Crom curse it!

Conan tossed the stripped pork rib into the fierce low red embers of the hearth-fire and rose, hitching at his sword-belt as the bone crackled and popped and fat-rich marrow flared up.

Sukhmet is a bad town to wander in, drunk or not, he thought, moving toward the doorway. She can’t object to a soldier going home when he chooses, and who knows what might happen…?

If anything was going to light a fire under Valeria’s tail, a fight would do it, and a man who fought at her side might well get a pleasant surprise out of it—unlike the ones who fought against her. He nodded to the innkeeper, trying to remember what the man now owed him. Unlike many of his comrades in the Free Companions, he usually didn’t keep a running tab with the owner of the Claw and Fang, or any tavern. Long experience had taught him the wisdom of paying on the nail, if you were going to pay at all.

For starters it meant the innkeeper liked him better, since he didn’t have to risk having a customer die or “wander off,” or finding that the company’s treasury was short that month. In this case the positions were reversed; the man was holding Conan’s money, and would want to keep him sweet lest it be demanded in cash.

Outside Conan felt the same disappointment as always. When stepping into the night from a room with a fire in it, he always expected it to be cooler, and hereabouts that wasn’t going to happen. Stepping to the other side of the alley he unbuttoned and did what many had before him, politely aiming the stream away from the tavern, and then padded out into the gathering darkness. A full bladder might distract at the wrong moment, and the pause let his eyes adapt fully to the dark.

Only a shadow of sunset still showed in the west, down the winding street. Night fell like a hammer here, without any of the long twilight gloaming to which he’d been born. The boom of the gate-drums sounded, along with a raucous shiver from a Stygian trumpet. About a quarter of a mile away they’d be shoving the massive hardwood portals closed for the night and letting the ironwood bar drop home in the thick forged-metal brackets.

He’d had that duty himself a few times. The bar was a baulk of seasoned tropical hardwood timber as thick through as one of Valeria’s splendid thighs…

Shows where my thoughts are, he thought with an utterly noiseless chuckle, and he padded off in the direction she’d likely taken. Ishtar of the Shemites, what a backside that woman has. He picked up the pace. I’ll follow far enough behind that she and her pretty toy never see me. Just in case.

Aquilonian legend had it that a Cimmerian could come up behind you, slit your throat, and be a mile away before you even noticed you were dead—and that he’d stolen your horse and coin-purse, too. It wasn’t quite true, but Conan often took advantage of the rumors, and had learned the hard way how to move silently.

His people hunted for nearly as much of their meat as they got from their herds, and the forests of his home held hunters that walked on four feet. The kind that weren’t in the least shy of feasting on those who stood on two. If you wanted your hide whole, children uneaten, and food on your table… then in Cimmeria you had to be able to out-stalk and out-fight the wolves. City-bred men, or even ones from a tame countryside, were sheep by comparison.

*   *   *

Ah, Conan thought. That’s quicker than I thought it would be.

Valeria was whistling a jaunty tune as she swaggered along with her arm around her companion’s shoulders—they were about the same height. She’d probably ducked into an alley for relief, too, a bit more complicated and time-consuming for her, giving her male companion some useful guarding to do. The whistle helped as Conan ghosted close to the southern walls, where the shadows were deeper.

This district was all mudbrick, some plastered with stucco and some not, mostly three stories high with the butt-ends of the beams protruding out through the walls. There wasn’t much traffic. At sundown Sukhmet’s respectable folk, such as they were, went to ground and barred their doors. Those who had to move after dark carried torches and clubs and moved in groups.

The darkness was deep, broken only by the half-full moon and brilliant southern stars that could be seen through the narrow slit of sky above, and an occasional leak of lamplight. The windows on the ground floor were all narrow slits in the thick adobe walls, often barred with grillwork to boot.

Valeria and her companion halted a dozen yards ahead of him, where the narrow road opened out into a misshapen oval all of twenty feet or so at its filth-strewn widest, what might with a stretch be called a square. It was a little less cave-dark, too, since the walls didn’t narrow the sky so much, though the smoke-haze was thick from the evening cooking going on all around them.

Just enough light penetrated to reveal six thugs standing across its width, and the gleam as three of them pulled long knives from sheaths under their left armpits. A fourth drew a shortsword and hefted a small buckler in the other paw, while a fifth brandished a club with a metal spike through the knob on its end. The last had a long ironwood staff of more than head height, and whirled it in a figure-eight that made a burring sound as it twisted.

“Hey, yellow-hair!” one called in the pidgin of Sukhmet’s streets. “Give us your money, we let you live.”

“Give us your sword and knife, we let you live,” another shouted.

“Give us all your clothes and make us happy, maybe we let you live,” the last said, with an illustrative hip-movement and one-handed clutch at his loincloth. “Or you die very good!”

“Your friend he can kneel and make us happy.”

Conan could hear shutters slamming shut and being barred in buildings close-by.

