Conan: Road of Kings Read Free Page A

Glancing down at their surly faces and rough clothes, Conan judged that many of these late arrivals could as easily be standing upon the gallows as amongst the throng. He wondered at the morbid curiosity that compelled them to watch the execution of their fellow brigands.
    A cheer from the crowd broke off Conan’s musings. Anonymous in his black mask, the king’s executioner ascended the scaffold and returned the applause with a grandiose bow. Swaggering across the platform, he inspected the preparations of his assistants with the businesslike air of a director who surveys the stage and the players before lifting the curtain on his drama. His smile was polished, with just the right inflection of suave boredom. It was a professional touch that seemed to bestow confidence upon the players. Conan had seen that same smile on a day when the royal executioner had broken a man on the wheel.
    A harsh rattle of the rachets brought Conan’s gaze around—even as the hemp noose about his throat suddenly bit into his flesh. Under the royal executioner’s supervision, the guards were completing final preparations—turning the seven windlasses so that each of the condemned prisoners stood straight upon his toes beneath the tautly stretched rope.
    Beneath his outward impassivity, Conan’s mind grappled with the hopelessness of his plight. Until this moment, he had been unable to accept the reality of his situation. Always there had been the false hope of escape, the lingering sense of outraged justice that argued that this could not be happening to him. Conan had faced death uncounted times since his childhood in the savage northlands. Always he had escaped; it bred for a certain contempt of death as an adversary. As the noose tightened about his neck, Conan fought down a rush of despair. Cimmerian warriors had died without a groan upon the torture stakes of the Picts, and Conan now stood straight and glowered his silent contempt upon the mob.
    “In the name of his Royal Majesty, King Rimanendo,” proclaimed the executioner above the vibration of the crowd, “let the sentences of his royal court be carried out!”
    Abruptly there was silence, Conan sensed that the crowd was holding its breath—as was he. A dreamlike stillness seemed to grip those upon the scaffold.
    Then the gnashing of the rachet’s teeth, as the executioner cranked the first windlass. Neatly he coiled the hemp upon the horizontal barrel as it spun. Effortlessly, almost magically, the first of the condemned was levitated from the scaffold floor—to hang suspended beneath the gallows beam. Neck stretched impossibly, head twisted, eyes and tongue bulging from grimacing face, body writhing, leg-irons clattering: the first dance began.
    There was a sighing murmur, then a rumble of harsh sounds—like surf soughing across sand to crash against the rocks. It was the chorus of the mob, letting out its breath and breaking into a babble of excited cries.
    The second in line broke down then, shrieked mindlessly for mercy. The breath of the crowd smothered his sobs, and then came the laughter of the rachet wheel—as the noose lifted him toward the heavens that ignored him.
    Tearing away from the morbid fascination that had bound his gaze upon the kicking puppets, Conan turned his face toward the crowd. Behind him, the executioner crawled like a great black spider upon its web—moving between the pieces of his apparatus, skillfully setting one rachet, then moving to the next windlass. Again the chatter of gears, and a third dancer twitched into the air.
    Three more. And then …
    But Hell was not waiting. Hell had come to the Dancing Floor.
    Across the square—bawling howls of pain and terror, shrill trumpeting of panic-stricken horses. From one, then another, of the narrow streets that opened into the prison yard—billowing gouts of flame burst full into the screaming crowd.
    Intent upon the hangman’s inexorable approach, Conan’s brain groped drunkenly to