling in the darkness, Alcina discovered flint, steel, and tinder and, with great difficulty, relighted the candle. Quickly she examined the general’s body, then curled his fingers around the jeweled hilt of her broken dagger. Darting back to the tent flap, she peered at the soldiers standing stiffly still and began to croon a tender song, slowly raising her voice until the flowing rhythm carried to the sentinels.

The song she sang was a kind of lullaby, whose pattern of sound had been carefully assembled to hypnotize the hearer. Little by little, unaware of the fragile, otherworldly music, the sentries slipped into a catatonic lethargy, in which they no longer heard the rain that spattered on their helmets.

An hour later, having eluded the guards at the boundaries of the camp, Alcina regained her own small tent on a wooded hilltop near the river. With a gasp of fatigue, she threw herself into the shelter and began to doff her rain-soaked garments. The shirt was torn—a ruin …

Then she clapped a hand to her breast, where had reposed the obsidian talisman; but there it lay no longer. Appalled, she realized that Procas, in seizing her in the darkness, had grasped the slender chain on which it hung and snapped it off. The glassy half-circle must now be lying on the rug that floored the general’s tent; but how could she recover it? When they discovered their leader's body, the royalists would swarm out like angry hornets. And at the camp hard-eyed sentries would be everywhere, with orders instantly to destroy a black-haired, green-eyed woman in the clothing of a page.

Shivering with terror and uncertainty, Alcina endured the angry rolls of thunder and the drumming fingers of the rain. But her thoughts raced on. Did Thulandra Thuu know that Conan had survived her poison? Her master had revealed no hint of such unwelcome knowledge the last time they conferred by means of the lost talisman. If the news of the Cimmerian’s recovery had not yet reached the sorcerer, she must get word to him forthwith. But without her magical fragment of obsidian, she could report only by repairing to Tarantia.

Further black thoughts intruded on her mind. If Thulandra Thuu had known that Conan lived, would he have ordered her to slay Amulius Procas? Might he not be angry with her for killing the general, even though he had himself ordained the act, now that Procas’s leadership was needed to save the royalist cause? Worse, might the sorcerer not punish her for failing to give the rebel chieftain a sufficient dose of poison? Worst of all, what vengeance might he not exact from her who lost his magical amulet? Stranded weaponless, without communication with her mentor, resourceless save for her puny knowledge of the elementary forms of witchcraft, Alcina lost heart and for a moment wavered between returning to Tarantia and fleeing to a foreign land.

But then, she reflected, Thulandra Thuu had always used her kindly and paid her well. She recalled his hinted promises of instruction in the higher arts of witchcraft, his talk of conferring on her immortality like his own, and—when he became sole ruler over Aquilonia, to reign forever—the assurance that she would be his surrogate.

Alcina decided to return to the capital and chance her master's wrath. Besides, being both beautiful and shrewd, she had a way with men, no matter what their station. Smiling, she slept, prepared to set forth with the coming of the light.

Toward dawn, an Aquilonian captain approached the general’s tent to have him sign the orders of the day. The two sentries of the night before, wearily anticipating the conclusion of their tour of duty, saluted their superior before one stepped forward to open the tent flap and usher the captain in.

But General Procas would sign no further orders, save perchance in hell. He sprawled face-down in a pool of his congealing blood, clasping in his hand the stump of the slim-bladed poniard that had stilled the voice of Aquilonia's mightiest warrior.

The two soldiers turned over the corpse and stared at it. Procas’s iron-gray hair, now dappled with dried blood, lay in disorder, partly masking his dormant features.

"I shall never believe our general took his own life,” whispered the captain, deeply moved. “It was not his way.”

"Nor I, sir,” said the sentry. "What man determined to kill himself would plunge a dagger into a shirt of mail? It must have been that woman.”

“Woman? What woman?” barked the captain.

"The green-eyed one I led here late last night She said she brought a message from the king. See, there is one of her footprints.” The soldier pointed to an outline of a small, booted foot etched in dried mud upon the carpet. "We begged the general to let us stay during the interview, but he ordered us out regardless.”

“What became of the woman?"

The sentry turned up helpless hands. “Gone, I know not how. I assure you, sir, that she did not pass us on her way out. Sergius and I were wide awake and at our posts from the time we left the general till you came just now for orders. You can ask the watch."

“Hm," said the captain. “Only a devil can vanish from the midst of an armed and guarded camp of war."

"Then perhaps the devil is a woman, sir," muttered the sentry, biting his lip. “Look there on the rug: a half-moon of rock-glass, black as the depths of hell!"

The captain toed the bit of obsidian, then kicked it aside impatiently. “Some forbidding amulet, such as the superstitous wear. Devil or no, we must not stand here babbling. You guard the general’s body, whilst I call up a squad to search the camp and the surounding hills. Sergius, fetch me a trumpeter! If I ever catch that she-devil…"

Alone in the tent, the sentry furtively searched among the shadows on the rug and found the amulet. He examined his find, tied the broken ends of chain together, and slipped it over his head. If the ornament was not much to look at, it might at least bring him good luck. Somebody must have thought so, and a soldier needs all the good fortune that the gods bestow.

Conan leaned above the rim of a great rock and studied the disposition of the royalist troops, still encamped along the northern bank of the Alimane. Only the day before, something unsettling had occurred among them; for there had been much shouting and noisy confusion. But from his eyrie not even the keen-eyed Cimmerian could discern the nature of the disturbance.

