Conan woke early the morning after his foray into the palace. He found the common room empty except for Abuletes, counting his night’s take at the bar, and two skinny sweepers in rags. The fat tavernkeeper eyed Conan warily and put a protective arm about the stacked coins.
“Wine,” Conan said, fishing out the necessary coppers. For all his celebration the night before there were still six of the dark man’s gold coins in his purse. “I don’t steal from friends,” he added, when Abuletes drew the money down the bar after him in the crook of his arm.
“Friends! What friends? In the Desert, a brother in blood is no friend.” Abuletes filled a rough earthenware mug from a tap in a keg and shoved it in front of Conan. “But perhaps you think to buy friends with the gold you were throwing about last night. Where did that come from, anyway? Had you aught to do with what happened at the palace in the night? No, that couldn’t be. You were spending like Yildiz himself before ever it happened. You’d better watch that, showing your gold so free in the Desert.”
The tavernkeeper would have gone on, but Conan cut him short. “Something happened at the palace?” He was careful to drink deep of the thin wine for punctuation, as if the question were casual.
“And you call a king’s counselor dead something, plus others to the king’s household and a dozen guardsmen besides, then it did.”
“A dozen!”
“So I said, and so it was. Dead guardsmen at every hand, Yildiz’s gifts to Tiridates taken, and never a one who saw a hair of those who did it. Never a one in all the palace.” Abuletes rubbed his chins with a pudgy hand. “Though there’s a tale about that a pair of the sentries saw a man running from the palace. A big man. Mayhap as big as you.”
“Of course it was me,” Conan snorted. “I leaped over the wall, then leaped back again with all that on my back. You did say all the gifts were taken, didn’t you?” He emptied his mug and thumped it down before the stout man. “Again.”
“Five gemstones, five dancing girls and a golden casket.” Abuletes twisted the tap shut and replaced the mug on the bar. “Unless there’s more than that, they took all. I’ll admit you couldn’t have done it. I admit it. But why are you so interested now? Answer me that.”
“I’m a thief. Someone else has done the hard part on this. All I have to do is relieve him of his ill-gotten goods.” Relieve whom, he wondered. Ankar had had no other plan beyond himself. Of that he was certain. That left guardsmen gone wrong, stolen away with the treasure and the slave girls after slaying their comrades, or slain themselves after letting someone else into the palace to do the theft.
Abuletes hawked and spat on a varicolored rag, and began to scrub the bartop. “Was me,” he said absently, “I’d have naught to do with this. Those who did this thing aren’t of the Desert. Those who rob kings aren’t to be crossed. Necromancers, for all you know. There was no one seen, remember. Not a glimpse of a hair.”
It could have been a mage, Conan thought, though why a mage, or anyone else, would go through the danger of stealing five dancing girls from the palace, he could not imagine. Too, magicians were not so thick on the ground as most men believed, and he was one who should know.
“You begin to sound worried for me, Abuletes. I thought you said there were no friends in the Desert.”
“You spend freely,” the tavernkeeper said sourly. “That’s all there is. Don’t think there’s more. You stay out of this, whatever it is. Whoever’s behind this is too big for the likes of you. You’ll end with your throat cut, and I’ll be out a customer.”
“Perhaps you’re right. Bel! I’m for a breath of air. This sitting around talking of other men’s thefts gives me a pain in the belly.”
He left the fat tapster muttering darkly to himself and found his way to the street. The air in the Desert was anything but fresh. The stench of rotting offal blended with the effluvia of human excrement and vomit. The paving stones where they had not been ripped up to leave mudholes, were slick with slime. From the dim depths of an alley, barely wide enough for a man to enter, the victim of a robbery moaned for help. Or the bait for a robbery. Either was equally likely.
Conan strode the crooked streets of that thieves’ district purposefully, though he was not himself sure of what that purpose was. A swindler with tarnished silver embroidery on his vest waved a greeting as he passed, and a whore, naked but for gilded brass bells and resting her feet in a doorway, smiled at the broadshouldered youth as she suddenly felt not so tired after all. Conan did not even notice them, nor the “blind” beggar in black rags, tapping his way down the street with a broken stick, who eased his dagger back under his soiled robes after a glance at the grim set of Conan’s jaw, or the three who followed him through the winding streets, the edges of their headcloths drawn across their faces, whiteknuckled hands gripping cudgels beneath their dingy cloaks, before the size of his arms and the length of his sword made them take another turning.
