The room below was narrow, and ill lit even with the skylight and two bra.s.s lamps on a table. In it four men stood, two with c.o.c.ked crossbows in hands, watching the door through which he was supposed to walk.

The big Cimmerian shook his head, in anger and wonder at the same time.

It was one thing to be wary of trouble where none was expected, another to find it waiting there.

"Is he coming, or not?" one of the men without a crossbow asked irritably. He had a deep scar across the top of his head, where someone had caught him a blow that should have killed him.

"He'll come," the other man with no crossbow replied. "The girl said she'd send him right to this room."

Conan froze. Ariane. Could she have sent him here to die?

"What will you tell her?" the horribly scarred man asked. "She has influence enough to cause trouble, Taras."

"That I hired him," Taras laughed, "and sent him out of the city to join the others she thinks I've hired. That should keep her quiet."

Lying on the roof, the big Cimmerian heaved a sigh of relief. Whatever Ariane had done, she had done unknowingly. Then the rest of what Taras had said penetrated. The others she thought he had hired. It was as he had feared. The young rebels were being duped. Conan had a great many questions for Taras. His broadsword slipped from its sheath, steel rasping on leather.

"Be you sure," Taras told the crossbowmen, "to fire the instant he steps into the room. These barbars die hard."

"Even now is he a dead man," one of the pair replied. The other laughed and patted his crossbow.

A wolfish grin came to Conan's face. It was time to see who would die in that room. Like silent death he rose, and leaped.

"Crom!" he roared as his feet tore through the skylight.

The men below had only time to start, then Conan's boots struck one of the crossbowmen squarely atop his head, bearing him to the floor with a crunch of snapping vertebrae. The second crossbowman desperately swung his weapon, trying to bring it to bear. Conan kept his balance with cat-like skill, and pivoted, dagger darting over the swinging crossbow to transfix the bowman throat. With a gurgling scream he who had named the Cimmerian a dead man himself died, squeezing the trigger-lever as he did. Abruptly the scar-topped man, sword half drawn, coughed once and toppled, the crossbow quarrel projecting from his left eye.

Using the dagger as a handle Conan hurled the sagging body of the bowman at Taras, and as he did he recognized that pock-marked face.

Taras had been at that other meeting he had interrupted by coming through the roof.

The pocked man staggered, clawing for his sword, as the corpse struck him. "You!" he gasped, getting his first clear look at the Cimmerian's face.

Snarling, Conan struck, his blade clanging against the hilt of the other's partially drawn sword. Taras shrieked, severed fingers dropping to the floor. And yet he was no man to go down easily. Even while blood flowed from his mutilated right hand, his left s.n.a.t.c.hed his dagger from its sheath. With a cry of rage, he lunged.

It would have been easy for Conan to kill the man then, but he wanted answers more than he wanted Taras' death. Sidestepping Taras' lunge, he clubbed his fisted hilt against the back of the pock-faced man's neck.

The lunge became a stumble, and, yelling, Taras fell over the scarred man's body and crashed to the floor. He twitched once, emitting a long sigh, and did not rise.

Cursing, Conan heaved the man onto his back. Taras' limp fingers slid away from his dagger, now embedded in his own chest. His sightless eyes stared at the Cimmerian.

"Erlik take you," Conan muttered. "I wanted you alive."

Wiping his blade on Taras' tunic, he returned the sword to its scabbard, thinking furiously all the while. The man was condemned out of his own mouth of duping the young rebels. Yet he had had that meeting with two who, by their clothing and bearing, were men of wealth and position. He had to a.s.sume that that meeting had a related purpose, and that someone did indeed intend to move against Garian, using Ariane and the rest as tools. And tools had a way of being broken and discarded once their use was done.

As Conan tugged his dagger from the crossbowman's throat, the door suddenly swung open. He crouched, dagger at the ready, and found himself staring across the corpse at Ariane and Graecus.

The stocky sculptor seemed to turn to stone as his bulging eyes swept the carnage. Ariane met Conan's gaze with a look of infinite sadness.

"I did not think Taras had the right to exclude us from this meeting,"

she said slowly. "I thought we should be here, to speak up for you, to...." Her words trailed off in a weary sigh.

"They intended my death, Ariane," Conan said.

