Conan the Barbarian

Her father smiled. “Will you find it for me, Marique?”

The girl bowed her head obediently. “As you desire.”

One hand emerged from beneath her scaly purple cloak. Silver talons sheathed her fingers. She waved them through the air as if plucking the strings of an invisible lyre. Something thrummed through Conan’s chest. The Kushite’s weight shifted, not enough to free him, but enough to let the boy know that the black giant had felt it as well.

The others drew back as the girl began to circle the smithy. Her path spiraled outward, her dark cloak swirling about her. Although she did not move swiftly, her movements were quite deliberate. She cocked her head as if she were listening for something. She must have heard it because the pattern of her movements shifted, narrowing, leading her to a shadowed corner.

“There, Father, I have it.”

She gestured casually and a wooden plank peeled back as if a leather flap. She reached down into the dark recess and removed a golden box. Bearing it in both hands, she approached her father. On bended knee, with her head bowed, she raised the box to him.

Khalar Zym set his great sword down and reached for the box with trembling hands. He removed the lid and stared. His eyes glistened. His mouth hung open for a heartbeat. He grasped the thing in the box and raised it up with the gentle reverence of a father holding his child for the first time.

“You have served me well, daughter. Your mother would be proud.”

The girl’s head remained bowed, but she smiled most contentedly.

Khalar Zym rubbed a thumb over the fragment of bone lovingly, then his eyes narrowed and his visage became cruel. “Oh, Cimmerian, you could have saved me much trouble. As I would have given you glory, so shall I now give you pain. But how? Oh, yes, yes . . .”

He gazed at his daughter. “Marique, would you like a brother? We can take this Cimmerian, bend him to our will.”

The girl shot Conan a venomous glance, then smiled up at her father. “As you wish.”

“My lord, you cannot.” Lucius shook his head, a bloody cloth held to his face.

“ ‘Cannot,’ Lucius? Did you say I cannot do something?”

The large man blanched. “No, my lord, I meant . . .” The Aquilonian drew his short sword. “I meant that I hoped you would give me the honor of dispatching this barbarian.”

“While that might give you satisfaction, Lucius, it will do nothing to give my Cimmerian friend pain.” Khalar Zym tapped the bit of mask against his chin. “No, I know what we shall do. Remo, Akhoun, more chains. The rest of you, gather the men, fire the rest of the village.”

At Khalar Zym’s instruction, his henchmen attached another chain to the helmet and looped it over a rafter. This they placed in Conan’s hands in the middle of the forge floor, while they hung a counterbalance above his father’s head. The boy hung on tightly. The first quiver of his arms had sent a droplet of burning metal sizzling into his father’s shoulder.

Khalar Zym crouched beside Corin. “This is the only way which I may punish you, Cimmerian. You do not cry out with pain. You fear no insult to honor. The worst I can do to you is to let you watch your son die trying to save you. And we both know, you and I, as fathers, that is precisely what shall happen.”

Zym stood and led his men from the forge. Torches thrown on the roof and laid against the walls from outside started fires that greedily consumed the building. Marique lingered, studying the great sword. She smiled at her reflection in its blade, then picked it up. She hesitated, and in the reflection her eyes met Conan’s.

She spun, watching him warily. “It is a good thing you die here, Cimmerian. Were you to live, you would prove troublesome.” She gazed after her father, then strode quickly to Conan’s side and licked sweat and blood from his cheek. Her voice became a whisper. “Not that this might prove wholly unwelcome, but we shall never know.”

In a swirl of cape she departed. From outside, men cheered their great victory, but the rising crackle of flames swallowed all sound of their retreat.

Corin met his son’s gaze. Though collared and chained to the helmet, begrimed, bloody, and exhausted, he did not look defeated. “Conan, you cannot save me. Save yourself.”

Already the chain had begun to get hot, but the boy shook his head. “A Cimmerian warrior does not fear death.”

“Nor does he rush foolishly to embrace it.” Corin raised a hand to the chain on his collar. “Let go of the chain, boy.”

“I’m not afraid to die.” A fiery coal fell from the ceiling, burning Conan’s cheek. It smarted fiercely, but to brush it away would be to doom his father. Conan snarled against the pain, but held on.

“Conan, look at me.”

The boy looked up into his father’s eyes. “Your mother . . . she wanted more for you in this life than fire and blood. As do I.” Corin’s grip tightened on his chain. “I love you, son.”

Corin yanked and his body fell. The chain ripped free of Conan’s grasp. Molten metal poured down over the smith, outlining his features in red-gold as the forge’s light had often done, then liquified them.

Conan darted toward his father, but the blast of heat from the metal drove him back. A rafter cracked, cutting him off. The heat forced him to the doorway. The boy stumbled through, expecting a spear thrust or an arrow. He tumbled into a snowbank, burying his face and hands. The snow cooled his seared flesh but could do nothing to erase the image of his father’s death.

The boy rolled over and looked at his blistered hands. Each link had left its mark on his flesh. He tried to remember his father’s hands, so big, so callused, and yet so gentle when circumstance required. Already that memory had begun to fade within the liquid metal pool that had consumed his father. Conan pressed his hands into the snow again and waited for numbness to swallow the pain.

He had no idea how long he lay there. Though he did not fear death, in that moment he was not so certain that he was fond of living. He knew that if Crom meant him to live, he would live—the courage and strength to do so would have been born in him. But there, with the forge burning and the stink of roasting flesh filling the gray smoke, Conan saw little reason to move.

Then he heard something. Not a random sound like fire’s crackle or the hiss of bubbling water. A voice. A voice free from pain and full of joy. In this place, at this time, that could herald only one thing.

Conan rolled to his feet and looked about warily. There, through a swirl of smoke, he saw two things. A raider, one of the heavy cavalry, kneeling over the body of a woman. He grabbed a double handful of her hair and pulled back, stretching her throat and opening her mouth in a silent scream. Then he pressed the edge of his sword to her hairline and, in one swift stroke, harvested her scalp.

And, halfway between the raider and Conan, a Cimmerian sword had been stabbed into a snowbank, forgotten.

Swiftly and silently, fluidly, the last Cimmerian warrior ran forward. He grasped the sword’s hilt with his left hand, mindless of the pain of bursting blisters. He splashed through a puddle of snowmelt that he could have run around, because he wanted the raider to know he was coming.

The man heard the sound and half turned toward it. His right hand came up to ward off the sword, but Conan’s first cut separated wrist from arm. Before the raider could scream, a second blow dented his helmet. He sagged to the side, dazed, and stared up.

Conan buried the sword in his throat and watched the light flow out of his eyes.

Conan sat down beside the dead raider and looked at the burning village. The boy he had been that morning would not have wanted to cry, but could never have held back the tears. The man he had become understood the desire to weep, but could never let him give in to weakness. Crom cared not for the lamentations of mortals, and Conan, determined to be make Marique’s comment into a prophecy, had no time to mourn.

As night came on and the warmth of fires faded, he freed the sword from the raider’s throat, took a knife from his body, scavenged meager supplies, and set off to find his grandfather.

CHAPTER 9

CONAN AWOKE WITH a start. He couldn’t feel his hands. He pulled them from beneath the heavy aurochs skin that was all but smothering him. They’d become as large as hams, or at least the cloth