Valeria chuckled and gave a happy sigh, pulling her companion along without stopping her forward stroll, but Conan could see the taut readiness in it. The mercenary slinger frowned until the situation penetrated his ale-fuddled mind; then he drew a dagger with one hand and pulled his sling from his belt, whirling it like a whip.

The thugs looked at each other in surprise, then shrugged and began to close in, the ends of their line curling inward in a way that showed they’d worked together before. Valeria hadn’t drawn a weapon, and they probably thought of the odds as six-to-one instead of six-to-two.

That was still bad enough…

Conan regarded this type of street-rat the way a wolf did their four-footed namesakes. He’d been a thief by trade in his first exposure to cities, but he’d robbed rich merchants and others even more dangerous, including a magician and a fallen god. And usually in the victim’s own well-guarded mansion, tower, or fort. He hadn’t stooped to preying on passers-by.

Invisible in the darkness, he squatted on his hams to watch the show. If the toughs had taken their work seriously, they might have had a good chance. As an old Cimmerian saying went, even Lugh Longspear couldn’t fight two if one of them was behind his back. But as it was…

Hisssst!

This time the blond woman didn’t stop after the quick draw. Whoever her teachers had been—probably her Gunderman father, the professional guardsman—they’d taught her how to do a good stepping lunge, and she’d learned the lesson well. Keeping the flat of the blade horizontal to the ground and less likely to jam in bone.

The point went through the throat of the bravo with the shortsword, cutting off his shout with a brief agonized gurgle of astonishment as his windpipe instantly filled with the jets of blood from the arteries in his neck.

She didn’t stop then, either, moving past him fast and wrenching the sword sideways like someone jointing a goose, sending blood out in a huge fan that cast gouts in the faces of the men to either side. It looked black in the dimness.

The slinger whipped his weapon around the neck of a man distracted by the woman’s bewildering speed and yanked him forward. He came in a running stagger, nearly jerked off his feet and windmilling his arms… including his knife-hand, which left him exposed to a stab up under the breastbone. The victor had just long enough to start to grin before the spiked club smacked into his left shoulder with a sound like a butcher’s cleaver. His expression turned into a rictus of snarling agony, but he rammed his knife into the club-man’s crotch, which brought a shriek of pain.

His advantage was short-lived as a knife buried itself in his chest.

Valeria was past the man she’d spitted and wheeling before his body hit the ground with a limp flaccid thump, and her dagger flashed into her left hand. The thugs halted in shock for a crucial instant. They probably hadn’t seen the details—even in the light of day she’d have been a blur—but it was clear that the one she’d spitted had a neck was open to the air all the way to the spine.

In the darkness it looked like sorcery.

The mercenary slinger lay dead, too, but two Stygians were down beside him. That meant half their number, shocking casualties even for experienced fighters, and these were street-toughs.

“Good choice, Valeria!” Conan murmured to himself. “He was the only one with real gear, and he might have known how to use it.” In his experience, even full-time pirates could be careless hack-and-smashers, fishermen or merchant sailors with delusions of warriorhood. Most didn’t live long. Despite being a woman, Valeria had lasted several years, enough to win some fame.

“You run now,” she said helpfully, in very basic Stygian. “Run away, little boy-boys, run away.”

The living three looked at each other, then rushed her, the two knife-men in the lead. Conan was astonished for a second as Valeria turned and began to flee. Until she suddenly dropped flat on her back, curled into a ball, and rolled against the ankles of the leading thug, her steel-bearing arms still stretched out to either side.

It would have been difficult to dodge even in daylight. At night and close range, and working up to full-tilt pursuit, the knife-man barely had time to squawk as his shins thumped into her and he went over full-tilt, planting his face in the hard-packed dirt. Instantly he went limp, probably breaking nose and jaw and any number of teeth, possibly his neck as well, from the way the body convulsed.

The other thug with a knife showed rare good sense in not trying to do anything but turn around, take her advice, and run as fast as he could while she bounced back to her feet with lithe ease. Eyes bulging, he went past Conan’s hiding place in a heedless dash.

The man with the staff who’d laughed as he clutched his loincloth came forward, sweeping his long weapon around his head and howling. Valeria skipped aside, ducked under a swing, and thrust with clinical precision into the back of his knee-joint, twisting the sword as she withdrew it. The man went over, and the very weight of his ironwood staff and the strength of his swing spun him around in mid-fall. His berserk howl of rage turned to a squawk of dismay and then a shriek of pain.

Valeria waited only long enough to check that her companion was well and truly dead, then turned and ran in earnest. With all the thugs down or gone, it was probably reflex learned in civilized cities where the night-watch showing up would pose a potential problem.

Unlike Sukhmet, he thought.

Conan could hear the husky, reckless chuckle of her mirth as she ran full-tilt at the wall and sheathed her weapons as she ran. Springing to a barrel-top with her foot barely touching it as she leapt upward again, she clamped her hands on the railing of a balcony, swung up nimble as an acrobat—or a sailor—ran up a drain-pipe like a squirrel, and disappeared onto the flat roof.