She glanced from the shattered skylight franc on tile floor toy tile opening in the roof. "Which of them leapt from above, Conan? It seems clear that one entered that way. To kill. I wondered so when you armored yourself and would not tell me why. Wondered, and prayed I was wrong."

Why did the fool girl have to take everything wrongly, he thought angrily. "I listened at the skylight, Ariane, and entered that way.

After I heard them speak of slaying me. Think you they had c.o.c.ked crossbows to slay rats?" She looked at him, levelly but with eyes lacking hope or life. He drew a deep breath. "Hear me, Ariane. This man Taras has hired no armed men to aid your rebellion. I heard him say this. You must-"

"You killed them!" Graecus suddenly shouted. The stocky man's face was flushed, and he panted as if from great exertion. "It is as Stephano feared. Did you kill him also, and Leucas? Mean you to slay us all? You will not! You cannot! There are hundreds of us! We will slay you first!" Suddenly he glanced down the hall toward the stairs, and with a shrill cry dashed in the other direction. Ariane did not move.

Hordo appeared in the doorway, gazing briefly after the fleeing sculptor.

His lone eye took in the bodies. "I returned to the Thestis in time to hear the girl and the other speak of following you. It looks well that I decided to follow them in turn."

Ariane stirred. "Will you murder me now, too, Conan?"

The Cimmerian rounded on her angrily. "Do you not know me well enough by now to know I would not harm you?"

"I thought I did," she said hollowly. Her eyes traveled from one corpse to the next, and she laughed hysterically. "I know nothing of you.

Nothing!" Conan reached for her, but she shied away from his big hand.

"I cannot fight you," she whispered, "but an you touch me, my dagger can yet seek my own heart."

He jerked back his hand as if it had been burnt. At last he said coldly, "Do not remain here o'er-long. Corpses attract scavengers, and those with two legs will see you as more booty." She did not look at him or make answer. "Come, Hordo," he growled. The one-eyed man followed him from the room.

In the street, those who saw Conan's dark face and the ice of his blue eyes stepped clear of his sweeping strides. Hordo hurried to keep up, asking once they were clear of the clangor of the Street of the Smiths, "What occurred in that room, Cimmerian, to turn the girl so against you?"

Conan's look at Hordo was deadly, but in swift, terse sentences he told of how he had gone there, of what he had heard and what deduced.

"I am too old for this," Hordo groaned. "Not only must we watch for Graecus and the others to put knives in our backs, but, not knowing who among the n.o.bles and merchants is embraced in this, with whom can we take service? Where do we go now, Cimmerian?"

"To the only place left for us," Conan replied grimly. "The King."

Chapter XII.

0n the wide marble steps of the Temple of Mitra, a startled man dropped a cage of doves as the Free-Company made its way down the narrow, winding street. So surprised was he to see mounted and armed men in the Temple District that he watched them open-mouthed, not even noticing that his cage had broken and his intended sacrifices were beating aloft on white wings.

Hordo's saddle creaked as he leaned forward and whispered fiercely to Conan. "This is madness! 'Twill be luck if we are not met atop the hill by the whole of the Golden Leopards!"

Conan shook his head without answering. He knew full well that approaching the Royal Palace unannounced with two score armed men was far from the proper way to appeal for entry into the King's service. He knew, too, that there was no time for more usual methods, such as bribery, and that left only enlistment in the Nemedian army. Or this.

In truth, it was not the Golden Leopards who troubled him so much as the young rebels. Desperate, believing he had betrayed them or was on the way to do so, they might try almost anything. And these winding streets that climbed the hill to the Royal Palace were a prime place for ambush.

Those streets were a remnant of ancient times, for once in the dim pact what would become the Royal Palace had been a hilltop fortress, about which a village had risen, a village which over the centuries had grown into Belverus. But long after the hilltop fortress had become the Royal Palace of Nemedia, long after the rude village huts had been replaced by columned temples of alabaster and marble and polished granite, the serpentine streets remained.

The Palace itself retained much of the fortress about it, although its battlements were now of l.u.s.trous white marble, and towers of porphyry and greenstone rose within. The portcullises were of iron beneath their gilt, and drawbridges spanned a drymoat bottomed with spikes. Round about it all a sward of gra.s.s, close cropped as if in a landscaped garden, yet holding not the smallest growth that might shelter a stealthy approach, separated the Palace from the Temple District that encircled the hill below.

At the edge of the greensward Conan halted the company. "Wait here," he commanded.