He tried telling himself that the pendants were beyond his reach now. He had naught beyond glimmers of suspicion who had taken them, no idea at all where they were. Still, ten thousand pieces of gold was not a thing a man gave up on easily. And there was Velita. A slave girl. She would be happy with any master who was kind to her. But he had promised, sworn, to free her. By Bel and by Crom he had sworn it. His oath, and ten thousand pieces of gold.
Suddenly he realized he was out of the Desert, near the Sign of the Bull Dancer, on the Street of the Silver Fish. A tree-lined sward of grass ran down the center of the broad avenue. Slave-borne sedan chairs vied in number with pedestrians, and there was not a beggar in sight. This place was far from the Desert, yet he had friends — or at least acquaintances—here. The tavern hoarding, a slender youth in a leathern girdle, vaulting between the needle horns of a great black bull, creaked in the breeze as he went in.
Taverns, Conan reflected as he searched for a certain face, were much alike, in the Desert or out. Rather than footpads and cutpurses, plump merchants in purple silk and green brocade occupied the tables, but only the methods of stealing were different. In place of a coiner was a slender man holding a pomander before his prominent nose. He did not make the money he passed, rather buying it through the back door of the king’s mint. The panderers dressed like noblemen, in scarlet robes, with emeralds at their ears, and some of them were indeed noblemen, but they were panderers no less. The prostitutes wore gold instead of gilt, rubies instead of spessartine, but they were just as naked, and they sold the same wares.
Conan spotted the man he wanted, Ampartes, a merchant who cared little if the king’s duties had been paid on the goods he bought, alone at a table against the wall. Whatever happened in Shadizar, Ampartes soon knew of it. The chair across the table from the plump merchant groaned in protest as Conan’s bulk dropped into it, a sound not far from that which rose in Ampartes’ throat. His oily cheek twitched as his dark eyes rolled to see who had noted the Cimmerian’s arrival. He tugged at his short, pointed beard with a beringed hand.
“What are you doing here, Conan?” he hissed, and blanched as if in fear the name might have been overheard. “I have no need of … of your particular wares.”
“But I have need of yours. Tell me of what happened in the city last night.”
Ampartes’ voice rose to a squeak.
“You … you mean the palace?”
“No,” Conan said, and hid a smile at the relief on the merchant’s face. He grabbed a pewter goblet from the tray of a passing serving girl, a hand’s breadth strip of crimson silk low on her hips her only garb, and filled it from Ampartes’ blue-glazed flagon. The girl gave him a coy smile, then tossed her blonde head with a snort and hurried on sulkily when he did not give h
er a second glance. “But anything else unusual. Anything at all.”
For the next two hours the merchant babbled in his relief that Conan was not involving him in the palace theft. Conan learned that on the night before in Shadizar a dealer in rare wines had strangled his mistress on discovering her with his son, and a gem merchant’s wife had put a dagger in her husband’s ribs for no reason that anyone knew. A nobleman’s niece had been taken by kidnappers, but those who knew said her ransom, to come from her inheritance, would pay her uncle’s debts. Thieves had entered the homes of five merchants and two nobles. One noble had had even his sedan chair and the robes from his back taken on the High Vorlusian Way, and a slave dealer’s weasand had been slit outside his own auction house, some said for the keys to his strongbox, others for not checking the source of his merchandise, thus selling an abducted noblewoman into Koth. A merchant of Akif, visiting a most specialized brothel called The House of the Lambs of Hebra, had … .
“Enough!” Conan’s hand cracked on the tabletop. Ampartes stared at him open-mouthed. “What you’ve told me so far could happen on any night in Shadizar, and usually does. What occurred out of the ordinary? It doesn’t have to do with gold, or theft. Just so it’s strange.”
“I don’t understand what you want,” the oily man muttered. “There’s the matter of the pilgrims, but there’s no profit there. I don’t know why I waste my time with you.”