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Conan, she realized with a twinge of regret, was wiser than she in such matters. He knew that a delicate, high-born lady, imbued with Zingaran ideals of womanly modesty and purity, could never adapt herself to the wild, rough life of an adventurer. Moreover, if he were slain or if he tired of her, she would become an outcast, for the princely houses of Zingara would never admit a barbarian mercenary’s drab into their marble halls.

With a small sigh, she touched the girl who nestled beside her. "Time to go below, Tina, and gather our belongings."

Amid shouts and hails, the slender galley inched up to the quay. Publius paid the harbor tax and rewarded the pilot. He settled his debt to Captain Zeno and his crew and, reminding him of the secrecy of the mission, bade the Argossean skipper a ceremonious farewell.

As the captain barked his orders, the sail was lowered to the deck and stowed beneath the catwalk; the oars were shipped amid oaths and clatter and placed under the benches. The crew—officers, sailors and rowers—streamed merrily ashore, where bright lights blazed in inns and taverns; and painted slatterns, beckoning from second-story windows, exchanged raillery and cheerful obscenities with the expectant mariners.

Men loitered about the waterfront street. Some lurched drunkenly along the roadway, while others snored in doorways or relieved themselves in the dark, mouths of alleys.

One among the loiterers was neither so drunk nor so bleary-eyed as he appeared. A lean, hatchet-faced Zingaran he was, who called himself Quesado. Limp blue-black ringlets framed his narrow face, and his heavy-lidded eyes gave him a deceptive look of sleepy indolence. In shabby garments of sober black, he lounged in a doorway as if time itself stood still; and when accosted by a pair of drunken mariners, he retorted with a well-worn jest that sent them chuckling on their way.

Quesado closely observed the galley as it tied up to the quay. He noted that, after the crew had roistered off, a small group of armed men accompanied by two women disembarked and paused as they reached the pier, until several loungers hurried up to proffer their services. Soon the curious party disappeared, followed by a line of porters with chests and sea bags slung across their shoulders or balanced on their heads.

When darkness had swallowed up the final porter, Quesado sauntered over to a wineshop, where several crewmen from the ship had gathered. He found a cozy place beside the fire, ordered wine, and eyed the seamen. Eventually he chose a muscular, sunburned Argossean rower, already in his cups, and struck up a conversation. He bought the youth a jack of ale and told a bawdy jest.

The rower laughed uproariously, and when he had ceased chuckling, the Zingaran said indifferently: “Aren’t you from that big galley moored at the third pier?"

The Argossean nodded, gulping down his ale.

“Merchant galley, isn’t she?”

The rower jerked back his tousled head and stared contemptuously. “Trust a damned foreigner not to know one ship from another!” he snorted. ”She’s a ship-o'-war, you spindle-shanked fool! That’s the Arianus, pride of King Milo’s navy.”

Quesado clapped a hand to his forehead. “Oh, gods, how stupid of me! She’s been abroad so long I scarce recognized her. But when she put in, was she not flying some device with lions on it?”

“Those be the crimson leopards of Poitain, my friend,” the oarsman said importantly. “And the Count of Poitain, no less, hired the ship and himself commanded her.”

“I can scarcely credit it!" exclaimed Quesado, acting much amazed. “Some weighty diplomatic mission, that royal warrant… "

The drunken rower, puffed up by the wind of his hearer’s rapt attention, rushed on: “We’ve been on the damndest voyage—a thousand leagues or more—and it’s a wonder we didn’t get our throats cut by the savage Picts—”

He broke off as a hard-faced officer from the Arianus clapped a heavy hand upon his shoulder.

"Hold your tongue, you babbling idiot!" snapped the mate, glancing suspiciously at the Zingaran. “The captain warned us to keep close-mouthed, especially with strangers. Now shut your gob!”

“Aye, aye," mumbled the rower. Avoiding Quesado’s eye, he buried his face in his jack of ale.

“It’s naught to me, mates," yawned Quesado with a careless shrug. “Little has happened in Messantia of late, so I but thought to nibble on some gossip.” He rose lazily to his feet, paid up, and sauntered out the door.

Outside, Quesado lost his air of sleepy idleness. He strode briskly along the pierside street until he reached a seedy roominghouse wherein he rented a chamber that overlooked the harbor. Moving like a thief in the night, he climbed the narrow stairs to his second-story room.

Swiftly he bolted the door behind him, drew tattered curtains across the dormer windows, and ht a candle stub from the glowing coals in a small iron brazier. Then he hunched over a rickety table, forming tiny letters with a fine-pointed quill on a slender strip of papyrus.

His message written, the Zingaran rolled up the bit of flattened reed and cleverly inserted it into a brazen cylinder no larger than a fingernail. Then he scrambled to his feet, thrust open a cage that leaned against the seaward wall, and brought out a fat, sleepy pigeon. To one of its feet he secured the tiny cylinder; and gliding to the window, he drew aside the drape, opened the pane, and tossed the bird out into the night. As it circled the harbor and vanished, Quesado smiled, knowing that his carrier pigeon would find a safe roost and set out on its long journey northward with the coming of the dawn.

In Tarantia, nine days later, Vibius Latro, chancellor to King Numedides and chief of his intelligence service, received the brass tube from the royal pigeon-keeper. He unrolled the fragile papyrus with careful fingers and held it in the narrow band of sunlight that slanted through his office window. He read:

The Count of Poitain, with a small entourage, has arrived from a distant port on a secret mission.

Q.

There is a destiny that hovers over kings, and signs and omens presage the fall of ancient dynasties and the doom of mighty realms. It did not require the sorceries of such as Thulandra Thuu to sense that the house of Numedides stood in grave peril. The signs of its impending fall were everywhere.

Messages came out of Messantia, traveling northward by dusty roads and by the unseen pathways of the air. To Poitain and the other feudal demesnes along the troubled and strife-torn borders of Aquilonia, these missives found their way; some even penetrated the palisaded camps and fortresses of the loyal Aquilonian army. For stationed there were swordsmen and pikemen, horsemen and archers who had served with Conan when he was an officer of King Numedides—men who had fought at Conan’s side in the great battle of Velitrium, and even before that, at Massacre Meadow, when Conan first broke the hosts of savage Picts—men of his old regiment, the Lions, who well remembered him. And like the beasts whose name they bore, they remained loyal to the leader of the pride. Others who barkened to the call were wearied of service to a royal maniac who shrugged aside the business of his kingdom to indulge his unnatural lusts and to pursue mad dreams of eternal life.

In the months after Conan’s arrival in Messantia, many Aquilonian veterans of the Pictish wars resigned or deserted from their units and drifted south to Argos. With them down the long and lonesome roads tramped Poitanians and Bossonians, Gundermen from the North, yeomen of the Tauran, petty nobles from Tarantia, impoverished knights from distant provinces, and many a penniless adventurer.

“Whence come they all?" marveled Pubhus as he stood with Conan near the large tent of the commander-in-chief, watching a band of ragtail knights ride into the rebel camp. Their horses were lean, their trappings ragged, their armor rusty, and they were caked with dust and dried mud. Some bore bandaged wounds.