The light patter of her feet was interrupted by a yell from a family sleeping there under the stars, as many did in this hot box. Then a carol of laughter fading toward the next street over.

Conan rose and strolled forward. The man with the quarterstaff was just coming to one knee, clutching a damaged shoulder and moaning. His other leg dragged limp and twitched as it bled.

“Not your night, rat,” the Cimmerian said cheerfully, grabbing him by the back of the neck. The thug wasn’t a small man, but the iron grip lifted him most of the way off his feet, and there wasn’t much fight left in him either. He squealed as fingers like steel rods threatened to separate the base of his skull from the rest of him.

“Who paid you?”

When there was no answer but a thrashing gurgle, Conan walked three steps to the wall Valeria had climbed and thumped the man’s face into it. Not hard enough to stun or kill, but enough to get his attention, even with his wounds.

Conan leaned closer.

“Who paid you?” he repeated, his face much closer to the street-rat’s.

The man’s eyes rolled toward him, probably seeing only a glint of blue eyes and a hulking shadow, and feeling a grip like the grapnels used to lift cargo out of a ship’s hold in a well-found port. Perhaps he thought he was in the hands of some night-spirit or monster from local legend.

“Don’t know!” he gasped. Another thump against the wall and he said more hurriedly, “Truth, by Set! Wore a hood! Paid us—said the woman was coming—take her. Sounded… Sounded like a toff, like a noble. From the north! Set and Derketa be my witnesses!”

“Thanks for the truth, friend,” Conan said. Drawing his arm back, he rammed the man’s face into the iron-hard mud brick three more times, full-strength.

The body didn’t move when he dropped it. Rifling through the club-man’s belt pouch produced a handful of coppers, one silver piece… and a gold Stygian crown, with the coiled python on one side and a pyramid with an eye in the center on the other. It looked fresh from the mint—there was one here, in the governor’s compound, which used the output of the local mines before it was shipped north.

Conan whistled softly. If it was genuine…

He bit, and the gold was greasy-soft between his back teeth, pure with only a little silver in it. It was genuine, and that meant six months’ wages for a skilled scout like himself. Ordinary folk didn’t handle gold coins more than once or twice in their lives, and only if they were lucky. Gold was for princes, nobles, rich merchants, and bankers, and the temples of powerful priesthoods.

And for the military, where thousands of men had to be housed and fed and armed, and paid wages better than ordinary laborers ever saw. Now and then for pirates, or mercenaries after the sack of a city—if they were very lucky.

Quick examination showed that each of the other dead thugs had one of the coins, along with a coil of rope, a cloth bag with a drawstring just right for popping over someone’s head, and a folded blanket in which to wrap the victim. Those might be just the tools of intended theft, but he didn’t think so, not with the gold coins and the man’s story.

Someone… almost certainly Khafset or one of his cronies… had paid the men to do a snatch, intended to have Valeria carried off to where he could take a suitably prolonged revenge for his humiliation, not to mention his pricked lip, broken nose and bruised testicles. Nobody would be much upset at the disappearance of a newly signed outland mercenary, much less prepared to accuse the highest-born noble in the district. Not even the governor would do that.

The Cimmerian grunted, thinking hard as he dragged the bodies by an ankle or wrist into a small laneway that opened off the oval. It was a dead-end, with a pile of fly-buzzing, maggot-swarming debris including a dead dog or two piled against the cross-wall at its end. Many small red-glinting eyes stared at him from it and then vanished.

With a full-armed swing each time, he threw the bodies onto the mid-slope of the garbage, and some of the contents slid down over them. The stench was bad enough that he took a step back for a moment and spat aside to clear his mouth. The dead thug’s club proved a useful tool to rake more down. After a moment’s work no obvious human parts showed, and the odds were the bodies wouldn’t be discovered for a week or more.

Nobody would care when they were.

Sukhmet was that sort of town.

He had a moment’s mild regret that he had to include the slinger, who wouldn’t get the cremation the worshippers of Mitra used, but if he was found, the uproar would be distracting.

Returning to the street, Conan flipped aside the club to clatter to the hard dirt. Best not to leave that near the bodies. Someone would steal it before dawn, if only for the copper or two the iron in the spike would fetch. Speaking of which…

I can’t spend the gold, he realized. Six pieces! Not for everyday.

He’d have to go to a moneylender to change them for silver, and pay through the nose not to have the authorities informed that an outland mercenary was flaunting wealth he couldn’t possibly have come by honestly. Even so, he was ahead by a handful of gold.

I could get passage back to the coast in a good caravan, he thought, and for nothing if I sign on as a guardsman. That would leave me with a year and a half of scout’s pay to get me back to the Isles, or wherever else I want.

It was tempting. He was thoroughly sick of Sukhmet.

But the thought of Valeria’s eyes as she held the Stygian with her sword on his lip… The vision wouldn’t leave him.

Then he brightened.

In a little while, she will be as sick of this place as I am.