His face hardened at her words. “I have said I will do it, and I will.”
“Very well,” Taramis said. “Now, one final thing, as important as all the rest, at least to you. On the seventh night from now will there be a configuration of the stars that occurs but once in a thousand years. It is during that configuration that I can bring Valeria back to you. If you have returned to me with the treasure and the Lady Jehnna.” Her raised hand forestalled the protest he was forming. “My astrologers can locate neither the key nor the treasure, but they assure me both can be found and returned here within the time.”
“They assure you,” he laughed grimly.
He peered into his goblet, and drained the rest of the wine in one gulp. An hour before, he thought, he had waded to his knees in sorcery, and cautiously. Now he knew he waded to his neck, and in the fog.
Suddenly a scream ripped through the palace, a girl’s scream. Again it came, and again. Conan leaped to his feet, a hand going to his sword. He saw the guards tense, and realized it was in response to him. The screams had brought no stir from them.
“It is my niece,” Taramis said hastily. “Jehnna suffers nightmares. Sit, Conan. Sit. I will return when I have seen to her comfort.” And to the Cimmerian’s surprise the Princess Royal of Zamora ran from the room.
Taramis did not not have far to run, and anger lent her speed. She had thought the nightmares dealt with, gone to plague their nights no more. Her niece was curled into a ball in the middle of her bed, sobbing convulsively in the dim light of the moon shining through arched windows. Taramis was not surprised to find no servant in attendance. They knew only she could deal with the dark visions that tormented Jehnna’s night. The noblewoman knelt beside the bed and put her hands on Jehnna’s shoulders.
The girl started, then saw Taramis and clutched at her. “It was a dream!” she wept. “A horrible dream!” Not yet eighteen, Jehnna was slender and pretty, but now her large, dark eyes swam with tears and her full lips trembled beyond control.
“Only a dream,” Taramis soothed, stroking the girl’s long, black hair. “No more than a dream.”
“But I saw—I saw—”
“Ssssh. Rest, Jehnna. Tomorrow you begin your grand adventure. You cannot let dreams frighten you now.”
“But it frightened me so,” Jehnna faltered.
“Hush, child.”
Lightly Taramis rested her fingertips on Jehnna’s temples, and chanted beneath her breath. Slowly the girl’s sobs quieted, her tremblings stilled. When her breathing took on the slow, deep rhythm of sleep, Taramis straightened. A hundred times she had thought the dream and the memories of the dream were banished, but each time the accursed dream returned to haunt her. She rubbed at her own temples. The same power that gave the girl her destiny made it harder each time to push away the nightmare. But without that power and destiny there would have been no nightmares. Jehnna was the One spoken of in the scrolls, and that was what was important. This time the banishment would last long enough. It had to.
All of her life had Taramis been on this path, truly since infancy. As soon as she was old enough to be aware of herself, her own aunt, the Princess Elfaine, began to teach her of the only two ways a woman could truly have power, seduction and sorcery. When Elfaine died, the child Taramis, but ten years of age, did not attend the funereal rites. Older heads thought her absence was an indication of her grief. In actuality she had been ransacking her aunt’s private chambers, stealing the sorcerous tomes and magical artifacts that Elfaine had spent a lifetime collecting. And there she found the Scrolls of Skelos. Within a phasing of the moon she began the twenty years of labor that now approached culmination.
She became aware of Bombatta standing in the doorway, staring at the girl on the bed. Swiftly she crossed the room and took him by the arms. For a moment he resisted; then he allowed himself to be drawn into the darkened corridor.
“You no longer even hide it, do you?” she said with deceptive quiet. “You desire my niece. Do not attempt to deny it.”
He towered over her, but he shifted from foot to foot like a boy awaiting chastisement. “I cannot help myself,” he muttered finally. “You are fire and passion. She is innocence and purity. I cannot help myself.”
“And she must remain innocent. It is written in the Scrolls of Skelos.”
In truth, the scrolls did not require Jehnna to be virgin, merely innocent of the slightest seed of evil, a pure soul incapable of thinking wrong or harm toward anyone or of believing that anyone might mean such toward her. Her carefully cloistered life had assured that. But Taramis had seen what was happening in Bombatta long before he had become aware of it himself, and nurtured his belief.
“Even were it not,” she told him, “you are mine, and I will not share what is mine.”
“I like it not that you are alone with the thief,” he growled.
“Alone?” Taramis laughed. “The four best of your guards stand ready to seize him or cut him down should he threaten me.” The huge warrior spoke under his breath, and she frowned. “Speak loudly enough for me to hear, Bombatta. I do not like things hidden from me.”
For a long moment he stared at her, black eyes burning, then said, “I cannot bear the thought of the thief looking at you, wanting you, touching you … .”
“You forget yourself.” Each word slashed like an icy razor. Bombatta took a step back, then slowly sank to his knees, head bent.
“Forgive me,” he muttered. “But this Conan cannot be trusted. He is an outlander, a thief.”
“Fool! The scrolls say that Jehnna must be accompanied by a thief with eyes the color of the sky. There is not another such in Shadizar, perhaps not in all of Zamora. You will do as I have commanded you. You will follow the instruction of the scrolls exactly. Exactly, Bombatta.”
“As you command,” he murmured, “so do I obey.”
Taramis touched his head, much as she might fondle the head of one of her wolfhounds. “Of course, Bombatta.” She felt flushed with victory, for it certainly would come now. The Horn of Dagoth would be hers. Immortality and power would be hers. The knowledge sent sparks through her, and flashes of heat that coiled in her belly. Her hand trembled on Bombatta’s black hair. She took a deep breath. “Rest assured that all will occur as I have planned, Bombatta. Now return to your chambers and sleep. Sleep, and dream of our triumph.”
Unmoving on his knees, Bombatta watched her go, his obsidian eyes glittering in the dark.