When the moon finally dipped below the horizon, all that was needed was to take up their gear and move, with no more than a few murmured words. It was densely dark, with only a few fires in the Darfari encampment throwing flickering light on the upper reaches of the ruins.
Derketa, Conan thought. We come to free your worshippers and punish those who blasphemed against your sanctuary. Help us now—or be damned for an idle bitch! It wasn’t exactly pious, but he hoped it might bring results.
They ghosted through the clicking, buzzing, odorous night toward the base of the final terrace wall. Just over the edge of it he could see a flicker of muted red light from a fire. The Darfari sentry hadn’t moved; very sensibly he kept to near the hole where the gate had been, squatting with his backside on a protruding rock that let him look just over the crest without exposing more than his head and part of his neck.
Irawagbon moved in utter silence, back a little from the base of the wall, with the loaded sling in her right hand. Conan climbed the rock face with a skill that was much aided by the fact that the stones didn’t even try to fit as neatly as the style of masonry he was used to facing. Despite its age, however, it was solid beneath his fingers, like an irregular cliff—and the Cimmerian had climbed many a cliff. As a boy before his voice broke, he had done it with a woven basket clenched in his teeth, collecting bird eggs for his family.
He came directly beneath the parapet and brought his feet up to secure toe-holds that left him crouched with his head only a few feet short of the top. Then he drew his dagger and waved it in a broad arc that his comrade could see despite the darkness.
Silence, and he waited patiently despite the tension on his muscles. Irawagbon acted as they’d agreed, throwing a rock to fall, tapping and thudding. Conan heard the rutch of sandals on dirt, and the sentry padded over to the wall, peering out into the darkness to see if it was some random animal’s scratching or something he needed to address. He yawned and scratched as he ambled over.
“Hisssst.”
The man started violently and leaned out over the wall to look downward. This close Conan could just see his eyes widen, white against the dark face and below the white cotton headcloth. He opened his mouth to shout and the Cimmerian poised to stab.
Thwack!
A rock the size and shape of a hen’s egg smacked into the man’s face, right over his nose, and there was a splash that looked black in the gloom. Something spattered on Conan’s face, the familiar salt-and-metal taste of blood. The Cimmerian went over the parapet in a single vaulting motion as the man pitched back. There was a thudding and rattle, not too loud, and he landed beside the man. Beside the body, rather, for there was no need for the precautionary hand he clamped on the sentry’s throat. Even so, he could feel the windpipe crumple under his grip.
Scant instants later there was a light sound as Irawagbon vaulted over the parapet. He’d already stripped the weapons belt off the dead man, with its sword and knife. She took up the spear the guard had leaned against the rock where he’d been sitting, a seven-foot thing with a broad blade. A moment of studying the jagged outlines of the ruins to the north, silhouetted against the stars, and then they were moving forward again.
Nineteen, he thought.
That many Darfari left who were any sort of fighting-men, not counting the man with the left arm in a sling. They slid forward again. Beyond this point the plan was fairly simple, and he was relieved at that. Complex plans had more ways to fail.
There was another sentry on top of the ruined wall of the large rectangle that had been some sort of great hall or assembly area. This was the greatest danger. If he spotted them, things would go very bad, very quickly.
The good part was that he—like his predecessors they’d watched all day—thought the thing he should watch most closely was the prisoners within, not some unforeseen attacker from the vast wilderness without. Conan stopped and waited while Irawagbon crept closer and closer, then they both froze as a twinkle from the man’s spear showed that he’d turned around.
Conan counted his breaths; thirty-two until the guard turned back to look down at the carpet of spear-wives within.
Irawagbon didn’t waste any time.
Her sling whirred again, and again there was a thwack of impact—harder this time, because it struck the back of his head.
Eighteen.
The man and the spear both pitched forward, and there was a chorus of cries from the women below as the body landed on them. There came a cry of startled pain as some sleeper found a spear cleaving her flesh. They tended to fall point-down.
A snarled order followed in the Abomean tongue, and even then Conan smiled at the contrast of a leader’s unmistakable tone, an order on the lines of shut up combined with some obscenity and the fact that it was a deep-throated growl but still unmistakably female.
His amazon companion hit the wall running and scampered up it at a speed that produced a heart-stopping moment when she was fourteen feet up over the tumbled blocks at the base of the wall and missed a handhold. She recovered, reached the top, reversed, and went down the other side. Probably even faster than she’d climbed, because there was a very brief exchange in her native tongue and then one Stygian word.
“Come.”
