Conan and the Spider God by Lyon Sprague de Camp Read Free Book Online Page B

so easily have taken him alive.”
    The captain pondered for a moment, then said: “Very well; you seem to have the right of it. But I am still minded to have him flogged for insolence and for putting us to needless trouble.”
    “Pray, sir, the men are weary. Besides, if he be truly a soldier on leave—which he may well be—such a course might cause us trouble with the commander of his unit.”
    The captain sighed. “Release his bonds. Next time, Master Nial, do not try such tricks upon us, and count yourself lucky to get off without at least a beating. You may go.”
    Growling a surly word of thanks, Conan recovered his sword from the soldier who held it and started for the door. He was crowding past the troopers when another lieutenant appeared in the hallway before him. This man’s eyes widened.
    “Why, Conan!” cried the newcomer. “What do you here? Don’t you remember Khusro, your old—”
    Conan reacted instantly. Lowering his head in a bull-like rush, he lunged at the lieutenant, giving him so violent a push in the chest with his open hand that the man, hurled back, crashed against the wall and fell supine. Leaping over the sprawling body, Conan dashed out into the night.
    Ymir was tied to a hitching post in front of the blockhouse. Without taking time to draw sword or dagger, Conan snapped the stout leather reins with a terrific jerk, vaulted into the saddle, and savagely pounded his heels against the horse’s ribs.
    By the time the shouting troopers had boiled out of the blockhouse, run to the paddock, saddled their mounts, and set out in pursuit, Conan was a distant speck in the starlight. As soon as a roll in the landscape hid him from view, he galloped off at right angles to the narrow road. Before the sun had thrust its ruddy limb above the level eastern horizon, he had shaken off his pursuers.
    I n the Zamorian language, the word maul denoted the most shabby, disreputable part of a city. Each of the two principal cities of Zamora, Shadizar and Arenjun, had its maul; and even some of the smaller towns boasted such unwholesome districts. The maul was an area of bitter poverty; a slum of tumbledown old houses ripe for razing; a section of starving folk defeated by life and sinking into oblivion; a quarter for new arrivals, fresh from the village and desperately struggling for a foothold in the life of the community; a haunt of thieves and outlaws who preyed alike on the rich outside the maul and on the poor within; and the repository of ill-gotten wealth.
    The stench of the winding alleys of the maul of Shadizar brought Conan vivid memories of his days as a thief in Zamora. Although he had adapted himself to a soldier’s life during the past two years, the smell of the maul in his nostrils roused the lawless devil in his blood. He felt a nostalgic yearning for the days when he owed no master and yielded to no discipline, save as his vestigial conscience and barbaric sense of honor dictated. Impatient of all restraint, he had often thought, during his employment as a mercenary, that the perfect freedom he dreamed of was worth the periods of starvation he had suffered as a thief.
    Following directions received at Eriakes’s Inn, Conan strode through the forbidding alleys, lit feebly by cressets and lamps set into the walls at distant, irregular intervals. His boots squidged in mud and refuse as he brushed aside beggars and pimps. A couple of knots of bravos eyed him with hostile or predatory stares. When he scowled at them, they turned away; his towering size and the stout scimitar at his side dissuaded them from their felonious intentions.
    He reached a doorway over which, illumined by a pair of smoking cressets, hung a dark board on which a yellow dragon was crudely depicted. The sign identified the Golden Dragon, a wineshop and alehouse. Shouldering his way in, Conan swept the common room with his wary glance.
    Suspended from the low, soot-blackened ceiling, a pair of brass lamps, burning liquid