"By the harvest-mother's teeming womb! I knew when I agreed to rule this city that it would be a toil!" The baroness, blinking and unkempt, ventured from her darkened sleeping-closet into the antechamber, which already glowed warm with morning light. "But does it have to begin so early, before the first of my subjects is awake?-before the rowdiest of them, I'll wager, has even gone to sleep?"

Hugging her green robe tightly about herself, she sank onto the cushioned divan opposite circled chairs occupied by Durwald, old Lothian, the rebel priest and two other rebels. "Oof!" she gasped, catching the heavy amulet as it swung against her breast. "I feel as decrepit as the brittle remains of my ancestors, who are doubtless stirring and rustling below in the family crypt."

"Now, now, you do not appear so, Milady." Sage Counselor Lothian bowed fragilely from his chair. "Nor did you last night, dancing with the courtiers and merchants. Would that I had dared to risk my old bones as your partner in one of those wild upcountry reels!"

Calissa smiled faintly, starting a silver-inlaid comb through her long, rumpled hair. "Last night I had much to rejoice over, Counselor. My enemies undone, my city at peace-it made me feel like a mere girl again."

"Milady, you are but a girl!" Marshal Durwald, fixed promptly by the baroness's suspicious glance, hastened to continue: "In health and beauty, I mean to say, if not in womanly attainments. You delight your subjects and charm all of us who are privileged to serve you."

Ignoring the personal overtures implicit in the courtier's tone, Calissa gazed coolly on him. "Best to remember that I am also a warlord when the occasion demands, Marshal-and your military commander. I am at present burdened by the cares of state and sorely tried by my recent illness; whether I will ever again be able to abandon myself to ... to the delights of girlhood will be dictated by events." She drew a prematurely gray strand from the red swirl of her hair and plucked it out unflinchingly. "One thing is sure: if I am to serve you and this city well, I must be less swayed by males than any Einharson woman before me."

"A brave and selfless resolve, Milady," the rebel priest interposed. "It seems to have carried us intact through yesterday's crisis."

"Indeed." Durwald, preening his ruffled poise, smiled around the group with satisfaction. "The barbarian was swiftly dealt with; and the city, swept away in revelry as it was, did not seem to mind. My officers have not reported any undue whispering or dissension over it, not even amongst the troopers who campaigned with him."

"No. I feared some unrest when I heard of the cheers they gave him at the gate." Old Lothian shook his head wistfully. "But apparently it came to naught."

"Aye," Durwald laughed. "Sigmarck's spy told me that it was all incited by the officer Rudo, one of the Cimmerian's old prison cronies whom he installed in the army to serve him. Haply, my guard shadowed the rascal last night and caught him looting the till of an ale house. So he is back in the munic.i.p.al lockup where he belongs." The marshal shook his head knowingly. "I wager that none of the other returning troops cares enough this groggy morning to speak up on the outloander's behalf."

"A lesson well remembered." Calissa regarded them gravely. "My father found it out, now likewise his killer: the mob is nothing if not fickle. Hope that you never learn it so bitterly!"

"In any case, Milady," the priest put in complacently "the city is quiet for now. I can attest that the former rebels find our joint rule congenial; in my judgment, our position is secure."

"Aye," Lothian added rea.s.suringly. "Even the escape of the barbarian, sometime last night, does not pose a significant threat to us. . . ."

"What!" The already scant color, drained entirely from Calissa's face as her comb clattered to the floor. "What are you telling me?" Her look raced around the circle of unsurprised faces. "Conan has escaped! And what of his trollop, Ludya? Is she gone too?"

Durwald nodded earnestly. "Somehow, Milady, they enticed the night sentry into their chamber and thumped him senseless. The eyebolt of their chain was levered out of the wall with a broken table leg." The marshal shook his head in ungainly humility, as if apologizing for his guard's ineptness. "Their route has been traced downstairs into the cellar; apparently they exited the Manse through an old pa.s.sage under the wall that none knew existed, opening from your family's burial crypt."

