Conan’s blade flashed upward, striking sparks from the other’s descending steel. Dagger darting to slide beneath Conan’s ribs, the Corinthian’s wrist slapped into his hand and was seized in an iron grip. Locked chest to chest they staggered out onto the balcony. Conan’s knee rose, smashing into Emilio’s crotch, but the reanimated corpse merely grunted. Risking freeing the Corinthian’s sword, Conan struck with his hilt into Emilio’s face. Now the other man fell back. Conan’s blade slashed the front of his old friend’s tunic, and Emilio leaped back again. Abruptly the backs of his legs struck the railing, and for an instant he hung there, arms waving desperately for balance. And then he was gone, without a cry. A sickening thud came from below.
Swallowing hard, Conan stepped to the rail and looked toward a ground that seemed all flitting shadows. He could make out no detail, but that Emilio had lived through the fall—if, indeed, he had lived before he fell—was beyond his belief. It was ill to kill a friend, no matter the need. There could be no luck in it.
Resheathing his sword, he hurried down the stairs. At the archway he stopped. Emilio’s body lay sprawled just outside, and its fall had triggered the trap. From the archway to the marble path, thin metal spikes the length of a man’s forearm had thrust up through the tiles. Four of them transfixed the Corinthian.
“Take a pull on the hellhorn for me,” Conan muttered.
But there was still Akeba to meet, and no time for mourning. Quickly he picked his way between the spikes and set out at a dead run for the landmark they had chosen, the tallest tower in the compound, its high golden dome well visible even by moonlight.
Abruptly a woman’s scream pierced the night, and was cut off just as suddenly. With an oath Conan drew his sword and redoubled his speed. That cry had com
e from the direction of the gold-topped tower.
Deep in the compound a gong sounded its brazen alarm, then a second and a third. Distant shouts rose, and torches flared to life.
Conan dashed into the shadows at the base of the tower, and stopped to stare in amazement. Akeba was there, holding a slender sable-skinned beauty in saffron robes, one arm pinning her arms, his free hand covering her mouth. Large dark eyes glared fiercely at him from above the soldier’s fingers.
“This is your daughter?” Conan asked, and Akeba nodded, an excited smile splitting his face.
“Zorelle. I could not believe my luck. She was fetching water to the women’s quarters. No one saw me.”
The shouts had grown louder, and the torches now seemed to rival the stars in number.
“That does not seem to matter, at the moment,” Conan said drily. “It will be no easy task to remove ourselves from this place, much less a girl who doesn’t seem to want to go.”
“I am taking her out of here,” the Turanian replied, his voice hard.
“I did not suggest otherwise.” He would not leave any woman to the mercies of Emilio’s destroyer. “But we must … hsst!” He motioned for silence.
An atavistic instinct rooted deep inside the Cimmerian shouted that he was being watched by inimical eyes, eyes that drew closer by the moment. But his own gaze saw nothing but deceptively shifting shadows. No. One shadow resolved itself into a man in black robes. Even after Conan was certain, though, he found it difficult to keep his eyes on that dim figure. There was something about it that seemed to prevent the eye from focusing on it. The hairs on his neck rose. There was sorcery of a kind here, sorcery most foul and unnatural throughout this place.
“Mitra!” Akeba swore suddenly, jerking his hand from his daughter’s mouth. “She bit me!”
Twisting in his loosened grasp, she raked at his face with her nails. At the distinct disadvantage of struggling with his own daughter, he attempted to keep his grip on her while avoiding being blinded. Under the circumstances it was an unequal fight. In an instant she was free and running. And screaming.
“Help! Outsiders! They are trying to take me! Help!”
“Zorelle!” Akeba shouted, and ran after her.
“Zandru’s Hells!” Conan shouted, and followed.
Of a sudden the black-robed man was before the girl. Gasping, she recoiled.
The strange figure’s hand reached out, perhaps to brush against her face. Her words stopped on the instant, and she dropped as if her bones had melted.
“Zorelle!” The scream from Akeba held all the anguish that could be wrung from a man’s throat.
Primitive instinct, primed now, reared again in Conan. Diving, he caught Akeba about the waist and pulled him to the ground. The air hummed as if a thousand hornets had been loosed. Arrows sliced through the space where they had stood, toward the man in black. And before Conan’s astounded gaze the man, hands darting like lightning, knocked two shafts aside, seized two more from the air, then seemed to slide between the rest and disappear.
Close behind their arrows came half-a-score Hyrkanians, waving short horn bows and curved yataghans as they ran. Two veered toward Conan and Akeba, but another shouted gutturally, “No! Leave them! ’Tis Baalsham we want!” The squat Hyrkanians ran on into the night.
Shaking his head, Conan got slowly to his feet. He had no notion what was happening, and was, in fact, not sure that he wanted to know. Best he got on about his business and left the rest to those already involved. Screams had been added to the shouts in the distance, and the pounding of hundreds of panic-stricken feet. Fire stained the sky as a building exploded in flame.
Akeba crawled on hands to knees to his daughter. Cradling her in his arms, he rocked back and forth, tears streaming down his flat cheeks. “She is dead, Cimmerian,” he whispered. “He but touched her, yet she … .”
“Bring your daughter,” Conan told him, “and let us go. We have no part in what else happens here this night.”
The Turanian lowered Zorelle carefully, drew his tulwar and examined the blade. “I have blood to avenge, a man to kill.” His voice was quiet, but hard.