Free Conan: Road of Kings by Karl Edward Wagner Page A

of vengeance. But half a dozen crumpled figures on the polished floor and a number more who nursed broken scalps and bleeding wounds were evidence that the outlaws were not overawed by their victims’ lofty status.
    Conan shook a cramp from his tense shoulders and glowered uneasily at the guards atop the stairway. There would be hard fighting should they determine to descend from the gallery. The Cimmerian wondered that these Zingarans could honor as their king a drunken coward who permitted his nobles to be plundered before his presence and refused to allow his soldiers to interfere.
    “Quickly now, my loyal subjects!” urged Mordermi, clapping his hands and prancing all about. In his guise of King Rimanendo, the travesty became unbearable, although the humor of it was little appreciated by His Majesty’s court.
    The looting of the royal pavilion proceeded swiftly. In a matter of minutes the raiders were weighted down with as many overladen sacks as they might feasibly make off with. Mordermi judged that it was time to bid his host a good night and depart—before reinforcements ruined the evening for them.
    “You will all remain inside, if you care to live through this night!” Mordermi warned in a loud voice. “I have archers positioned outside the doorways. Any fool who tries to pursue us from here will be given a wooden stickpin to wear upon his heart!”
    Wondering how long that bluff would hold them, Conan warily followed his comrades from the pavilion. If the Zingaran gentry were made of the same stuff as their king, he decided, then they would probably remain inside until they starved.
    They had little more than fled the pavilion, when shouts and the clamour of running soldiers told them how closely they had timed it.
    Faced with the threat of archers, the mob at the gate had broken for cover. From the shelter of the darkened trees, they had continued to hurl stones and verbal abuse at the guards—Carico haranguing them at the top of his stout lungs. Flames crackled upward from the midst of the road, and a grotesque effigy of King Rimanendo began to burn lustily.
    Enraged, the captain of the guard had ordered his archers to loose upon the rabble. A few howls of pain rewarded their efforts, but the archers were few and their targets hidden by the night and the forest. Reasonably protected from the desultory archery barrage, the mob seemed more incensed than cowed by the show of force, and the riot before the royal pleasure gardens only waxed the more furious.
    Not waiting for new troops to reach them from the city, the captain of the guard had ordered a sortie to break up the rioters. A strong detachment of his force had just marched out of the gate, when word of the raid upon the king’s pavilion reached him. In an agony of indecision, the officer sought to call back his sally to defend the gate once again, so that he could dispatch another body of troops to the pavilion—all the while uncertain which of these threats constituted the main attacking force.
    As a result, it was a disordered and winded party of guards who reached the plundered pavilion too late to trap Mordermi’s raiders within the marble structure. Instead, they came upon a frightened and outraged mass of royal guests, bereft of their valuables and angrily demanding the heads of all those concerned—incompetent guards included.
    With a scant lead, Mordermi and his treasure-laden band raced through the darkened grounds beyond the lighted gardens. While they were ahead of the chase for the moment, they had not made good their escape by any means. Sheer cliffs dropped away into the sea on all sides of the headland beyond its walled landward side—and there was no chance of scaling the wall now that the garrison was fully alerted.
    The third phase of Mordermi’s raid must work perfectly now, or they would be hunted down like wolves trapped in a sheep pen.
    Out of the mist-buried sea, a small flotilla of rowboats fought the tide to gain a