"And what alert has been given?" During Durwald's report, Calissa had sprung from her chair to pace feverishly before the window. "Are the Red Dragons mobilized yet? What word from the sentries at the town gates?"

Lothian sat watching her, his withered hands clasped nervously together. "Their flight was only recently discovered, Milady. We thought it best to consult you before sounding an alarm. The gatekeepers have permitted motley revelers to leave the city throughout the night, I am told."

"Well, sound the alarm! And why, pray, have you come creeping here so meekly?" Calissa scorched them with an angry look. "Is it in the belief that I will go mad again? Is this a test?" Livid with rage, she followed Lothian's involuntary glance toward the closed door, beyond which guards undoubtedly waited. "And whom, we wonder, will the army now obey?-the counselors or the mad baroness?"

"Milady," the priest of Ulla urged soothingly, "we merely wished you to consider that an alarm just now might provoke more trouble and unrest among the populace than if we wait and see-"

"Wait and see!" Calissa laughed, her voice ringing with an uncontrolled wildness. "While this usurper again sets in motion his mills of treachery and deceit? While he suborns the city against us? And his prowess -have you not seen him, as I have, toss armored men about like ninepins? This Conan is a force to be reckoned with, I warn you!" She turned and paced again, her robe slashing the air behind her. "If he lurks outside the city, we can send detachments to hunt him through the countryside. Alert Sigmarck and Ottislav's forces to do the same-providing he has not already crept into their tents and slit their throats as if they were spring lambs!"

"Milady!" Frail old Lothian straightened in his seat, speaking up with surprising firmness. "To call for their aid would reveal unseemly weakness in our state. Can we really afford to have the neighbor barons ransacking our province, flaunting military prerogative here?" He shook his gray head. "At last report, Sigmarck and Ottislav were striking camp. If we keep this affair silent, - they may leave us in peace."

"Silent!" Calissa wheeled on them again with red, feverish eyes. "Can you possibly understand what this man has done to my family . . . done to me? How can you let him fly in the night and expect me to keep silent?"

Durwald arose gravely from his chair. "I do not know what your intentions were for this barbarian, Milady. It would have been unsafe to hold him here for long, because of his irrespressible violence and the controversy his imprisonment would cause. We should soon have been forced to kill him, which would only have made him a particularly irksome kind of martyr." He faced the baroness dispa.s.sionately. "As it stands, you have stripped him of baronial pretensions. Without n.o.ble blood, he can never rule Dinander. He is too unripe to overthrow us, and too shallow a self-seeker to try. He will simply run away, and once he does . . ." the marshal's hand flicked aside an invisible bubble of air ... "our problem is gone."

As Calissa stood silent, her downturned face concealed by a red cascade of hair, the priest arose from his seat and laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. "It is well, Baroness. It will be as you have said; the chain of bloodshed is ended."

"All right, then." She raised her tear-damp, grieving face from the floor to the faces of the counselors and thence to the sunlit window. "Let them go!"

Day shone bright in the southern hills, where Conan and Ludya rested after many hours of flight from Dinander. The sky's blue brilliance reflected up to them from the placid tarn stretching away on one hand. Almost as dazzling was the green of the nearby meadow gra.s.s, now cropped peacefully by their stolen, dappled horse.

The couple sat on boulders at the water's edge, only one of them truly at rest. Conan was pounding with a sharp stone at the shackle on Ludya's cloth-wrapped wrist, the dull clanks ringing out across the tarn. When the metal seam parted, he gave a satisfied grunt, then set to work prying at it with the stub of a broken sword.

The Cimmerian was dressed only in a rough kilt, and shed in sandals, one of which he now braced against the shackle to hold it steady. Ludya, having shed most of her satin and lace, reclined tawny-skinned on the sunlit stone, thoughtfully trailing her free hand in the water.

"Conan, you should have told me before of your exploits with the women of Dinander. Had I known the truth about you and Calissa, I never would have ridden so brazenly with you into the city!"

