The tent flap twitched aside, revealing a tall soldier.
“What is it, man?" asked Procas. “Do the rebels stir?”
"Nay, General; but you have a visitor.”
"A visitor, you say?” repeated Procas in perplexity. "Well, send him in; send him in!”
"It’s 'her'," sir, not 'him,'” said the soldier. As Procas gestured for the entry of the unknown visitor, his partner at the board game rose, saluted, and left the tent.
Presently the soldier ushered in a girl attired in the vestments of a page. She had boldly approached the sentries, claiming to be an agent of King Numedides' ministers. None asked how she had traveled thither, being impressed by her icy air of calm authority and by the strange light that burned in her wide-set emerald eyes.
Procas studied her dubiously. The sigil that she showed meant little to him; such baubles can be forged or stolen. Neither gave he much credence to the documents she bore. But when she claimed to carry a message from Thulandra Thuu, his curiosity was aroused. He knew and feared the lean, dark sorcerer, whose hold over Numedides he had long envied, distrusted, and tried to counteract.
"Well," growled Amulius Procas at length, “say on.”
Aleina glanced at the two sentries standing at her elbows, with hands on sword hilts. "It is for your ears only, my general,” she said gently.
Procas thought a moment, then nodded to the sentries: "Very well, men; wait outside!"
“But, sir!" said the elder of the two, “we ought not to leave you alone with this woman. Who knows what tricks that son of evil, Conan, may be up to—”
“ConanI” cried Aleina. “But he’s dead! No sooner had she uttered those impetuous words than she would have gladly bitten off her tongue could she have thus recalled them.
The older sentry smiled. “Nay, lass; the barbarian has more lives than a cat. They say he suffered a wasting illness in the rebel camp for a while; but when we crossed the river, there he was behind us on his horse, shouting to his archers to make hedgehogs of us.”
Amulius Procas rumbled: “The young woman evidently thinks that Conan perished; and I am fain to learn the reason for her view. Leave us, men; I am not yet such a drooling dotard that I need fear a wisp of a girl!”
When the sentries had saluted and withdrawn, Amulius Procas said to Alcina with a chuckle: “My lads seize every opportunity to stay in out of the rain. And now repeat to me the message from Thulandra Thuu. Then we shall investigate the other matters.”
Rain pounded on the tent, and thunder rolled as Alcina fumbled at the fastenings of the silken shirt she wore beneath her rain-soaked page’s tunic. Presently she said:
"The message from my master, sir, is …”
A bolt of lightning and a crash of thunder drowned her following words. At the same time, she dropped her voice to just above a whisper. Procas leaned forward, thrusting his graying head to within a hand’s breadth of her face in an effort to hear. She continued in that same sweet murmur:
"—that the time—has come— "
With the speed of a striking serpent, she drove her slender dagger into Amulius Procas’s chest, aiming for the heart.
"—for you to die!” she finished, leaping back to escape the flailing sweep of the wounded general’s arms.
True though her thrust had been, it encountered a check. Beneath his tunic, Procas wore a shirt of fine mesh-maiL Although the point of the dagger pierced one of the links and drove between the general’s ribs, as the blade widened, it became wedged within the link and so penetrated less than a fingers breadth. And, in her frantic struggle to wrench it free, Alcina snapped off the blade’s tip, which remained lodged in the general’s breast.
With a hoarse cry, the old soldier rose to his feet despite his injury and lunged, spreading his arms to seize the girl. Alcina backed away and, upsetting the taboret on which the candle stood, snuffed out the flame and plunged the tent into darkness deeper than the tomb.
Amulius Procas limped about in the ebony dark, until his strong hands chanced to grasp a handful of silken raiment. For a fleeting instant Alcina thought that she was doomed to die choking beneath the general’s thick, gnarled fingers; but as the fabric ripped, the old soldier gasped and staggered. His injured leg gave way, and death rattled in his throat as he fell full-length across the carpet The venom on Alcina’s blade had done its work.
Alcina hastened to the entrance and looked out through a crack in the tent flap. A flash of lightning lighted the two sentries, huddled in their sodden cloaks, standing like statues to the left and right. She perceived with satisfaction that the rumble of the storm had masked the sounds of struggle within the general’s tent.
Fumbling in the darkness, Alcina discovered flint, steel, and tinder and, with great difficulty, relighted the candle. Quickly she examined the general’s body, then curled his fingers around the jeweled hilt of her broken dagger. Darting back to the tent flap, she peered at the soldiers standing stiffly still and began to croon a tender song, slowly raising her voice until the flowing rhythm carried to the sentinels.
The song she sang was a kind of lullaby, whose pattern of sound had been carefully assembled to hypnotize the hearer. Little by little, unaware of the fragile, otherworldly music, the sentries slipped into a catatonic lethargy, in which they no longer heard the rain that spattered on their helmets.
An hour later, having eluded the guards at the boundaries of the camp, Alcina regained her own small tent on a wooded hilltop near the river. With a gasp of fatigue, she threw herself into the shelter and began to doff her rain-soaked garments. The shirt was torn—a ruin …
Then she clapped a hand to her breast, where had reposed the obsidian talisman; but there it lay no longer. Appalled, she realized that Procas, in seizing her in the darkness, had grasped the slender chain on which it hung and snapped it off. The glassy half-circle must now be lying on the rug that floored the general’s tent; but how could she recover it? When they discovered their leader's body, the royalists would swarm out like angry hornets. And at the camp hard-eyed sentries would be everywhere, with orders instantly to destroy a black-haired, green-eyed woman in the clothing of a page.
Shivering with terror and uncertainty, Alcina endured the angry rolls of thunder and the drumming fingers of the rain. But her thoughts raced on. Did Thulandra Thuu know that Conan had survived her poison? Her master had revealed no hint of such unwelcome knowledge the last time they conferred by means of the lost talisman. If the news of the Cimmerian’s recovery had not yet reached the sorcerer, she must get word to him forthwith. But without her magical fragment of obsidian, she could report only by repairing to Tarantia.
Further black thoughts intruded on her mind. If Thulandra Thuu had known that Conan lived, would he have ordered her to slay Amulius Procas? Might he not be angry with her for killing the general, even though he had himself ordained the act, now that Procas’s leadership was needed to save the royalist cause? Worse, might the sorcerer not punish her for failing to give the rebel chieftain a sufficient dose of poison? Worst of all, what vengeance might he not exact from her who lost his magical amulet? Stranded weaponless, without communication with her mentor, resourceless save for her puny knowledge of the elementary forms of witchcraft, Alcina lost heart and for a moment wavered between returning to Tarantia and fleeing to a foreign land.
But then, she reflected, Thulandra Thuu had always used her kindly and paid her well. She recalled his hinted promises of instruction in the higher arts of witchcraft, his talk of conferring on her immortality like his own, and—when he became sole ruler over Aquilonia, to reign forever—the assurance that she would be his surrogate.