Keeping his eyes fixed on the scene across the river, Conan accepted a joint of cold meat from his squire and gnawed on it with a lusty appetite. He felt full of renewed vigor, now that he had shaken off the lingering effects of the poisoned wine; and the days of harrying the Border Legion home had much appeased his rage over the lost battle amid the waters of the Alimane, where so many of his faithful followers had perished in the swirling flood.

Years had passed since the Cimmerian adventurer had last fought a guerilla war—striking from the shadows, ambushing stragglers, hounding a stronger force from the seciuity of darkness. Then he had commanded a brigand band in the Zuagir desert Pleased he was that the skills were still with him, trammeled in his memory, razor-sharp in spite of long disuse.

Still, now that the enemy had crossed the Alimane and were encamped upon the further bank, the problems of the war he fought had changed again—and, thought the impatient Cimmerian, changed for the worse.

The hosts beneath the Lion banner could not ford the Alimane so long as the royalists stood ready to repel each assault. For such an attack to succeed in the face of vigorous resistance would require, as in scaling the wall of a fortress, overwhelming numbers; and these the rebels did not have. Nor could they rely upon guerilla tactics and the novel employment of mounted archers. Moreover, their supplies were running low.

Conan scowled as he moodily munched the cold meat. At least, he reflected, the troops of Amulius Procas displayed no inclination to recross the river to do battle. And for the twentieth time he pondered the nature of the event that, the day before, had so disturbed the orderly calm of the enemy camp.

The Border Legion had enlarged the open space on the further side of the river, where the Culario road met the water; they had felled trees, extending the clearing up and down the stream to make room for their camp. Beyond the camp, the forest, was a wall of monotonous green, now that the springtime flowers on tree and shrub had faded. As Conan watched, a party of mounted men entered the encampment, and the song of trumpets foretold a visitation of some moment.

Conan shaded his eyes, frowned at the distant camp, and turned to his squire. "Go fetch Melias the scout, and quickly."

The squire trotted off, soon to return with a lean and leathery oldster. Conan glanced up, his face warm with greeting. Melias had served with Conan years before on the Pictish frontier. His eye was keener than any hawk's, and his moccasined feet slipped through dry underbrush as silently as a serpent.

"Who is it enters yonder camp, old man?" Conan inquired, nodding toward the royalist encampment

The scout stared fixedly at the party moving down the company street At length he said: "A general officer—afield rank, at any rate, from the size of his escort And of the nobility, too, from his blazonry.”

Conan dispatched his page to fetch Dexitheus, who made a hobby of unraveling heraldic symbols. As the scout described the insignia embroidered on the newcomer's surcoat, the priest-physician rubbed his nose with a slow finger, as if to stimulate his memory.

“Methinks," he said at last, "that is the coat of arms of the Count of Thune."

Conan shrugged irritably. "The name is not unfamihar to me, but I am sure I have never met the man. What know you of him?"

Dexitheus pondered. "Thune is an eastern county of Aquilonia. But I have not encountered the present holder of the title. I recall some rumor—perhaps a year ago—of a scandal in connection with his accession; but further details I fail to recollect"

Back at the rebel camp, Conan sought out the other leaders, to query them about the new arrival. But they could tell him little more than he already knew about the Count of Thune, save that the man had served as an officer on the peaceful eastern frontiers, with, so far as they knew, neither fabulous heroism nor crushing disgrace to his name.

By midafternoon, Melias reported that the troops of the Border Legion were ranked in parade formation and that, presently, the Count of Thune appeared and began to read aloud from documents bearing impressive seals and ribbons. Prospero and an aide slipped out of camp and, screened by foliage along the river bank, listened to the proceedings. Since a royalist sergeant repeated every phrase of the proclamation in a stentorian voice, which carried across the water, the astounded rebels learned that their adversary had died by his own hand and that Ascalante, Count of Thune, had been appointed in his place to command the Border Legion. This startling news they relayed with all dispatch to the other rebel chiefs.

“Procas a suicide?” growled Conan, bristling. "Never, by Crom! The old man, for all he was my enemy, was a soldier through and through, and the best officer in all of Aquilonia. Such as Procas sell their lives dearly; they do not slough them off! I smell the stench of treachery in this; how say the rest of you?"

"As for myself,” muttered Dexitheus, fingering his prayer beads, "in this I see the sly hand of Thulandra Thuu, who long nursed hatred for the general”

"Does none of you know more of this Count Ascalante?” demanded Conan. “Can he lead troops in battle? Has combat seasoned him, or is he just another perfumed hanger-on of mad Numedides?” When the others shook their heads, Conan added: “Well, send your sergeants to inquire among the troops, whether any man of them has served beneath the count, and what manner of officer he was.”

“Think you,” asked Prospero, “that this new commander of the Border Legion may unwittingly serve our cause?”

Conan shrugged. “Perhaps; and perhaps not. We shall see. If Trocero’s promised diversion comes to pass . . ."

Count Trocero smiled a secret smile.

The following morning, the rebel leaders, gathered on the lookout prominence, stared across the river in somber fascination. While the Border Legion stood in parade formation, a small party of mounted men moved slowly through the camp and vanished up the Culario road. In their midst a pair of black horses, driven by General Procas’s charioteer, trundled the general’s chariot along at a slow and solemn pace. Across the rear of the vehicle was lashed a large wooden box or coffin.

Conan grunted: "That’s the last we shall ever see of old Amulius. If he had been king of Aquilonia, things would be quite different here today.”

A few nights later, when fog lay heavy on the surface of the Alimane, the black-clad swimmer, whom Count Trocero had sent across the river several days before, returned. Again he bore a letter sewn into an envelope of well-oiled silk.

That very night the Lion Banner rose against the silver splendor of the watchful moon.