Conan shrugged over his labors. "What was there to tell? She was a warmhearted girl, but then she went mad, blaming me for all her woes." He shook his head in puzzlement. "Perhaps 'tis best that poor Evadne was spared her vengeance; she might have had her tortured, or poisoned."

"No, Conan, she loved you." Ludya shook her head sadly. "If you ever again become a lord, you must learn to manage your women better. You could have ruled Dinander with Calissa-or with Evadne, from what you tell of her. But never with me." She breathed a wistful sigh. "Yet I think Calissa will make a better baron than her father did."

"She will have to if she wants to hold power." Conan forced open the shackle and removed it, unwinding the cloth from Ludya's chafed wrist. "She will not have the weight of her undead ancestors to anchor her in place any longer."

"Conan, what do you mean? Does it have something to do with the ancient relic you took from the crypt?"

"Aye. The sword of old Einhar himself!" He held up his work tool, the broken-bladed bronze hilt with the familiar X-shaped crossguard. Somewhere between the Manse and the lake, its ornamental gems had been prized from their settings, which now blinked empty like blind eyes in the sunlight.

"This is the source of the spell." Conan tossed the corroded hilt confidently in his palm. "Calissa's enchanted amulet is modeled after it, do you see? Old Baldomer worshiped this as a holy idol." Rising smoothly to his feet, the Cimmerian drew back his strong-thewed arm and hurled the object far out into the center of the tarn, where it made a small, bright splash. A moment later the broken shackle and chain followed it, end over end into the water. "The next time old Einhar wants to raise his sword and lead his dead descendants to battle, he'll have to shamble a long way looking for it!"

"Mayhap. But the fear will still be there in the province, for a time." Ludya sat gazing out over the water, her voice sultry as Conan stroked her tan, smooth back, no longer bearing the scars of Favian's whip-their disappearance the only remainder, she had told him, of Lar's magicks. "But I do not think that Calissa will ever need to use the talisman."

"No matter to us, anyway!" Conan clasped the Nemedian's arm, bidding her arise. "Come along, la.s.s, there is much before us. Have you never, then, seen the jeweled cities of the south? There you will find wealth and ease beyond your fondest hopes. A thief can be richer than a baron, and a woman of wit and charm can rise as high as her dreams will take her. Come, girl, I will show you. The world awaits!"

Epilogue: The Chariot

In eastern Nemedia, where the lush meadowlands at the fringe of the Varakiel rise to a high, dry plain, there stretches a trackless district, uncultivated and uninhabited. The nearest farmers and herders shun the tract in the belief that crops will not grow there, or that its tainted gra.s.s will cause cattle to sicken and die.

The place is rumored to have been once the site of a vast, portentous battle. Did it not also have something to do with the demon-sent plague that depopulated the land in years past? At this question, the superst.i.tious farm folk will turn stolidly away and refuse to speak further, chopping hands against wrists in an odd gesture said to represent a blade striking off the head of a serpent.

None travel in that blighted district, for game is plentiful elsewhere, and the few primitive cart tracks skirt the area widely. But if a traveler were to cross the very center of the desolation, he might find a curious thing: pyres of bones extending in a broad ring of ashy, brush-grown heaps, a dozen and more such mounds, each bedded with enough shards of decaying armor and chalky, crumbling skulls to show that the remains were once human.

If the wayfarer were to disregard or fail to understand the warning signified by this outer circle, and chose to venture inside, he might find at the center a smaller pyre, this one containing the fire-eaten timbers and metal fittings of a rude chariot, and entombing but a single set of deformed, crushed bones. Yet the low, brushy mound would seem to hold little of interest to the traveler-unless, as the soughing wind gusted across the steppe, it turned back a frond of brush to reveal the glint of bright, untarnished gold washed clean of dust by vagrant rain showers, and an unblinking emerald eye.

Thus forgotten bides the serpent-headed chest, the trove of Set, lost once again to the world of men. Pray that it shall remain so.

End