The Cimmerian climbed swiftly, pivoted over on his belly and climbed downward. When he was still ten feet up he spoke quietly but firmly.
“Out of the way.”
He dropped, and landed in a crouch, with breathing—and a powerful stench—close about him. There were already sounds, of blades hammering on hard wood. Irawagbon hadn’t been idle, and every woman freed would help with the others. There were her sword and dagger, the dead cliffside sentry’s sword and knife, and the ones the man atop this wall had held. A snarling murmur ran through the seventy-odd prisoners as their limbs and necks were cut free, and quiet swearing as sheer willpower forced cramped muscle back into action.
Wood snapped as others broke the yokes by main force as soon as their hands were loose. With every sound, however, he expected the soldiers to be roused.
“Let me through,” Conan hissed and he ran forward. That required some shouldering and shoving, but he could tell that the Abomeans knew he was coming—enough not to try to hit him, at least. Then he was past the last of the soon-to-be-freed prisoners.
And barely in time. Two Darfari in full kit of hauberk, helmet, and shield careened into the big room, glints and glimpses in the dark until one of them lifted a lit torch in his left hand and shouted in dismay as he saw the boil of action. Then a snarl as he saw the Cimmerian. His comrade stood in slack-jawed shock, but the man with the torch was keener of wit.
He threw the blazing thing in to a pile of brush and firewood that flared up with a whooshing, cracking rush, slapped his comrade on the back with the flat of his sword, and charged. The other was on his heels, not timid but simply slower.
Both of them gave ululating war-cries and charged, the long horseman’s swords naked in their hands. Two alert armored men against one who was naked save for leather breeks provided bad odds, but odds had never bothered the Cimmerian overmuch.
Conan didn’t let the darkness or the uncertain footing beneath slow him, either. Broken stone was scattered over the interior, some of it covered in human waste, and it turned beneath his feet several times, nearly throwing him aside. A twisted ankle would mean quick death. The light from the pile of brushwood was waxing brighter quickly.
A Darfari sword slashed at him, and his blade met it in an upward sweep, a clang of steel and shower of sparks and shock to the wrist.
It was worse for the other man, who grunted and took a half-step back as the force of Conan’s blow nearly tore the crude weapon from his grip. The Darfari’s shield came up, as Conan slapped his left hand onto the hilt of his broadsword and delivered an arching cut with all the strength of his massive shoulders and arms.
There was a thudding, crunching crack as the Aquilonian steel slammed into laminated rhino-hide and tough wood. The blade sank in nearly to the fuller ridge in its middle, and the ironwood frame cracked across… So did the bone of the arm beneath it, and the Darfari wailed.
Conan wrenched at his weapon, shattering the broken shield-arm at the shoulder-joint, at which the man fainted. Then he pivoted with desperate speed. Even a god couldn’t fight two, as the saying went. The weight of the shield and the man attached to it dragged at his arm, but it turned out to be moot, because rocks thrown by hand hit the second Darfari in the head, making his helmet clang.
He staggered back, coming up again to a fighting crouch and raising his shield against more flung stones.
It did him little good as five screaming she-devils struck. Three had broken yoke-poles held like spears. Another was Irawagbon, with a real Darfari spear, and the fifth was the stocky company commander who they’d seen kicked into submission that morning, wielding another. There was nothing submissive about her now, and the point of her spear went past the edge of his shield and into his bare throat just as Irawagbon’s went through the slit below the waist and into his thigh.
He gave a single gurgling shriek and fell.
Seventeen, Conan thought, stepping back and finally freeing his sword with a foot planted on the corpse.
Eager hands stripped the enemy warriors’ gear from their belts and backs, even as the last of the captives were cut and smashed loose from their bonds. Shrill shrieking battle-screams began, then echoed from the high stone walls. The man whose arm Conan had shattered recovered just in time to feel a spear-wife’s hand close on his scrotum and see a knife flash. His bulging eyes swiveled up with a last shriek. From the amount of blood, he wouldn’t be waking up from that.
Sixteen.
Another brace of Darfari tried to hold the broad empty doorway at the north end of the ruined hall. Six of the spear-wives bent, heaved up a broken building-stone and ran at them, casting it with malignant perfection at the men trying to control the gap. A dozen more poured into the breech, stabbing and hacking. The rest swarmed after and Conan stood, slowing his breathing and wiping his sword, hearing the clash of weapons elsewhere in the ruins. He had lost count.
One final burst of steel on steel, and a man’s hoarse scream of agony that seemed to go on for a very long time.