Her father, tall and terrible, towered over two half-naked men who groveled before him. Bloodstains marked where they had clawed at the deck, and a pale rivulet of urine betrayed the true depth of one’s terror.
Khalar Zym turned toward his daughter, his dark eyes flashing. “They say they cannot find her. They claimed to be the best, but they fail me.”
Marique moved to her father’s side and slipped a hand from within the cloak to lay it on his sword arm. If any glimpsed her nakedness within the shadows, none gave sign, not even the mishappen wretch Remo, who had watched her for years when he believed he was unwatched.
“It is not their fault, Father.” She smiled carefully. “We know the trail is cold, two decades cold.”
“But they have come this far.”
“And now there are elements which work against them.” She turned and made for the gangway. “Remo, bring them.”
Her father’s subordinate grumbled, but did as he was bidden. Guards hastened down the gangway ahead of Marique and the elephant trainers calmed beasts as heavy, booted feet thundered down the wooden planking. Marique made certain to step lightly and to move carefully so it could seem as if all she did was float. Her father, stern and strong, trailed behind her but stopped halfway down, where the gangway twisted back. Arms folded tight to his chest, he would watch from there, so Marique made certain to position herself to great advantage.
Even before she reached the ground, she could feel the magick. She had long since learned all her mother had known, and had studied it all far more carefully than Maliva had been capable of doing. She knew that was a harsh assessment, but she had read her mother’s journals and seen her errors in translation and transcription. Had her mother not been so careless, she would have found other ways to grant Khalar Zym the power he sought, but instead her mistakes had doomed his quest.
Marique stabbed the Cimmerian sword into the earth and rested a hand on it. It would anchor her. Though she sensed no immediate malice in the enchantments blanketing the Red Wastes, many were the sorcerers who concealed the lethal in the benign, and many more were the foolish who died because they failed to take precautions. The Cimmerian steel would not ward her per se, but could supply an element to her magick which she doubted another sorcerer would have anticipated.
She crouched, allowing the cloak to puddle around her. Cool air rushed in, exciting her flesh. She slowly reached out with her right hand, fingers splayed, then tucked them in toward her palm as if plucking the warp and weft of some arcane weaving. She felt vibrations, and the voices began to whisper in her head.
As always, they remained annoyingly vague, but none hissed a warning about immediate danger. Marique did not take this as a sign that she was safe, but more as a sign of the enchantment’s beguiling nature. That it could fool the voices was proof of its strength, and that others failed to notice it revealed its subtlety.
She clutched the sword’s pommel with her left hand. “She has protectors, Father, powerful patrons who deny her to you.”
“I am not to be defied, Marique.” Khalar Zym raised his face to the heavens. “Your mother has waited too long for her resurrection. We can afford no further delays.”
“And you shall have none, Father.”
Again Marique played her fingers through the air and encountered more strands of eldritch energy. Some swirled and eddied, like currents in a stream that trapped debris in stagnating pools. These numbered in the dozens, and were the most powerful. She found them rather attractive. They beckoned her on like a melody, to spin her about and out and away, without her ever realizing she had not gone in the direction she desired.
But there were other strands, tiny strands, more fragile than a whisper, as fleeting as a dream upon wakening, and she found them, too. They shied away from her, recoiled, became dead at her touch. The sharp scent of decay filled her head.
Only her grip on the sword prevented her from falling over, nauseous and dizzy. She steadied herself, then smiled. If this is the game you wish to play. “We have them, Father.”
“Yes, child?”
“These patrons, they are fools. They help the one you seek, and they help others. Had they barred the way to all, we should have been reduced to a pack of curs howling beyond their walls.” Marique reached down and gathered a handful of dust. “Because they allow others to seek them, we may find them.”
She straightened up and spat into her hand. She mixed the dust and spittle into a muddy paste, then shot a glance at Remo. “Bring the scouts.”
The misshapen man wrestled them before her. She dabbed a finger in the mud and used it to draw a sigil over each of their closed eyelids. “If you open your eyes, the magick will be broken. You will die. Do you understand?”
They both nodded.
She stepped between them and Remo and threw her cloak back past her shoulders. She grasped the scouts and turned each to face into the Waste, then smeared another sigil in mud between their shoulder blades. She pressed a finger to the heart of each design, right over the scouts’ spines, then whispered a word which, when said louder and with malice, could age a man twenty years before its echoes dwindled to silence.
“Eyes closed. Tell me what you see.”
One man shook his head, but the other pointed a quivering finger toward the south. “There, it’s beckoning. Blue, a soft blue, tendrils, weaving and flowing. Inviting. Mingling.”
Marique lowered her arms, shrouding herself with the cloak. “Do not look where they conjoin, but follow the lines. Ignore the knots, do not get lost in the knots, follow the skein.”
The scout who had spoken nodded and started off.
The other, head bowed, half turned back toward her. “But I see nothing.”
“I know.” Marique nodded solemnly. “One of you had to be blinded so the other could see. Remo, kill him.”
Above, her father pointed south. “Do not lose him. Before day flows again into night, we shall have our prize.”
CHAPTER 18
CONAN STOOD ON the hillside, shading his eyes with a hand. His horse, reins drooping on the ground, pawed the earth in an attempt to uncover anything even the least bit edible. The barbarian grunted.
He’d spent the night at the top of the hill, and had risen before dawn. He and the horse set off, but as it became light, they’d not gotten very far. Conan could see the tracks leading down the hill and then tracking back around it, but couldn’t, for the life of him, remember making any of the turns.
He spat. Sorcery. As magework went, it’s wasn’t the nastiest he’d ever run into. It didn’t try to scare him from entering the Wastes. He and the horse could ride into them without feeling any pain. It was just that he got a vague sense of frustration followed by a wave of exhaustion. Trying to go further just didn’t seem worth the effort. And, curiously enough, when he let the horse go, they ended up near his hill, with good water and the view of a road that would carry them far from the Wastes themselves.
He suspected, in fact, that if he followed the road and tried to enter the Wastes from another direction, he’d end up near some other campsite of relative safety. It was akin to when his father had placed a sword at his throat, keeping him back from any potential harm in their first duels. Frustrating, yes, but his father wasn’t going to let him hurt himself.
But it is worth the effort. Conan took a deep breath and faced himself due west. He spotted a stone twelve feet in front of him. His shadow touched it. He deliberately put one foot in front of the other and in two strides had reached it. Something tried to convince him that he’d gone far enough, but he picked another target and moved to it.