Only the lady Thanara remained, sitting petrified in her chair. With a grating laugh, Conan tore the glittering diadem from her hair and flung her into the throng that milled about the platform.
Soldiers now advanced grimly from all sides, their spearheads and sword blades forming a bristling hedge in front of an ordered line of shields. Behind them, archers nocked their shafts.
Conan flexed his muscles, swung his scimitar, and gave a booming laugh. Blood ran down his naked hide from superficial cuts in scalp, arm, chest, and leg. Surrounded and unarmored, not even his strength and speed could save him from the thrust of many keen blades all at once. The prospect of death did not trouble him; he only hoped to take as many foes as he could into the darkness with him.
Suddenly there came the clash of steel, the spurt of blood, and the icy gleam of a northern longsword. A giant figure hewed its way through the armored lines, leaving three blood-spattered corpses on the floor. With a mighty bound, the fair-haired Northerner leaped to the dais. In his left arm he cradled a couple of heavy, round objects—bucklers of bronze and leather picked up from the floor where the victims of Conan's first outburst had dropped them.
"Catch this!" cried the newcomer, tossing one of the shields to Conan. Their glances met and locked. Conan cried:
"Rolf! What do you here, old polar bear?"
"I will tell you later," growled the Northerner, grasping the handle of the other buckler. "If we live, that is. If not, I am prepared to fight and die with you."
The unexpected advent of this formidable ally raised Conan's spirits even higher.
"Rush in, jackals," he taunted, waving his bloodstained scimitar. "Who will be the next to consign his soul to Hell?"
The steel-sheathed ranks of the Turanian soldiery had halted, forming a square about the dais. The two giant barbarians stood back to back, one black-haired and almost naked, the other blond and clad in somber black.
"Archers!" cried an officer directing the Turanian troopers. "Spread out, so the shafts shall strike from all sides."
"They have us," growled Rolf "Had we but stout coats of Asgardean mail ... Ah, well, it was fun while it lasted."
"Not quite," said Conan. "See you that row of windows? Here is my plan ..."
He whispered a few quick words to his comrade, who nodded. The two giants sprang forward, their blades flickering with the speed of striking snakes. Two guardsmen sank to the floor in their blood, and the others shrank back momentarily from the fury of the mad onslaught.
"Follow me, Rolf! We will fool these dogs yet!" barked the Cimmerian, striking right and left.
The swords of the barbarians cleared a bloody avenue. The big Northerner wheeled, thrusting and cutting, his sword cutting down the Turanians like wheat stalks before the scythe as he guarded Conan's back. As Conan rushed forward, Rolf followed in his wake, his sword widening the bloody path opened by the Cimmerian. His booming bass was casting forth the ringing tones of old Northern battle songs, and the gleam of the berserk was in his gaze.
Turanian swords and spears sought their blood, but glanced harmlessly from the shields as the pantherish speed of the barbarians blurred the eyes of their adversaries. Conan bled from a score of wounds and Rolf's garb was in tatters, but the bodies heaped upon the floor bespoke the violence of their attack.
They put their backs to one of the large windows. For a few seconds both barbarians exploded into maniacal fury, laying about them with blood-crusted blades and clearing a space of several feet around them. The massed soldiers shrank back for a moment. It seemed to their superstitious minds as if these were not men but invincible ogres, hard as steel, risen from the darker realms to wreak terrible vengeance.
Conan utilized this moment with lightning-like speed. The stained glass of the window shattered into thousands of gleaming, many-colored shards under blows from his scimitar that tore a great gap in the leaded pane. Hurling their swords and shields into the faces of their foes, the Cimmerian and the Northerner sprang through in headlong dives toward the sea two hundred feet below. A taunting laugh lingered behind them in the air as the guardsmen closed in.
"Archers! An archer, quickly, to have at them!" The commanding officer's voice was shrill with desperation. Five men stood forward, each armed with the powerful, double-curved Hyrkanian war bow. The window niche was cleared, and soon the twang of cords was heard. Then one of the bowmen shrugged his shoulders and turned to the officer,
"The range is too great in this treacherous moonlight. We cannot even discern their heads, and probably they are swimming under water most of the time. The task is beyond us."
Glaring, the general swung about and hurried to the king's chamber. Yezdigerd had recovered from his shock. The only sign of damage was a small bandage round his forehead, partly covered by his turban. The terse account of the incidents elapsed was interrupted by the crash of the king's fist on a table, spilling vases and wine jugs to the floor.
"You have dared to fail! Are my soldiers sucklings, that they cannot lay two men low? Every tenth man among the guards shall die in the morning, to bolster the courage of the rest!"
He continued in a lower voice: "See that two war galleys are outfitted at once. The barbarians will surely try to steal a boat and make their way across the sea. We shall overtake them. See that the ships are well-provisioned and manned by my best seamen and soldiers. When I have caught these dogs, they shall suffer the agonies of a thousand deaths in the torture chambers of Aghrapur!"
He laughed, animated by the grisly prospect, and gestured imperiously to his general. The latter hurried out, threading his way through the throng in the courtroom to carry out his lord's commands.
Khosru the fisherman sat patiently on the gunwale of his sloop, mending a net which had been broken by the thrashing of a giant sturgeon that afternoon. He cursed his misfortune, for this was a fine net. It had cost him two pieces of gold and the promise of fifty pounds of fish to the Shemite merchant whom he had bought it from. But what could a poor, starving fisherman do? He must have nets to get his living from the sea.
Aye, if those were the only things necessary for him and his family! But he must also strain and work to meet the taxes imposed by the king. He looked up in venomous, furtive hatred at the palace, limned against the moonlit sky. The king's taxgatherers had supple whips and no compunction about using them. Welts and old scars on Khosru's back told of wrongs suffered when the shoals were empty of fish.
Suddenly the sloop heaved, almost unseating him. Khosru sprang up, his eyes starting from their sockets in terror. A huge, almost-naked man was climbing aboard, his black, square-cut hair disordered and dripping. He seemed to Khosru like some demon of the sea, an evil merman, come up from unknown deeps to blast his soul and devour his body.
For a moment the apparition simply sat on a thwart, breathing in deep gasps. Then it spoke in Hyrkanian, though with a barbarous accent. Khosru's terror increased as another figure, a huge, black-clad, golden-haired man with a broad-bladed dagger at his belt, followed the first over the gunwale.
"Fear not, sailor!" boomed the black-haired giant "We don't want your blood, only your ship." He drew a glittering diadem from die waistband of his loincloth and held it out. "Here is payment enough and more. You can buy ten such craft as this one with it. Agreed—or—?"
He flexed his thick fingers suggestively. Khosru, his head whirling, nodded and snatched the diadem. With the speed of a frightened mouse he scuttled into the dinghy moored to the stern of the sloop and rowed away at desperate speed.
His strange customers lost no time. The sail went swiftly up and billowed in the freshening breeze. The trim craft gathered speed as it steered out towards the east.