"Thou have a distance yet to go ere you wear the mantle of divinity," said Thulandra Thuu with a narrow smile.
The king bellowed in a sudden rage of fear: “Slaves! Pages! Phaedo! Manius! Where in the nine hells are you? Your divine master is being murdered!"
“It will do him no good," said Alcina, evenly. "He told me that he had ordered all his servants elsewhere in the palace, so I might scream my head off to no avail.” And she tossed back her night-tipped hair with her uninjured hand.
“Where are my loyal subjects?" whimpered Numedides. “Valerius! Procas! Thespius! Gromel! Volmana! Where are my courtiers? Where is Vibius Latro? Has everyone deserted me? Does no one love me any more, despite all I have done for Aquilonia?" The abandoned monarch began to weep.
“As you know in your more lucid moments," the sorcerer said sternly, “Procas is dead; Vibius Latro has fled; and Gromel has deserted to the enemy. Volmana is fighting under Count Ulric, as are the others. Now, pray sit down and listen; I have things of moment to relate."
Waddling to the throne, Numedides sank down, his spotted robe billowing about him. He pulled a dirty kerchief from his sleeve and pressed it to his wounded cheek, where it grew red with blood.
“Unless you can better control yourself,” said Thulandra Thuu, “I shall have to do away with you and rule directly, instead of through you as before."
“You never will be king!" mumbled Numedides. “Not a man in Aquilonia would obey you. You are not of royal blood. You are not an Aquilonian. You are not even a Hyborian. I begin to doubt if you are even a human being.” He paused, glowering. “So even if we hate each other, you need me as much as I need you.
“Well, what is this news at which you hint? Good news, I hope. Speak up, sir sorcerer; do not keep me in suspense!”
“If you will but listen … I cast our horoscopes this afternoon and discovered the imminence of deadly peril.”
“Peril? From what source?”
“That I cannot say; the indications were unclear. It surely cannot be the rebel army. My visions on the astral plane, confirmed by yesterday’s message from Count Ulric, inform me that the rebels are penned beyond Elymia. They will soon retreat in face of hopeless odds, disperse in despair, or suffer annihilation. We have naught to fear from them.”
“Could that devil Conan have slipped past Count Ulric?”
“Alas, my astral visions are hot clear enough to distinguish individuals from afar. But the barbarian is a resourceful rascal; when you drove him into flight, I warned you might not have seen the last of him.”
“I have had reports of bands of traitors within sight of the city walls,” said the king, lip quivering in petulant uncertainty.
“That is gossip and not truth, unless some new leader has arisen among the disaffected of the Central Provinces.”
“Suppose such scum does wash ashore and lap the city walls? What can we do with the Black Dragons far away? It was your idea to have them join Count Ulric.” The king’s voice grew shrill, as fear and rage snapped the thin thread of his composure. He ranted on:
"I left the management of this campaign to you, because you claim a store of arcane wisdom. Now I see that in military matters you are the merest tyro. You have bungled everything! When you sent Procas into Argos, you said that this incursion would snuff out the rebel menace, once and for all; but it did not. You assured me that the rabble would never cross the Alimane, and lo! the Border Legion was broken and dispersed. Quoth you, they had no chance of passing the Imirian Escarpment, and yet the rebels did. Finally, the plague you sent among them, you said, would surely wipe the upstarts out, and yet— "
“Your Majesty!" A young voice severed the king’s recriminations. "Pray, let me in! It is a dire emergency!”
"That is one of my pages; I know his voice,” said Numedides, rising and going to the still-locked door on the left side of the throne. When he had turned the key, a youth in page’s garb burst in, gasping: "My lord! The rebel Conan has seized the palace!”
“Conan!” cried the king. "What has befallen? Speak!”
“A troop of the Black Dragons—or men appareled in their garb—galloped up to the palace gates, crying that they had urgent messages from the front The guards thought nothing of it and passed them through, but I recognized the huge Cimmerian when I saw his scarred face in the lighted anteroom. I knew him in the Westermarck, ere I came to Tarantia to serve Your Majesty. And so I ran to warn you.”
“Mean you he is about to burst upon us, with no guards in the palace save a scrawny pack of striplings and their grandsires?” Eyes ablaze with fury, he turned to Thulandra Thuu. "Well, you sorcerous scoundrel, work a deterrent spell!”
The magician was already making passes with his staff and speaking in a sibilant, unknown tongue. As the sonorous sentences rolled out, a strange phenomenon occurred. The candles dimmed, as if the room were filled with swirling smoke or roiling fogs from evening marshes, dank with decay. Darker and darker grew the atmosphere, until the Chamber of Private Audience became as black as a dungeon rock-sealed for centuries.
The king cried out in terror: "Have you blinded me?"
“Quiet, Majesty! I have cast a spell of darkness over the palace, a magical defense. If we do lock the doors and speak in whispers, the invaders will not discover us."
The page felt his way across the wide expanse of carpet and turned the great key in the left pair of doors, while Alcina, lithe as a jaguar, likewise barred the right-hand portal. The king retreated to his throne and sat in silence, too terrified to speak. Alcina sought the slender body of the sorcerer and huddled at his feet in mute supplication. The page, uncertain of his whereabouts, shrank back from the door whose key he turned and wished himself home in the humble alleys of Tarantia. The silence was complete, save for the beating of four frightened hearts.
Suddenly the page’s door sprang open, and a chant could be heard in the ancient Hyborian tongue. The blackness thinned and rolled away, and the light of many candles once more flooded the utmost comers of the audience chamber.
In the open doorway stood Conan the Cimmerian, bloody sword in hand; and at his side Dexitheus, the priest of Mitra, still crooned the final phrases of his potent incantation.
"Slay them, Thulandra,” shrieked Numedides, eyes starting at the sight of his former general. He held the bloody kerchief to his injured cheek and moaned.
Alcina shrank closer to her mentor and stared with baleful eyes upon the man who had survived her deadly potion.
Thulandra Thuu raised his carven staff, thrust it at Conan, and, in the language of his undiscoverable bourn, spat out a curse or else a ringing invocation to an unknown god. A rippling flash of light, like a blue streak of living fire, sped from the staff tip toward the Cimmerian’s armored breast. With the dread rattling of a thunderclap, the bolt shattered against an unseen barrier, spattering sparks.
Frowning, Thulandra Thuu repeated his cantrip, louder and in a voice of deep authority, shifting his aim to Dexitheus. Again the blue flame zigzagged across the intervening space and spread out, like water tossed against a pane of glass.
As Conan started for the sorcerer, his blue eyes blazing with the lust to kill. Captain Silvanus jostled past him, shouting:
"You who slew my daughter! I seek revenge!”
Silvanus, with madness glinting in his bloodshot eyes, rushed at the sorcerer, sword raised above his head. But before he had gone three paces, the magician pointed his staff and once again cried out. Again the blue lightning illumined the room with its awful radiance; and Silvanus, uttering a scream of horror, pitched forward on his face.
A hole the thickness of a man’s thumb opened on the back plate of his cuirass, and the blackened steel curled into the petals of a rose of death. A red stain slowly spread over the Iranistani carpet and mingled with the jeweled tones of its weaving.